Peace and Justice Post

Ewen MacAskill and Chris McGreal in Washington, The Guardian, Nov 8, 2010

George Bush – ‘Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I’m comfortable with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it’. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

George Bush ordered the Pentagon to plan an attack on Iran‘s nuclear facilities and considered a covert attack on Syria, the former president reveals in his memoirs.

Bush, in the 497-page Decision Points, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian in advance of its publication in the US tomorrow, writes of Iran: “I directed the Pentagon to study what would be necessary for a strike.” He adds: “This would be to stop the bomb clock, at least temporarily.”

Such an attack would almost certainly have produced a conflagration in the Middle East that could have seen Iran retaliating by blocking oil supplies and unleashing militias and sympathisers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Bush also discussed with his national security team either an air strike or a covert special forces raid on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility at the request of Israel.

The book, which is published in the US tomorrow, seeks to rebuild Bush’s reputation, giving his side of the story on the most controversial issues of his presidency, which include Iraq, Afghanistan, hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street meltdown and torture at Guantánamo.

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By Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service,

WASHINGTON, Nov 8, 2010 (IPS) – Less than a week after Republicans made major gains in the U.S. midterm elections, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has called on President Barack Obama to “create a credible threat of military action” against Iran.

Initial official reaction was negative, with Defence Secretary Robert Gates insisting that Obama’s preferred strategy of enhanced multilateral sanctions and negotiations, which may resume after a year’s hiatus later this month, was working better than expected.

“I disagree that only a credible military threat can get Iran to take the actions that it needs, to end its nuclear weapons programme,” Gates said when asked about Netanyahu’s remarks during a visit in Australia.

“We are prepared to do what is necessary, but at this point, we continue to believe that the political, economic approach that we are taking is, in fact, having an impact in Iran.”

According to diplomatic sources quoted in the Israeli and U.S. press, Netanyahu’s appeal came during a meeting with Vice President Joseph Biden in New Orleans Sunday. It suggests that his right-wing government and its allies here, including hawkish Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January, are preparing to escalate pressure on Obama to adopt a more confrontational stance with Tehran.

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The US is vocal about its commitment to peace in Israel and the Palestinian territories — but its actions suggest otherwise.

Palestinian children play near a tent in Ezbet Abed Rabbo area, that was heavily destroyed during Israel’s 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Getty Images.

That the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, not only is it possible, but there is near-universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognised (pre-June 1967) borders – with “minor and mutual modifications”, to adopt official US terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.

The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (which call for the full normalisation of relations), the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (including Iran) and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas). A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the UN Security Council in January 1976 and backed by the major Arab states. Israel refused to attend. The United States vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.

But there was one important and revealing break in US-Israeli rejectionism. After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Clinton recognised that the terms he and Israel had proposed were unacceptable to any Palestinians. That December, he proposed his “parameters”: imprecise but more forthcoming. He then stated that both sides had accepted the parameters, while expressing reservations.

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Sherwood Ross

by Sherwood Ross, The Smirking Chimp, November 6, 2010 – 3:40pm

If the CIA routinely lies to the American people, maybe that’s because its got so much to lie about, like killing millions of innocent human beings around the world. As far back as December, 1968, the CIA’s own Covert Operations Study Group gave a secret report to president-elect Richard Nixon that conceded, “The impression of many Americans, especially in the intellectual community and among the youth, that the United States is engaging in ‘dirty tricks’ tends to alienate them from their government.” According to Tim Weiner’s book “Legacy of Ashes” (Anchor), the report went on to say, “Our credibility and our effectiveness in this role is necessarily damaged to the extent that it becomes known that we are secretly intervening in what may be (or appear to be) the internal affairs of others.”

President Bill Clinton, who first gave the CIA the green light to launch its illegal “renditions” (kidnappings,) told the nation on the occasion of the Agency’s 50th birthday (1997), “By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage.” (Courage? For 22 agents to grab one Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan, Italy, and ship him abroad to be tortured?) Anyway, presidents who authorize criminal acts by the CIA, as virtually all have done since its founding in 1947, don’t want the truth out, either, lest knowledge of those “dirty tricks” sicken and revolt the American people when they find out what crimes the Agency is perpetrating with their tax dollars. As former CIA agent Philip Agee once put it, “The CIA is the President’s secret army.” This point was underscored at a luncheon by President Gerald Ford himself, which he hosted for New York Times top editors on Jan. 16, 1975. According to Weiner, Ford told them the reputation of every President since Truman could be ruined if the secrets became public. Asked by an editor, like what? Ford replied “like assassinations.”

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Almost two years and one disastrous election later, we’re still waiting for the other Barack Obama to make an appearance, and from the gab coming out of Washington right now, it looks like we’ll be twiddling our thumbs a bit longer (if not forever). Once again, the sweet talk of compromise and bipartisanship is on the lips of the president, but not, of course, on the lips of top Republicans. Talk about consistency!

Right now, all the news chatter is about domestic policy (health care, tax cuts, etc.), but count on the Republicans – Rand Paul aside – to light out after the president sooner or later at least as hawkishly on foreign policy as they have domestically. Already, Senator John McCain and others are preparing the ground to launch what’s likely to become a jihad against Obama’s civilization-busting “mistake” in announcing a vaguely “conditions-based” drawdown of vague numbers of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for July 2011. And that’s just a start. On a whole host of issues from the Iraq and Afghan wars to Israel, Iran, and North Korea, buckle your seatbelts and hold onto your hats. The critical weather in Congress, especially in the House, is going to get fiercer, and a president with a most un-Harry-Truman-ish tendency to placate is unlikely to stake his fighting future on foreign policy.

So expect war drums and alarums to the horizon (i.e., 2012) from congressional Republicans. And when it comes to the famous Republican urge to cut every budget in sight, be assured of one thing – our wars, the Pentagon budget, and the industrial part of the military-industrial complex – in other words, our next generation weaponry, however ill-conceived – will surely be removed from the “table” where “all options” are always placed.

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Chris Hedges, Truthdig,  Nov 8, 2010

AP / Matt York

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.

More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as “mainstream Americans” now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

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by Stuart Littlewood, Dissident Voice, November 6th, 2010

In his recent pep-talk to the Anti-Defamation League, media magnate Rupert Murdoch complains about “an ongoing war against the Jews”.

He seems desperate to divert attention from the mounting resentment around the world towards Israel. But his threadbare argument collapses straightaway because no distinction is made between criminal Israelis and Jews generally. The one remains carefully hidden behind the other.

And the anti-Semitism label tends to get pinned on anyone and everyone in European society, “from its most élite politicians to its largely Muslim ghettoes”, who speaks against or as much as frowns at the racist regime.

The after-dinner audience he was addressing no doubt lapped it up, but unfortunately for Mr Murdoch people are better informed nowadays. I doubt if the wider audience buys it.

What they find unacceptable is Israel’s lawlessness and unrestrained killing. The much-hyped religious dimension is only relevant insofar as the perpetrators hide behind religion’s skirts and misinterpret religious texts to whitewash their crimes.

What also undermines Mr Murdoch’s case is the fact that not all Jews support the state of Israel or approve the dispossession and removal of its indigenous (Arab) population. An increasing number, to their credit, actively campaign against it.

And not all of Israel’s supporters are Jewish. They include battalions of Christian Zionists.

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by Khalid Amayreh, Intifada Palestine, Nov 3, 2010

“It is a slaughter house,” “even the Gestapo didn’t do this;” I spent many years in Israeli jails, and never experienced some thing like that.” These are some of the comments and observations made by people who have just been released from Palestinian Authority (PA) lockups and detention centers.

The PA said  it formally and completely stopped physical torture  in its numerous detention centers as of October 2000, especially following protests by the donor countries which complained that their tax-payers’ money was being used to torture suspected political  opponents in the West Bank.

However, recent reports and testimonies gathered by human rights organizations and journalists have shown that intensive, even life-threatening torture is still being widely practiced by PA security authorities with or without the knowledge of the political authorities.

In some instances, like at the Jericho prison, which has been described as most notorious in the application of torture, some prisoners and detainees are tortured 17 hours per day.

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Police tussles with demonstrators as they clear an area where anti-nuclear activists digged a hole beside the possible Castor transportation route in Splietau near Dannenberg November 6, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski

DANNENBERG, Germany (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of protesters took part in one of the largest anti-nuclear rallies in years Saturday as the first shipment of waste in two years was slowed by activists on its way from France back to Germany.

The transport has become a tense political issue this year due to anger over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to extend the lifespan of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

The waste transported Saturday originated in Germany and was reprocessed at the French nuclear group Areva’s processing plant at La Hague for storage in a site in the northern German town of Gorleben.

Merkel urged those taking part in the rally to refrain from committing criminal acts while attempting to stop the convoy of 11 train cars carrying 154 metric tones of waste.

The train was held up for hours by an earlier demonstration near the German-French border when thousands of activists blocked the tracks. The waste shipment is expected to arrive in Gorleben, near the central city of Dannenberg, Sunday.

There were some isolated scuffles between demostrators and police. Also a group of about 150 protesters were trying to dig a tunnel under one road near Gorleben to make it impassable. They threw stones at police attempting to stop them. The police responded with clubs and pepper spray.

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By Bill Van Auken, uruknet.info, Nov 6, 2010

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of waterboarding.The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.” The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.” The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic interests. Continues >>