Peace and Justice Post

One of Barack Obama’s first acts as president should be to instruct his attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush Administration officials who gave the green light to torture.

At Obama’s press conference on Dec. 1, he spoke of upholding America’s highest values as he introduced Eric Holder as his choice for attorney general. Holder insisted there was no tension between protecting the people of the United States and adhering to our Constitution.

A few months ago, Holder was even more explicit. “Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution,” he said. “We owe the American people a reckoning.”

The day of reckoning is fast upon us.

If Obama and Holder want to adhere to our Constitution and uphold our highest values, they must pursue those in the Bush Administration who violated that Constitution, broke our laws, and tarnished our values.

Read the words of Lt. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal for the Pentagon. “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” he concluded. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Despite Taguba’s words and reams of documentation supporting his statement, there has been little discussion about holding officials accountable for their design and implementation of the torture program.

We need to make it clear, just as we do in cases with the most minor offenses, that actions have consequences. To simply let those officials walk off the stage sends a message of impunity that will only encourage future law breaking. The message that we need to send is that they will be held accountable.

A popular refrain in Washington these days is that criminal prosecutions would be an unnecessary look backward. Some argue that in order for the new administration to move forward, presidential pardons should be granted and a Truth Commission assembled to investigate the circumstances that gave rise to the brutal interrogations and deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites around the world.

But pardons would be the final refuge for an administration whose egregious violations of human rights have, for all too long, gone unpunished. And a Truth Commission is not applicable.

This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions. We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed.

Criminal prosecutions are not about looking to the past; they are about creating a future world without torture. They will be the mark of the new dawn of America’s leadership and our new era of accountability.

Prosecuting these officials would help the United States regain its moral standing in the world and to prove our commitment to upholding international human rights standards.

In his first nationally televised interview, President-elect Barack Obama made this promise: “I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture. And I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture.”

The best way to do that is to prosecute those who designed the torture policies.

Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of “The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.”

By Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service

PTAB submunitions piled up near Bagram, Afghanistan 2002. Part of a munition dump containing 60,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance. Credit:John Rodsted

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 (IPS) – When the United Nations talks of “Israeli-occupied territories”, the conventional definition is that these disputed lands include the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — all of them annexed after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

But to most Lebanese, there are border villages inside southern Lebanon that are virtually “no-man’s land” because of the myriads of cluster bombs air-dropped by Israel during its four-week conflict with the Islamic militant organisation Hezbollah in 2006.

For all intents and purposes, says one Arab diplomat stretching the U.N. definition further, these heavily-mined border villages are also “Israeli-occupied territories”.

“The devastating military legacy left behind by Israel lives on in these Lebanese villages, parts of which remain uninhabitable because of cluster munitions and unexploded ordnance,” he adds.

But he is not sure how a new treaty banning cluster bombs, which was signed by 94 nations in the Norwegian capital of Oslo on Thursday, will help resolve the problem of “occupied territories” inside Lebanon.

The United Nations says that “millions” of cluster munitions — in which hundreds of small ‘bomblets’ are packed together — were dropped on more than 48 million square metres of Lebanese territory in July and August 2006, killing and injuring over 300 civilians.

And hundreds of thousands of munitions failed to explode on impact and remained on the ground, on rooftops, and in agricultural areas, killing mostly civilians.

In Laos, clearance operations have been going on for over 30 years after a conflict there left 75 million unexploded cluster bomblets strewn across the country, according to the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that exactly 11 years ago, governments, international organisations, parliamentarians and civil society gathered for the historic signing of the landmine convention which banned those anti-personnel weapons.

“That treaty added a new chapter to international humanitarian law, disarmament and non-proliferation, and is a prime example of how a shared sense of conviction and determination can translate into concrete measures that save lives and livelihoods,” he said in a statement read at the signing ceremony by Sergio Duarte, the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.

He said the new Convention on Cluster Munitions will not only prohibit the future use and proliferation of cluster weapons but also promote their very obsolescence.

“Moreover, the Convention’s far reaching provisions on victim assistance and clearance will improve the lives of survivors, families and communities that have been affected by cluster munitions,” he added.

The signing of the CCM is also a historic victory for the progressive governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that made it happen, says William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the Washington-based New America Foundation.

“While there is still much work to do — like getting major players like the United States, Russia and China on board — the treaty sets a norm against selling or using these weapons that will be hard to roll back,” he said.

But it is a hopeful sign, Hartung told IPS, “that President-elect Barack Obama has agreed to reconsider current U.S. policy with an eye towards possibly joining the cluster bomb ban.”

“And even short of signing on, there is much that the United States can do, from stopping exports, to curbing their use, to spending more to help clean up unexploded ‘bomblets’ that could approach de facto support for the ban,” he said.

The most important thing now is for activists and political leaders to view this as an historic first step that will be followed by vigorous efforts to get the major powers on board, Hartung added.

The CCM was adopted by 107 countries at a conference in Dublin, Ireland, in May this year, and comes into force six months after 30 states ratify it. The legally-binding treaty prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions.

According to the United Nations, at least 15 countries, and a number of non-state actors, mostly military groups, have used cluster munitions in at least 32 countries or territories. A total of 34 countries have produced more than 200 types of cluster munitions while billions of these are said to be stockpiled in 75 countries.

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, told IPS that the signing of the Convention by so many states eliminates an entire category of weapons and “is another major triumph for disarmament achieved through a unique coalition of civil society groups and nation states”.

“It is an indictment of the established framework for the negotiation of international disarmament treaties and on the major powers whose obstructionism has failed to stop the powerful groundswell of international public opinion,” he added.

“We have more mountains to climb especially with regard to the elimination of nuclear weapons and this victory, which includes victim assistance as an important element, should be an encouragement,” added Dhanapala.

Bill Van Auken | World Socialist Web Site, December 4, 2008

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to New Delhi Wednesday, ostensibly to deliver US condolences for the 173 people killed in the terrorist attacks that rocked Mumbai last week and express solidarity with the people of India.

This will likely be among the last major international initiatives launched by Rice, whose role in foisting the wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan on the American people and implementing the US programs of torture and extraordinary rendition makes her an appropriate target for a war crimes indictment.

In the Middle East—where she is infamous for hailing the 2006 Israeli war that killed thousands of Lebanese civilians as the “birth pangs” of peace—protesters have frequently portrayed the American secretary of state as a vampire, her fangs dripping in blood.

This image serves as a fitting metaphor for her current foray into South Asia, where she is spearheading an attempt by Washington to exploit the blood of the innocent victims in Mumbai to promote the so-called “global war on terrorism” through which Washington pursues its geostrategic interests.

Speaking in New Delhi, Rice pointedly applied pressure on Pakistan, declaring that its government must “act with resolve and urgency and cooperate fully and transparently.” For its part, Pakistan has condemned the terror attacks and denied any involvement by its state agencies.

Rice suggested a nonexistent link between Al Qaeda and the Mumbai attacks, declaring, “This is clearly the kind of terror in which Al Qaeda participates.” She was later forced to backtrack on the remark, but still declared that those who attacked India’s commercial capital and those blamed for the 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington “move in the same circles.”

If there is a connection between the Mumbai attacks and those of September 11 it is to be found in the American response. Seven months after the planes flew into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rice described those tragic events as “an enormous opportunity” to “create a new balance of power.” Washington now sees a similar opportunity arising from the carnage in India to pursue its interests in South Asia.

While Rice was in New Delhi, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was in Islamabad, exerting pressure on Pakistan’s eight-month-old civilian government and on the country’s military commanders.

Mullen echoed Rice’s statements in New Delhi, calling on the government of President Asif Ali Zardari to “investigate aggressively any and all possible ties to groups based in Pakistan.” The admiral went further, however, declaring that the Pakistani government had “to take more, and more concerted, action against militant extremists elsewhere in the country.”

This last reference was clearly a demand that the Pakistani military intensify its operations in Waziristan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and other territories bordering Afghanistan, which have provided support to Afghan forces battling against the seven-year-old US occupation. The American military has carried out its own repeated attacks in the area, killing Pakistani civilians in missile strikes as well as commando assaults.

It is apparent that Washington sees in the Mumbai events an opportunity to bully Pakistan into more effectively doing its bidding in support of the war in Afghanistan, or, should that fail, to justify the escalation of its own intervention.

Significant in this regard was a column published in the Washington Post Tuesday by Robert Kagan, a leading proponent of the Iraq war with close ties to the Bush administration. Kagan called for forming an international force to invade Pakistan and “root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas.”

In arguing for such a military intervention, Kagan declared that it “would be useful for the United States, Europe and other nations to begin establishing the principle that Pakistan and other states that harbor terrorists should not take their sovereignty for granted. In the 21st century, sovereign rights need to be earned.”

Such a move “to internationalize the response” to the Mumbai attack, Kagan argues, “would have the advantage of preventing a direct military confrontation between India and Pakistan.”

Finally, he asserts that this kind of intervention is necessary because the US has the “obligation to demonstrate to the Indian people that we take attacks on them as seriously as we take attacks on ourselves.”

Thus, the attempt to connect 9/11 with Mumbai and the full implications of this amalgam are spelled out quite clearly. As with the attacks of 2001, the terrorist acts in India are seen as the pretext for a new war of aggression and justification for riding roughshod over the sovereignty of a historically oppressed nation.

The military confrontation between India and Pakistan against which Kagan warns has been made all the more probable by US imperialism’s interventions in the region.

For US strategic interests, such a war poses a serious threat in that Pakistan would likely withdraw troops it now has deployed on its western border with Afghanistan and move them east towards India, leaving the border region and the key lines of supply for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan unprotected.

For humanity, such a war poses the danger of a nuclear conflagration and the deaths of millions.

This crisis is unfolding barely six weeks before Barack Obama is to be sworn in as the next president of the United States. Here as elsewhere, there are indications that a “seamless transition” can be anticipated. Obama has repeatedly indicated that a top priority of his administration will be the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, along with its extension into Pakistan itself.

At his press conference last Monday introducing his national security team, Obama fully embraced the language of the “war on terrorism,” indicating that he will use similar cynical justifications for US aggression as those employed under George W. Bush.

Jacob G. Hornberger| The Future of Freedom Foundation, Dec 2, 2008

In reflecting on his war on Iraq in an interview this week with ABC, President Bush made some revealing statements. He first said that “the biggest regret of all the presidency has been the intelligence failure in Iraq. I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”

He was, of course, referring to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be non-existent. According to AFP, Bush then “refused to say whether he would have ordered the March 2003 invasion if he had known that the late dictator Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, calling it an ‘interesting question.’”

The overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence leads to but one conclusion: that after the 9/11 attacks, Bush intended to invade Iraq for the purpose of regime change and that the WMD “threat” was nothing more than a fake and false covering rationale for the invasion. Bush’s statements to ABC do nothing to dispel that conclusion.

Here is what the circumstantial evidence leads to:

After 9/11, Bush and Cheney decided that the opportunity was right to accomplish what Bush’s father had failed to accomplish and what 11 years of brutal sanctions against Iraq had failed to accomplish: the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power and the installation of a pro-U.S. regime.

However, Bush and Cheney knew that while they could effect regime change in Afghanistan on the basis that the Taliban had been “harboring” terrorists, no such excuse existed with respect to Iraq. Neither the Iraqi people nor their government had ever attacked the United States or threatened to do so.

Bush and Cheney felt they needed both legal and political cover for their invasion. That’s what their desperate attempts to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attackers were all about. If they could establish such a link, then they could claim that they were attacking Iraq in “self-defense.”

When that rationale failed for lack of evidence, Bush and Cheney turned to the UN-resolution rationale. Saddam Hussein, they claimed, was violating UN resolutions by possessing WMDs. The big problem with that rationale, however, was that only the UN, not the U.S., could enforce UN resolutions, and the UN Security Council wasn’t willing to give Bush the authority to enforce resolutions with an invasion.

Bush and Cheney then turned to the imminent-threat-of-a-WMD-attack-on-the-U.S. rationale to garner support within Congress and among the American people for an invasion of Iraq. They figured that they were safe relying on this rationale since they knew that the U.S. and other Western countries had delivered the WMDs to Saddam during the 1980s. They still had the receipts! How likely was it that Saddam had destroyed all those WMDs that the U.S. had delivered to him? In the minds of Bush and Cheney, not very likely at all.

Thus, the idea was to invade Iraq, find WMDs, oust Saddam from power, and claim that Bush and Cheney had heroically saved America from an imminent WMD attack. Bush’s real regret has got to be not the intelligence failure but rather the fact that Saddam Hussein really did destroy the all the WMDs that the U.S. and its allies had delivered to him during the 1980s.

Bush and Cheney and their subordinates then embarked on their campaign to magnify the post-9/11 fears of the American people by conjuring up images of mushroom clouds and chemical and biological weapons that Saddam was supposedly about to unleash on the American people. Bush and Cheney knew that Congress and many Americans would take the position that “The president must know things that we are not privy to. We must trust him.”

That Bush lied about the reason for invading Iraq is also supported by the classified British memo that pointed out that President Bush had already decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2002 and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

So, why doesn’t Bush simply tell the truth — that the real reason he invaded Iraq was simply to accomplish what his father and sanctions had failed to accomplish — regime change? Because he knows that to invade a country simply for the purpose of regime change constitutes a war crime and he and Cheney do not want to be prosecuted for committing war crimes.

Bush continues to claim that his war on Iraq has turned out to be a big “success.” If the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis he has killed could speak, how likely is it that they would agree with that assessment?

Once he leaves office, Bush will have plenty of time to reflect upon the massive death and destruction he has wrought on a country that never attacked the United States or threatened to do so. He will also have time to wrestle with his conscience over the lies he has told to cover up his regime-change operation.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

President Nixon wanted to “decimate” North Vietnam and viewed university professors as “enemies”, new Oval Office tapes tapes have revealed.

President Nixon greets John McCain after he was released from a North Vietnamese prison camp Photo: AP

The newly declassified discussions with close aides such as Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig also reveal the president’s contempt for colleagues and his vitriol for critics.

“Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy,” he told Mr Kissinger, his national security adviser, in Dec 1972.

“Professors are the enemy,” he repeated. “Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

A few days later, Mr Haig, then the deputy assistant for National Security Affairs, told Mr Nixon that his vice president, Spiro Agnew, disagreed with Mr Kissinger on Vietnam.

Mr Nixon replied that his VP “is a goddamned fool” who “doesn’t know a goddamned thing. He bores the hell out of me. Christ… I’ll have to have him come in here.”

Within days, in one of the most controversial US acts of the war, it had carried out a series of intense air attacks on North Vietnam aimed at forcing the country to come to the table for peace talks.

“We’re going to bomb them. We’ll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it’s Christmas withdrawal,” the president told Mr Kissinger and Mr Haig. He called the North Vietnamese communists “filthy bastards”.

Although Mr Nixon sought reassurance from aides that the US was “punishing the hell out of the enemy”, he stressed his forces were trying to avoid civilian casualties.

When an adviser said Americans wanted reassurance that the bombing was simply an attempt to “decimate” the North Vietnamese, Mr Nixon snapped: “It’s too damned bad we aren’t decimating the country… with all the screaming about civilians, believe me: if we were trying, the goddamned place would be levelled. Levelled!” Nearly 200 hours of tapes and 90,000 pages of text have been released by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and the US National Archives.

The tapes include a conversation Mr Nixon had with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, at a time when the president wanted Moscow to put pressure on the Vietnamese to negotiate.

“Your government and I – we’ve got bigger fish to fry than this damn thing,” Mr Nixon told him, referring to the war as an “irritant”.

The new documents also show that Mr Nixon’s siege mentality was shared by his closest advisers.

Together, they collected dirt on the president’s critics and public figures, including their marital, mental and drink problems.

Luke Nichter, a Nixon scholar, said the tapes would mean that “one of the most secretive presidential administrations in American history will over time become the best chronicled”.

Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate Inc.

SFGate.com, Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife.

Tactically, that act of terror eliminated the reformist Ferdinand, who meant to address the grievances of his Slav subjects by granting them greater autonomy and equality with Austrians and Hungarians inside the empire.

Strategically, the assassination succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Black Hand plotters.

Hard-liners in Austria demanded an ultimatum to Serbia. When her demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war. Czar Nicholas mobilized in support of Russia’s little Slav brothers. The German Kaiser ordered mobilization. When the French refused to declare neutrality, Germany declared war. In hours, the British Cabinet had reversed itself to back war with Germany on behalf of Belgium and France.

Princip had lit the fuse that set off in six weeks the greatest war in history. While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Hungarians. The Habsburg Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished.

Last week’s Mumbai massacre seems a similar triumph of terror.

Tactically, by sending a platoon of suicide warriors into India’s financial capital, terrorizing a train station, two five-star hotels and a Jewish center, and killing 183 over 60 hours, the plotters assured themselves of round-the-clock worldwide television coverage.

In so riveting the world’s attention for four days, this atrocity was a success.

And by using Pakistanis to perpetrate the massacres and Karachi as port of embarkation, the plotters focused India’s rage exactly where they want it, against Pakistan. By this slaughter in India’s commercial capital, the Islamists have destroyed the detente Pakistan was seeking with India and pushed both toward war. Out to murder moderation and stoke militancy, the terrorists succeeded.

Years ago, this writer observed:

“Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.”

Yet terrorism – the killing of innocents for political ends – can triumph only if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama. What, then, may we surmise are the tactical and strategic goals of the terror masters of Mumbai?

To humiliate, wound and outrage India in her pride as a great new democratic and economic power in Asia. To imperil Mumbai’s future as a safe and secure financial capital in which to live, work and invest. To awe the world and inspire Islam’s young by their audacity. To attain immortality.

But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani government.

Pakistan’s offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and the border region, battling al Qaeda and the Taliban, withdrawing from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where 170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.

President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.” For war in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists across what Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the “Global Balkans.”

War would pit two nuclear powers against each other for the first time since the Sino-Soviet border clash of 1969. It would spawn bloodshed between Muslim and Hindu in India. It would see the collapse of Pakistan, its possible dissolution and a military dictator in a nation already divided against itself over whether to continue resisting al Qaeda and the Taliban, or cut ties to the unpopular Americans.

Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9/11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al Qaeda source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.

For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.

India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.

But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.

Should it come, they win – and enter history as revolutionary terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9/11.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.”

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/02/ED3P14F76S.DTL

This article appeared on page B – 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle