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UK MPs urge the Quartet to bring Hamas into peace talks

July 24, 2008

A cross party group of MPs has called on the Quartet mediating in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to open a dialogue with Hamas, saying “until now there has been no engagement between the Quartet and Hamas, but now we think it is time”.

Publishing a report on the humanitarian and development situation in the occupied territories, the international development select committee said the international community should “seize the opportunity” of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to bring the Palestinian group into the peace process.

The chair of the committee, Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce told the Guardian that the MPs believed it was time for the Quartet – made up of the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations – to “sound out Hamas”.

The committee heard evidence from former prime minister Tony Blair – the representative of the Quartet – whose session in front of the committee was a rare return to the House of Commons. The MPs found that Blair had made a “welcome first step” to reduce strategic checkpoints.

Although the MPs reported that the Hamas armed takeover of Gaza was “neither justified nor acceptable”, they also said that it was important to include Hamas in peace talks. They also urged the Quartet to use the opportunity provided by the truce to begin a reconciliation between rival Palestinian parties Hamas and Fatah.

The Quartet’s insistence that Hamas must first agree to three principles – to recognise Israel, renounce violence, and abide by previous agreements – before being involved in peace talks had “achieved very little” in the last two years, the committee said.

Bruce said that food, fuel and water were in short supply in Gaza, and the public health system was under severe pressure following the closure of borders. Though a six-month ceasefire was agreed between Hamas and Israel last month allowing food and aid through Gaza’s borders, the committee found that the effect of Israel’s blockades were still felt and the situation on the ground was far worse.

Bruce said: “Israel has obligations to ensure the health and welfare of the Palestinian population, which it has not met.

“We believe the situation was allowed to continue for too long, and that the Quartet did not exert sufficient pressure on Israel to open the crossings.”

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US-led forces kill more Afghan civilians

July 23, 2008
By Jerry White | World Socialist Web Site, 22 July 2008

US and NATO forces killed at least 13 Afghans over the weekend, adding to the toll of civilian deaths as the military intensifies efforts to crush opposition to the nearly seven-year-old US occupation.

The two latest incidents occurred as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama visited Afghanistan and called for more US troops to be sent to the war-ravaged country.

On Sunday, US-led coalition forces killed four Afghan police officers and five civilians in the Anar Dara district in the western province of Farah, near the Iranian border. Coalition forces, which entered the area around midnight, waged a four-hour firefight and called in air strikes after reportedly receiving small arms fire from a group of local policemen.

Provincial Deputy Governor Younus Rasuli said the US-led convoy of troops never informed local police or officials of their plans to be in the area, and the policemen mistook them for Taliban fighters.

The US military issued a perfunctory statement justifying the action against what it described as a “non-uniformed hostile force.” Coalition forces, the statement said, had “engaged the enemy with precision close air support.”

In a separate incident Saturday night, NATO forces killed at least four civilians in eastern Paktika province when International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) fired two mortar rounds that landed nearly half a mile short of their target. The Associated Press reported that NATO was investigating whether three other civilians were also killed in the attack, which occurred in the Barmal district, an area made up mostly of Sunni Pashtun people.

The ISAF issued a statement saying it “deeply regrets this accident” and would investigate the incident. The alliance acknowledged it was providing medical aid to four others who were wounded in the attack.

As has been the case in previous such incidents in which, all told, thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by US-led forces, military commanders insisted they were taking every precaution to prevent civilian deaths, which they said, were ultimately the fault of the insurgency.

The slaughter of innocent men, women and children, however, is inevitable given the neo-colonial character of the war and the counter-insurgency methods the US and NATO forces are using against growing popular resistance.

The number of attacks launched against the occupation forces has jumped by over 40 percent this summer. For the first time last month, US and allied casualties in Afghanistan surpassed those in Iraq.

In response to the deteriorating military situation, 646 bombs were dropped in June—the second highest total for any month of the war. In the first half of 2008, 1,853 bombs and missiles were used, 40 percent more than the same period last year.

The escalating violence took place as Obama visited Kabul on Sunday. In the morning he met with US troops at Camp Eggers, a heavily fortified military base in the city, praising them for their “excellent work.”

Later, in a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he pledged additional military support to the puppet regime. Karzai’s spokesman said Obama was “committed to supporting Afghanistan and to continue the war against terrorism with vigor.” He said Democrats and Republicans “are friends of Afghanistan and no matter who wins the US elections, Afghanistan will have a very strong partner in the United States.”

In an interview from Kabul broadcast by CBS News on Sunday, Obama said the situation in the country was “precarious and urgent” and reiterated his position that Afghanistan had to become the focus of US military action, as opposed to the “strategic mistake” in Iraq that had diverted the US from the so-called “war on terror.”

Obama said as US troops left Iraq, at least 7,000 should be sent to the Central Asian country and that plans to increase US presence should not wait until the next administration takes office.

The massacre of Afghan civilians exposes the brutal, neo-colonial reality of US imperialist policy that is supported by both parties and both presidential candidates.

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Madness and Shame

July 23, 2008

Truthout, Tuesday 22 July 2008

by: Bob Herbert, The New York Times

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney, but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror – regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say – was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”

Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused – that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it – rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

Continued . . .

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Middle East: Rights group hails video as new weapon against Israeli army

July 22, 2008

Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday promised an inquiry after video footage showed an Israeli soldier shooting baton rounds at a Palestinian detainee who was blindfolded and cuffed.

“The Israeli military will investigate the incident, learn its lessons and hold those responsible to account,” he told MPs from his Labour party. “Warriors do not behave like this.”

The advocate general, Brigadier General Avichai Mendelblit, is said to have ordered a military police inquiry after he saw the footage released on Sunday by the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem. The incident happened on July 7 in Nil’in village. Several other soldiers were present, including a lieutenant colonel who was holding the arm of the Palestinian man.

The man shot, Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, was treated for an injury to his toe and was then released.

It was the latest incident in which video footage has been used to highlight violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. B’Tselem has been running a project since January last year in which it has given out around 100 video cameras to Palestinians to allow them to film human rights abuses in the West Bank. The Nil’in footage was filmed on a private camera by a 17-year-old girl who lives in the village. B’Tselem has now given her one of its cameras as part of its Shooting Back project.

Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B’Tselem, said the footage was intended as much for an Israeli audience as for an international one. She said spoken or written testimony from Palestinians involved in such cases was often given little weight in official police or military investigations into apparent abuses, but video footage was much more powerful.

“I see no better way of encouraging accountability among members of the security forces,” said Michaeli.

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Serbia captures fugitive Karadzic

July 22, 2008

BBC News, July 22, 2008

Radovan Karadzic (archive image)

Radovan Karadzic is one of the world’s most wanted men

Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted men, has been arrested in Serbia after more than a decade on the run.

The Bosnian Serb wartime political leader disappeared in 1996.

He has been indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide over the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

The appointment of a new, pro-European government in Belgrade last month appears to have cleared the way for his arrest, says a BBC correspondent.

The European Union, which the new government hopes to join, has put Serbia under considerable pressure to hand over indicted war criminals to the UN tribunal in The Hague.

But Mr Karadzic’s wartime military leader, Ratko Mladic, remains at large.

‘Located and arrested’

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic was welcomed by war crimes prosecutors in The Hague as a “milestone”.

He has been brought before Belgrade’s war crimes court, a legal procedure that indicates he may soon be extradited.

But it is not clear how soon he might be transferred to stand trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, says the BBC’s Bridget Kendall.

Serbian officials have suggested he will stay put for at least three days while his lawyer appeals against his extradition.

Continued . . .

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WHILE NABLUS IS RAIDED: GORDON BROWN, ANOTHER FALSE PROPHET PRAISES ISRAEL

July 22, 2008
By Khalid Amayreh | Desert Peace, July 21, 2008

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was having an audience with Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, the Israeli occupation army was raping anew the Palestinian town of Nablus, rounding up and humiliating innocent people, violating homes and vandalizing businesses.

On Sunday and early Monday, the so-called Israeli Defense Forces raided the northern city, for the fourth time in less than three weeks, as thousands of CIA-trained Palestinian security personnel were watching from their comfortable headquarters nearby.

The invading forces arrested dozens of innocent people, including a lawmaker named Muna Mansur, the wife of an Islamic political leader who was murdered by a Jewish death squad while sitting in his office in downtown Nablus several years ago.

The detainees, who are likely to be dumped in an Israeli concentration camp for lengthy periods of time, have committed no felony or even misdemeanor. Their only “guilt” seems to be their conscientious opposition to the Nazi-like Israeli occupation of their country.

Two weeks ago, the same Jewish forces, acting like the German Gestapo, ransacked the main commercial center of Nablus, raiding commercial malls, beauty salons, a major medical center and numerous other institutions, crushing furniture, smashing equipments and vandalizing public and private property.

These acts of rape passed quietly as the governments of Europe and North America, thoroughly absorbed in their pornographic hypocrisy toward the Palestinian plight, kept silent. After all, the victims are Palestinian, they are Arabs, they are Muslims.

These are the same governments that have been demanding rather shamelessly the prompt and unconditional release of an Israeli combat soldier who was taken prisoner by Palestinian fighters near the Gaza Strip more than two years ago, while utterly ignoring the fate of more than 10,000 Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli dungeons and detention camps.

This pattern of moral whoredom on the part of European and North American leaders is echoed ad nauseam every time a European or American or Canadian official sets foot on the soil of occupied Palestine, a holy land made unholy by the overwhelming obscenity of Israel’s oppression of a people whose only guilt is its enduring determination to survive and be free.

There, these officials and statesmen utter a few empty words about the “glory of Israeli democracy” before returning home, hoping to have succeeded in impressing the international Zionist cartel which effectively controls the policies, politics and governments of most western countries.

Gordon is no exception. He is just another carbon copy of the typical hypocritical, double-faced, and morally bankrupt western leader who tries to blur his dishonest discourse with diplomatic niceties and nice-sounding statements.

In fact, not only did Gordon keep his mouth shut regarding Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, apparently fearing upsetting his arrogant Zionist hosts, but he also reiterated the same mantra western leaders like to utter whenever they visit Europe’s ugly brat in the Middle East.

Brown, whose country gave birth to ugly Zionist entity, vowed that Britain would “back Israel’s right to exist,” a euphemism for backing Israel’s settlement expansion and territorial aggrandizement at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Indeed, this is how Israel understands such statements from western leaders because if a given western country doesn’t fully support Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, then the government of that country must be advocating the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people!!

In short, from the Israeli perspective, Europe and America have two choices vis-à-vis Israel, either they support the liquidation of Palestine and its native people, the Palestinians, or get themselves ready for vociferous Jewish accusations of being Nazis, anti-Semites and “Hamas lovers”!!!

I don’t know why western leaders, such as Gordon, keep talking about Israel’s right to exist while rarely alluding to the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Do they think that Palestinians are unimportant? Do they consider the rights of the “Chosenites” to be superior to and override the rights and lives of the non-Chosenites?

Continued . . .

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Dictatorial Powers Upheld

July 22, 2008

The Meaning of the Al-Marri Decision

By ANDY WORTHINGTON | Counterpunch, July 21, 2008

Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli that the President can arrest US citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion that they are “enemy combatants.” Have a little think about it, and you’ll see that the Fourth Circuit judges have just endorsed dictatorial powers.

In the words of Judge William B. Traxler, whose swing vote confirmed the court’s otherwise divided ruling, “the Constitution generally affords all persons detained by the government the right to be charged and tried in a criminal proceeding for suspected wrongdoing, and it prohibits the government from subjecting individuals arrested inside the United States to military detention unless they fall within certain narrow exceptions … The detention of enemy combatants during military hostilities, however, is such an exception. If properly designated an enemy combatant pursuant to legal authority of the President, such persons may be detained without charge or criminal proceedings for the duration of the relevant hostilities.”

As was pointed out by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, who was steadfastly opposed to the majority verdict (and whose opinion was endorsed by Judges M. Blane Michael, Robert B. King and Roger L. Gregory), “the duration of the relevant hostilities” is a disturbingly open-ended prospect. After citing the 2007 State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that ‘[t]he war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others,’” Judge Motz noted, “Unlike detention for the duration of a traditional armed conflict between nations, detention for the length of a ‘war on terror’ has no bounds.”

The Court of Appeals made its extraordinary ruling in relation to a habeas corpus claim in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, whose story I reported at length here. To recap briefly, al-Marri, a Qatari national who had studied in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, returned to the United States in September 2001, with his US residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family — his wife and five children — with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead.

Continued . . .

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RIGHTS-US: Hamdan Case to Test Military Tribunals

July 22, 2008

By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Jul 21 (IPS) – As the long-awaited trial of Guantanamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan opened this week at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, human rights groups filed suit demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) produce documents related to the U.S. government’s ghost detention, torture, and extraordinary rendition programme.

Attorney-General Michael Mukasey also called on Congress to quickly pass new legislation to guard against judges imposing a patchwork of conflicting rules that could produce confusion, more court challenges and even lengthier delays for prisoners who have been held at Guantanamo for as long as seven years.

Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s alleged former driver, is the first terror suspect to face trial at Guantanamo in seven years and the first test of whether that system can dispense fair and impartial justice. The charges against the Yemeni father of two will proceed before a military commission — the first since the end of World War II — with a jury of uniformed officers and rules that many constitutional authorities believe give great deference to the prosecution.

Evidence obtained from “cruel” and “inhuman” interrogation methods as well as hearsay evidence will be admissible under certain circumstances. Hamdan faces a maximum of life in prison if convicted.

“This was supposed to be the premier system for bringing to justice the masterminds of the worst crime ever committed on U.S. soil,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “The only result in seven years was the conviction of an Australian kangaroo trapper, who is now free.”

Continued . . .

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U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq

July 21, 2008

by Peter Phillips | Dissident Voice, July 19th, 2008

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003…. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000”.

The ORB report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18 2003 put the civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces.

The now estimated 1.2 million dead, as of July 2008, includes children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cab drivers, clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers, policemen, poets, healthcare workers, day care providers, construction workers, babysitters, musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many more. All manner of ordinary people in Iraq have died because the United States decided to invade their country. These are deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government.

The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of US forces — a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history. This act has not gone unnoticed.

Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single impeachment article against George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq. On July 15, the House forwarded the resolution to the Judiciary Committee with a 238 to 180 vote. That Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s threat to the US is now beyond doubt. Former US federal prosecutor Elizabeth De La Vega documents the lies most thoroughly in her book U.S. v. Bush, and numerous other researchers have verified Bush’s untrue statements.

The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in our name. We have allowed the war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered ourselves little choice within the top two presidential candidates for immediate cessation of the mass killings. McCain would undoubtedly accept the deaths of another million Iraqi civilians in order to save face for America, and Obama’s 18-month timetable for withdrawal would likely result in another 250,000 civilian deaths or more.

We owe our children and ourselves a future without the shame of mass murder on our collective conscience. The only resolution of this dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq and the prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible. Anything less creates a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation for that we will forever suffer.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization. Read other articles by Peter, or visit Peter’s website.

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The US will not prosecute Bush

July 21, 2008

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will never be tried for war crimes in the US because the country lacks a consensus on torture

The evidence is mounting that top US officials – including President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld – committed war crimes by authorising the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – ie torture. The war crimes drumbeat has accelerated with the recent release of two books: New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side and Philippe Sands’s Torture Team, which document the executive decision-making that led the US to set aside not just the Geneva Conventions, but a tradition of respect for the human rights of enemy prisoners that dates to back to George Washington’s prohibition on harming POWs.

Current and former Bush officials are now scrambling to avoid the opprobrium – not to mention the risk of prison time – that would result from criminal prosecution. This week, Capitol Hill was treated to the spectacle of Sands and Douglas Feith, a former Rumsfeld protege who was an architect of the Iraq invasion, testifying side by side before a House subcommittee. In an earlier interview with Sands, Feith claimed to be “really a player” in the engineering of legal workarounds to the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo. Before the committee, Feith declared his unerring support for Geneva.

The stream of commentary on this topic is waxing as we near the end of the Bush presidency. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof went his fellow pundits one better, suggesting that what the US needs is a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to sort through not just the legal transgressions of the past eight years, but the political manipulations as well.

Hang on a moment. There is no way that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or the second- and third-tier enablers of torture – the Feiths and John Yoos – will be prosecuted for war crimes in the United States.

The obstacle to prosecutions is the absence of a national consensus on the specific issue of torture, or, more generally, the Bush administration’s actions on terror. Certainly there is a consensus that the Bush administration has been a disaster and that the Iraq war was a mistake. But this doesn’t apply to specific terrorism policies, on which the White House still has more or less a political blank check to do as it pleases. (Whether a majority of the public supports those policies is debatable, but Republicans still back Bush, and Democrats are still cowed by the risk of appearing soft on the issue.) See Kevin Drum on why this is not Watergate: a well of political support remains for Bush’s terror policies, “enhanced interrogation” among them.

The matter of criminal culpability lies several steps further on. Even if they concede that torture is a war crime and buy the practical arguments against it – that it generates false information, endangers US soldiers should they be taken prisoner and is disastrous for America’s image and diplomatic efforts – many Americans would still resist prosecuting officials whose motive was averting terror attacks.

This also goes deeper than politics. I hate to sound cynical, but Americans don’t have much interest in accountability, truth or reconciliation. Our national motto is “move on”. The buzzword of the decade is Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”. Trials or commissions on war crimes would force a reckoning that many Americans don’t think is necessary and/or would simply rather not have.

However, those still hoping to see Bush and his associates in the dock might see promise in another feature of American culture: its disposability. What seems set in stone today, an immutable law of politics, almost certainly won’t be tomorrow. What once seemed an issue of high principle to many conservatives – embracing torture and defending Bush & Co – may quickly become passé once Bush leaves office and other issues come to dominate. The ideal condition for a successful prosecution is not a rising tide of outrage at Bush that would stoke the divisions in US society, but indifference.

Still, the most likely scenario for a torture prosecution is something like what happened to ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. His own country wouldn’t touch him, but an industrious Spanish prosecutor – aided by the work of human rights activists and backed by international opinion – indicted him for torture and war crimes and nearly snared him. If Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld faced a similar indictment from abroad, Americans would be outraged – but not really. The US government would try to head it off, but wouldn’t be able to do much. No one would actually go on trial, but the indictees would see their travel options humiliatingly curtailed and go to their graves knowing the phrase “charged with war crimes” will be next to their names in the history books.

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