Peace and Justice Post

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2008 by Reuters

by Hez Holland

KIBATI, Congo – Hungry, frightened Congolese refugees pleaded for protection from marauding fighters on Sunday while foreign governments discussed aid but hesitated over sending more troops.

Displaced people walk back towards their homes, near Kibumba, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Goma in eastern Congo, Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008. Thousands of war-weary refugees returned to the the road Saturday, taking advantage of a rebel-called cease-fire to try to reach home beyond the front lines of this week’s battles in eastern Congo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

European, U.S. and U.N. envoys have criss-crosssd the Great Lakes region trying to prevent a newly resurgent Tutsi rebellion in the eastern Congolese borderlands from escalating into a rerun of Democratic Republic of Congo’s 1998-2003 war.After a weekend diplomatic shuttle that took them to Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania, the French and British foreign ministers called for more international aid to Congo’s North Kivu province, where an offensive by rebel general Laurent Nkunda has displaced tens of thousands of people.

A ceasefire by Nkunda appeared to be holding on Sunday.

At Kibati, north of the provincial capital Goma, refugees among 70,000 people sheltering there said they were desperate for protection and would welcome troops from Europe to bolster the 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers already deployed in Congo.

“We want to return to our village, but only if there is security. I have not eaten for six days,” said one elderly woman, Rgwasa Nyakaruhije. “We would be very happy if they sent in a European Union force.”

Around her, displaced civilians huddled in groups in the muddy grass, some under umbrellas or parasols.

“The urgent need for food, water, shelter and care must be covered through international mobilization and the securing of routes to allow aid to reach all North Kivu,” the French and British ministers, Bernard Kouchner and David Miliband, said in a joint statement after their visit.

But they stopped short of announcing a deployment of European Union troops to Congo. France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, had mooted the proposal earlier in the week but encountered resistance from some member states.

Instead, they recommended reinforcing the United Nations peacekeeping force in Congo, already the biggest in the world but badly stretched across a nation the size of Western Europe.

“The U.N. is not providing any security. If the French soldiers came, they would be very welcome,” said Zainabo Bunyurura, 40, who fled to Kibati from her home in Kibumba when the rebels attacked.

She said they burned down her house.

The U.N. says Congo’s army has also killed and looted.

Max Hadorn, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Congo, said restoring security was paramount.

“For us, it’s less a question of being able to mobilize aid but rather of being able to enter different zones with security guaranteed,” he told Reuters.

TUTSI AND HUTU INSURGENTS

An estimated one million people have been forced from their homes in North Kivu by two years of violence that has persisted despite the end of the 1998-2003 war in the vast, former Belgian colony, which is rich in copper, cobalt, gold and diamonds.

Kouchner and Miliband backed political solutions, including a regional summit that could be held next week to bring together the Congolese and Rwandan presidents, Joseph Kabila and Paul Kagame, to discuss the conflict on their borders. Both Congo and Rwanda have accused each other of backing rival rebel groups.

The two presidents have signaled they are ready to take part in talks on ending intertwined insurgencies in Congo that trace their origin back to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

Less clear is what participation will be given to renegade Tutsi General Nkunda, whose recent offensive on Goma has rekindled the ethnic fault lines that traverse eastern Congo.

Nkunda, who says his four-year-old bush rebellion aims to defend east Congolese Tutsis, says he is ready to talk to the government but wants a neutral mediator. He had abandoned a previous January peace deal, calling it government-imposed.

He accuses Kabila’s army of backing Rwandan Hutu rebels operating in east Congo who took part in the 1994 genocide killings in Rwanda of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Kabila’s government denies this and has in turn accused Tutsi-led Rwanda of backing Nkunda, a charge denied by Kigali.

Foreign governments are pressing Kabila and Kagame to revive a November deal signed in Nairobi under which both pledged to take steps to end the rival Tutsi and Hutu rebellions.

Anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness says the armed factions in North Kivu, including Congo’s army, are using the province’s cassiterite (tin ore), gold and coltan to gain profits and perpetuate the violence, abetted by willing buyers.

“For as long as there are buyers who are willing to trade, directly or indirectly, with groups responsible for grave human rights abuses, there is no incentive for these groups to lay down their arms,” Global Witness director Patrick Alley said.

© Thomson Reuters 2008

Robert Weitzel, Nov. 2, 2008

“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.”
–Mark Twain

Mark Twain once said that “in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.” Now if the two are combined, as James Dobson’s right-wing Christian organization, Focus on the Family, did in their recent “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” the bar has been lowered to somewhere between the reasoning power of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, the most poisonous biological substance known, and that of George W. Bush . . . the most toxic presidential substance yet known [19 percent approval rating].

Dobson’s letter from the “future” was emailed on October 22 to millions of his weekly TV and radio audience in the United States. His purpose was to scare the bejesus out of corn pone connoisseurs who devour the stuff faster than even Jesus can multiply it.

Keep in mind that the targeted readers’ “reasoning power” has already convinced them that they’re going to be Raptured—swooshed up bodily [naked as a third-rate centerfold] into heaven—moments after they initiate an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration in the Middle East, which they hope will eventually engulf the entire world. This is not a one-derivation-above-the-mean crowd, after all.

“To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Thank you, Mr. Twain.

According to the letter, a phantasmagoria of horror begins shortly after Obama takes office. Shedding his centrist campaigning skin, he is transmogrified into a far left-wing liberal antichrist. Outlandish? Keep reading.

In his first week in office Obama fires all 93 U.S. attorneys and replaces them with radical ACLU lawyers. Consequently, the Justice Department initiates criminal proceedings against nearly every member of the Bush administration.

Due to death or retirement, the Supreme Court is taken over by far left-wing radical judges (6-3 majority) who—you guessed it—begin legislating from the bench. The youthful appointees are expected to rule the country for the next 30-40 years.

Same-sex marriage becomes the law and compulsory training in gender identity in elementary school results in the firing of tens of thousands of Christian teachers accused of hate speech for refusing to speak positively about homosexuality.

The Boy Scouts choose to disband rather than obey a Supreme Court decision ordering them to hire homosexual scoutmasters to sleep with young boys in tents.

The Bible can no longer be read on radio or TV because doing so amounts to hate speech, and students cannot pray in school . . . not even silently while sitting outside the principal’s office.

All federal restrictions on abortion are removed and babies are killed only seconds before they can be delivered. Doctors and nurses who refuse to “murder” babies lose their licenses.

A new law mandating equal time for alternative views on public airwaves drives Rush Limbaugh types off the air, essentially shutting down conservative [hate] talk radio in America by 2010.

Commander in Chief Obama proves to be a total wimp, which emboldens Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who eventually seize control of Iraq, imprisoning, torturing [imitation is the ultimate form of flattery] and putting to death millions of “American sympathizers” in that country.

Obama, it seems, is more interested in sending foreign aid to impoverished Third World countries in the form of food and medical aid, which does nothing but nourish and keep healthy the next generation of terrorists.

Dobson finally lets go of his tenuous grip on reality when he describes how Iran’s one nuclear missile destroys Tel Aviv and forces Israel to cede huge amounts of land to the Palestinians, leaving Israel defenseless. WHAT? Israel cede land? Israel defenseless?

“The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightening ain’t distributed right.” Thank you Mr. Twain.

Oh yeah, and gasoline costs $7 per gallon and only military personnel can own a gun.

Needless to say, the next four years are a living hell for the Dobson clan, much as the last eight years have been for anyone with reasoning power marginally superior to that of Twain’s pet monkey.

As a bona fide left-wing liberal atheist, who “wasted” a vote on Nader, I had mixed feelings reading Dobson’s half-baked corn pone. My initial reaction was something akin to enjoying a preposterously funny Twain satire. But then I began to get the creepy feeling I was reading an American fundamentalist version of the Nazis’1935 Nuremburg Laws, which disenfranchised German Jews and foreshadowed the murderous persecution of European Jewry.

It became clear that what I was actually reading was Focus on the Family’s back-handed glimpse of America under a ruler of their choice . . . say, for instance, Sarah Palin.

Win or lose this time around, Palin is the GOP’s rising star and James Dobson’s heartthrob. She’s the “real deal” of an End Times fundamentalist. Unlike President Bush—a suspected convert—she’s been stuffing her gob with apocalyptic corn pone her entire life. The only way for Palin to get to heaven with her admittedly appealing carcass intact is the Rapture route via an Armageddon avenue, which does not bode well for a survivable foreign policy.

It’s easy to poke fun at the corn pone Focus on the Family and like-mindless organizations dish out during an election. It stops being funny, however, when one realizes that for tens of millions of people this fare is their only sustenance, and this toxic repast, like the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, is the most poisonous of all substances to the body politic.

“If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times” Thank you, Mr. Twain.

Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience (www.mwcnews.net). His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com

“Dramatic consequences” are what U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, predicts if, on Jan. 1, 2009, there is no agreement concerning the rights of U.S. troops to operate in Iraq, either via a so-called Status-of-Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the United States or, second best, an extension of the United Nations mandate that is at the moment the juridical basis of the presence and rights of U.S. military activity there, but which expires on Dec. 31, 2008.

The negotiations between the United States and Iraq have reached an impasse, as almost everyone now acknowledges. There could be a last-minute breakthrough, but it seems unlikely. It seems more probable that the U.N. Security Council will meet at the very end of December to authorize a time-limited extension of the present mandate. This would throw the question into the hands of the next U.S. president to negotiate. This is not at all what the Bush administration had wanted or ever expected to happen.

A year ago or so, the Bush administration was confident that it could negotiate a SOFA agreement with a presumed-to-be friendly al-Maliki government in Iraq. It wanted an agreement that would more or less renew the current rules governing U.S. military operations in Iraq and one that would also thereby tie the hands of the next U.S. administration for at least several years. The U.S. negotiators proposed an agreement at the level of the two governments, one that would not have to be ratified by the legislatures of either country.

Everything went wrong with this plan. First of all, the legislatures insisted that they wanted to be part of the arrangements, especially the Iraqi legislature. Secondly, there were important political voices within Iraq who were against any arrangement that would keep U.S. forces in Iraq. These included, of course, the group led by Moktada al-Sadr, who has consistently raised the banner of Iraqi nationalism against a continued U.S. presence.

But al-Sadr was not alone. It turned out that there were serious reservations among all three groups on whom the United States had counted to be sympathetic to an extension – the two main Shi’a parties other than the Sadrists (SCIRI and al-Maliki’s party, Dawa), the so-called moderate Sunnis, and of course the Kurds. The rumblings on all sides led Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take a far tougher line in the negotiations than the United States had anticipated. He started to act as though his greatest worry was that he might be outflanked as an Iraqi nationalist leader by others, and in particular by Moktada al-Sadr.

Al-Maliki therefore made two primary demands in the negotiations. He wanted a firm date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. And he wanted to submit U.S. troops and civilian contractors to Iraqi jurisdiction, whenever they were accused of serious crimes committed outside of legitimate military activity. Both demands were totally anathema to the United States.

But al-Maliki held firm. And after many months he got concessions. There was agreement on a terminal date of 2011 for U.S. combat troops, and there was agreement on Iraqi jurisdiction on behavior in the non-military arena. But the wording of each concession also included escape clauses. The withdrawal in 2011 was to be subject to “conditions on the ground.” And Iraqi jurisdiction was to be subject to someone (presumably the United States) deciding that the alleged behavior was indeed outside of legitimate military activity.

The escape hatches turned out to be too much for Iraqi politicians to accept. As one of them recently put it, “they have given with the right hand what they have taken away with the left hand.” So, one after the other, they said they would not vote to approve the present “compromise” draft. The most important voice along these lines was Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani who indicated that the present proposal was unacceptable. The largest Shi’a party, SCIRI, refused the draft. The moderate Sunnis and the Kurds indicated that they wanted changes. The entire Iraqi cabinet then voted to insist on amendments. It then indicated that one of the amendments would be to give the Iraqi (and not the U.S.) government the power to decide on whether behavior of Americans was outside legitimate military activity. It doesn’t seem that such amendments are at all acceptable to the United States.

In this situation, Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tried to issue careful diplomatic comments. Other Americans were not as restrained. The commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, said that Iraqi reluctance was due to Iranian bribes. Al-Maliki immediately said that Odierno had “risked his position.”

Then the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, opined that, without U.S. troop support, Iraqi forces would not “be ready to provide for their own security.” The Iraqi government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, immediately responded angrily that “it is not correct to force Iraqis into making a choice and it is not appropriate to talk with the Iraqis in this way.” Other Iraqis were more blunt. They called Mullen’s comments about ending all U.S. assistance if a SOFA agreement was not signed a form of “blackmail.”

When the United States launched its recent raid against presumed al-Qaeda elements located on Syrian soil, and did this from a base in Iraq, it threw further cold water on the proposed agreement. A prominent Kurdish politician said that the raid was made without the knowledge of the Iraqi government and would give Iraqi’s neighbors “a good reason to be concerned about the continued U.S. presence in Iraq.” Another amendment the Iraqi cabinet now wants is one forbidding attacks on neighbors by U.S. forces located in Iraq.

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has made it clear that Russia would not oppose an extension of U.N. authorization, provided it is the government of Iraq that requests it. Lavrov added that Russia supports “the government of Iraq as far as the need to ensure the sovereignty of Iraq on its own territory is concerned.” Why should Russia not do this? Russia is quite happy to see U.S. troops tied down in Iraq for the time being. It constricts U.S. ability to use them anywhere else. In any case, there is a question whether the Iraqi government, if and when it requests an extension of the U.N. mandate, would ask that the new provisions the United States is opposing in the SOFA agreement be included in the extension, in which case the United States might veto the extension.

The person who is quietly relishing what is going on is Moktada al-Sadr. His mere existence as a voice on the Iraqi scene has forced all other Iraqi political forces to express Iraqi nationalist demands more openly and more aggressively. The tide is moving in his direction. It is now quite probable that the Iraqi government will ask the United States to withdraw entirely even before the hypothetical date of 2011 in the present proposal, and very long before the 100 years of which John McCain once spoke.

Will there be “dramatic consequences”? The world will judge. So of course will the Iraqis. And so will U.S. public opinion. But dramatic or not, it is probably going to happen.

By Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, October 30, 2008

In its final months, the Bush administration is pressing ahead with a new generation of spy technology designed to strengthen the U.S. military’s ability to detect and eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere based on computer analyses of their movements and activities.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has begun granting contracts to software firms to create algorithms that can be applied to the real-time video feeds from drone aircraft so the data can be sorted and stored on a wide range of human activities, from digging a ditch to climbing into a car to kissing someone.

The contracts represent the latest step in the Bush administration’s seven-year drive to develop high-tech spying capabilities that can be applied to a variety of situations and locales to detect terrorist or insurgent activities.

The new DARPA project would develop algorithms that would identify specific human activities – both by individuals and by groups – and evaluate if these actions suggested behavior that would justify a military response.

The list of activities that would draw attention to a single person include “digging, loitering, picking up, throwing, exploding/burning, carrying, shooting, launching, walking, limping, running, kicking, smoking, gesturing,” according to DARPA’s contract description.

For person-to-person activities, the project would identify and catalogue cases of “following, meeting, gathering, moving in a group, dispersing, shaking hands, kissing, exchanging objects, kicking, carrying together.”

Categories relating to vehicles include getting into or out of a car, opening or closing the trunk, driving, accelerating, turning, stopping, passing and maintaining distances.

According to DARPA’s description, the research project addresses challenges faced by intelligence analysts in processing and retrieving the vast amounts of visual data created by live video feeds from Predator drones and other aerial surveillance over Iraq and Afghanistan. By identifying and indexing specific actions, the analysts would be helped in evaluating potential threats and could retrieve video regarding similar behavior.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” said the DARPA document, written in March but withheld from the public until September.

Kitware, a software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, won an initial $6.7 million contract for what is technically called Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, or VIRAT.

In a statement about the contract award, Kitware projected that through its proposed system, “the most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.”

Anthony Hoogs, Kitware’s project leader, said, ”This project will really make a difference to the war fighter.”

To carry out the project, Kitware said it was teaming up with two leading military technology companies, Honeywell and General Dynamics, as well as a number of academic researchers. [See Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract.]

Repression Works

Though this DARPA project is not expected to be completed until early next decade, other technological breakthroughs reportedly have helped U.S. forces identify and kill insurgents in Iraq.

In his latest book, The War Within, Bob Woodward writes that highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics allowed for rapid targeting and killing of Iraqi insurgent leaders, representing a more important factor in undermining the insurgency than President George W. Bush’s much touted troop “surge.” However, Woodward withheld details of these secret techniques so as not to undermine their effectiveness.

Still, there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspected insurgents. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]

Continued . . .

Socialist Worker online, Nov 1, 2008

Until A few weeks ago, supporters of free market capitalism were confident enough to proclaim that their system was the only way that the world could be organised. Now their certainties have vanished.

The economic crisis that started in banking and finance has spread quickly to the wider economy. Now it threatens to engulf whole countries, bringing untold misery to millions.

Belarus, Hungary, Iceland, Pakistan and Ukraine all stand on the brink of bankruptcy. Beyond them are even bigger countries – including Poland, Russia, Argentina and Turkey – whose economies are in danger of collapse.

As their currencies slide and exports falter, all of these countries have been forced to borrow heavily just to ensure that they can pay their bills.

Some have so little in their foreign exchange reserves that they will only last a matter of weeks without an injection of cash. They have been forced to beg the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency loans.

But the IMF – an organisation dominated by the rich countries of the West – will only extend its help at a price.

During past crises, it has demanded swingeing cuts in government budgets, privatisation of industries and the liberalisation of markets. Struggling nations are now preparing themselves for the worst.

In Pakistan, where already millions cannot afford food or the fuel to cook it with, the government has announced the ending of fuel subsidies and the removal of a cap on gas and electricity prices. This is to be accompanied by big cuts in government spending.

In Hungary, the government has suggested a massive assault on its state pension and the slashing of pay as part of the bailout of the economy.

If the past is anything to go by, the IMF will endorse these measures but demand much more for its money.

The economic shockwave that is spreading across the world is not confining itself to poorer economies. Already the Bank of England estimates the cost of the financial crash at $2.8 trillion – a sum so big that it defies comprehention.

And despite the billions spent on bank bailouts, scores of British firms announced major redundancies this week.

We are told that these shutdowns are inevitable and that it is pointless to resist. There is simply a lack of a demand for the goods that are produced, it is said.

But while goods pile up unsold and workers are laid off, millions of people go without the things they need because they can’t afford to buy them.

And the skills and machinery in each closing factory could offer solutions to some of the greatest problems facing humanity. For example, engineers who once made cars could be employed to make generators for alternative sources of energy.

We have the resources to build a better world. So far, the stranglehold of capitalism has been a barrier. Now it is up to us all to ensure that its hold is broken.

The Law of the Jungle

By BINOY KAMPMARK | Counterpunch, Oct 31, 2008

The Bush doctrine continues to live a charmed life less than a week before the US Presidential elections.  It has made sovereignty nigh redundant – attacks on the soil of Washington’s close ally Pakistan, and now, Syria.  The Sunday attack on the village of Sukkariyeh near Abu Kamal, ostensibly to capture or eliminate the insurgent leader, Abu Ghadiya, is causing more problems than its worth.

Curiously for a country so addicted to such moral categories as ‘rogue’ states and outlaw regimes, the United States has maintained the Damascus Community School (in operation since 1950), and a culture centre at the embassy.  Presumably, hope still burned brightly that locals might desist in disliking the great power and ultimately embrace the virtues of Americana in droves.  In the end, such centers simply provided a base for US expatriates.

That won’t be an issue now: the centers have been closed by the Syrian authorities in retaliation for the American incursion as Washington contemplates its next move.

Given that Syria remains one of the key powers in brokering settlements  on various fronts in the Middle East (the problems of Iraq, hostilities with Israel), such raids do little in the way of making any headway.

The mission had been authorized by the Central Intelligence Agency, using four specially fitted helicopters with special forces.  The target was, as ever, members of that ubiquitous yet amorphous network Al Qaeda.  Some people specialize in funnelling undocumented immigrants past porous borders; others prefer moving foreign fighters to such Iraqi cities such as Mosul where frontline forces can stage strikes on the Great Satan.  The latter cottage industry has proven particularly successful since US-led forces decided to beef up the reserves of terrorists by attacking Iraq, effectively creating a market Ghadiyah supposedly specializes in.

The success of the operation, like so many CIA operations on the ground, is questionable. We do know that eight people were killed, including four children and a married couple.  A man may have been bundled into one of the helicopters to be whisked away to an uncertain fate.  It is questionable whether slaying four children in the course of an ‘elite’ raid raises expectations in military effectiveness, but that is something US authorities remain mute about.

The Syrians are very clear about the situation.  ‘Killing civilians in international law means terrorist aggression,’ said foreign minister Waleed Moualem.  ‘We consider this criminal and terrorist aggression.’  Syria’s press attaché in London, Jihad Makdissi, told the BBC that Damascus should have been approached first instead of ‘applying the law of the jungle and penetrating, unprovoked, a sovereign country’.  Maura Connelly, US charge d’affaires in Damascus, has been saddled with a demarche.

The Iraqis have commenced an investigation into the raid, which is only fitting, given that Iraqi territory was used as the staging ground for the assault.  Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, whose utterings are often more confusing than anything else, released a statement condemning the attack.  ‘The constitution does not allow Iraq to be used as a staging ground to attack neighbouring countries.’  But al-Dabbagh has also made it clear that Syria had to hand over combatants responsible for the deaths of Iraqi policemen from the Ministry of Interior.  Such is the price of impotence.

There has been condemnation by a host of countries, fearful that the hand of US unilateralism  has again shown itself.  Predictably Iran has weighed in, as has North Korea.  Many European states aren’t particularly comfortable with it either.  Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa suggests that the incursion ‘should not pass by without clear condemnation.’

The mess the US and its allies in the Middle East find themselves in seems intractable.  But an inability to appreciate the very concept of sovereignty (the current crisis over the status of US forces in Iraq being one such example) dooms the operation further.  And we still remain in the dark as to what actually happened to Ghadiyah.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.  He can be reached at bkampmark@gmail.com