Peace and Justice Post

By Jacob Hornberger, Sep 9, 2010

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. confirms two things: the U.S. government wields the omnipotent, unreviewable power to torture people and, two, that Barack Obama, despite his much ballyhooed pre-election campaign hype about “change,” is actually just serving George W. Bush’s third term in office.

The plaintiffs’ claims against Jeppesen arose out of the CIA’s infamous kidnapping and rendition program, in which the CIA kidnaps people and then transports them to brutal foreign regimes for the purpose of torture. According to the plaintiffs’ complaint, which the Court was required to accept as true for purposes of ruling on the defendant’s motion to dismiss, the victims were subjected to horrible medieval-like torture techniques, such as breaking of bones, cutting into sexual organs, and pouring of painful liquids into open wounds.

The U.S. government intervened in the case, claiming that the suit should be dismissed based on the “state-secrets doctrine,” a pernicious doctrine that is found nowhere in the Constitution but which, the Court held, trumps the due process provisions of the Bill of Rights.

The government claimed that to allow the suit to go forward would entail the disclosure of government secrets, which would supposedly threaten national security.

The government’s position, however, which the court unfortunately bought into, is sheer nonsense. The state-secrets doctrine does nothing more than protect government officials from having their wrongdoing disclosed to the American people. That’s its purpose. That’s its effect.

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By Eric Margolis, Lew Rockwell.com, Sep 7, 2010

On 2 Sept, 2001, in a newspaper rticle, I wrote: “America’s strategic and economic interests in the Mideast and Muslim world are being threatened by the agony in Palestine, which inevitably invites terrorist attacks against US citizens and property.”

The 9/11 attacks came nine days later.

President Barack Obama is absolutely right to seek an end to the endless suffering of Palestinians. It is an affront to humanity and gravely undermines America’s values, security and prestige.

In my most recent book, American Raj – America and the Muslim World, I tried to show how the poisonous conflict over Palestine has generated much of what we call “terrorism,” and how it is dragging the United States ever into a deeper but unnecessary conflict with the Muslim world.

For those yearning to see an end to the seven decade Jewish-Palestinian conflict, to see security and tranquility for Israel, and justice for Palestinians, last week’s so-called “peace talks” in Washington were a painful farce.

President Obama convoked Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to meet in Washington with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s strongman, Husni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Abdullah.

The result was the same kind of tired, stale Mideast political kabuki that has dragged on for the past decade: platitudes about peace, cheery handshakes, and talks about talks about talks.

All involved knew that this was political theater designed to beguile American voters into believing progress was being made in the eternal Mideast mess.

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Barbara Koeppel, Consortiumnews.com, Sept 8, 2010

A few weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus pulled off a flawless remake of Gen. William Westmoreland’s 1967 performance in which the Vietnam War commander detected “light at the end of the tunnel” – just months before the Viet Cong launched its Tet offensive, proving the resistance was very much alive and well. This time, the geography is Afghanistan. But Gen. Petraeus’s upbeat claims on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and elsewhere — that U.S. and NATO troops have ousted some Taliban from conflicted areas, helped reform the corrupt Afghan government, and trained Afghan security forces to fight on their own — are equally phony, according to a former senior U.S. government official.

In an interview, Matthew Hoh, an ex-Marine commander in Iraq who took a high-ranking State Department job in Afghanistan before resigning a year ago because he “couldn’t stand the BS of it anymore,” disputed each Petraeus claim.

First, rather than the U.S. having ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan’s south and east, quite the opposite is true, Hoh said.

“Villagers still turn to their Afghan brothers to rid their towns of carpetbaggers,” Hoh said. “These include not only U.S. or NATO forces, but also the Afghan government that … is staggeringly corrupt and its troops are mainly from different ethnic groups or regions.”

These areas of Afghanistan are so anti-outsider that U.S. congressional and other delegations can’t venture there.

According to Hoh, nothing has improved, even though “the number of NATO troops soared from under 30,000 in 2005 to the current 150,000, and we’ve spent about $350 billion for the military and $50 billion for reconstruction programs, which include training and equipping Afghan forces.”

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by John Chuckman, Dissident Voice, September 8th, 2010

I don’t know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.

It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.

As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.

Israel has the peace that comes of infinitely greater power, systematic and ruthless use of that power, the reduction of the people it regards as opponents to squatters on their own land, and a world too intimidated to take any effective action for justice or fairness.

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