Peace and Justice Post

Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 28 December 2011

According to a study reported Tuesday, nearly half the members of the United States Congress are millionaires. Of the 535 legislators (100 members of the Senate and 435 members of the House of Representatives), at least 250 are millionaires and the median net worth is $913,000.

Sixty-seven senators are millionaires and the median wealth of the body’s 100 members is $2.63 million.

While the Senate has long been known as a millionaires’ club, the transformation of the House is a relatively recent phenomenon. The median net worth of members of the House of Representatives, excluding home equity, has more than doubled over the last 25 years, from $280,000 in 1984 to $725,000 in 2009 in inflation-adjusted dollars. During that same period, the median net worth of an American family fell from $20,600 to $20,500.

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  by Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Dec 28, 2011

December 27 is the third anniversary of Israel’s premeditated war of aggression on Gaza with more planned.

December 27 marks the third anniversary of Israel’s lawless war on Gaza. Without provocation, three weeks of terror bombing and invasion devastated the Strip.

Missiles, bombs, shells, and illegal weapons were used against defenseless people. Mass slaughter and destruction followed.

Brazen crimes of war and against humanity were committed. Responsible officials remain unaccountable. Security Council no-fly zone protection wasn’t ordered. International leaders shared culpability through silence. They still do. Washington was complicit by supplying Israel with weapons, munitions, and encouragement.

Cast Lead’s one of history’s great crimes. Before his fall from grace, Richard Goldstone said:

“(T)here is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.”

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Khalaf Ali Hassan,  Egypt Independent, December 27, 2011

The military police assaulted volunteer doctors working at the field hospital in Tahrir Square, doctors have said. The doctors say the military told them it was helping the wounded.

“The military police burnt our first aid kits,” said Dr. Mona Mina at a press conference on Sunday, adding that they were treating the doctors as if they were prisoners of war. “They must respect the international conventions that Egypt has signed in this regard.”

“The wounded have the right to medical treatment, even if they were thugs,” she said, refuting the army’s excuse for removing the make-shift clinics.

Dr. Karim Abdel Halim said the military police beat him with clubs and shocked him with taser guns. “And they took my mobile phone and my camera,” he said.

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By Greg Miller,  The Washington Post,  December 28, 2011

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

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by Stephen Lendman, Veterans Today, Dec 27, 2011

Sham Israeli peace negotiations were stillborn from inception. Writer Henry Siegman once called them “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history.”

Netanyahu once said they’re “a waste of time.” Previous Israeli officials called occupation and status quo conditions “permanent.”

Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich calls Palestinians an “invented” people. Decades ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (a transplanted Ukrainian American) said:

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist….How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”

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The harsh treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning is part of a broader campaign to silence government whistleblowers, a pattern that began with Vice President Dick Cheney’s outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame but has expanded under President Obama, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

By Melvin A. Goodman, Consortiumnews.com, Dec 21, 2011

When Pvt. Bradley Manning appeared in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, last week, it was his first public appearance in more than 19 months. Manning has been held without trial for the past year and a half; only now is a hearing being conducted to determine if there is sufficient evidence to refer his case to a general court martial.

During this period, Manning, who is charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized source, has been treated as an “enemy combatant,” subjected to solitary confinement in a maximum-security cell as well as harassment day and night.

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Palestinians Only Obstacle to Peace, Insists Lieberman

In a Christmas press conference attended by a number of top ambassadors, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman lashed those critical of Israel’s position on the peace process, while insisting no peace could be achieved within the next decade.

“In the next decade, this will be the situation and we need to know how to deal with it,” insisted Lieberman, saying that ambassadors should focus on “managing” the conflict instead of trying to solve it.

Lieberman also reiterated his condemnation of the European Union for criticizing settlement expansion, saying that the only obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is the Palestinians themselves and that construction would continue.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to support the notion that the Israeli government has abandoned the idea of peace, insisting that his government will no longer negotiate with the Palestinians under any circumstances once they form a unity government, something expected within the next few months.

MWC News,  20 December 2011

By Nima Shirazi

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Why Alan Dershowitz is Wrong on Israel’s ‘Rights’

Renowned torture enthusiast and perennial Israel apologist Alan Dershowitz is in Tel Aviv this week attending an annual business conference sponsored by Globes and, as usual, has been busy equivocating for Israeli espionage, defending war criminals, and warmongering about Iran.

During a speech he delivered on Sunday December 11, Dershowitz opined, “Israel has the right morally and legally to strike Iran just as it did on [the Osirak nuclear facility] in Iraq in 1981.”

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When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

“Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

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