Peace and Justice Post

Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers, Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and Republican Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade

By Max Blumenthal, TomDispatch.com,  Dec 21, 2010

Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.

Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.  It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.

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By Deepal Jayasekera, wsws.org, 21 December 2010

US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that Washington has long had evidence of Indian authorities’ systematic use of torture against opponents of Indian rule over Jammu and Kashmir, but has chosen not to speak out against New Delhi’s gross human rights violations.

In a classified cable sent in April 2005, the then-US ambassador to New Delhi, David C. Mulford, reported to the US State Department on a “confidential briefing” embassy officials had received from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) “on widespread severe torture in Indian prisons in Kashmir between 2002 and 2004.”

“The continued ill-treatment of detainees,” reported Mulford, “despite longstanding ICRC-GOI (Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude” that New Delhi “condones torture.”

In their briefing, the ICRC officials emphasized that those subjected to torture by Indian authorities were generally not anti-Indian insurgents—since Indian security forces have a standard practice of summarily executing suspected insurgents. Rather they were noncombatants, those accused of providing the insurgents support or suspected of having useful information: the “detainees were rarely militants (they are routinely killed), but persons connected to or believed to have information about the insurgency.”

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Richard Falk, uruknet.info, Dec 18. 2010

The politics of the peace process have emphatically ensured that the mere prospect for producing peace is nonexistent.

It is astonishing that despite the huge gaps between the maximum that Israel is willing to concede and the minimum that the Palestine Authority could accept as the basis of a final settlement of the conflict, governmental leaders, especially in Washington, continue to pull every available string to restart inter-governmental negotiations.

Is it not enough of a signal that Israel lacks the capacity or will to agree to an extension of the partial settlement freeze for a mere additional 90 days, despite the outrageous inducements from the Obama Administration (20 F-35 fighter jets useful for an attack on Iran; an unprecedented advance promise to veto any initiative in the Security Council acknowledging a Palestinian state; and the assurance that Israel would never again be asked to accept a settlement moratorium) that were offered to suspend partially their unlawful settlement activity.

In effect, a habitual armed robber was being asked to stop robbing a few banks for three months in exchange for a huge financial payoff. Such an arrangement qualifies as a transparently shameless embrace of Israeli lawlessness on behalf of a peace process that has no prospect of producing peace, much less justice.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross sent evidence to US diplomats about widespread torture by Indian security forces in Kashmir, according to cables obtained by Wikileaks.

Visits to detention centres in the region in 2002-04 revealed cases of beatings, electric shocks, sexual abuse and other types of ill-treatment.

The organisation concluded that India condoned torture in the region.

There has been no comment from the US. The ICRC said it was investigating.

The chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, told India’s NDTV channel that the allegations related to a period before his government took power and that he did not condone torture.

SM Sohai, inspector general of police in Indian-administered Kashmir, said the reports were baseless “propaganda”.

“I do not how the Red Cross could have accessed that information because, normally they would not have access to these kind of locations, so it’s completely unfounded,” he told the BBC.

“Torture doesn’t happen… Where can it happen?”

Correspondents say the revelations will be embarrassing for Delhi, coming at a time of heightened sensitivity in Kashmir, which is divided between Indian and Pakistani control.

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World Bulletin, Dec 19, 2010

Bolivia has recognized Palestine as an independent state, following the lead of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Friday said his government would send a letter to Mahmud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, recognizing Palestine as “an independent and sovereign state.”

He made the statement during the Mercosur summit.

Speaking at a news conference in Paraguay, Morales said Bolivia would officially notify international institutions of its decision next week.

He said, that genocide was being committed in the region and called on the international community to assume responsibility for preventing it.

With the announcement, Bolivia joined the list of Latin American and South American countries consisting of Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela which have all recognized an independent Palestinian state within its pre-1967 borders.

“Bolivia recognizes Palestine as an independent state along 1967 borders, together with Brazil and Argentina,” President Morales said during the Mercosur summit.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the move and thanked the support of Morales. Furthermore, Abbas praised the bilateral relationships.

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It may take years, but some researcher will travel to Pakistan’s tribal areas and produce a definitive study on what it’s been like to live amidst an aerial bombardment from American pilotless aircraft. When that account inevitably comes out, it’s likely to find that 2010 — and especially the final quarter of 2010 — marked a turning point in how civilians coped with a drone war that turned relentless.

Even as the Obama administration’s assessment of its war strategy nodded to the primacy of the CIA’s drone campaign, Predators underscored the point. Over the past two days, four Predators or Reapers fired their missiles at suspected militants in North Waziristan, with three of the strikes coming early today.

They represent a geographic expansion of the drone war. Today’s strikes come in Khyber, an area abutting Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, that’s been notably drone-free. It has become an area for militants fleeing military action in South Waziristan to take succor.

They also bring the drone-strike tally for this year up to 113, more than twice last year’s 53 strikes. But those figures don’t begin to tell the whole story.

According to a tally kept by the Long War Journal, 58 of those strikes have come since September: There has been a drone attack every 1.8 days since Labor Day. LWJ’s Bill Roggio says the pace of attacks between September and November (there was a brief December respite, now erased) is “unprecedented since the U.S. began the air campaign in Pakistan in 2004.” (By contrast, in 2008, there were just 34 strikes.)

Both Roggio and the New America Foundation have found that the overwhelming majority of this year’s strikes have clustered in North Waziristan: at least 99, by Roggio’s count.

That torrid pace of attacks should make it beyond debate that the drones are the long pole in the U.S.’s counterterrorism tent, even if the drone program is technically a secret. The Pakistanis haven’t sent their Army into North Waziristan to harass al-Qaeda’s haven in the mountainous, Connecticut-sized region, waving off U.S. pressure to invade.

Without a ground force to rely on, the CIA argues, the only option for fulfilling the administration’s goal of crushing al-Qaeda is a missile strapped to a surveillance aircraft. During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would pursue al-Qaeda in Pakistan unilaterally if he deemed the Pakistanis intransigent. No one expected he meant he’d do so from the skies.

Of course, the Pakistanis have been the silent partner in the strikes, allowing the drones to fly from their territory, so it’s not as if these are unilateral attacks.

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By William Blum, Foreign Policy Journal, April 15, 2010

Produced and directed by Charle Mauch and William Blum.

William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press. Mr. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe, and South America and was one of the recipients of Project Censored’s awards for “exemplary journalism” in 1999. He is the author of numerous books, including: Freeing the World to Death: essays on the American Empire, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Mr. Blum writes a free monthly newsletter, the Anti-Empire Report, which you may subscribe to by contacting him at bblum6@aol.com. Read more articles by William Blum.
http://www.killinghope.org

• Declan Walsh in Islamabad
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 December 2010 16.46 GMT

Pakistani tribesmen from Waziristan protest against US drone attacks, outside parliament in Islamabad. Photograph: T Mughal/EPA

The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.

The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.

In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.

“This is just diplomatic language they are using. Banks is a liability to the CIA because he’s likely to be called to court. They want to save him, and themselves, the embarrassment,” said lawyer Shahzad Akbar. Pakistani media reports have claimed that Banks entered the country on a business visa, and therefore does not enjoy diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

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One hears again and again Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked but that the US is distrusted, even hated

The Independent, Dec 18, 2010

Alan Hart, Information Clearing House, Dec 17, 2010

After his appointment as chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, California’s representative Howard Berman told The Forward: “Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist.” This is the man, one of the Zionist lobby’s most influential stooges in Congress, who introduced House Resolution 1734 which gives President Obama his new orders.

Israel’s instructions to Obama

Thoroughly disingenuous, the resolution, which was drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and in my view is an indication of panic on its part, was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives on 15 December. It

• strongly and unequivocally opposes any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums;

• calls upon the administration to continue its opposition to the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state;

• calls upon the administration to affirm that the United States would deny any recognition, legitimacy, or support of any kind to any unilaterally declared ‘‘Palestinian state’’ and would urge other responsible nations to follow suit, and to make clear that any such unilateral declaration would constitute a grievous violation of the principles underlying the Oslo Accords and the Middle East peace process;

• calls upon the administration to affirm that the United States will oppose any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums and will veto any resolution to that end by the United Nations Security Council (my emphasis added);

• calls upon the president and the secretary of state to lead a high-level diplomatic effort to encourage the European Union and other responsible nations to strongly and unequivocally oppose the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state or any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations or other international forums; and

• supports the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the achievement of a true and lasting peace through direct negotiations between the parties.

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