Peace and Justice Post

Consortium News, May 22, 2008

Robert Parry

Facing a tough reelection fight in 2004, George W. Bush expressed outrage over leaked photos showing U.S. military police at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison abusing detainees, who were paraded naked before female guards, threatened by attack dogs, chained in “stress positions” and forced to wear ladies underpants on their heads.

President Bush assured the American people that he “shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Other administration officials pinned the blame on a “few bad apples” and dismissed the prison guards’ claim that they were told to “soften up” the detainees for interrogation.

Now, a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General reveals that months before those abuses at Abu Ghraib, nearly identical tactics were used against “war on terror” detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at CIA prisons – and that FBI complaints about the tactics went up the chain of command back to Washington.

FBI agents at Guantanamo even opened a file that they labeled “war crimes” to document the systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions and laws against torture that they witnessed – before being told by superiors to close the file.

According to the Inspector General’s report, the FBI protests reached the White House but went unheeded. Instead, the prisoner abuses spread to Iraq where the Abu Ghraib prison was “Gitmo-ized” with the same harsh and bizarre tactics applied to Iraqi detainees.

So, the new Inspector General’s report adds to the growing body of evidence that – in the months before Election 2004 – Bush only feigned shock about what was being done to detainees in American custody.

The evidence is now overwhelming that Bush knew of – and approved of – those violations of the rules of war and basic human decency, that the “war crimes” catalogued by the FBI agents could be traced to him.

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The Daily Star, May 22, 2008

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

GAZA CITY: Five Palestinian children were wounded in an Israeli air strike on the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, Palestinian health officials and witnesses said. The Israeli aircraft targeted a vehicle carrying militants but instead hit a car carrying the five children, witnesses said.

None of the five – two babies less than a year old and children aged five, 12 and 14 – was seriously hurt, the Palestinian emergency services said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the air force had “attacked a vehicle that was driven by terrorists who had just fired rockets in the direction of Israel.” She added that “if some children were injured, we only regret that Hamas fires rockets from residential areas.”

Israeli forces conduct almost daily raids in Gaza. They have also imposed a blockade on the territory since Hamas seized control last June in what they say is an attempt to pressure the Islamist movement to stop rocket or mortar attacks on Israel.

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Who is the Enemy?

By ERIC WALBERG | Counterpunch, May 21, 2008

Twenty years ago this week the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, eight and a half years after it was invited by the desperate People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had degenerated into intra-party squabbling and was beset by Islamic rebels massively financed by the United States. The straw that broke the Soviets’ back was when the US began providing Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden and his friends.

Now, after eight years of US/NATO occupation, the parallels — and differences — between the two occupation are many and stark, as confirmed by the current Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov.

“There is no mistake made by the Soviet Union that was not repeated by the international community here in Afghanistan,” Kabulov said. “Underestimation of the Afghan nation, the belief that we have superiority over Afghans, that they are inferior and cannot be trusted to run affairs in this country. A lack of knowledge of the social and ethnic structure of this country; a lack of sufficient understanding of traditions and religion.”

Not only that, but the country’s new patrons are making lots of new mistakes as well.

“NATO soldiers and officers alienate themselves from Afghans — they are not in touch in an everyday manner. They communicate with them from the barrels of guns in their bullet-proof Humvees.” As a career diplomat who was posted to Afghanistan in 1977, he sees some divine justice in the US’s current predicament. “But I am even more satisfied by not having Russian soldiers among ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] because I don’t want them to suffer the same results.”

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RINF.Com, May 22, 2008

By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed in discussions with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, that a naval blockade be imposed on Iran as one of several ways to pressure Iran into stopping its uranium enrichment program.

Although the White House denied a published report that U.S. President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term in January, the Bush administration is said not to have ruled out entirely the possibility of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A story in the Jerusalem Post quoted an unidentified official as claiming that a “senior member” of Bush’s entourage to Israel last week made the statement about attacking Iran in a closed meeting. However, White House press secretary Dana Perino said the article is “not worth the paper it’s written on.” She added that the administration’s preference and actions for dealing with Iran remain through peaceful diplomatic means.

Israelis who spoke to Bush and his entourage while they were in Israel last week said they had the impression that the military option “is on the table,” and that the president felt a sense of deep obligation to overcome the Iranian threat.

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Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations were designed as p.r. exercises to reinstate its victim status, but they failed miserably, starting with their keynote speakers.

Socialisr Worker, May 22, 2008 | Issue 672

SOUTH AFRICA’S white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of Black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the Black majority democratically elected the African National Congress–previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.–to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.

Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population.

While Israel’s proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa’s racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, “We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us.” If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, “the state of Israel is finished.”

Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.

Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa’s white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine’s majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority.

In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.

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Declan Walsh in Islamabad

The Guardian, Thursday May 22 2008

The Pakistani government has agreed to withdraw troops and introduce Sharia law in the conflict-ravaged Swat valley in return for an end to Taliban suicide bombings and attacks on government buildings.

The peace deal was signed yesterday by the newly elected government of North-West Frontier Province and representatives of the extremist cleric Maulvi Fazlullah, whose fighters battled the army last year.

The breakthrough represents a coup for the government, which is eager to end militant violence, but will be warily regarded by the US, which advocates a strong hand against the Taliban.

The US deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, told senators in Washington on Tuesday that any agreement was “something we’re going to have to watch very carefully”.

The Swat valley, an area of mountains and lush fields, became a battle zone last year after the army tried to tame Fazlullah’s increasingly bold militants. The deal concedes several of their demands.

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Uruknet, May 21, 2008

Five Palestinians, including one child, killed in Gaza on Tuesday

Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies

A wounded Palestinian girl is rushed into hospital after an Israeli air strike in Gaza May 20, 2008. REUTERS/Ismail Zaydah (GAZA) Palestinian sources in the Gaza Strip reported on Tuesday at night that five Palestinians, including one child, were killed in separate Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip. Medical sources reported that a child and a farmer were killed and two other Palestinian were wounded when the army shelled several areas, including houses and farmlands, on the northern and central parts of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian news agency, WAFA, identified the child as Majd Ziad Abu Okal, 13, from Beit Lahia. The killed famer was identified as Hamdi Al Dahdouh, 32, from Juhr Al Deek in the central Gaza Strip; his body was severely mutilated. Also on Wednesday, one fighter was killed and five Palestinian were wounded in an Israeli shelling that targeted a group of fighters in Al Zeitoun neighborhood, south of Gaza City. The fighter was identified as Mohammad Khamees Odah, 28, member of the AL Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas movement. Five residents were injured in the shelling. On Tuesday evening, resident Zayid Abu Wadi, 23, died of wounds sustained during the shelling which at the time led to the death of Odah, medical sources reported. A fifth resident, identified as Ali Al Dahdouh, 32, was killed when the army shot him in his head as he was driving his car in Juhr Al Deek area. The Israeli army claimed that the shelling targeted fighters who fired homemade shells into adjacent Israeli areas. Also on Tuesday, the army invaded Al Maghazi refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, and bulldozed farmlands in the area.

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted May 20, 2008.

“I was ordered multiple times by commissioned officers and noncommissioned officers to shoot unarmed civilians if their presence made me feel uncomfortable,” Sgt. Jason Lemieux told a panel of lawmakers last Thursday in a packed public hearing on Capitol Hill. “These orders were given with the understanding that my immediate chain of command would protect our subordinates from legal repercussions.” Lemieux, a former Marine who was part of the invading force that entered Baghdad in March 2003, came to Washington, D.C., with Iraq Veterans Against the War, weeks after the fifth anniversary of President George Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” to tell Congress enough is enough. Invited by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., the veterans spoke firmly and eloquently before members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, telling stories that were just “the tip of the iceberg,” as Lemieux put it, but which nevertheless offered a frightening range of accounts: violent house raids, the killings of innocent people, “drop weapons” used to make dead civilians look like insurgents, racism in the ranks, and their own process of dehumanization as they became inured to the humanity of those who they were supposedly sent to “liberate.”

The morning was infused with a sense of urgency. “Every day that the occupation continues, more men, women and children will be killed, maimed, or forced to flee their country as refugees,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of IVAW, in introductory remarks. “More veterans will return home with lifelong scars, emotional and physical, with little support to help them readjust.

“Many,” she added, “will fall victim to suicide.” Indeed, of the nine veterans who testified that day, two said they had tried to kill themselves after returning home.

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Malcom Lagauche, May 22-24. 2008

A few days ago, George Bush lectured the Arab world on its ways and said it must change. The speech was feeble and hypocritical. Almost everything Bush used as bad examples can also be attributed to his own country, especially since he has been the monarch. For Bush to criticize the Arab world for their justice systems would be like Jeffrey Dahmer advocating vegetarianism. There are definitely injustices in some Arab cultures, but Bush should be the last person to give advice. In 2006, we saw the worst travesty of justice of our time during the trial of Saddam Hussein and members of the Ba’ath government. Virtually every international legal institution condemned the farce that was called a trial. Even the United Nations issued a report blasting almost every aspect of the proceedings. A lackey judge sentenced Saddam to hang. Shortly after, he fled Iraq and ended up in Great Britain, claiming financial asylum. Now we are confronted with another chapter of the outrageous trials of Ba’ath Party members. Tariq Aziz, after rotting in prison for five years, will be tried for the crime of being involved with the execution of 42 Iraqis during the embargo that strangled the country. The accused tampered with food prices while food was in short supply. Because of their actions, many Iraqis suffered. This column is not about the execution of some black-marketeers. It concerns the total lack of any legal integrity for Aziz’ upcoming trial. First of all, Aziz had nothing to do with the execution of the 42 Iraqis. He was in foreign service and was out of the country when they were condemned. But, the court doesn’t seem interested in the truth. The judge will be the same one who sentenced Saddam. Miraculously, he has re-appeared in Iraq. Maybe some investigative journalist will take the time to see who his paymasters are for this trial. I will give a hint: start looking in Washington, D.C. Tariq Aziz made an appearance in court on May 20, 2008. However, he had no legal representation. His Iraqi lawyer was refused protection by the U.S. Then, he hired lawyers from France, Italy and Lebanon. Lo and behold. None was able to acquire a visa to enter Iraq. The nation that brags about its justice system and chastises other countries for deficiencies in their own systems, has made it impossible for Tariq Aziz, an old and sickly man, to even have a lawyer in the courtroom. One can only imagine how the trial will be conducted.

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