Peace and Justice Post

John Nichols | The Nation, June 20, 2008

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress Friday that the Bush-Cheney Administration continues to conceal information about abuses of power committed to punish former Ambassador Joe Wilson for challenging the President’s storyline with regard to the “need” to invade and occupy Iraq.

“This matter continues to be investigated by Congress because of what the White House has chosen to conceal from the public,” McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee. “Despite assurances that the administration would discuss the matter once the special counsel had completed his work, the White House has sought to avoid public scrutiny and accountability.”

Speaking under oath, the longtime aide to President Bush seemed at times to dumb down his testimony, softening points made in his explosive book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

In the book and in interviews promoting it, McClellan suggested that key players in the White House — including political czar Karl Rove, vice presidential chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney — had at critical points in 2003 lied to him (or, at the least, conspired to keep him in the dark) about their involvement in the leaking information about the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA covert operative.

Continued . . .

International Herald Tribune, June 20, 2008

By Michael R. Gordon and Erich Schmitt

Washington: Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

Israeli officials declined to discuss the details of the exercise. A spokesman for the Israeli military would say only that the country’s air force “regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel.”

But the scope of the Israeli exercise virtually guaranteed that it would be noticed by American and other foreign intelligence agencies. A senior Pentagon official who has been briefed on the exercise, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter, said the exercise appeared to serve multiple purposes.

One Israeli goal, the Pentagon official said, was to practice flight tactics, aerial refueling and all other details of a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear installations and its long-range conventional missiles.

A second, the official said, was to send a clear message to the United States and other countries that Israel was prepared to act militarily if diplomatic efforts to stop Iran from producing bomb-grade uranium continued to falter.

“They wanted us to know, they wanted the Europeans to know, and they wanted the Iranians to know,” the Pentagon official said. “There’s a lot of signaling going on at different levels.”

Several American officials said they did not believe that the Israeli government had concluded that it must attack Iran and did not think that such a strike was imminent.

Shaul Mofaz, a former Israeli defense minister who is now a deputy prime minister, warned in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that Israel might have no choice but to attack. “If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack,” Mofaz said in the interview published on June 6, the day after the unpublicized exercise ended. “Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable.”

But Mofaz was criticized by other Israeli politicians as seeking to enhance his own standing as questions mount about whether the embattled Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, can hang on to power.

Israeli officials have told their American counterparts that Mofaz’s statement does not represent official policy. But American officials were also told that Israel had prepared plans for striking nuclear targets in Iran and could carry them out if needed.

Iran has shown signs that it is taking the Israeli warnings seriously, by beefing up its air defenses in recent weeks, including increasing air patrols. In one instance, Iran scrambled F-4 jets to double-check an Iraqi civilian flight from Baghdad to Tehran.

“They are clearly nervous about this and have their air defense on guard,” a Bush administration official said of the Iranians.

Any Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would confront a number of challenges. Many American experts say they believe that such an attack could delay but not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Much of the program’s infrastructure is buried under earth and concrete and installed in long tunnels or hallways, making precise targeting difficult. There is also concern that not all of the facilities have been detected. To inflict maximum damage, multiple attacks might be necessary, which many analysts say is beyond Israel’s ability at this time.

Continued . . .

Chris Floyd | uruknet.info, June 19, 2008

This has been one of the most extraordinary weeks in modern American history. The many isolated streams of evidence about the Bush Administration’s torture system – and the direct responsibility of the Administration’s highest officials for this vast crime – have now converged into a mighty flood: undeniable, unignorable, pouring through the halls of Congress and media newsrooms, lashing at the walls of the White House itself. In the course of the past few days, a series of events has laid bare the stinking sepsis at the heart of the Bush Regime for all to see. It began last Sunday with the launch of a remarkable series by McClatchy Newspapers, detailing the torture, brutality, injustice and murder that has riddled the Bush gulag from top to bottom. Then came fiery Senate hearings, in which long-somnolent legislators finally bestirred themselves to confront and denounce some of the torture system’s architects, including Dick Cheney pointman William Haynes III, who was left reeling, shuffling, dissembling – and bracing for perjury charges after his blatantly mendacious testimony. Companion hearings in the House produced stunning confirmation of mass murder in the Bush gulag – a bare minimum of 27 killings, among the 108 known cases of death among Terror War captives. This evidence came from rock-solid Establishment figure Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. (Of course, as many captives have been and are being held in “secret prisons,” and an untold number of others have been hidden from the Red Cross, there is no way of knowing at this point how many prisoners have actually died or been murdered – or even how many prisoners there are in the gulag.) Continued . . .

Richard Cowan |Reuters North American News Service, June 19, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House Thursday approved enough new money to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for another year, while abandoning attempts to set deadlines opposed by President Bush for withdrawing American combat troops.

By a vote of 268-155, the House approved the funding for the two wars. Most of the $161.8 billion the Pentagon will get, which is slightly less than Bush requested, will be used to fight in Iraq.

The measure, which the Bush administration backed, is expected to be debated by the Senate within several days. It was not yet clear whether the Senate would amend the bill.

Some Democrats expressed frustration with an inability to force troop withdrawals from Iraq, despite their party’s majority status in the House.

“Let us hope this is the last time another dollar will be spent without constraint, without conditions,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who opposes the Iraq war.

The debate over the future of the Iraq war is expected to shift to the presidential campaign, where Democrat Barack Obama has called for prompt troop withdrawals, while Republican John McCain has talked about the possibility of a long military presence in Iraq.

As the House voted on money for the war, an anti-war protester sitting in a visitor’s gallery in the chamber threw red-stained dollars at lawmakers before being escorted out by security.

PENTAGON LAYOFFS

The Pentagon has said that without a new infusion of war money, personnel layoffs would begin next month and it would not be able to pay active duty soldiers.

According to the House Appropriations Committee, the new money will cover war costs through mid-2009, well beyond when a new U.S. president takes office on Jan. 20.

With this new batch of money, Congress will have appropriated more than $800 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. That money is piled onto a huge federal debt that has grown since Bush took office in 2001, giving fiscal conservatives in Congress heartburn.

Last month, the House passed a different version of the war-funding bill, which would have called for immediately starting troop withdrawals from Iraq and with the goal of completing the removal of combat soldiers by the end of 2009.

There are nearly 150,000 U.S. troops fighting in Iraq.

But in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate and a certain veto by Bush, Democrats who control the House gave up, at least for now, trying to legislate troop withdrawals.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, continued voicing support for the 5-year-old war, despite its unpopularity among voters. “I’m glad we’re there,” he said.

“Our effort in Iraq is important,” Boehner said earlier. “Building a growing democracy in a part of the world that has never known it will pay great dividends over the next 50 years.”

Besides providing war funds, the measure would significantly expand college education benefits for veterans of the two wars and their families at an estimated cost of about $63 billion over 11 years.

It also would prohibit the construction of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and require Baghdad to match, dollar-for-dollar, U.S. reconstruction aid.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Justifying the Unjustifiable

Posted by Dr Nasir Khan at 9:41 AM 0 comments

CIA Played Larger Role In Advising Pentagon

RINF.COM, June 19, 2008

By Joby Warrick

A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

Torture “is basically subject to perception,” CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known. By the time of the meeting, the CIA already had used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on at least one terrorism suspect and was holding high-level al-Qaeda detainees in secret prisons overseas — actions that Bush administration lawyers had approved.

The new evidence, along with hours of questioning of former Pentagon officials at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, shed light on efforts by top aides to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to research and reverse-engineer techniques used by military survival schools to prepare U.S. service members for possible capture by hostile forces. The techniques — sensory deprivation, forced nudity, stress positions and exploitation of phobias, such as fear of dogs — would eventually be approved for use at Guantanamo Bay and would spread to U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison. Nearly all were later rescinded.

Continued . . .

RINF.COM, June 19, 2008

By Joby Warrick

A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

Torture “is basically subject to perception,” CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known. By the time of the meeting, the CIA already had used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on at least one terrorism suspect and was holding high-level al-Qaeda detainees in secret prisons overseas — actions that Bush administration lawyers had approved.

The new evidence, along with hours of questioning of former Pentagon officials at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, shed light on efforts by top aides to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to research and reverse-engineer techniques used by military survival schools to prepare U.S. service members for possible capture by hostile forces. The techniques — sensory deprivation, forced nudity, stress positions and exploitation of phobias, such as fear of dogs — would eventually be approved for use at Guantanamo Bay and would spread to U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison. Nearly all were later rescinded.

Continued . . .

Congressional proceedings would help prevent another mistaken war

BY RAY McGOVERN | The Detroit Free Press, June 19, 2008

United States Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has a rendezvous with destiny. He is uniquely placed to thrust a rod through the wheels of a White House juggernaut to war with Iran by commencing impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush.

A move to impeach would bolster the resistance to Bush among our senior military leaders who know that attacking Iran at this time would be the strategic equivalent of the marches into Russia by Napoleon and Hitler.

Since Conyers took the helm of Judiciary in January 2007, the train of abuses and usurpations by the Bush administration has gotten even longer. But oddly, Conyers has lost his earlier appetite for impeachment and begun offering all manner of transparent excuses not to proceed. On July 23, 2007, for example, Conyers told Cindy Sheehan, the Rev. Lennox Yearwood and me that he would need 218 votes in the House, and vociferously claimed the votes were not there.

Well, they are now. Last week, 251 members of the House voted to refer to Conyers’ committee the 35 Articles of Impeachment offered by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Conyers should take them up.

When bombs are falling on Iran, it will be too late — and our commander in chief is likely to give that order within the next couple of months. As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan reminds us, when the president sets his mind on something, he is not going to let anything stop him.

What seems to be driving Bush comes through best when he ad-libs at press conferences. On June 10, in Slovenia, he was asked about the intensifying debate in Israel about a military option against the nuclear installations in Iran. Bush responded: “If you go to Israel and listen carefully, you’ll hear the urgency in their voice.”

What’s so urgent? Israel’s ambassador to the United States, speaking at an American Jewish Committee luncheon last Oct. 22, said the Iranians must not be permitted to conclude that, “come January ’09 (after Bush leaves office), they have it their own way.”

Vice President Dick Cheney last summer pushed for air strikes on Revolutionary Guards bases in Iran, but was thwarted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to J. Scott Carpenter, a senior State Department official working on the Middle East at the time.

The Joint Chiefs also have strongly opposed attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, according to a former Iran specialist at the National Security Council, Hillary Mann, who has wide contacts among senior Pentagon officials. Mann reports that Admiral William Fallon, the former CENTCOM commander, joined the Joint Chiefs in opposing such an attack and made his views known to the White House. Fallon was forced to resign in March and will be replaced as CENTCOM commander by Gen. David Petraeus.

A “political general,” Petraeus has already demonstrated his willingness to do Cheney’s bidding — by, for example, making demonstrably false claims about Iranian weaponry in Iraq. Nonetheless, the U.S. military in Baghdad apparently remains under orders to blame any serious violence on “special groups” — code for those said to be supported by Iran.

Continued . . .

Aftenposten, Oslo, June 19, 2008

Some cultural treasures allegedly carried out of Afghanistan by a Norwegian soldier are 4,000 years old, and the country wants them back.

Norwegian soldiers have been part of the UN force in Afghanistan. PHOTO: RUNE THOMAS EGE / FORSVARET

Related stories:

Soldier’s loot turned away – 30.05.2008

News magazine Ny Tid reports in its current edition that Afghan authorities are seeking return of ancient coins and a bottle that a soldier recently offered to an Oslo museum.

“They are from the bronze age, and very valuable for Afghanistan,” the director of the National Museum in Kabul, Omara Khan Masoudi, told Ny Tid. The museum itself was ransacked and fell into ruin during the war in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.

Masoudi said he was “shocked” to hear that a Norwegian soldier “who came here to serve the country and our people, had smuggled out historical treasures that belong to the Afghan people.”

Masoudi said he plans to write to the Norwegian government through Afghanistan’s own foreign ministry, in the hopes of securing return of the items.

He noted that he’s not sure the soldier stole the items. “Maybe he found them by mistake, but we will take this up with the Norwegian government, so they can help us find the items and get them returned,” Masoudi told Ny Tid. “The soldier must be encouraged to give them back.”

Afghanistan’s embassy in Oslo has also told Ny Tid that they had contacted the Norwegian Defense Ministry, in an effort to find out what happened.

Masoudi praised the Norwegian government for returning 65 manuscripts that also were smuggled out of Afghanistan last year.

“Norway is one of the countries that has given us a lot of support to rebuild our museums, they have helped us rebuild the country,” Masoudi said. “I’m certain they will do all they can to find and return these stolen treasures.”