Peace and Justice Post

Herb Keinon, jpost.com staff and AP, THE JERUSALEM POST, July 3, 2008

This week’s warnings from US President George W. Bush and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, against an IDF strike on Iran are a sign that Washington is concerned that Jerusalem may indeed attack the Islamic Republic, Israeli government officials said Thursday.

Also on Thursday, Channel 2 analyst Ehud Ya’ari reported that Iran had expressed readiness to freeze its uranium enrichment program in return for the lifting of the international sanctions imposed on it.

Citing unnamed Western officials, he said the Iranians had conveyed messages indicating they could accept the latest incentive package offered by the West in return for halting its enrichment program.

Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman said the US was sticking to its demand that Iran halt uranium enrichment as a precondition for US participation in negotiations with the Islamic republic over its nuclear program. He added, however, that the US would not rule out early consultations with Iran before official talks begin on resolving its standoff with the West.

The spokesman went on to say that Washington would not dismiss the option of Iran stopping enrichment for a limited time in exchange for the removal of sanctions. However, he stressed that Teheran must first give a detailed response to the EU incentive package, Israel Radio reported.

The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the report.

Mullen said late Wednesday that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be a high-risk move that could destabilize the Middle East. At a Defense Department news conference, he refused to say what Israeli leaders had told him during meetings last week about any intentions to strike Iran.

Asked whether he was concerned Israel would strike before the end of the year, Mullen said: “This is a very unstable part of the world and I don’t need it to be more unstable.”

Israeli officials said the fact that Mullen gave a press conference on the matter indicated he was not reassured by what he heard on his visit to Israel.

One of the purposes of his visit was to see whether recent comments made here, such as those made by Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, who said Israel might have no choice but to act against the Islamic Republic, were “just words” or indicated real intent.

Israel’s large air force exercise over the eastern Mediterranean in the first week of June, which was widely described as a “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Iran, has also caused concern in Washington, the officials said.

Mullen’s visit was his second in seven months. Prior to December, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had not been in Israel in more than 10 years.

He said Thursday that opening a third front now, with the US military already stretched thin by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “would be extremely stressful on us.”

“I believe they’re [the Iranians] still on a path to get nuclear weapons and I think that’s something that needs to be deterred,” and that this should be done through diplomatic, financial and economic actions by the US and other nations, Mullen said.

But, he added, “I think that just about every move in that part of the world is a high-risk move.”

In a news conference earlier in the day, President Bush was also asked about increasing speculation that Israel will launch a strike, and said that all options are on the table but that military action would not be his first choice.

“I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be solving this problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “And the best way to solve it diplomatically is for the United States to work with other nations to send a focused message – and that is: You will be isolated, and you will have economic hardship, if you continue to enrich” uranium for a bomb.

Israeli officials said Iran was also the main topic of conversation when Bush called Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday to express his condolences for the victims of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem.

“All this is designed to throw cold water on any possible Israeli intentions,” the officials said.

“They are worried by the atmosphere in Israel, and that reports of an inevitable attack have suddenly started to dominate the debate.”

ACLU Releases Navy Files On Civilian Casualties In Iraq War ACLU

July 2, 2008

Public Has A Right To Unfiltered Information About The Human Cost Of War, ACLU Says

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today released thousands of pages of documents related to Navy investigations of civilians killed by Coalition Forces in Iraq, including the cousin of the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. Released today in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the ACLU filed in June 2006, these records provide a vivid snapshot of the circumstances surrounding civilian deaths in Iraq.

“At every step of the way, the Bush administration and Defense Department have gone to unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Our democracy depends on an informed public and that is why it is so important that the American people see these documents. These documents will help to fill the information void around the issue of civilian casualties in Iraq and will lead to a more complete understanding of the prosecution of the war.”

The ACLU obtained documents from eight Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigations. One of the files documents the investigation of the death of Mohammed al-Sumaidaie, a cousin of the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S, Samir al-Sumaidaie. In 2006, the ambassador accused Marines of “intentionally” killing his cousin and today’s records shed light on al-Sumaidaie’s NCIS investigation for the first time. Among the findings uncovered in this file are conflicting accounts of events, questions of credibility, possible command influence issues and cover-ups.

“As these files remind us, many charges of war crimes in Iraq have not seen the light of day,” said Michael Pheneger, a retired Army intelligence colonel who is also a board member of the ACLU. “There are many discoveries here that should bring pause to any American who cares about this country and hopes to restore the United States’ respected role in the world. It is time to bring the facts about this war into the sunlight and end practices that go against our laws and national values.”

Through its FOIA project, the ACLU has made public information on Defense Department policies designed to control information about the human costs of war. These practices include:

• Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas; • Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort; • Inviting U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review; • Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan; and • Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

Today’s documents are available online at: http://www.aclu.org/natsec/foia/NCIS_log.html

Attorneys involved in this project are Bargzie, Ben Wizner and Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU National Security Project. In a separate lawsuit, the ACLU sued for records concerning the abuse of prisoners held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. To date, that request has resulted in the release of more than 100,000 pages, all of which are available online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

By Con Coughlin | Telegraph.co.uk, 04/07/2008

There are two ways of interpreting this week’s warning by America’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, that opening a new front in the Middle East by launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “extremely stressful”.

Either the United States, with the help of its favoured Middle Eastern proxy, Israel, is already preparing to take out Iran’s main nuclear facilities, and is simply preparing public opinion for the likely consequences of such action.

Or America’s top brass, who already have their work cut out prosecuting two major military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, are trying to pre-empt any thoughts President George W. Bush, the nation’s commander-in-chief, might have about ordering his armed forces into action against the mullahs.

Senior military officers, whether in Britain or America, specialise in the art of understatement, and what Mr Mullen means by “extremely stressful” is what most laymen would take to be “catastrophic”.

It’s not just that such an attack could, in the words of Mohammed elBaradei, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, turn the region into a fireball.

The Iranians have made it abundantly clear that they would do their utmost to close the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf, the main shipping channel for 60 per cent of the world’s oil.

With oil prices yesterday tipping $146 a barrel and most Western economies already struggling to cope with the inflationary consequences of soaring oil prices, it is not difficult to imagine the effects the strangulation of the main oil export artery would have on the world’s economy.

The Russians call World War II “The Great Patriotic War.” The current longest of our wars could well be called the same thing. It is a war that originated in the orgy of patriotism (“U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”) that followed the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and has been sustained by the patriotism of those who support it (“Our soldiers are defending American freedom”) and false promises of some latter-day prophets (“We are winning the war in Iraq.”) It is likely to be revived by the Iranian attack that the McCainites see as their main chance of winning the election.

The president was right in his spontaneous reaction when he first heard of the attack — “This is war!” The subtext was, “Now I’ll be a wartime president and people will forget about Florida and how Antonin Scalia stole the election.” The Arabs had killed 3,000 Americans; we had to kill at least that many of them.

The issue was: Which Arabs? The obvious target was Saudi Arabia. Most of the terrorists were from that country, indeed products of the religious education that the country provided for its devout young men. But the Saudi royal family has excellent relations with the American oil companies. So very early in the discussions the neo-cons in the administration began to promote the idea of attacking Iraq. The road to Jerusalem, they argued, is through Baghdad. The administration’s neo-cons were (and are) very heavy thinkers. They write great memos. The days when the country was hesitating, some of them found a story about cooperation between al-Qaida and the Iraq government that seemed to legitimate an attack on Iraq. Some of their allies in the media, most notably the Wall Street Journal, insisted that this fable was true.

Much of the literature on the Longest War finds it hard to explain how the decision was made to attack Iraq. Poor Scott McClellan had it part right in his book. The administration, influenced by the memos of the neo-cons, decided that toppling Saddam Hussein would restructure the Middle East to American advantage. But that was a thesis too complicated to sell to the American people. Therefore, the desire for patriotic revenge was used in combination with fear of Iraq’s (as it turns out nonexistent) weapons to launch a great patriotic war. The Republican Party continues to rely on this lethal combination to win elections.

National security means kill Arabs. We get our revenge by protecting our children. We start a patriotic war in the name of self-protection and spread patriotic gore by killing Arabs. Neat!

It is not the first patriotic/revenge war on which the country has embarked. Remember the Maine. Remember the Alamo. Remember Fort Sumter. Remember Pearl Harbor. The psychology for whipping up revenge in the name of patriotism has always worked. World War II was a just war, but the mix of patriotism and revenge made it easy for the American military to firebomb out of existence 50 Japanese cities and to destroy a couple more with atom bombs.

Are the American people guilty of a war crime because of the Iraq war? Surely the leaders who cooked up the excuses for the war are. So, too, are the national media that allowed patriotism to silence them. So, too, are those ordinary Americans who almost insisted on some kind of patriotic gore. On this weekend in which we glorify — with good reason — our patriotism, we might examine our conscience about what phony patriotism has caused us to do. A third of the American population supported the war and has now changed its mind. It might be wise for such folk to prepare answers to the kinds of questions God might ask about phony patriotism.

Andrew Greeley is a priest in good standing of the Archdiocese of Chicago. for 52 years, a columnist for 40 years, a sociologist for 45 years, a novelist for 28 years, distinguished lecturer at the University of Arizona for 28 , research associate at National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for 46 years.

© Copyright 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc.

Editor’s Note: The Soviets called the heroic struggle the Red Army and the people of the USSR waged to defend their country against the Nazi war of aggression as ‘The Great Patriotic War’. They did not call the Second World War started by Hitler ‘The Great Patriotic War’.

TEHRAN – Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi warned the West on Thursday against launching a military attack against Iran or imposing economic sanctions over its contested nuclear programme.

“We not only are against military action on Iran but are also against economic sanctions,” Ebadi said in a speech in Tehran.

“They would spread destitution in Iran and we will do our best to prevent this disaster occurring,” the 2003 Nobel peace prize winner said, according to a transcript of her speech.

Her address marked the formation of a “National Peace Council” of around 70 dissident Iranian politicians, social activists and intellectuals.

The list of people who signed on as founding members of the council included figures like Ibrahim Yazdi, head of the outlawed but tolerated Freedom Movement and Hashem Aghajari, who was sentenced to death but pardoned for apostasy.

Also included is the film director Jafar Panahi, winner of the top prizes at the Berlin and Venice film festivals and Iran’s leading female film-maker Rakhshan Bani Etemad.

“We must have a society with a sustainable peace and we should avoid being in a situation where there is no war but also no peace,” Ebadi said.

Ebadi’s call and the formation of the council come at a time when US President George W. Bush has said that “military options remain on the table” in the five-year nuclear standoff with the West.

Iran has rejected Western charges it is seeking a nuclear weapon and has warned any military aggression against its soil will be met with the fiercest response.

• Patrick Wintour and Riazat Butt
• The Guardian, Friday July 4, 2008

Britain’s most senior judge reopened one of the most highly charged debates in Britain last night when he said he was willing to see sharia law operate in the country, so long as it did not conflict with the laws of England and Wales, or lead to the imposition of severe physical punishments.

The remarks by the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, in a speech to the London Muslim Council yesterday, had a conscious echo of the comments made by the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in February who argued that sharia law could sometimes be used in Britain.

The archbishop, who suggested “sharia law was rooted in the sense of doing God’s will in the ordinary things of law”, was later forced to retract the statement.

Phillips insisted last night there was “widespread misunderstanding” of the nature of sharia law, and argued: “There is no reason why sharia principles, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution [with the understanding] … that any sanctions for a failure to comply with the agreed terms of mediation would be drawn from the Laws of England and Wales.”

He also suggested sharia principles should be applied to marriage arrangements.

Less controversially, Phillips backed the creation of specialist financial products and services which comply with sharia principles, something the UK Treasury has acknowledged since 2002.

The lord chief justice, in an address broadly designed to reassure the Muslim community that it was treated equally under British law, stressed that he was not countenancing “any notion of sharia courts operating in this country and seeking to impose such punishments”.

He said: “There can be no question of such courts sitting in this country, or such sanctions being applied here.

“So far as the law is concerned, those who live in this country are governed by English and Welsh law and subject to the jurisdiction of the English and Welsh courts.”

In the most controversial section, Phillips said: ” It was not very radical to advocate embracing sharia law in the context of family disputes, for example, and our system already goes a long way towards accommodating the archbishop’s suggestion.

Continued . . .

• John Pilger, The Guardian, Wednesday July 2, 2008

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel’s infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. “Where is the English pound you have?”

“I realised,” said Mohammed, “he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn’t have it with me. ‘You are lying’, he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: ‘Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.’ He said, ‘This is nothing compared with what you will see now.’ He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, ‘Why are you bringing perfumes?’ I replied, ‘They are gifts for the people I love’. He said, ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

“As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror.”

An ambulance was called and told to take Mohammed to a hospital, but only after he had signed a statement indemnifying the Israelis from his suffering in their custody. The Palestinian medic refused, courageously, and said he would contact the Dutch embassy escort. Alarmed, the Israelis let the ambulance go. The Israeli response has been the familiar line that Mohammed was “suspected” of smuggling and “lost his balance” during a “fair” interrogation, Reuters reported yesterday.

Israeli human rights groups have documented the routine torture of Palestinians by Shin Bet agents with “beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation”. Amnesty has long reported the widespread use of torture by Israel, whose victims emerge as mere shadows of their former selves. Some never return. Israel is high in an international league table for its murder of journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, who receive barely a fraction of the kind of coverage given to the BBC’s Alan Johnston.

The Dutch government says it is shocked by Mohammed Omer’s treatment. The former ambassador Jan Wijenberg said: “This is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a long-term strategy to demolish Palestinian social, economic and cultural life … I am aware of the possibility that Mohammed Omer might be murdered by Israeli snipers or bomb attack in the near future.”

While Mohammed was receiving his prize in London, the new Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Proser, was publicly complaining that many Britons no longer appreciated the uniqueness of Israel’s democracy. Perhaps they do now.

johnpilger.com

The Peoples Voice, July 2, 2008

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate

US senator Joe Lieberman says the United States would come under attack during the first year of the country’s new president.

“Our enemies will test the new president early,” Lieberman said in an interview with CBS news. “Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration.”

Lieberman also praised likely Republican nominee John McCain, saying the Arizona senator is determined to counter any possible attacks as the next US president.

“John McCain is ready to take the reins on January 20, 2009. He doesn’t need any training,” he said. “He’s been tested. He’s ready to protect the security of the American people.”

Lieberman’s recent remarks are views by many as a means to create fear and panic among American citizens, thus suggesting the notion that the US would need a war veteran as the head of state to protect the nation.

Lieberman, who endorsed McCain in early February, believes the 71-year-old Arizona senator is the only candidate who ‘will bear any burden, pay any price to assure the survival and sustenance of liberty’.

AGB/MMN