Peace and Justice Post

Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent | The Australian, April 19, 2008

MOVES to drive Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf into a corner and force him to quit were being finalised last night as part of a parliamentary package that could end with Pakistan’s sacked chief justice being reinstated as early as next week.

Sources said constitutional changes were being prepared that would “so cripple (Mr Musharraf’s) authority in all respects” that he will have “no option but to bow out without facing impeachment”.

Mr Musharraf’s ouster would be a blow to the administration of US President George W. Bush and its widely criticised policy on Pakistan, attacked yesterday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the Congress in Washington.

The GAO held that even though it faced an enhanced terrorist threat from al-Qa’ida safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the administration had failed to develop a plan to deal with the situation.

In what was being described last night as a “searing report” the GAO sharply criticised the administration, saying it had relied too heavily on Pakistani security forces to deal with a major US national security problem.

Continued . . .

The Independent, April 19, 2008

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

NAYEF HASHLAMOUN/REUTERS/CORBIS

Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian student during a protest in Hebron in 2005. Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the Israeli military

• enlarge

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.

Continued . . .

“Just as the Wall is Called a Fence, So are the Mercenaries Called Contractors”

By DAN GLAZEBROOK | CounterPunch, April 18, 2008

Robert Fisk has a well-earned reputation as one of the most honest and hard hitting foreign correspondents in the British media. He has worked in Northern Ireland, where he exposed the presence of the SAS in the mid-1970s, as well as Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. It was here, as a witness to the immediate aftermath of the Israeli-organised Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2000 Palestinian refugees, that his journalism took on its current form: angry, passionate, and as he puts it “partial on the side of the victims”–a style of journalism which, unfortunately, is not shared by many of his colleagues in the profession. In the midst of a torrent of lies and propaganda emanating from our media about British and US policy on the Middle East, Fisk’s writings are a breath of fresh air–although the hellish reality he depicts does not always make for pleasant reading.

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• Richard Norton-Taylor
• The Guardian, Saturday April 19 2008

America’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington, who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date, is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts of which appear in today’s Guardian.

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From Desert Peace, April 17, 2008

Images by Abonoon

The following were taken yesterday….. zionism in action. Even the camera cried as can be seen above. Share these photos with all…. ISRAEL MUST NOT GET AWAY WITH THESE CRIMES… continua / continued [43143] [ 17-apr-2008 19:30 ECT ]

Newly Released Government Documents Show Special Forces Used Illegal Interrogation Techniques In Afghanistan

By American Civil Liberties Union, April 16, 2008

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents today from the Department of Defense confirming the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods on detainees held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The documents from the military’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), obtained as a result of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include the first on-the-ground reports of torture in Gardez, Afghanistan to be publicly released.

“These documents make it clear that the military was using unlawful interrogation techniques in Afghanistan,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “Rather than putting a stop to these systemic abuses, senior officials appear to have turned a blind eye to them.”

Special Operations officers in Gardez admitted to using what are known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques, which for decades American service members experienced as training to prepare for the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Continued . . .

On April 1, a secret 81-page memo written by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in March 2003 was made public. In that memo, Yoo advised the Bush administration that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel would not enforce U.S. criminal laws, including federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. The week after the publication of Yoo’s memo, the National Lawyers Guild issued a press release calling for the Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California to dismiss Yoo, who is now a professor of law there. The NLG also called for the prosecution of Yoo for war crimes and for his disbarment.

Two days later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a letter supporting the NLG’s call for Yoo’s dismissal and prosecution. CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren wrote, “The ‘Torture Memo’ was not an abstract, academic foray. Rather, it was crafted to sidestep U.S. and international laws that make coercive interrogation and torture a crime. It was written with the knowledge that its legal conclusions were to be applied to the interrogations of hundreds of individual detainees… And it worked. It became the basis for the CIA’s use of extreme interrogation methods as well the basis for DOD interrogation policy… Yoo’s legal opinions as well as the others issued by the Office of Legal Counsel were the keystone of the torture program, and were the necessary precondition for the torture program’s creation and implementation.”

Continued . . .

JERUSALEM – Three decades after he brokered the first-ever peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has become persona non grata in the Jewish state.

Both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defence Minister Ehud Barak refused to meet with him during his four-day visit here. So did former prime minister and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused Carter of holding “anti-Israel views in recent years.”

In a highly irregular move, Israel’s Shin Bet security service refused to assist U.S. agents guarding Carter. The Shin Bet, which is overseen by Olmert’s office, is routinely involved in assisting with the protection of visiting dignitaries.

Israeli leaders are furious over the former president’s plans to meet with Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshal during his trip to Syria this week. Some Israeli politicians have called Carter’s readiness to meet with an organisation whose founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction and which has carried out most of the suicide attacks and rocket attacks on Israel a “legitimisation of terror.”

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Leader
The Guardian, Friday April 18 2008

Like the Kennedy Library in Boston, where Gordon Brown makes the main foreign policy speech of his US visit today, most American presidential libraries are monuments to the past. The Carter Centre, near Atlanta, is totally different. Like its begetter, Jimmy Carter, it is focused on the future. The centre thrums with constant activity. Its slogan, “Waging peace, fighting disease, building hope” sums up the work of the most active ex-president the US has ever seen. Mr Carter, now 83, has spent the last quarter-century on a punishing round of conflict resolution, monitoring foreign elections and running medical and other aid programmes in Africa. In 2002 his work won the Nobel peace prize. Six years on there is no letup. Last week Mr Carter was in Nepal for the elections. This week he is in the Middle East on a peace mission. He met a Hamas delegation from Gaza in Cairo yesterday. Today he moves on to Syria for more talks. These meetings, amid so much recent bloodshed in Gaza, have raised the wrath of the Israeli political establishment against Mr Carter. And not just the Israeli establishment. Back in the US there have been calls for funding to the Carter Centre to be cut off, while Barack Obama has been forced to say he will not meet Hamas if he becomes president. But Mr Carter is undeterred – and rightly so. He says Middle East peace will eventually require talks with Syria and talks with Hamas. That is no more than the truth. Today would be a good day for Mr Brown to say the same thing.

The thought police are haunting Europe, says Eric Walberg

A French civil servant was sacked in late March for publishing what has been widely reported as a “violent anti-Israeli diatribe” on the oumma.com website, a crime that was investigated by no less than Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. Bruno Guigue, deputy prefect of Saintes, wrote that Israel was “the only state where snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates.” The author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Guigue also wrote of “Israeli jails where — thanks to religious law — they stop torturing on the Sabbath.”

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Russian-Israeli author Israel Shamir told Al-Ahram Weekly. “There are thousands of people sentenced and imprisoned for similar ‘crimes’, mainly in Germany and Austria, more than all the dissidents ever imprisoned in Soviet Russia. The majority of these cases never reach public awareness.”

That a lowly sous-prefet became the subject of the interior minister’s personal intervention for stating the above is astounding, just one example of the heavy hand of the Israeli lobby in Europe. Bruno Guigue’s real “crime”, it’s quite clear, was to criticise the state of Israel.

Continued . . .