Putin’s war enablers: Bush and Cheney

August 15, 2008

Russia’s escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration’s long assault on the international rule of law.

By Juan Cole | Salon.com, August 14, 2008

Pages 1 2

George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Vladimir Putin (right) of Russia and George W. Bush arrive at a summit on the Black Sea, April 5, 2008.

The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, “It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose [Georgia’s] duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.” By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

While U.S. leaders have tended to back Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, there are two sides to every dispute, and in the ethnically diverse Caucasus it may be more like a hundred sides. Abkhazia and Ossetia are claimed by Georgia, but they have their own distinctive languages, cultures and national aspirations. Both fought for independence in the early 1990s, without success, though neither was Georgia able to assert its full sovereignty over them, accepting Russian mediation and peacekeeping troops.

The separatist leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia now speak of Saakashvili in terms reminiscent of the way separatists in Darfur speak of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Sergei Bagapsh of Abkhazia and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia have come out against conducting any further talks with Georgia, calling instead for Saakashvili to be tried for war crimes. Kokoity told Interfax, “There can be no talks with the organizers of genocide.” The Russian press is full of talk of putting Saakashvili on trial for ordering attacks on Ossetian civilians.

Continued . . .

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Muslims take to streets as Kashmir protests continue

August 14, 2008

Yahoo News, Thu Aug 14, 4:41 AM ET

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) – Protesters shouting “we want freedom” took to the streets of Kashmir on Thursday as a land dispute between Muslims and Hindus boiled into a litmus test of New Delhi’s hold on the troubled Himalayan region.

The row pits Muslims in Kashmir against Hindus in Jammu — the two main regions which make up the state of Jammu and Kashmir — in what is one of the hardest challenges facing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government since it took office in 2004.

At least 23 people have been killed and over 500 injured in clashes between Muslim protesters and police this week, hospital records show.

The protests are some of the biggest since a separatist revolt against New Delhi broke out in the region 20 years ago.

The dispute over land allocated to Hindu pilgrims visiting a shrine in Kashmir has snowballed into a full-scale anti-India protest, uniting Kashmiri separatists and reviving calls for independence.

A curfew remained in force in many parts of the state, but the protests seemed not to have spread elsewhere.

“I strongly condemn the reign of terror let loose by the Indian forces against the besieged people of Kashmir,” said Mohammed Yasin Malik, who led a protest in Srinagar.

“Indian troops cannot suppress our struggle.”

The dispute began after the Kashmir government promised to give forest land to a trust that runs Amarnath, a cave shrine visited by Hindu pilgrims. Many Muslims were enraged.

The government then rescinded its decision, which in turn angered Hindus in Jammu who attacked lorries carrying supplies to Kashmir valley and blocked the region’s highway, the only surface link with the rest of India.

Challenging the blockade, Kashmiris took to the streets.

Muslim Pakistan, which controls part of Kashmir, condemned the violence, sparking angry protests from India which accuses its nuclear-armed rival of supporting Kashmiri separatists.

Through Wednesday night, thousands of Kashmiri protesters shouted anti-India slogans, condemning security forces. Hundreds of Muslims also assembled in mosques and shrines which relayed the slogans on loudspeakers.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch urged India to show restraint.

“The Indian government should order troops and police to refrain from using lethal force against violent protesters in Jammu and Kashmir unless absolutely necessary to protect life,” it said.

(Reporting By Sheikh Mushtaq; Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and David Fox)

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Can Obama Bridge America’s Wall of Ignominy?

August 14, 2008

Robert Weitzel | August 14, 2008

“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
–Barack Obama

When Barack Obama visited Germany in July, he stood at the site where a wall once separated East and West Berlin. With his usual eloquence he praised the crowd of 200,000 for having had the courage to tear that wall down. He reminded them that the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us one from the other.”

The day before his Berlin speech Obama was in Israel standing less than two miles from the 400-mile-long apartheid wall that separates Israel from the West Bank. He did not call on Israeli courage to tear their wall down, nor did he mention that wall to his Berlin audience.

I recently wrote about Obama’s Berlin speech and his politically “prudent” silence regarding Israel’s apartheid wall. I challenged him to walk his talk should he be elected president and work to tear down the world’s most unconscionable wall.

Responding to that piece in an email, Eric Murillo, an activist from El Paso, Texas, reminded me that “there is another wall that exists on the US/Mexican border . . . this wall is still under construction . . .THIS wall is HERE! . . . Must we ignore it?”

Mr. Murillo was referring to the 700-mile-long, $2.2 billion wall along the US/Mexico border that will, in Obama’s Kingesque prose, “separate us one from the other.”

I should mention that Senator Obama voted for the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which authorized the construction of the five segments of the new wall along the 1,952-mile border between the United States and Mexico.

I should mention also that Kollsman Inc., an American-based subsidiary of the Israeli company, Elbit Systems Ltd., which supplies the surveillance and security technology for its apartheid wall, was awarded a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to supply “technology . . . to deter and prevent crossings . . . along the US borders with Canada and Mexico.”

It seems American taxpayers, who are bankrolling Israel’s million-dollar-a-mile apartheid wall with an annual contribution of $3 billion in economic and military aide (one-sixth of U.S. foreign aid budget), will be paying an Israeli company to help build our border wall using the experience and expertise the American nickel has already paid for—such is the way of boondoggles.

Mr. Murillo wishes America’s million-dollar-a-mile border wall was a mere boondoggle. For him it is a “wall of ignominy,” a phrase coined by Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox. It is “concrete” evidence that the economic globalization policies championed by the Clinton and Bush administrations open borders for the “migration” of multinational corporate profits and natural resources to “countries with the most” from “those with the least,” but closes borders to migration of those whose livelihoods have been diminished or destroyed by globalization’s cynical reality.

Predictably then, the numbers of illegal immigrants from Mexico increased exponentially after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s.

Raising a family’s economic status ten-fold by illegally entering the United States—and that’s assuming only minimum wage or less—is a powerful incentive to attempt the arduous, if not deadly, desert border crossing. Consider for a moment why swarms of Canucks are not illegally crossing our pine-forested northern borders each year.

Just as Israel’s American financed apartheid wall separates lives and livelihoods and imprisons dreams, so goes America’s Israeli built “wall of ignominy.”

Calexico, California, a community of 27,000, has a mutual aid agreement with Mexicali, just across the border. These two communities not only support each other with police and fire protection, but their economies are interdependent as well. Calexico’s stores depend on Mexican shoppers. “If we don’t have Mexico, we don’t have Calexico,” said former Calexico Mayor Alex Perrone.

This is not an isolated border relationship. It is one that occurs along the entire 1952-mile border. Mike Allen, an executive vice president with the Economic Development Corporation of McAllen, Texas, a community of 131,000 along the US/Mexico border, said, “Every single mayor from Brownsville to El Paso is against it [border wall].” He went on to say, “This will be a tremendous waste of money, and it will not stop [illegal] immigration. People will just go around it.”

Jeff Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington D.C., estimated that as many as one-third of the eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2005 did not hop over or tunnel under or walk around a border wall. They entered the country legally on visitor, student, or work visas and stayed after their visas had expired. All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country this way.

It is not “Israel-lite” walls we should be constructing between “[ourselves] with the most and those with the least.” We should be constructing bridges to economic parity that will allow “those with the least” to cross over to a more secure, fulfilling future for themselves and their families without having to illegally cross a national border.

Obama’s good looks and charisma and cadenced speechifying cannot help but remind one of John Kennedy. Hopefully, before he makes another speech about tearing down walls he will read Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress” and begin building bridges so that its vision of a “hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living and all can live out their lives in dignity and in freedom” has a chance to finally be realized.

In such a hemisphere, people will be content to remain in the country where their roots are secured by the generations buried there.

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

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Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Press

August 14, 2008

Credit and Credibility

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY | Counterpunch, Aug. 13, 2008

So attacks in Afghanistan must be the work of Pakistan’s dastardly Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), yet again, because the New York Times told us the other day that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.” The New York Times went on to claim that “The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region. The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

There are plenty of clichés (“powerful spy service” and “actively undermining” are splendid examples), but not a shred of hard evidence in this important story. There is not one bit of material that can be verified or even checked for accuracy. No names are named. There are declarations by anonymous “American officials” concerning supposed electronic intercepts of which no details are provided. But the New York Times and other US newspapers chose to blare to the world the unsupported conclusion that Pakistan is guilty of treason against itself.

It might be thought that the New York Times would have learned a lesson after being manipulated by the infamously incompetent and gullible reporter Judith Miller who made such a fool of the paper at the time of the US invasion of Iraq. She swallowed nonsense purveyed to her by un-named “government officials” and other anonymous and indeed malevolent sources, but the newspaper’s editors just followed along and published the rubbish. Garbage in; Garbage out. As one of her colleagues said of her in the context of a combined story : “She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.”

To believe the sort of drivel that comes from “officials” of any nationality who refuse to be identified takes particular energy and dedication. But even those who are required to speak on the record are liars when it suits official purposes and policies. Take the VOA report in early July that “The Pentagon says no civilians were killed in an air strike Sunday in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan, which local officials say killed 27 people who were walking to a wedding . . . US military officials in Kabul say they believe the air strike hit its intended target, a group of militants. Pentagon Spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed that view. “I can only tell you I talked to Afghanistan this morning, and they are very clear with that particular strike that they believe they struck the intended target and that there were not innocent civilians involved in that particular strike”.”

The claim, the flat statement, that there were no civilian casualties was first made by unidentified “US military officials,” then by a spokesman who had “talked to Afghanistan.” To whom did he talk? To any Afghans? To anyone in the Afghan government? To an Afghan who had lost a wife or husband or children in the blitzed village of Deh Bala where so many civilians were killed? Of course not : he spoke with “Afghanistan” as represented by a bunch of unnamed US officials in Kabul. He then retailed the same rubbish, that “there were not [sic] innocent civilians involved,” which was a lie, because the province governor stated with hard evidence – like bodies of children – that there had indeed been many civilian deaths.

Then the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, left his fortress in Kabul and flew to the stricken village to speak with the tribes, saying he had “come to share your grief.” Now : is it likely that Karzai, beholden to Bush as he is, would have taken the trouble to do that if the US claim of no civilian deaths had been even remotely believable?

One has to give Karzai recognition for venturing into the region where the US bombing took place, because there is no doubt that by doing so his life was in extreme danger (possibly from a US airstrike like the one for which he went to offer condolences). We must give credit where it’s due. But there is no credit, or credibility for that matter, due to the liars who try, with increasing success, to mislead the media and thereby the outside world, about the slaughter of civilians through incompetence. And when they kill so many scores of civilians by reason of technical or human ineptitude and then lie about the crimes, how can we believe mysterious unidentified “officials” who allege without evidence that Pakistan’s intelligence agency was responsible for the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul?

Stories change ; usually when the lie has become too obvious for all the “officials” and other sources to continue spreading it. As happened with the killing of a bank manager and two of his staff by American troops on Baghdad’s Airport Road on 25 June, for example. It was stated officially that “The attack left bullet holes in two of the convoy vehicles, and a weapon was found in the car;” but these were lies. Deliberate, unvarnished, straightforward, downright lies. Iraqi outrage was such that there had to be an investigation, and eventually a US spokesman had to say that the official description of the incident was poppycock from beginning to end. (Nobody was punished for telling lies or slaughtering civilians, of course : that would be too much to expect.)

There are dozens of stories like this. Most of the killings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are ignored because US military media releases are published unquestioningly by the world’s newspapers. The words of US “officials” go straight into print without question and are presented as incontrovertible fact.

The evidence that US “officials” have lied to the depth of their bootstraps is, however, irrefutable. So why believe the unsupported word of nameless US officials that Pakistan plotted the Kabul bombing?

As a result of worldwide parade of a media report based on unverifiable declarations by anonymous “US government officials” there has been a dramatic dive, a terrible crash in relations between Pakistan and India. At the exact time when, for the first time in almost five years, there were exchanges of fire between soldiers of India and Pakistan along the Line of Control in Kashmir, the sadly disputed territory between the two countries, there suddenly appeared a US-sourced report that gravely endangers ongoing but fragile India-Pakistan confidence-building discussions.

Why?

The tale from unidentified US “officials” that Pakistan was involved in an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul was published in a period when the governments of India and Pakistan are extremely vulnerable to religious and nationalist pressures. In Delhi the shaky coalition is apprehensive about elections next year and trying to be all things to all people; it is under enormous strain. In Islamabad there is a barely-functioning coalition of mutual distrust, and the country is desperately in need of external support that could promote domestic calm. Domestic and bilateral stability in the region, one would think, should be encouraged by foreign powers.

Yet “American intelligence agencies” and “United States government officials” tell newspaper reporters that Pakistan was involved in attacking the Indian embassy in Kabul, thus immeasurably increasing tension between Islamabad and Delhi (and Islamabad and Kabul, of course) and almost destroying their faltering but sincere approaches to rapprochement.

The extremely serious implications of such statements to reporters of a large US newspaper, and consequent international results, must have been understood by whoever made them. So why did they make them? What was the purpose? It certainly wasn’t to encourage dialogue between two neighbours who distrust each other.

We will never know the motive, of course, because there is no means of finding out; just as there is no means of verifying the story. So once again some unaccountable US officials have sown even more distrust and created much more resentment in a region in which there is singular lack of trust and a marked inclination to believe the worst of neighbours. Whoever had the bright idea of spreading this malevolent tale must now have the satisfaction that it had the result of stirring up hatred and suspicion. Give credit where it’s due. But credibility is quite another matter.

Brian Cloughley lives in France. His website is www.briancloughley.com

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Charging the Victim: Who Should Pay to Rebuild Iraq?

August 14, 2008
By Ed Kinane | CommonDreams.Org, August 12, 2008

Our Congressional Representative James Walsh (R-NY) recently “lashed out at Iraq.” Walsh, now in his tenth term, said Iraq should use its oil windfall sales to repay some of the $48 billion the United States has spent “rebuilding” there.

“We have delivered democracy for them….The least they could do is step up to the plate and help out,” Walsh opined.

Let’s not look too closely at that “democracy” we’ve “delivered.” Let’s not ask to what extent bombed-out medical facilities have been restored. Nor to what extent Iraqis, after five years of beneficent occupation, now have electricity and potable water. Nor how many Iraqi jobs any U.S. reconstruction has generated. Nor how much of that $48 billion lined the capacious pockets of Halliburton et al. Nor how much of the “re-building” fund goes to building permanent U.S. military bases.

Nor need we ask who’s going to pay to clean up Iraq’s soil, air and water after their protracted exposure to depleted uranium — the toxic and radioactive substance used in the U.S. shells rained down on that liberated land. And let’s not open that other can of worms: How will we compensate Iraqi families for the unnumbered kin we have killed?

Instead let’s take a more legalistic approach. Let’s look at precedent. In 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, no one thought to hold that victim responsible for the damage. Nor did anyone claim that, because it had oil assets, Kuwait owed Iraq money.

No one – especially the UN Security Council — questioned that it was Iraq that had to reimburse losses and finance the rebuilding. Indeed, since its Gulf War defeat, Iraq keeps paying billions in reparations. But those billions are only a fraction of what Kuwait and the corporations doing business there still keep demanding.

Fast forward to the new century. Now it’s Iraq that’s been (illegally) invaded; it’s Iraq that’s been laid low. In a classic case of “charging the victim,” Mr. Walsh and some of his Congressional colleagues,* both Democrat and Republican, argue that Iraq must help pay for its own rebuilding. Both common sense and common decency wince.

It is the invader, not the invaded, who is both morally and legally obligated to pay to restore a war-torn land. And note: those billions Iraq has been paying Kuwait go to Kuwaitis and not to any Iraqi war profiteer. Given adequate reparations, Iraq — a land of builders and engineers — is quite capable of repairing itself. It needs no assist from the invader’s avid corporations.

Those who perpetrated the U.S. invasion, besides being tried in a Nurnberg-like tribunal, should make financial amends. Their shills — much of the U.S. mainstream media — also share responsibility. But sorting out who should pay what would take the wisdom of Solomon.

In the case of Kuwait, a UN commission plays Solomon. The case seemed simple enough: only Iraq invaded; it was then vanquished. Ergo, the Iraqi people — via their oil reserves — must be perpetually taxed to repair Saddam Hussein’s folly. Never mind that it was his western allies who helped militarize Saddam’s regime.

Yes, some Iraqis also collaborated with Saddam. But most were Saddam’s victims. Saddam frowned on dissent. Many of his soldiers were conscripts. Thousands of these — slaughtered from the air as they fled homeward — remain interred in desert sands.

Now, the U.S./Iraq case isn’t quite parallel. All too many U.S. people and our Congressional representatives enthusiastically supported “Shock and Awe” and the ensuing occupation.

Does it let us off the hook — at least a little — that Cheney/Bush and their shills persistently lied to us? Many U.S. Americans believed that our “pre-emptive” war had nothing to do with certain corporations cornering the world’s oil supply. Nor did it even occur to us that Saddam’s move to switch from dollars to euros for oil payments helped trigger the wrath. Wasn’t the war about WMD and about somehow — never mind how — defending our borders against “terror”?

Should U.S. wage earners be forced to pay for a war many might not have supported had they known the truth? Should they then also pay for what that war wrought? Maybe yes, maybe no. One thing is certain: it was the Pentagon that maniacally demolished Iraq.

No, Mr. Walsh, it isn’t the Iraqi people who should devote their national wealth to rebuilding their desolated country. Nor should the U.S. people, also variously victims and dupes of this war, be further taxed. By all rights, the rebuilding fund should come out of our own oiligarchy’s windfall profits and out of the Pentagon’s obscenely bloated budget.

* “Iraq Told to Pick Up the Tab: Congress Wants to Cut Reconstruction Aid,” by Anne Flaherty, Associated Press in the Syracuse Post-Standard, 15 Apr. 2008.

The author spent five months in Iraq in 2003 with the human rights group, Voices in the Wilderness. Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.

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GEORGIA: Israeli Arms Sales Raise New Concerns

August 14, 2008

By Peter Hirschberg | Inter Press Service

JERUSALEM, Aug 12 – With the eruption of fighting between Russia and Georgia, Israel has found itself in an awkward position as a result of its arms sales to Georgia, caught between its friendly relations with Georgia and its fear that the continued sale of weaponry will spark Russian retribution in the form of increased arms sales to Iran and Syria.

After fighting broke out late last week between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Israel’s foreign ministry over the weekend recommended suspending the sale of all weapons and defence-related equipment to Georgia, the daily Haaretz newspaper reported.

The paper quoted an unnamed senior official saying that Israel needed “to be very careful and sensitive these days. The Russians are selling many arms to Iran and Syria and there is no need to offer them an excuse to sell even more advanced weapons.”

Israel’s immediate concern is that Russia will proceed with the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran, which would help it defend its nuclear installations from aerial attack. Israel, like the U.S., believes that Iran’s nuclear programme is aimed at developing a bomb, and Israeli leaders have refused to rule out the possibility of a pre-emptive strike aimed at derailing Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

Israel recently conducted a major aerial exercise over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece that was widely viewed as a rehearsal for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. But with the U.S. and Europe resorting to diplomatic pressure in the form of sanctions to deter Iran, Israel is loathe to anger Russia, which until now has opposed harsher sanctions on Tehran.

Israel’s relations with Georgia have been close, partly because there is a large Georgian Jewish community in Israel. In recent years, ties have also taken on a military dimension, with military industries in Israel supplying Georgia with some 200 million dollars worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted planes, rockets, night-vision equipment, other electronic systems and training by former senior Israeli officers.

“Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers,” Georgian Minister Temur Yakobashvili, who is Jewish, told Israel’s Army Radio in Hebrew shortly after the fighting erupted.

Israel is not a major supplier of arms to Georgia, with the U.S. and France supplying Tbilisi with most of its weaponry. But the arms transfers have attracted media attention partly because of the role played by some high-profile Israeli figures, including former Tel Aviv mayor Roni Milo, who conducted business in Georgia on behalf of Israel Military Industries.

According to media reports, Brig. Gen Gal Hirsch, a senior commander in the 2006 Lebanon war who resigned after the release of a highly critical report on the way the war was conducted, served as an adviser to Georgian security forces.

Further attention was drawn to the Israel-Georgia arms trade earlier this year when a Russian jet shot down an Israeli-made drone being operated by the Georgians.

Even though weapons transfers were modest in scope, Russian diplomats began increasingly relaying to Israel their annoyance over its military aid to Georgia, including the special forces training provided by security experts. Israel decided about a year ago to limit military exports to defensive equipment and training.

New contracts weren’t approved as the arms sales were scaled back. Georgia’s request for 200 advanced Israeli-made Merkava tanks, for example, was turned down.

There were reports in Israel that the sale of the tanks didn’t go through because of a disagreement over the commission that was to be paid as part of the deal. But Amos Yaron, the former director-general of the defence ministry, insisted it had to do with “security-diplomatic considerations” — a clear reference to the sensitivity of the arms sales to Georgia. Israel, Yaron added, didn’t want “to harm Russian interests too much.”

Asked about the motivation to initially engage in the sale of weaponry to Georgia despite concerns it might anger Russia, Yaron replied: “We did see that there was potential for a conflagration in the region but Georgia is a friendly state, it’s supported by the U.S., and so it was difficult to refuse.”

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Pakistan celebrates amid tensions

August 14, 2008
Al Jazeera, August 14, 2008

A suicide attack on Wednesday in Lahore left at least seven people dead [AFP]

Pakistan is observing its 61st independence day amid tight security following a sucide blast overnight that killed at least seven people.

The celebration started at dawn with a 31-gun salute in Islamabad, the capital, on Thursday, and will continue throughout the day.

Yousuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, played a major role by raising the country’s flag and reading his independence message.

But behind the jubilation, pressure is mounting on Pervez Musharraf, the president, to resign.

In an apparent appeal to his political opponents who are preparing to impeach him, Musharraf called for political reconciliation in Pakistan.

Musharraf told a function on the eve of independence day that there was a “conspiracy” to weaken the country.

“It’s my appeal that we should adopt a reconciliatory approach so that stability should return,” he said.

“Because if there is stability we can fight terrorism, if we have a strong economy we can fight terrorism, and we should all put aside our differences and work to make Pakistan strong.”

Gilani, in his independence day speech, also said that ” the country must defeat extremisim to survive”.

“Pakistan is passing through a difficult phase. We have to fight back the challenges of terrorism and extremism,” he said.

“The war against terrorism and extremism is the war of our own survival. With the people’s co-operation we will fight this war and ensure the government’s writ at all costs.”

Vote of confidence

Musharraf’s appeal came hours after legislators in southern Sindh province became the third of Pakistan’s four provincial assemblies to approve a motion calling on Musharraf to face a vote of confidence or else be impeached.

Coalition leaders Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, the slain former prime minister, and Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister, said last Thursday that they would seek the president’s impeachment.

Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said that the key question is where the government is headed.

“While there are celebrations … song and dance is happening … violence continues in the tribal areas, and the government, despite the Musharraf issue, is under pressure to control and ultimately end the violence,” he said.

Syed Mohammed Tarik Pirzada, a political analyst, told Al Jazeera that the coalition has never been more united against Musharraf.

“The army which was his real power base cannot support him anymore because he has become a liability,” he said.

“Also among the masses he is unpopular and has no credibility left.”

Continued violence

Amid the uncertainty over Musharraf’s political future, there has been no let-up in the violence.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a police station in Lahore on Wednesday during preparations for the independence-day celebrations, killing at least seven people, police said.

The blast hit a crowd of policemen standing guard at the station on the outskirts of the eastern city, witnesses said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but security officials said they believed the blast was probably in revenge for an offensive against pro-Taliban fighters in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

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This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression

August 14, 2008

War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It’s likely to be a taste of things to come

Seumas Milne

The Guardian, Thursday August 14 2008

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”. George Bush denounced Russia for having “invaded a sovereign neighbouring state” and threatening “a democratic government”. Such an action, he insisted, “is unacceptable in the 21st century”.

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied – along with Georgia, as luck would have it – the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?

You’d be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to “restore constitutional order” – in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: “I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children,” one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain’s minister for Europe, called a “small beautiful democracy”. Well it’s certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a “Rose revolution”. Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an “increasingly authoritarian” government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. “Democratic” simply seems to mean “pro-western” in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia – as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia – is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia’s control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo – whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia’s forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq – hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili’s links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration’s wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush’s father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

Over the past decade, Nato’s relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia’s borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why Saakashvili launched last week’s attack and whether he was given any encouragement by his friends in Washington.

If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And despite Bush’s attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper’s independence is respected – best protected by opting for neutrality – that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, this week’s conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. That would be even more obvious in the case of Ukraine – which yesterday gave a warning of the potential for future confrontation when its pro-western president threatened to restrict the movement of Russian ships in and out of their Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great power conflict returns, South Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of things to come.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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Jewish International Opposition Statement Against Attack on Iran

August 13, 2008

Information Clearing House, August 12, 2008

Efforts to beat the drums of war for an attack on Iran’s nuclear reactor facilities are promoted in both the USA and Israel scenes. The recent New York Times opinion piece of July 18th, written by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, serves to consolidate those political forces. The Jewish opposition here expresses our outrage in order to forestall this horrendous proposal.

That clamour for war with Iran has met not only popular opposition but also runs counter to the quiet diplomacy that has engaged Iran in ongoing relations with the UN nuclear agency, as well as economic trade talks with the USA itself. Israel is also committed to a cease-fire that has held now for a month’s time, to the relief of both the populations of Israel and Gaza. In light of the developing political atmosphere of reason and negotiations, the militarist mindset has pumped up its rationale for war attempting to create the preconditions for a further war. Morris seeks to fabricate such prior conditions arguing,

“They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html

This promotion of inevitability plays on Jewish and Israeli memory of the Nazi Holocaust in order to garner any and every source of support for an Israel military strike against Iran, provoking a reaction and leading to a further war by drawing in the USA. This is particularly deplorable in view of the fact that 16 US intelligence agencies concluded that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has not had one for five years.

We extol the heroic courage of Israel’s nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, joining our voices to his in condemnation of Israel’s illegal stockpile of nuclear warheads and support the call for a nuclear-free Middle East.

The mindset calling for a war of mutual annihilation as a solution to security is astoundingly self-contradictory. Only the fabrication of a Nazi-like threat seeks to provide any credibility to such a call to war, much like the rationale for occupation that perceives a Palestinian plot to drive Jews into the sea. The reference to Iranian ideology (Islam) as the source of confrontation does not stand up to scrutiny, since the political challenge to Israel by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not a call for extermination, despite any mistranslation.

We seek security for all concerned by affirming the right of all to security. While we lend no credibility to the prospect of an inevitable conflict, we nonetheless object to the hysteria promoted by the Iran-bashers who are now desperate in their repeated false starts to create another unnecessary war. The attempt to oblige Iran to comply with Security Council resolutions loses its legal, diplomatic and political force as the United States and Israel consistently ignore UN diplomacy and World Court decisions, relevant to the question of Palestine. We call upon all opposed to a military confrontation with Iran to write their governmental representatives demanding that the State of Israel subject its nuclear facilities to international inspection and sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) as has Iran, rather than issue threats of war.

Continued . . .

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‘Where Are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?’

August 13, 2008

Truthdig, Aug 11, 2008

AP photo / Bullit Marquez

A U.S. soldier checks the radiation level of a canister that was looted during the invasion from the nuclear facility in Tuwaitha, Iraq. A Harris poll released July 21, 2006, found that 50 percent of U.S. respondents said they believed Iraq had nuclear arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.

By Scott Ritter

In the past two decades I have had the opportunity to participate in certain experiences pertaining to my work that fall into the category of “no one will ever believe this.” I usually file these away, calling on them only when events transpire that breathe new life into these extraordinary memories. Ron Suskind, a noted and accomplished journalist, has written a new book, “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism,” in which he claims that the “White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush [Tahir Jalil Habbush, the director of the Mukhabarat], to Saddam [Hussein], backdated to July 1, 2001.” According to Suskind, the letter said that “9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq—thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq.”

This is an extraordinary charge, which both the White House and the CIA vehemently deny. Suskind outlines a scenario which dates to the summer and fall of 2003, troubled times for the Bush administration as its case for invading Iraq was unraveling. I cannot independently confirm Suskind’s findings, but I, too, heard a similar story, from a source I trust implicitly. In my former line of work, intelligence, it was understood that establishing patterns of behavior was important. Past patterns of behavior tend to repeat themselves, and are thus of interest when assessing a set of seemingly separate circumstances around the same source. Of course, given the nature of the story line, it is better if I introduce this information within its proper context.

In the summer of 2003 I was approached by Harper’s Magazine to do a story on the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a CIA-sponsored operation investigating Saddam’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. David Kay, a former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector who served briefly in Iraq in 1991 and 1992, was at that time the head of the ISG. By October 2003 the group had prepared a so-called interim report, which claimed to have eyewitness evidence of Iraqi WMD-related activities prior to the invasion in March. The key to the ISG’s interim report was the testimony of “cooperative sources,” Iraqis of unstated pedigree purportedly providing the ISG with unverifiable information. With one exception—an Iraqi nuclear scientist who had been killed by coalition forces—David Kay failed to provide the name or WMD association of any of the sources he used for his report, making any effort to verify their assertions impossible. Many of the senior Iraqis who had openly contradicted Kay’s report were, and still are to this day, muzzled behind the walls of an American prison in Baghdad. But there was another group of Iraqis, the former scientists and technicians involved in Iraq’s WMD programs who were known to have been interviewed by the ISG, and who were released back into Iraqi society. These scientists held the key to deciphering the vague pronouncements of the ISG interim report, and could help to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Continued . . .

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