Peace and Justice Post

Eric Margolis, ericmargolis.com, November 19, 2010

Amazing as it sounds, NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, may be losing the only war the 61-year old pact every fought. All its soldiers, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and electronic gear are being beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

This weekend in Lisbon, NATO’s 28 members face deepening differences over the Afghanistan War as public opinion in the United States, Canada and Europe continue to turn against the conflict.

President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of US foreign policy.   His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from Afghanistan next July has been brazenly – even scornfully –  contradicted by US generals and strongly opposed by resurgent Congressional Republicans.  Hardly anyone believes the president’s withdrawal  date.

Obama is fresh from groveling before Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.  He pleaded with Israel’s leader to impose a short, token freeze on settlement building in exchange for a multi-billion dollar bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising the value of US arms stockpiled for Israel’s use to $1 billion. Rarely has a US president crawled so low.

Israel will likely take Obama’s bribe, with more sweeteners,  but not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really runs US Mideast policy and as a warning not to mess with Israel. The last US president to challenge Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, George H. W. Bush, was ousted in 1992 after one term.

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The Nowhere to Turn report, by 29 international and national aid agencies including Oxfam, the Afghan Women’s Network and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, was released to coincide with the Nato summit in Lisbon.

The groups say that US forces used 2,100 bombs or missiles from June through September – an almost 50 per cent increase on the same period last year – in a bid to “show fast results at home.”

Hundreds of civilians are believed to have died in the air raids.

The report shows that 2010 has been the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since 2001.

According to the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan there were 1,271 civilian deaths in the first six months of 2010 – an increase of 21 per cent on the same time last year.

The agencies say that armed opposition groups have responded to the influx of Western military forces – whose presence increased from 90,000 to 140,000 over the past year – by expanding their presence into the north, centre and west and “now have control of or significant influence in over half of the country.”

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By Don North, Consortium News, November 18, 2010

At this complex and dangerous moment in history, we must recognize that journalists around the world are failing in their duty as watchdogs of the people and that – combined with economic stresses – the traditional role of journalism is diminishing.

As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life disappear from public view and go dark. Much of local and state governments, whole federal departments, and the world itself are neglected.

Politicians are working increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability. Perhaps most alarmingly, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism abroad go underreported despite the billions of dollars spent and the tens of thousands of lives lost.

And it often isn’t much better when the major U.S. news media does provide saturation coverage. During President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, American journalists – with only a few exceptions – failed to respond, first, to the challenge of scrutinizing the case for war and, then, to the political and military failures during the war.

At times the U.S. media’s coverage made one think that the Pentagon could have skipped the middlemen and simply supplied the news feeds itself.

‘Embedded’ Journalists

In those first heady days of the conflict, “embedded” journalists excitedly broadcast green-tinted, night-vision action footage as they traveled on U.S. Army personnel carriers racing through the Iraqi desert.

Meanwhile, cable networks MSNBC and Fox News superimposed waving American flags on news scenes from Iraq and ran special packages of patriotic war images with stirring music and heroic titles.

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Encircling Russia, Targeting China

By Diana Johnstone, Counterpunch,  Nov  18, 2010

On November 19 and 20, NATO leaders meet in Lisbon for what is billed as a summit on “NATO’s Strategic Concept”.  Among topics of discussion will be an array of scary “threats”, from cyberwar to climate change, as well as nice protective things like nuclear weapons and a high tech Maginot Line boondoggle supposed to stop enemy missiles in mid-air. The NATO leaders will be unable to avoid talking about the war in Afghanistan, that endless crusade that unites the civilized world against the elusive Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabah, eleventh century chief of the Assassins in his latest reincarnation as Osama bin Laden.  There will no doubt be much talk of “our shared values”.

Most of what they will discuss is fiction with a price tag.

The one thing missing from the Strategic Concept summit agenda is a serious discussion of strategy.

This is partly because NATO as such has no strategy, and cannot have its own strategy.  NATO is in reality an instrument of United States strategy.  Its only operative Strategic Concept is the one put into practice by the United States. But even that is an elusive phantom.  American leaders seem to prefer striking postures, “showing resolve”, to defining strategies.

One who does presume to define strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of the Afghan Mujahidin back when they could be used to destroy the Soviet Union.  Brzezinski was not shy about bluntly stating the strategic objective of U.S. policy in his 1993 book The Grand Chessboard: “American primacy”.  As for NATO, he described it as one of the institutions serving to perpetuate American hegemony, “making the United States a key participant even in intra-European affairs.” In its “global web of specialized institutions”, which of course includes NATO, the United States exercises power through “continuous bargaining, dialogue, diffusion, and quest for formal consensus, even though that power originates ultimately from a single source, namely, Washington, D.C.”

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“Goyim Were Born Only to Serve Us”

by Gary Leupp, Dissident Voice,  November 19th, 2010

Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel.

— Israeli rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas party spiritual leader, Oct. 11, 2010

The Shas Party is a mainstream Israeli political party founded in 1984 by ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews. The name is an acronym for  Shomrei Torah Sephardim or “Observant Sepharadim.” (Sepharadim are for the most part Jews tracing their ancestry to the Iberian Peninsula, as opposed to the Ashkenazim who trace theirs to Germany, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. They are sometimes grouped together with the Mizrahim who have lived for centuries in the Arab Middle East, Iran and Uzbekistan.)

The party holds 11 seats in the Israeli Knesset (parliament). Its first leader, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, served as a interior minister in the 1980s. Its current spiritual leader, 90 year old Rabbi  Ovadia Yosef, holds no political position but four Shas members now hold posts (including interior minister) in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It is an anti-intellectural, religiously fundamentalist party. Like many groups in the U.S., and many prominent U.S. politicians, it rejects (and misrepresents) evolutionary theory, a pillar of modern science. One of its TV campaign ads bore the message, “One old Sepharadi lady kissing a Torah book with a tear in her eye is worth more than 40 university professors who tell us we are descended from monkeys.”

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by Reese Erlich, CommonDreams.org, Nov 19, 2010

I’m finishing up a 25-city book tour that took me from New York and Chicago to Elizabethtown, PA, and Spearfish, SD. I met with college students, farmers and laid-off workers. Most people in the US now oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I found a lot of confusion about the War on Terrorism.

Here are four of the more commonly asked questions:

1. Isn’t it true that while not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims?

Well, just asking the question reveals a lot about how those in power have manipulated our concept of terrorism.

To begin, I point out that plenty of non-Muslims have carried out terrorist acts. Here’s a partial list.

• Timothy McVeigh was convicted of detonating a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which resulted in 168 deaths. He was Catholic.
• In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish-American Israeli settler in the West Bank city of Hebron opened fire on Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 150. He died at the scene, and his grave later became a pilgrimage site for extremists in Israel.
• Murderers of abortion doctors in the US frequently carry out their crimes in the name of evangelical Christianity.
• In 2010, in a protest against federal government policies, Joseph Stack flew a plane into an Austin building housing IRS offices. He came from a Christian background and ranted against all religion.

I understand if you didn’t think of those examples right away. We’ve been conditioned to think of terrorists as foreigners, or people trained by foreigners, preferably dark skinned people with a grudge against the West. But a white guy with a bomb trying to kill civilians for political purposes is still a terrorist.

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By Steve Jonas, Planetory Movement, Nov. 15, 2010

The 9/11 remembrances and memorials seem to have come and gone very quickly this year, except to the extent that the GOP/Tea-Party led campaign for Islamophobia had gained strength and will continue on, to what ends and endings no one at this point can say with certainty.

But the 9/11 controversy has not gone away, that is the controversy over what were the real causes of the disaster.  It will not, at least until there is another investigation of the tragedy, bringing in many more witnesses and testifiers from many different points of view and perspectives, with an opportunity to raise so many questions that have yet to be answered and to offer for consideration scientific evidence about cause and effect that was not considered in the first investigation.

What we know for sure is that the tragedy was caused by a group of conspirators working closely together, operating at a level of secrecy that few of their kind have been able to achieve in mounting an attack of such large proportions.  And it was the result of a conspiracy, that is, for example, according to the World English Dictionary, “a secret plan or agreement to carry out an illegal or harmful act, esp. with political motivation; plot.”  Cass Sunstein to the contrary notwithstanding, yes this awful event was the result of a conspiracy.

The question is whose conspiracy was it and who were the conspirators.  At the beginning the finger pointed at Osama bin Laden.  After all, President Bush had been warned by the CIA on August 5 that Osama was determined to carry out an attack in the United States.  So, that conspiracy theory goes, bin Laden pulled together 20 Muslims, mainly Saudis, who were willing to die for the cause (pre-determined casualties).  They then managed to get themselves trained to do some kinds of flying in large, complicated airliners, and you know the rest.

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According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank.

By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz (Israel), Nov  16, 201

Travelers along the “original” West Bank roads, the ones enabling drivers to bypass Palestinian villages, can see signs declaring “USAID from the American People.”

The roads are one of the initiatives of the United States Agency for International Development for building infrastructure in underdeveloped countries. Israel has already proudly left the club of developing countries and is not among the clients of USAID. Nevertheless, it appears the Smith family of Illinois is making the occupation a little less expensive for the Cohen family of Petah Tikva.

According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank. It also says completion of a road in the southern part of the West Bank dramatically increased the amount of trade between Dahriya and Beer Sheva.

	Illustration
	Photo by: Amos Biderman

What the site doesn’t say is that a significant segment of the road goes through Area C – the 60 percent of the West Bank under exclusive Israeli civilian and military control and responsibility under the interim agreement of 1995 (the second Oslo agreement ). The agreement states: “Territorial jurisdiction includes land (and ) subsoil.”

This is not the only occupation-perpetuating road funded by American money. Dror Etkes, an expert on the settlements, noticed a few days ago USAID workers energetically laying asphalt on two roads in the Samaria region (northern West Bank ) that crosses Area C. Israelis haven’t been traveling these roads for years now because the taxpayer (in this case, the Israeli taxpayer ) has already paved separate, wide, modern roads for them.

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The baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it.

By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate,  Nov. 10, 2010,

The old adage held that if they couldn’t get you for the crime, they would get you for the coverup. But this week, it was revealed that both the crime and the coverup will go permanently unpunished. Which suggests that everything in between will go unpunished as well.

In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.* We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

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