Peace and Justice Post

US Envoy Secretly Offered Troops in Iraq After 2011

By GARETH PORTER, Counterpunch, Nov 16, 2010

A special envoy from President Barack Obama raised the possibility in a secret meeting with senior Iraqi military and civilian officials in Baghdad Sep. 23 that his administration would leave more than 15,000 combat troops in Iraq after the 2011 deadline for U.S. withdrawal, according to a senior Iraqi intelligence official familiar with the details of the meeting.

But the White House official, Puneet Talwar, special assistant to the president and senior director for the Gulf States, Iran and Iraq on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, said the deployment would have to be handled in a way that was consistent the president’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops completely from Iraq under the 2008 agreement, the official said.

Talwar suggested that the combat troops could be placed under the cover of the State Department’s security force, the Iraqi intelligence official told IPS.

The Obama envoy was referring to a force that the State Department had announced in August to provide security for U.S. civilian officials working in Baghdad and four regional consulates in Kirkuk, Erbil, Mosul and Basra. The administration’s official position is that the security force is to be manned by private security personnel, as explained in a briefing given by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Corbin Aug. 17.

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Beena Sarwar, AHRC, Nov 16, 2010

The introspection, debate and outrage generated a month ago by the attacks on two villages in Gojra on July 31 and Aug 1 may be out of public sight, as happened all too often in the past, but the nine people murdered and the homes and churches gutted are not out of mind. Neither is Najeeb Zafar, the young factory owner in Sheikhupura, Punjab, killed on August 4 for allegedly desecrating Quranic verses when he removed a calendar from a wall. The following day, police in Sanghar, Sindh, saved a similarly accused 60-year old woman, Akhtari Malkani by taking her in protective custody.

On the surface, these incidents were motivated by passions aroused by allegations of blasphemy or disrespect to the holy Quran. These criminal charges can be punishable by death – but this is a punishment for the state to administer, not private citizens. The real motivation remains settling scores, a pattern identified over twenty years ago when the first ‘blasphemy murder’ took place; that of the Punjabi poet and teacher Naiamat Ahmar in Faisalabad in 1992.

The pattern involves one party targeting another, alleging blasphemy while the real motives are personal enmity or economic rivalry as Zubeida Mustafa noted in a recent column. The accused tend to be poor people who have improved their lot in life, triggering jealousies. Accusations of blasphemy are used to justify the violence. Ms Mustafa also pointed to (mis) education as a factor that makes it easy, when such an allegation is levelled, to rabble-rouse a mob into violence.

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US Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke raised a few eyebrows yesterday when he announced, in front of a number of reports, that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in July and that the war would be over by 2014.

Which was particularly surprising as a number of other officials, including the president, have repeatedly disavowed the July drawdown date and have made the 2014 date out to be the prospective start of some transition to Afghan leadership of the war.

Holbrooke seems to have changed his mind today, however, insisting that there is absolutely no “exit strategy” for the nearly decade long Afghan War and insisting that 2014 would not be the end of the international occupation of Afghanistan.

NATO is expected to focus this weekend’s Lisbon summit on the Afghan War, but as is so often the case officials will not consider any strategy that might seem like ending the war. According to NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, continuing the war will be the only option considered.

William Dalrymple, The Guardian, Nov 12, 2010

When George W Bush sent the US into Iraq in 2003, he believed he would be replacing Saddam Hussein with a peaceful, pro-American Arab democracy that would naturally look to the Christian west for support. In reality, seven years on, it appears that he has instead created a highly radicalised pro-Iranian sectarian killing field, where most of the Iraqi Christian minority has been forced to flee abroad.

This week saw new levels of violence directed at Iraq’s Christians. Eight days after the attack on Baghdad’s main Catholic church that left more than 50 worshippers dead, militants detonated more than 14 bombs in Christian suburbs, killing at least four and wounding about 30. Since then the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an al-Qaida front, has warned of a new wave of attacks on Christians “wherever they can be reached … We will open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of blood.”

Before Bush senior took on Saddam for the first time in 1991, there were more than a million Christians in Iraq. They made up just under 10% of the population, and were a prosperous and prominent minority, something exemplified by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Christian foreign minister. Educated and middle class, the Christians were concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which then had the largest Christian population of any city in the Middle East.

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Amnesty International has accused the EU of failing to hold its members to account for their role in the detention of terrorism suspects by the CIA.

It calls for European governments to ensure justice for suspects who were interrogated under the programme known as extraordinary rendition.

Countries including Poland have been accused of hosting secret CIA prisons.

Many suspects are alleged to have been taken to other countries where they were tortured or disappeared.

Several European nations have been accused of co-operating by hosting secret CIA prisons or allowing CIA flights carrying the prisoners to use airports on their way to other countries.

In a report entitled Open Secret: Mounting Evidence of Europe’s Complicity in Rendition and Secret Detention, published on Monday, Amnesty compiles what it says is the latest evidence of European countries’ involvement in the CIA’s programmes.

“The EU has utterly failed to hold member states accountable for the abuses they’ve committed,” said Nicholas Berger, director of Amnesty International’s European institutions office.

“These abuses occurred on European soil. We simply can’t allow Europe to join the US in becoming an ‘accountability-free’ zone. The tide is slowly turning with some countries starting investigations, but much more needs to be done.”

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Intifada Palestine,  Nov,10, 2010

by Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine,

Israel’s fanatical supporters insist on behaving and acting like mad dogs by disregarding any consideration for honesty, rectitude and moral consistency.

They nearly completely overlook Israel’s Nazi-like behavior as if such behavior were taking place in a distant galaxy, not in this world.

Instead, they constantly focus on essentially mundane matters such as anti-Semitism and try desperately to link such secondary issues with the growing rejection in many countries of Israel’s decidedly fascist and criminal conduct in Occupied Palestine.

In fact, it is manifestly clear that Israel uses, or more correctly, misuses the issue of anti-Semitism as its ultimate red herring to distract attention from its affronting criminality in occupied Palestine.

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In his new book, George W. Bush writes that he was under pressure not just from hawks in the United States to invade Iraq, but from Arab statesmen as well.

In a revealing passage, Bush writes that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt “told Tommy Franks that Iraq had biological weapons and was certain to use them on [American] troops,” a VOA article highlights. Bush goes on to say that Mubarak “refused to make the allegation in public for fear of inciting the Arab street.”

Additionally, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who served as the influential Saudi ambassador to the United States for over 20 years and who Bush calls “a friend of mine since dad’s presidency” also wanted a “decision” to be made — although this seems less direct an indictment than “Iraq has biological weapons and will use them against you.”

So while the Arab street was firmly opposed to American intervention in Iraq, Arab heads of states were quietly and secretly either encouraging or tacitly endorsing allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a fact that was directly being used as the principal justification for invading the country.

Sounds familiar?

Netanyahu presents security cabinet with Clinton’s incentive of 20 F-35 fighter planes and security guarantees in exchange for 90-day West Bank building moratorium.

By Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz (Israel), Nov 13, 2010

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s seven-member inner cabinet discussed Saturday an offer by the United States to reinstate a freeze on West Bank Settlement construction in return for a package of incentives.

Netanyahu presented Saturday the U.S. offer, which was discussed by Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday, to the forum of seven.

	U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their meeting in New York, November 11, 2010.
	Photo by: Reuters

According to the offer Israel would stop construction in the West Bank for 90 days. The freeze includes construction that began after the end of the first settlement moratorium on September 26.

The moratorium would not apply to construction in East Jerusalem. The U.S. will not ask Israel to extend the new moratorium when it expires.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said the Americans had not officially informed the Palestinians about the details of the proposal, “but they know we have a major problem in not including east Jerusalem”.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will  put the U.S. plan before Palestinian
decision-makers and call for an immediate session of Arab League officials before announcing an official decision, Erekat said.

In return for an Israeli freeze, the U.S. government would deliver 20 F-35 fighter jets to Israel, a deal worth $3 billion. Moreover, if an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is achieved, the U.S. would sign a comprehensive security agreement with Israel. The U.S. and Israel are to discuss the nature of the new security arrangements in the next few weeks.

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By ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times, November 13, 2010

Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press

Arthur Rudolph, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA.

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The O.S.I. Report

Interactive

In Hunt for Nazis, an Incomplete History

Associated Press

Dr. Josef Mengele in 1956.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

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