Peace and Justice Post

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu (L) is understood to be calling for military action against Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to rally support in his cabinet for an attack on Iran, according to government sources.

The country’s defence minister Ehud Barak and the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are said to be among those backing a pre-emptive strike to neutralise Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But a narrow majority of ministers currently oppose the move, which could trigger a wave of regional retaliation.

The debate over possible Israeli military action has reached fever pitch in recent days with newspaper leader columns discussing the benefits and dangers of hitting Iran.

Mr Lieberman responded to the reports of a push to gain cabinet approval by saying that “Iran poses the most dangerous threat to world order.”

But he said Israel’s military options should not be a matter for public discussion.

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• Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011

Israeli doctors are ignoring the complaints of Palestinian patients who claim they have been mistreated, according to the report. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Medical professionals in Israel are being accused of failing to document and report injuries caused by the ill-treatment and torture of detainees by security personnel in violation of their ethical code.

A report by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims that medical staff are also failing to report suspicion of torture and ill-treatment, returning detainees to their interrogators and passing medical information to interrogators.

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By Stephen Lendman

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Promising change after eight Bush/Republican years, Obama delivered betrayal.

With congressional Democrats, he exceeded Bush’s harshness, lawlessness, belligerency, and public trust betrayal.

He violating every major domestic and foreign issue promise made. As a result, he’s been complicit in:

• looting the nation’s wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;
• giving Wall Street crooks greater money power, disguised as financial reform;
• waging multiple imperial wars and occupations, spending more on militarism than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;
• belligerently ousting Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and Libya’s Gaddafi;
• promoting regime change in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and elsewhere against independent leaders, while continuing support for the world’s most ruthless, corrupt tyrants;
• presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;
• continuing Bush’s worst lawless policies; adding more of his own, including indefinite detentions without charge, and deploying Special Forces death squads in over 120 countries to kill targeted suspects, including Americans;
• targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;
• illegally spying on Americans more aggressively than Bush; …

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James Petras, Information Clearing House, November 1, 2011

On October 23rd of this year, President Cristina Fernandez won re-election receiving 54% of the vote, 37 percentage points higher than her nearest opponent. The President’s coalition also swept the Congressional, Senatorial, Gubernatorial elections as well as 135 of the 136 municipal councils of Greater Buenos Aires.

In sharp contrast President Obama, according to recent polls is trailing leading Republican Presidential candidates and is likely to lose control of both houses of Congress in the upcoming 2012 election. What accounts for the monumental difference in voter preferences of incumbent presidents? A comparative historical discussion of socio-economic and foreign policies as well as responses to profound economic crises is at the center of any explanation of the divergent results.

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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cites her personal climb to power as a shining example of how civil rights benefited a worthy African-American, but her Faustian bargain for success within George W. Bush’s administration meant death for many Iraqis, notes Lawrence Davidson.

Condoleezza Rice, who was both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, also was an administration spokesperson who helped scare the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

She accomplished this by invoking the image of “mushroom clouds” incinerating the skylines of America. In doing so, she gave credence to the false story that Iraq was a threat to the United States because it possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Rice is presently on a lecture tour promoting her 734-page memoir entitled No Higher Honor, which is what brought her to the Belk Theater on the campus of Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Oct. 25. She spoke to a packed house of 2,000 people.

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by Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice,  November 2nd, 2011

The recent moves by the self-declared “leader of the free world” are puerile to an extreme.

The vote to grant membership to Palestine in the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO was 107 votes in favor, 14 against, and 52 abstentions. The United States was one of the 14 votes against, demonstrating that it was only “leading” a small group of nations.

The reaction of the US was embarrassing. It announced cancellation of its $60 million payment due in November to the UN body. Membership dues paid by the U.S. account for about 20 percent of UNESCO’s annual budget. Canada also announced it would withholding “voluntary contributions” (are there involuntary contributions?) to UNESCO.

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The US drone war in the tribal regions of Pakistan continue to exact a heavy toll on civilians, including the elderly, women, and children – and two teenagers, age 16 and 12, who were killed last week. There exists no evidence that either of these two had any links to militants, and since journalists are banned from the region, it is hard to get to the truth of the carnage behind America’s drone program. Other victims of drones have survived, like the teenage boy called Saadullah, who lost three of his relatives, both legs, one eye and his hope for the future. ”What’s going on here, unfortunately, is murder,” says one British lawyer.

Read the whole report by Orla Guerin at the BBC.

The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both political parties upon its raw money power and upon access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.

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