Peace and Justice Post

Watching and listening to Stephen Harper’s bizarre and unnerving speech about anti-Semitism and Israel raises the question as to whether or not the man is mentally fit to be prime minister.

In effect, Harper has taken the position of being Israel’s defender no matter what — in other words, this commitment comes before his duty as prime minister, before his duty to represent Canada’s interests abroad, before his role of elected representative. Harper is a defender of Israel no matter the consequences for Canada. He stated:

“[As] long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the United Nations, the Francophonie, or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand whatever the cost. I say this, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israeli mob tell us all too well if we listen to it, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are a threat to all of us.”

His dedication to that country supersedes his commitment to his own. That would be disturbing enough if Harper were merely a private citizen. But as prime minister it is beyond the pale and it isn’t much of a stretch to suggest it borders on the betrayal of Canada and certainly Canadian interests. For what does it mean that Harper will defend Israel no matter the consequences for Canada?

Harper referred in his speech to “the anti-Israeli mob.” I have to presume here that he is referring to all the Arab and Muslim countries which regularly criticize Israel at the UN. But, of course, not only them. UN resolutions criticizing Israel are regularly supported by virtually every country with the exception of Israel, the U.S. and — sometimes — El Salvador. Is the whole of the UN membership part of the “mob”?

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By Dan Froomkin, The Huffington Post, Nov 12, 2010

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether former president George W. Bush violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.

In his new memoir and ensuing book tour, Bush has repeatedly admitted that he directly authorized the waterboarding of three terror suspects. Use of the waterboard, which creates the sensation of drowning, has been an iconic and almost universally condemned form of torture since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Except for a brief period during which a handful of Bush administration lawyers insisted that the exigencies of interrogating terror suspects justified its use, waterboarding has always been considered illegal by the Justice Department. It is also a clear violation of international torture conventions.

The ACLU is urging Attorney General Eric Holder to ask Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate Bush. For nearly three years now, Durham has been acting as a special prosecutor investigating a variety of torture-related matters involving government officials considerably lower on the food chain. Just this Tuesday, it was widely reported that Durham had cleared the CIA’s former top clandestine officer and others in the destruction of agency videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects — but that he would continue pursuing other aspects of his investigation.

“The ACLU acknowledges the significance of this request, but it bears emphasis that the former President’s acknowledgment that he authorized torture is absolutely without parallel in American history,” the group wrote in its letter to Holder.

“The admission cannot be ignored. In our system, no one is above the law or beyond its reach, not even a former president. That founding principle of our democracy would mean little if it were ignored with respect to those in whom the public most invests its trust. It would also be profoundly unfair for Mr. Durham to focus his inquiry on low-level officials charged with implementing official policy but to ignore the role of those who authorized or ordered the use of torture.”

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• 
• • Seumas Milne, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 November 2010

In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.

There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.

But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.

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By Arundhati Roy, ZNet, Nov 10, 2010

Source: NYT

A WEEK before he was elected in 2008, President Obama said that solving the dispute over Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination — which has led to three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 — would be among his “critical tasks.” His remarks were greeted with consternation in India, and he has said almost nothing about Kashmir since then.

But on Monday, during his visit here, he pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir and announcing his support for India’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. While he spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.

Whether Mr. Obama decides to change his position on Kashmir again depends on several factors: how the war in Afghanistan is going, how much help the United States needs from Pakistan and whether the government of India goes aircraft shopping this winter. (An order for 10 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, worth $5.8 billion, among other huge business deals in the pipeline, may ensure the president’s silence.) But neither Mr. Obama’s silence nor his intervention is likely to make the people in Kashmir drop the stones in their hands.

I was in Kashmir 10 days ago, in that beautiful valley on the Pakistani border, home to three great civilizations — Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. It’s a valley of myth and history. Some believe that Jesus died there; others that Moses went there to find the lost tribe. Millions worship at the Hazratbal shrine, where a few days a year a hair of the Prophet Muhammad is displayed to believers.

Now Kashmir, caught between the influence of militant Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, America’s interests in the region and Indian nationalism (which is becoming increasingly aggressive and “Hinduized”), is considered a nuclear flash point. It is patrolled by more than half a million soldiers and has become the most highly militarized zone in the world.

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By John Andrews, wsws.org, Nov 11, 2010

The five-year statute of limitations for criminally prosecuting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who destroyed videos depicting torture during interrogations expired Monday with no charges being filed. The lapsing of the case followed a nearly three-year-long investigation by a special prosecutor.

Before their destruction, government officials were ordered by courts to preserve all records of so-called “enhanced interrogations.” Both before and after the videos were destroyed, officials lied repeatedly about the recordings’ existence.

Monday’s non-action is the latest by the Obama administration to cover up Bush era war crimes. Previously, Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the “state secrets” privilege to quash a case brought by torture victims against the private contractor hired by the CIA to transport them abroad for torture, and to block a case brought against the National Security Agency for illegal wiretapping.

Holder’s lawyers also successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court order mandating the release of photos, which depict torture and abuse of inmates held at Abu Ghraib and other notorious Bush-era detention facilities. Although Obama pledged to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year of his inauguration, it still holds 240 prisoners, most having languished there for years without charges or trials of any sort.

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The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.

NATO officials say the increase in air attacks is simply a natural outgrowth of a more aggressive campaign to push militants out of their strongholds in southern Afghanistan. “Simply put, our air strikes have increased because our operations have increased. We’ve made a concentrated effort in the south to clear out the insurgency and therefore have increased our number of troops on the ground and aircraft to support them in this effort,” Lt. Nicole Schwegman, a NATO spokesperson, tells Danger Room.

On the other hand, some outside observers believe the strikes are part of an attempt to soften up the insurgency before negotiations with them begin in earnest. But one thing is clear: it’s a strategy Petraeus has used before. Once he took over the Iraq war effort, air strikes jumped nearly sevenfold.

Next month, the Obama administration is set to review the strategy for the Afghanistan campaign. Petraeus’ newly-aggressive approach will almost certainly part of that examination. It’s a dramatic reversal from Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy, which drastically restricted the use of air power — even when troops came under fire.

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by Zachary Roth, CommonDreams.org, Nov 9, 2010

Emboldened by President Obama’s political struggles, foreign-policy hard-liners are stepping up efforts to press the administration to take a tougher stance — and perhaps even launch an attack — on Iran.

Some observers see parallels with the successful multiyear campaign for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. “The theoreticians who called for war in Iraq as a way to stop Saddam acquiring weapons of mass destruction are at it again, with the same playbook,” Joel Rubin of the liberal National Security Network told The Upshot.

Of course, advocates of an aggressive foreign policy have long talked up the notion of an attack on Iran as a means of preventing the Islamic republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon — remember Sen. John McCain’s “Bomb Iran” performance from the 2008 presidential campaign? But with a weakened president, the effort to promote a military strike is “definitely going into a higher gear” of late, Matthew Duss of the liberal Center for American Progress told The Upshot.

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Alex Lort-Phillips was on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla’s boat the Mavi Marmara when it was boarded by the Israeli Defence Force at 4am on May 31 this year.

She had first visited Gaza in January. She was moved to go by the effects of the blockade on Gaza’s people, more than half of whom are under the age of 16.

An experienced youth worker in north London, she understands the devastating effect four years of blockade has on the youth of Gaza in terms of maladjustment and instability. It was also on this earlier aid convoy that she encountered, and grew to admire, the Turkish relief organisation IHH.

So it was when she heard that IHH was planning another convoy, this time by ship as well as land, she decided to join in.

With a friend she drove a 7.5-ton truck from this country to Istanbul, where supplies were repackaged and loaded onto ships.

Turkish customs gave all their aid a completely clean bill of health. She then boarded the Mavi Marmara, which was the main passenger ship of the flotilla. It was carrying, among other things, toys for the children of Gaza. The ship set out for Cyprus, where it was joined by other ships from Greece to make up a flotilla of three passenger ships and three cargo vessels.

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Speaking today at the Jewish Federations of North America meeting, US Vice President Joe Biden vowed eternal support for the Israeli government, insisting US support for the nation would continue no matter what Israel does “forever.”

“The ties between our two countries are literally unbreakable” insisted Biden, adding that policy disagreements with the far-right government will never be “fundamental” and will never have any affect on ties. Biden insists President Obama “feels exactly the same way.”

The comments were largely in keeping with a number of top US officials over the past few decades who have pledged eternal fealty to Israel regardless of the relative merits of that government’s position on any given issue. Biden’s position is therefore a politically safe one, but is it an obsolete one?

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(New York) – The US government is wrong to not criminally prosecute CIA officials who destroyed evidence of torture, Human Rights Watch said today. The televised statements of former President George W. Bush acknowledging his personal responsibility for ordering torture demonstrate the need for the Obama administration to pursue prosecutions of senior US officials responsible for planning and authorizing the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, Human Rights Watch said.

Acting US Attorney John Durham, who is also in charge of an ongoing investigation into improper interrogations of detainees, announced today that he would not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of CIA videotapes showing interrogations of terrorism suspects. “It is beyond shocking that a former US president can publicly claim responsibility for torture and the next day the US government can say it will not pursue charges for destroying evidence of that torture,” said Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program director at Human Rights Watch. “It sends the ugly message that there are no legal consequences in the United States for committing the most heinous of international crimes.”

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