Peace and Justice Post

by James Petras, Information Clearing House, November 9, 2011

After nearly 3 years in deep pursuit of the colonial wars initiated by ex-President Bush, the Obama regime has finally recognized the catastrophic domestic and foreign consequences. As a result the “reality principle” has taken hold; the maintenance of the US Empire requires modification of tactics and strategies, to cut political, military and diplomatic losses[1].

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators. This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity”) remains to be seen.

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“We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America’s) 20,000,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week that accuses Iran of doing just that. He called Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, a US puppet, saying: “This person does not publish a report about America and its allies’ nuclear arsenals.”

Well, that’s true, actually. Amano will never publish a report about America’s nuclear weapons (only 5,133 of them now, actually). He hasn’t said anything about Israel’s, Britain’s and France’s weapons of mass destruction either. And his report is largely based on information fed to him by Western intelligence agencies.

But apart from that, Amano is as impartial and free from US influence as you would expect a career Japanese diplomat to be. Only cynical people will see any resemblance to Colin Powell’s performance at the United Nations in 2003, when the US defense secretary held up a test tube and assured us all that Iraq really was working on germ warfare.

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The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, in a move initiated by the Obama administration, has voted to waive Bush-era human rights restrictions on military aid to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet. The lifting of the restrictions, now part of the Foreign Operations bill, is before the full Senate and appears to have bipartisan support. The Obama administration has indicated that it intends to provide taxpayer-funded military assistance to Uzbekistan once the legislation passes both houses of Congress.

Torture is endemic in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where his regime has banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually taken as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest.  Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally boiled alive.

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Middle East Monitor, November 9, 2011

A media frenzy followed the publication of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s description of Benjamin Netanyahu as “a liar” during a private discussion with US President Barack Obama. The exchange took place shortly before a press conference with the two leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

The French president’s comment revealed absolutely nothing new; there is something of a consensus, both inside and outside Israel, on Netanyahu’s expertise in the ways and means of deception. Palestinians who over the years have been burned by Netanyahu’s lies could provide a reference for his expertise.

What stands out is that Obama, who said nothing to dispel Sarkozy’s description of the Israeli Prime Minister, complained that he was forced to deal with this deceitful Israeli leader on a daily basis.

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Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization.

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Palestine News Network, November 9, 2011

Fifteen of the activists from the Freedom Waves to Gaza flotilla came before an Israeli court on Tuesday, and were advised they could be held for up to 2 months without charges or a trial.

The coastline of the blockaded Gaza Strip, where the Canadian and Irish aid ships hope to reach on Friday (Lo Yuk Fai, PNN).

Bahraini medical personnel protesting in Manama.

The United States continues to ignore the thwarted Arab Spring in Bahrain. Recently, a quasi-military court in the small Gulf state sentenced 20 doctors and nurses to up to 15 years in jail. The charge against them? Treating injured demonstrators opposing the regime.

Doctors and nurses in the Middle East have a long and proud tradition of treating the ill, regardless of the situation. In ninth-century Baghdad, for example, Hunayn ibn Ishaq was the Caliph’s physician. The Caliph asked this physician to prepare a poison to kill his enemies. The physician refused, risking his life, and was eventually jailed for one year. After serving his sentence, the Caliph inquired as to why he refused. The physician replied, “My profession is instituted for the benefit of humanity and limited to their relief and cure.”

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by Jim Fetzer, Leuren Moret, and Christopher Busby, Vetrans Today, November 3, 2011

 U.S. Marines fire Nov. 11, 2004, on Fallujah with a 155 mm Howitzer. One of the weapons originally designed for this artillery piece was a tactical nuclear weapon (that could include a neutron warhead) designed by Samuel Cohen, to be fired in eastern Europe on Soviet troops during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office. [Photo: Lance Cpl. Samantha L. Jones]

On Friday, 28 October 2011, it was my honor to host Leuren Moret and Christopher Busby as my guests on “The Real Deal”, an internet radio program broadcast on M/W/F from 5-7 PM/CT over revereradio.net. Leuren Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster, radiation problems around the world including depleted uranium. Dr. Christopher Busby is a visiting biomedical studies professor at the University of Ulster and is the co-author of reports about the effects of depleteed uranium in Iraq especially in relation to Fallujah. What Busby found much to his surprise was not DU but enriched uranium instead.

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by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, November 5, 2011

Surely, the New York Times would not dare turn down a piece from the new Richard Goldstone, who had already recast himself as the self-appointed guardian of Israel’s world reputation even as he had earlier been anointed as the distinguished jurist who admirably put aside his ethnic identity and personal affiliations when it came to carrying out his professional work as a specialist in international criminal law, or in carrying out high profile investigative and fact-finding missions in the international arena. Goldstone was even seemingly willing to confront the Zionist furies of Israel when criticized by one of their own adherents in chairing the UN panel appointed to consider allegations of Israeli war crimes during the Gaza War of 2008-09.

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Faced with a round of threats and speculations of an impending war so shrill that it has sent oil prices soaring, Russia and China were quick today to caution the United States against launching an attack on Iran.

Attacking Iran would be a “very serious mistake fraught with unpredictable consequences,” warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while China expressed concern that the threats were harming the prospects of diplomacy.

They are just the latest in a growing chorus of nations to express concerns about starting another major war. Germany has also said they oppose such a move.

A growing number of US officials past and present have expressed a preference for launching a military attack on Iran soon, with an IAEA report alleging some vague allegations about computer simulations serving as the latest pretext.

Israeli officials have also been hyping the prospect of launching an attack on Iran themselves, with President Shimon Peres insisted the war was “more likely” than any sort of diplomatic solution. Israeli military officials are said to prefer an attack before winter.