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Spain investigates what America should

April 7, 2009

By Marjorie Cohn | San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 2009

A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay.

If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions could arrest these six men when they travel abroad.

Does Spain have the authority to prosecute Americans for crimes that didn’t take place on Spanish soil?

The answer is yes. It’s called “universal jurisdiction.” Universal jurisdiction is a well-established theory that countries, including the United States, have used for many years to investigate and prosecute foreign nationals for crimes that shock the conscience of the global community. It provides a critical legal tool to hold accountable those who commit crimes against the law of nations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Without universal jurisdiction, many of the most notorious criminals would go free. Countries that have used this as a basis to prosecute the most serious of crimes should be commended for their courage. They help to create a just world in which we all seek to live.

Israel used universal jurisdiction to prosecute, convict and execute Adolph Eichmann for his crimes during the Holocaust, even they had no direct relationship with Israel.

A federal court in Miami recently convicted Chuckie Taylor, son of the former Liberian president, of torture that occurred in Liberia. A U.S. court sentenced Taylor to 97 years in prison in January.

Universal jurisdiction complements, but doesn’t supersede, national prosecutions. So if the United States were investigating the Bush officials, other countries would refrain from doing so.

When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture, it promised to extradite or prosecute those who commit, or are complicit in, the commission of torture.

President Obama, when asked whether he favored criminal investigations of Bush officials, replied, “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen.”

“But,” he added, “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backward.” Preoccupied with the economy and two wars, Obama reportedly wants to wait before considering prosecutions that would invariably anger the GOP.

Evidence that Bush officials set a policy that led to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo continues to emerge.

According to ABC News, Gonzales met with other officials in the White House and authorized torture, including waterboarding.

The Office of Professional Responsibility, which reports to the U.S. attorney general, drafted a report that excoriates Yoo and Bybee for writing the infamous torture memos. Haynes, Addington and Feith participated in decisions that led to torture. The release of additional graphic torture memos by the U.S. Department of Justice is imminent.

It is the responsibility of the United States to investigate allegations of torture. Almost two-thirds of respondents to a USA Today/Gallup Poll favor investigations of the Bush team for torture and warrantless wiretapping. Nearly four in 10 support criminal investigations.

Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora told Congress, “There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” Providing impunity to those who ordered the torture will be the third recruiting tool.

If the United States refuses to investigate now, it will be more likely that some future administration will repeat this scenario. The use of torture should be purged from our system, much like we eradicated slavery.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd). Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn.com (The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer; she is not acting on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild or Thomas Jefferson School of Law)

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US Hypocrisy on North Korea: Let’s Talk About Israel’s Nukes

April 7, 2009

RebelReports, April 6, 2009

Obama said of North Korea’s satellite launch: “Rules must be binding… Violations must be punished.” He used Iran to justify a controversial missile system. What about Israel’s nukes and violations?

By Jeremy Scahill

President Obama’s administration is pressing for diplomatic retaliation, perhaps in the form of more sanctions against North Korea, after Pyonyang launched a rocket into space. There are conflicting reports about the success of the launch. North Korea says the rocket carried a satellite, which is now orbiting the earth. That’s according to state-run media in North Korea, which reportedly broadcast patriotic songs and images of Kim Jung Il, praising him for the launch. The US, meanwhile, said the launch failed to reach orbit, landing in the Pacific Ocean. According to The New York Times, “Officials and analysts in Seoul said the North’s rocket, identified by American officials as a Taepodong-2, flew at least 2,000 miles, doubling the range of an earlier rocket it tested in 1998 and boosting its potential to fire a long-range missile.”

There is disagreement at the Security Council over whether North Korea violated any UN resolutions with the US on one side and Russia, backed by China, on the other. The Obama administration has called the launch a “provocative act.” “We think that what was launched is not the issue; the fact that there was a launch using ballistic missile technology is itself a clear violation,” said UN ambassador Susan Rice, who is pressing for more sanctions against North Korea at the Security Council. Chinese officials said North Korea, like other nations, had a right to launch satellites. “Every state has the right to the peaceful use of outer space,” said Russia’s deputy U.N. envoy, Igor N. Shcherbak.

Obama used the launch in his major address in Prague, which has been characterized as an anti-nuclear speech. “Rules must be binding,” he said of North Korea’s launch. “Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

Many countries around the world certainly see hypocrisy in the Obama administration’s position on North Korea. Israel has repeatedly been condemned by the UN for its occupation of Palestinian lands. Moreover, it has hundreds of nuclear weapons with estimates ranging from 200-400 warheads. What’s more, Israel and the US are in league with North Korea in the small club of nations that have refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Other nations include: China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan. In his Prague speech, Obama said his administration “will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification,” saying, “After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned.”

All of this must be kept in context as the “crisis” with North Korea continues to unfold. US hypocrisy on the nuclear issue takes away credibility the US has in its condemnations of North Korea, or Iran, for that matter. “Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies,” Obama said in Prague. Obama used Iran to justify a controverisal central European missile system, saying, “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward… with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.” Obama did not mention Israel once in his speech and has never acknowledged its nuclear weapons system. Perhaps Obama should ask Arab and Muslim nations in the region what country they see as the biggest nuclear threat.

“Rules are only rules if they apply to everyone,” said Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicIntifada.net. “Obama’s silence in the face of Israel’s violation of international law, and UN calls for war crimes investigations in its on attacks on Gaza, contrast to his strident calls for Security Council action regarding North Korea. Israel has violated dozens of UN Security Council resolutions. Obama has even refused to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, though former President Jimmy Carter has confirmed that the country has 150 nuclear weapons.”

And this historical fact, which to Obama’s credit he acknowledged, should never be forgotten: One nation in the world has used nuclear weapons—the United States.

In a statement, Peace Action, cautiously welcomed some of Obama’s positions outlined in Prague, but said, “President Obama’s statement that [a nuclear weapons-free] world might not be achieved in his lifetime is very disappointing.  Obama can and should announce the initiation of negotiations on the global elimination of nuclear weapons.  Similarly, his promotion of nuclear power, missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and his escalation of troops in Afghanistan are all moves in the wrong direction.”

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Democrats and War Escalation

April 7, 2009

by Norman Solomon | CommonDreams.org, April 6, 2009

Top Democrats and many prominent supporters — with vocal agreement, tactical quibbles or total silence — are assisting the escalation of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The predictable results will include much more killing and destruction. Back home, on the political front, the escalation will drive deep wedges into the Democratic Party.The party has a large anti-war base, and that base will grow wider and stronger among voters as the realities of the Obama war program become more evident. The current backing or acceptance of the escalation from liberal think tanks and some online activist groups will not be able to prevent the growth of opposition among key voting blocs.In their eagerness to help the Obama presidency, many of its prominent liberal supporters — whatever their private views on the escalation — are willing to function as enablers of the expanded warfare. Many assume that opposition would undermine the administration and play into the hands of Republicans. But in the long run, going along with the escalation is not helping Obama; by putting off the days of reckoning, the acceptance of the escalation may actually help Obama destroy his own presidency.

Ideally, in 2009, Democratic lawmakers would see as role models the senators who opposed the Vietnam War — first Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, and then (years later) others including Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Earlier and stronger opposition from elected officials could have saved countless lives. The dreams of the Great Society might not have been crushed. And Richard Nixon might never have become president.

Now, everyone has the potential to help challenge the escalation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan war — on a collision course with heightened disaster.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times of London reported that U.S. drone attacks along the Afghan-Pakistani border on Saturday killed “foreign militants” and “women and children” — while Pakistani officials asserted that “American drone attacks on the border . . . are causing a massive humanitarian emergency.” The newspaper says that “as many as 1 million people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army.”

This is standard catastrophic impact of a counterinsurgency war. In short, as former Kennedy administration official William Polk spells out in his recent book “Violent Politics,” the key elements are in place for the U.S. war in Afghanistan to fail on its own terms while heightening the death and misery on a large scale.

Citing UN poverty data, a recent essay by Tom Hayden points out that in Afghanistan and Pakistan “the levels of suffering are among the most extreme in the world, and from suffering, from having nothing to live for, comes the will to die for a cause.” While the Washington spin machine touts development aid, the humanitarian effort adds up to a few pennies for each dollar going to the U.S. war effort.

A report from the Carnegie Endowment began this year with the stark conclusion that “the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.” Hayden made the same point when he wrote that “military occupation, particularly a surge of U.S. troops into the Pashtun region in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the surest way to inflame nationalist resistance and greater support for the Taliban.”

Over the weekend, in his pitch for more NATO support, President Obama tried to make the U.S. war goals seem circumscribed: “I want everybody to understand that our focus is to defeat Al Qaeda.” But there’s no evidence that Al Qaeda has a significant foothold in Afghanistan. That group long since decamped to Pakistan.

In any event, the claim that a massive war is necessary to fight terrorism is hardly new. Lest we forget: After George W. Bush could no longer cling to his claims about WMDs in Iraq, he settled on the anti-terrorist rationale for continuing the Iraq occupation.

Even among allies, the anti-terrorism rationale is not flying for a troop buildup in Afghanistan. After Obama’s latest appeal to the leaders of NATO countries, as the New York Times reported Sunday, “his calls for a more lasting European troop increase for Afghanistan were politely brushed aside.”

Europe will provide no more than 5,000 new troops, and most of them just for the Afghan pre-election period till late summer. In the words of the Times: “Mr. Obama is raising the number of American troops this year to about 68,000 from the current 38,000, which will significantly Americanize the war.”

For those already concerned about Obama’s re-election prospects, such war realities may seem faraway and relatively abstract. But escalation will fracture his base inside the Democratic Party. If the president insists on leading a party of war, then activists will educate, agitate and organize to transform it into a party for peace.

The mirage of wise counterinsurgency has been re-conjured by the Obama White House, echoing the “best and brightest” from Democratic administrations of the 1960s. But the party affiliation of the U.S. president will make no difference to people far away who mourn the loss of loved ones. And, whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan or the United States, the president will be held to the astute standard that Barack Obama laid out as he addressed unfriendly foreign leaders in his inaugural speech: “People will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is “Made Love, Got War.” He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign.

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Peace talk, war reality

April 6, 2009

Editorial

Morning Star Online, April 5, 2009

IT is certainly true that US President Barack Obama’s broad and inclusive public persona is a welcome change from the narrow bigoted fundamentalism of his predecessor George W Bush.

And it is refreshing, albeit faintly incredible, to hear the commander-in-chief of the largest nuclear power in the world say that the US seeks “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” and continue that the US is “ready to lead,” has a “moral responsibility to act” and stands for the right of everybody to live free of fear in the 21st century.

It is only when one stands back from the dizzy power of Mr Obama’s rhetoric and measures it against the cold realities of world politics that the doubts start to crowd in like the qhost of Christmas past steaming in on Ebenezer Scrooge.

For someone so vocally committed to nuclear detente and eventual disarmament, President Obama cuts a strange figure on the world stage, mixing mixing peace talk with a cold-warrior reality which would not disgrace the most right-wing of his predecessors.

On the one hand stands a man who declares that “the world must stand together and prevent the spread of these weapons.”

But on the other stands a president in control of sufficient nuclear firepower to turn large tracts of the world into nuclear wastelands.

The man proclaims “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but the president continues to support Israel, whose illegal nuclear weapons clearly classify it as a rogue state among the nations of the world.

He shamelessly continues to use nuclear-armed Israel to counterbalance the regional influence of Iran and, to preserve the integrity of that counterweight, argues and threatens against an Iranian nuclear capacity while blithely disregarding the Israeli nuclear crime.

Mr Obama says that the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security” is terrorists possessing nuclear weapons.

But he continues to disregard the role of his own massive nuclear arsenal in making that possession into a logical aspiration for any organisation, be it nationally or religiously led, that wishes to become a force in world politics.

His condemnation of North Korea’s launch of a rocket on Sunday would have carried considerably more authority if it had come from a president who didn’t have a lackey following him around with the nuclear red button always within reach.

None of this is to say that Mr Obama’s initiative in reopening the issue of nuclear arms reduction should be rejected as phoney. Quitethe reverse.

Substantial bilateral reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenal would be an enormous forward move in any event.

The world would be much safer for such reductions and they should be pursued with eagerness.

But the fact remains that US influence to remove the perceived threat of an Iranian nuclear capability should be accompanied by the use of that influence to neutralise the Israeli arsenal.

And any bilateral talks should be predicated on an acknowledgement that war, whether nuclear or conventional, is not the continuation of politics by other means, but an outrage perpetrated on the weak by the strong and an inappropriate response from a man who wishes to be seen as a peacemaker.

And US policy on Afghanistan and Iran must reflect just that.

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Capitalism is Dead, Long Live Capitalism

April 6, 2009

What of Religion?

By Badri Raina | ZNet, April 5, 2009

I

One million Indian lives were consumed by the famine of 1771 in the Purnea district of the then undivided Bengal Province.

Warren Hastings, Governor General, proudly wrote back to the Board of Directors of the East India Company that, contrary to what might have been expected, he had collected more taxes that year than ever before!

This may have pleased the Company but did not please Edmund Burke.

His fulminations about how the Company had devastated flourishing cities like Dacca and Murshidabad and handed the region over to the tiger and the orangutan are of course legend.

So why was he so displeased, and why did he become the chief engine of the subsequent impeachment of Hastings?

Not because his heart bled for the Indians, but because he knew cannily enough that if such depredations were allowed to continue, the Company could not hope to survive for long.

Crucial to the continued exploitation of the colony and to the drain of its wealth was the preservation of the myth that the British were in India to do good to the Indians against their own primitive incompetence. The “white man” had to show himself a saviour.

Such was also the reason why Burke was to become an implacable enemy to the revolution in France.

It was important to show that the British dispensation at home, however oppressive, was anyway to be preferred to the egalitarian impulse of the French event, and to ensure that nothing of that kind brewed within the shores of Britannia.

Some fifty years on from there, Carlyle wrote perhaps the first three-volume account of the French Revolution (1836).

And the intent was no different. The purpose was to egg the new Whig parliament to effect “reforms” in good time lest Chartism took on the dimensions of the French happenings at home.

II

Something similar seems to have happened at the London, G-20 summit.

Recognizing the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon model of free-market Capitalism, its global votaries have put their heads together to salvage Capitalism from its ruins.

The air from London is thus thick with news of Capitalist institutions and practices up for pragmatic “reform.”

Interestingly, if “reform” since the Washington Consensus (1990) had meant a near-total deregulation of Capital flows, Banking practices, Market mechanisms, and a dissolution of the sovereignty of nation-states to enable the global privatization of wealth and profit-maximisation, “reform” at the 2009 London conclave seems to have come to mean something rather contrary to all that. Even if only as a change of garb.

We now hear of a global intent to reform the IMF, even as more liquidity is infused into its coffers ($500 billion, precisely), of regulation of banking and other investment practices, of sops to be doled out to those most innocent of the collapse but most affected by it, and of steering clear of “protectionism” so that the revival of global wealth multipliers are not thwarted by debilitating autarky.

In one word, the Captains of world Capitalism seem to have come to the view that if Capitalism is to be saved for the times to come, it will need to be given the garb of a world-wide Social Democracy for a while.

And, the Sinner of the first part, namely the United States of America, seems to have also come round to the view that it may not hope to lord it over the wealth of nations in quite the unfettered way it has been used to.

Cannily, if the survival of Capitalism requires that parties such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and China be incorporated fully into the world Capitalist system then so be it.

Better that than give them the breathing space to chalk out political economies of an alternate kind.

And, surely, all of them seem equally elated to be now sitting at the global high-table, with a stake in the pie. And the right to make impressive noises in the world’s regulatory committees.

However we may cavil at the subterfuges, the news of the death of the Washington Consensus and of its transmutation into the London Consensus must for now be greeted with some relief, even as the struggle for Socialism must continue to be engaged in with conviction and hard work.

III

The world could, however, also do with another concomitant relief—namely, from the devastating ravages that religion has been subjecting it to.

This writer has often pointed to the integral tie-up between Capital and organized Religion (www.zcommunications.org/zspace/badriraina.)

And a full enunciation of that thought is now available in a book called God Is Back, written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge.

Indeed, these two gentlemen, one a Roman Catholic and another an Atheist, concur sentiently on how the adherence to faith and to science-driven capital meet most sweetly in the market-economies of the world. Precisely what we have been at pains to say.

It is another matter that the book shallowly endorses this marriage of convenience, without, as Troy Jollimore underscores in a fine review (Truthdig, April 2, 2009), being troubled by any chicaneries and inconsistencies of logic or principle. Including the reality that this unholy tie-up has tended to “encourage parochialism and hatred of the other, as well as superstition and scientific ignorance.”

As Jerry Coyne says it in The New Republic, to say that science and religion are compatible because many profit by the conjunction is “like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.”

Here is a sampling of what some illustrious souls have had to say on the matter:

“Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies”

(Thomas Jefferson)

“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”

(Lincoln)

“Religion is based. . . mainly on fear. . .fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . .My own view on religion is that of Lucretious. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”

(Bertrand Russel)

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

(Kurt Vonnegut)

“Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” (Nietzsche)

“I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. . . No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end.” (Edison)

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.” (Einstein)

and, succinctly for our consideration of contemporary international life:

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” (Voltaire).

Indeed, the thinker most congenial to the Capitalist way of perceptions, Freud, was to call religion an “extraordinarily useful illusion.”

IV

The fact is that where organized religion before the advent of Capitalism presided unmitigatingly as the chief oppressor in league with privileged authority, Capitalism, from the Protestant Reformation onwards, has found in it a potent tool to neuter the secular concerns and mobilizations of vast billions of human beings, as well as to make of it yet another source of commercialized profit-making.

And when the need arose, to draft whole nations into war through a deadly mix of faith and jingoism. All for the enrichment of the possessing classes.

It is hardly a wonder that the conflict between a rampant imperialism thirsting to appropriate the oil wealth of Western Asia and the Middle East, and to secure land and sea routes for the purpose was until the other day to find it useful to pitch the contention as a “clash of civilizations.”

And we were invited to think that the “civilization” responsible for Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the slave trade, and innumerable other depredations through centuries of aggressive invasions was “superior” to Babylon and Mesopotamia. Think again.

That human frailty, compounded by immiseration and exploitation, looks heaven-ward is perhaps both understandable and excusable.

Yet, that “global” impulse has nowhere been given a more humane expression than in the saying of those drop-outs from organized “high-religions” whom the world knows as the Sufis, the Mystics, the Dervishes and so forth.

A tribe of empathy-riddled, non-coveting, and fearlessly loving human beings who placed the least always at the centre of their teachings and concerns.

Happily, such ones were to be found among all of the world’s major semitic and non-semitic faiths, and among all of the world’s poet-legislators.

They were, and remain, the uniters, not the vicious dividers.

I may conclude by citing just one couplet from the great Mirza Ghalib—a couplet that could bring light and wisdom both to the fraught world of contemporary Islam and their counterparts everywhere, including the right-wing Hindutva fascists in India:

“Hum Muvahid hein, hamara kesh hai tarque rasoom, Milatein sab mitt gayein, ajzaayei eemaan ho gayein.”

Instantly translated, this might read:

Ghalib, I hold all gods to be one god:

The highest faith can result only

When all discrete dogmas are shunned.

V

At a time now when Capitalism is somewhat on the back foot, when the drums of war seem more hesitant, when relations between nations and communities are sought to be “reset’, how lovely it would be if the world were also to be freed of the fatal stranglehold of dogmas, and returned to the noble instincts of common humanity.

After all, what use is it otherwise to say that Jesus, Mohammed, Ram, Budh were indeed the finest human beings—before they were anything else—known to the history of homo sapiens?

Can we expect that Capitalist and other warlords will now spare both the earth and the human race from the twin onslaughts of Capital and Religion?

badri.raina@gmail.com

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Fake Faith and Epic Crimes

April 3, 2009

By John Pilger | Information Clearing House, Apri 2, 2009

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves.”

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had “universal jurisdiction” statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against “ourselves,” or “our” allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq — “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters.” He said, “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa — the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported “good news” is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter … I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.”

Blair, too, is safe — but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing “an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges,” according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: “My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.”

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli “peace prize” worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister — a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his “project” and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried.” He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?”  This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq’s “contribution to international terrorism” and Saddam Hussein’s “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction.” Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right.” He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.” In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour — in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the “mystical” Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: “I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them.”

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as “a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion.” She asked him: “What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability …[sic]?” A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about “values.” Doogue said to him that “it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard” [sic], to which Blair replied that “in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was.” It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bondish-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels.” She wrote, “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible.” No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair’s task to “prepare them for statehood.” The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man “has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.” The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that “women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him.”

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. “We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.” To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part — or, like Alistair Campbell, his “communications director,” offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some — might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.”

These are indeed extraordinary times.

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Beyond Afghanistan: Choosing Nonviolence

April 3, 2009

Published on Thursday, April 2, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

War Resisters League

As we approach the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, the War Resisters League reiterates King’s urgent cry for nonviolence­ and nonviolent resistance. The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. war against Vietnam fill us with foreboding. While we adamantly oppose continued U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we also call upon people of conscience to think beyond Afghanistan and challenge, as King did, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

Others have laid out reasons­from Afghanistan’s topography to the U.S. economic crisis­ that would make an expanded war in Afghanistan “unwinnable.” But WRL does not base our opposition on such arguments. While they may be correct, we challenge the very idea of a “winnable” war and oppose this one as we oppose all war: not solely for practical and strategic reasons, but because of our, and King’s, decades-long commitment to nonviolence.

Purveyor of Violence

Much has changed in the 40-plus years since King made that speech, yet the United States remains, as he named it then, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” WRL stands, as he did, against that violence, which is not only wrong in itself, but cures nothing and rebounds on its perpetrators.

King declared that the people of Vietnam “must see Americans as strange liberators.” The assessment applies today to the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has lost more than two million civilian lives to war in the last 30 years alone, and the toll is rising again, in a dreadful example of the ways in which violence boomerangs and warfare begets only devastation and more warfare (including attacks by groups like Al Qaeda). For centuries that battered land has been subject to imperial aggression and intervention. The Taliban rose to power with the support of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, intervening against the USSR’s invasion. Today, Afghanistan’s infrastructure is destroyed. Each year, pregnancy and childbirth kill 25,000 women, and diarrhea kills 85,000 children. Landmines planted in turn by troops of the Soviet Union, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban kill 600 people per year and maim so many that manufacturing artificial limbs is a major industry. The infamous U.S. “detention center” at Bagram continues to hold more prisoners than Guantánamo. Rather than bombing and shelling Afghanistan­and maintaining a prison there ­the United States could promote economic development, public health, education, food security, women’s empowerment, and de-mining efforts.

The Enemy of the Poor

War wreaks its devastation within our own country as well. In this period of increased global instability and recession, the world is undergoing a tectonic shift in its assumptions about the institutions of capitalism. That re-evaluation must include its assumptions about the institution of war.

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube,” King said in 1967. Substitute “Iraq and Afghanistan” for Vietnam, and the sentence is equally, terribly true today.

Here as abroad, war remains, as King called it, the “enemy of the poor.” While the Pentagon pours billions of tax dollars into implements of destruction and rains down bombs on poor civilians in Afghanistan, our own infrastructure crumbles, and our own people are struggling without decent schools, healthcare, and employment. The funds that we need to provide housing and care at home end up diverted into killing people thousands of miles away, and people of color, immigrants, and lower-income whites are targeted by military recruiters to do the killing. Massive bailouts line the pockets of bankers, unemployment skyrockets, and military recruiters are having the easiest time meeting their quotas in years.

Nonviolence in Afghanistan and at Home

Despite the monumental obstacles they face, many in Afghanistan and Pakistan are working nonviolently for peace and to repair the ravages of war and warmaking. In Afghanistan, Parliamentarian Malalai Joya­despite illegal suspension from Parliament and assassination attempts ­has continued to denounce the warlords and call for human rights, women’s rights, and governmental accountability. Thousands of peace advocates in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have met in the assemblies called jirgas to imagine and formulate peace and reconstruction initiatives. The lawyers’ campaign in Pakistan has mobilized thousands, despite beatings and arrests, to reverse the military’s control over the courts. Others are building schools and countering the bitter legacy of violence against women. U.S. peace advocates should be promoting and publicizing these nonviolent actions to rebuild Afghan and Pakistani society in the midst of war, devastation, warlordism, and patriarchal control.

In our own country as well, there are increasingly loud voices against war and for a reordering of our priorities­for affordable housing, universal healthcare, gender justice, disability rights, clean energy, quality education, restorative justice, fair food, and an anti-racist society. Among these allies are newcomers to the United States, people who have survived and resisted wars and challenged immigration policies that facilitate the extraction of profits from cheap labor, even while being criminalized, imprisoned, deported, and denied citizenship. Some of those most forsaken by the U.S. government have continued to build organizations and networks for those with no safety net.

The Choice

The War Resisters League urges everyone to join us in organizing, protesting, and demanding the closing of Bagram prison (and all such “detention centers”) and an end to military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and across the globe. Organizing against military recruitment is as important as ever now that ­the military is preying on those most affected by the battered economy. Support the voices and actions of the survivors of war. Listen to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; create space for their heartbreaking stories of remorse and harrowing accounts of the worst kinds of violence and dehumanization. Stop funding war – ­become a war tax resister. Instead of paying to train men and women to kill, foster ways to help all of us rebuild our communities.

The so-called “war on terrorism,” with its occupations and detentions, its torture and carnage, has failed because military action can never lead to security. We don’t have easy answers, but we know that the cycle of violence has to end, and we have to help end it. While thousands of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are finding the courage to risk their lives to work for nonviolent solutions, we have a responsibility to lift our voices. We must reject the notions of good wars and bad wars, legal or illegal wars, winnable and unwinnable wars. We must decide whether our identity as a nation will be based on a culture of cultivating life or dealing death. As King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” Together, let’s choose the path of nonviolence.

For suggestions for actions opposing war in Afghanistan, see United for Peace and Justice, the antiwar coalition to which WRL belongs, www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=4044..

The United States’ oldest secular pacifist organization, the War Resisters League has been resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923. Our work for nonviolent revolution has spanned decades and has been shaped by the new visions and strategies of each generation’s peacemakers.

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Doctors to reopen Yasser Arafat death investigation

April 3, 2009

Arab doctors to review information about ‘strange death’ of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat


Arab doctors are to investigate the death of the former Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, re-opening a four-year-old case which is still the subject of suspicion, conspiracy theories and political accusations.

Doctors from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian territories have been given the task of reviewing information about the former president’s demise.

Arafat’s death in November 2004 in a military hospital near Paris triggered immediate rumours that he had been poisoned. French doctors said the 75-year-old died from a “massive brain haemorrhage” but could not explain what had prompted it. At the time, Arafat’s widow refused to allow an autopsy.

“The investigations carried out so far didn’t reach the point at which they could say conclusively what happened,” said Mansour Tahboub at the Yasser Arafat foundation, set up last year to preserve the former president’s legacy, and which commissioned the Amman investigation. “All we know is that there is something strange about his death.”

The panel had been expected to meet as early as today in the Jordanian capital, Amman, but the exact timing of the meeting remains unclear, with the head of the committee, Jordanian heart surgeon Abdullah al-Bashir saying it had been postponed.

Tahboub said the decision to re-examine the evidence was not political. “We want to give Palestinians new facts,” he said.

Accusations have been routinely directed at the Israeli government which saw Arafat as an obstacle to peace, putting him under house arrest in Ramallah and allegedly talking of eliminating him. Israel has strongly denied any involvement in his death.

Other rumours suggest the Palestinian president had Aids or that his death was caused by a fatal infection.

Arafat became ill in October 2004 and was flown from his Ramallah headquarters to France. He died a few weeks later, having dedicated 40 years to the Palestinian liberation movement.

The former president is seen as a national hero and was the first to give the Palestinian cause a legitimate voice on the world stage. His photograph still adorns homes, offices and public buildings in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank.

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“Af-Pak: Obama’s War”

April 3, 2009

by Immanuel Wallerstein ,  commentary No. 254, April 1, 2009

Af-Pak is the new acronym the U.S. government has invented for Afghanistan-Pakistan. Its meaning is that there is a geopolitical concern of the United States in which the strategy that the United States wishes to pursue involves both countries simultaneously and they cannot be considered separately. The United States has emphasized this policy by appointing a single Special Representative to the two countries, Richard Holbrooke.

It was George W. Bush who sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan. And it was George W. Bush who initiated the policy of using U.S. drones to bomb sites in Pakistan. But, now that Barack Obama, after a “careful policy review,” has embraced both policies, it has become Barack Obama’s war. This comes as no enormous surprise since, during the presidential campaign, Obama indicated that he would do these things. Still, now he has done it.

This decision is likely to be seen in retrospect as Obama’s single biggest decision concerning U.S. foreign policy, one that will be noticed by future historians as imprinting its stamp on his reputation. And it is likely to be seen as well as his single biggest mistake. For, as Vice-President Biden apparently warned in the inner policy debate on the issue, it is likely to be a quagmire from which it will be as easy to disengage as the Vietnam war.

There are therefore two questions. Why did he do it? And what are likely to be the consequences during his term of office?

Let us begin with his own explanation of why he did it. He said that “the situation is increasingly perilous,” that “the future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” and that “for the American people, [Pakistan’s] border region [with Afghanistan] has become the most dangerous place in the world.”

And why is it so dangerous? Quite simply, it is because it is a safe haven for al-Qaeda to “train terrorists” and to “plot attacks” – not only against Afghanistan and the United States but everywhere in the world. The fight against al-Qaeda is no longer called the “war on terrorism” but is hard to see the difference. Obama claims that the Bush administration had lost its “focus” and that he has now installed a “comprehensive, new strategy.” In short, Obama is going to do this better than Bush.

What then are the new elements? The United States will send more troops to Afghanistan – 17,000 combat troops and 4000 trainers of the Afghan forces. It will send more money. It proposes to give Pakistan $1.5 billion a year for five years to “build schools and roads and hospitals.” It proposes to send “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers” to Afghanistan to “develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.” In short, Obama says that he believes that “a campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.”

However, implicitly unlike Bush, this will not be a “blank check” to the two governments. “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.” As for Afghanistan, the United States “will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behavior.” The Afghan and Pakistani governments are pleased to be getting the new resources. They haven’t said that they will meet Obama’s conditions. And Obama hasn’t said what he will do if the two governments don’t meet his conditions.

As for the way forward, Obama asserts that “there will be no peace without reconciliation with former enemies.” Reconciliation? Well, not with the “uncompromising core of the Taliban,” or with al-Qaeda, but with those Taliban “who’ve taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price.” To do this, Obama wants assistance. He proposes to create a new Contact Group that will include not only “our NATO allies” but also “the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran, Russia, India and China.”

The most striking aspect of this major commitment is how little enthusiasm it has evoked around the world. In the United States, it has been applauded by the remnants of the neo-cons and McCain. So far, other politicians and the press have been reserved. Iran, Russia, India, and China have not exactly jumped on the bandwagon. They are particularly cool about the idea of reconciliation with so-called moderate Taliban. And both the Guardian and McClatchy report that the Taliban themselves have reacted by creating unity within their hitherto divided ranks – presumably the opposite of what Obama is trying to achieve.

So, where will we probably be six months from now? There will be more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the U.S. commanders will probably say that the 21,000 Obama is sending are not enough. There will be further withdrawals of NATO troops from there – a repeat of the Iraq scenario. There will be further, perhaps more extensive, bombings in Pakistan, and consequently even more intensive anti-American sentiments throughout the country. The Pakistani government will not be moving against the Taliban for at least three reasons. The still very influential ISI component of the Pakistani army actually supports the Taliban. The rest of the army is conflicted and in any case probably too weak to do the job. The government will not really press them to do more because it will only thereby strengthen its main rival party which opposes such action and the result may be another army coup.

In short, the “clear and focused goal” that Obama proposes – “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future” – will probably be further than ever from accomplishment. The question is what can Obama do then? He can “stay the course” (shades of Rumsfeld in Iraq), constantly escalate the troop commitment, while changing the local political leadership (shades of Kennedy/Johnson and Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam), or he can turn tail and pull out (as the United States finally did in Vietnam). He is not going to be cheered for any of these choices.

I have the impression that Obama thinks that his speech left him some wiggle room. I think he will find out rather how few choices he will have that are palatable. I think therefore he made a big, probably irreparable, mistake.

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U.S. Weighs Putting 70,000 Troops in Afghanistan

April 2, 2009

By Yochi J. Dreazen | The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is weighing whether to deploy 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning an increased commitment and seeking specific measures of progress against the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

When President Obama took office, the U.S. had about 38,000 troops in Afghanistan. The White House has announced plans to send 21,000 reinforcements in coming months, increasing the tally to almost 60,000.

Mr. Obama will decide this fall whether to order 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year, senior Pentagon officials told a Senate panel Wednesday, bringing the total to almost 70,000.

[A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.] Getty Images

A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Lawmakers sought benchmarks on U.S. efforts in the area. “How will we know if we’re winning?” asked Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine).

The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee came days after the Obama administration rolled out its new strategy for Afghanistan. The strategy is designed to counter the Taliban’s resurgence as an effective fighting force capable of exerting day-to-day control over many rural parts of the country.

The White House plan calls for deploying 4,000 troops and hundreds of civilian officials, expanding U.S. counternarcotics efforts in southern Afghanistan, and giving billions of dollars in development aid to Pakistan.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed skepticism about Pakistan’s willingness — or ability — to take effective measures against its militants.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the panel’s ranking Republican, faulted Pakistan for striking a peace treaty with Taliban militants in the Swat Valley that allows for the implementation of strict Islamic law there.

Sen. McCain also said the Pakistani government and military need to exert greater control over the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence arm, which has long been suspected of providing covert assistance to the Taliban and other Islamist extremists.

Gen. David Petraeus, who runs the military’s Central Command, and Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said Pakistan hadn’t yet fully committed to the counterterrorism fight.

“Many Pakistani leaders remain focused on India as Pakistan’s principal threat, and some may even continue to regard Islamist extremist groups as a potential strategic asset,” Gen. Petraeus said.

The Pentagon officials said they think their new strategy is the best way to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gen. Petraeus said the Afghan Taliban are “growing in strength” and expanding their influence over portions of the country. Militants in Pakistan pose a serious risk to that country’s survival, he added.

“The Pakistani state faces a rising — indeed, an existential — threat,” he said. “In Afghanistan, the situation is deteriorating.”

In a reminder of the Taliban’s resurgence, militants from the group assaulted a government office in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least 13 people.

The attack began when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the gates to a provincial council building, clearing the way for a trio of heavily armed militants in Afghan army uniforms to storm the compound. The four militants also died in the assault.

A senior Pentagon official said in an interview that commanders in Afghanistan want to deploy the 10,000 additional forces to southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold that is also one of the largest drug-producing regions in the world. The extra forces would provide an additional brigade of combat troops as well as a new American division headquarters in southern Afghanistan, the official said.

—Peter Spiegel contributed to this article.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com

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