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The Agenda Behind The Anti-Sadr Agenda by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach
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Global Research, April 16, 2008
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When Gen. David Petraeus along with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker gave their testimony to the Senate on April 9, they did nothing more than to confirm in spades what had been being mooted and duly leaked by the Washington-based press: that the Bush-Cheney Administration had officially endorsed the line that Iran should be set up for attack, on grounds that it–and not any indigenous resistance–were responsible for the mounting death toll among American troops in Iraq. While claiming security had improved, Petraeus said the violence involving the Mahdi Army of Moqtadar al Sadr “highlighted the destructive role Iran has played in funding, training, arming and directing the so-called ‘special groups'” which, he added, “pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.” (See Washington Post, April 9, 2008). Petraeus even granted that Syria had cut the alleged flow of fighters into Iraq, only to stress by con trast, that “Iran has fuelled the violence in a particularly damaging way, through its lethal support to the special groups.” Finally, Petraeus specified that the “special groups” were run by Iran’s Qods force, the Revolutionary Guards recently placed in the category of terrorists.. There was nothing new about the line: Dick Cheney had dispatched Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner last year to Iraq, with the task of finding a smoking gun, or, better, a couple of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) with “made in Iran” stamped on them. What was new in the testimony of the top U.S. military and diplomatic officials in the war zone, were the categorical statements, uttered with an air of certainty usually backed up by courtroom evidence, that Iran was the culprit, and the implicit conclusion that Iran must be the target of U.S. aggression. In order to make sure that (as Nixon would have said), the point be perfectly clear, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was trotted out to tell an enthusiastic Fox News reporter on April 13, that indeed Iran was the casus belli; Iran is “training Iraqis in Iran who come into Iraq and attack our forces, Iraqi forces, Iraqi civilians.” And, therefore, Hadley went on, “We will go after their surrogate operations in Iraq that are killing our forces, killing Iraqi forces.” (www.foxnews.com). Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates was saying almost simultaneously that he thought “the chances of us stumbling into a confrontation with Iran are very low,” he, too, repeated the mantra that the Iranians were sending weapons into the south of Iraq, etc. etc. President George W. Bush could not be left out of the dramatic build-up, and blessed Petraeus’s testimony with an order for a halt in the troop reductions. |
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Iran should be “Set Up for an Attack”
April 17, 2008
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Print this articleReport: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks good for Israel
April 17, 2008 Haaretz Service and Reuters, April 16, 2008
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“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” Ma’ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events “swung American public opinion in our favor.” Netanyahu reportedly made the comments during a conference at Bar-Ilan University on the division of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cast doubt over the veracity of the September 11 attacks Thursday, calling it a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. “Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names,” Ahmadinejad told Iranians in the holy city of Qom. “Under this pretext, they [the U.S.] attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then, a million people have been killed only in Iraq.” Speaking Wednesday at a news conference on the Iran threat, Netanyahu compared Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler and likened Tehran’s nuclear program to the threat the Nazis posed to Europe in the late 1930s. Netanyahu said Iran differed from the Nazis in one vital respect, explaining that “where that [Nazi] regime embarked on a global conflict before it developed nuclear weapons,” he said. “This regime [Iran] is developing nuclear weapons before it embarks on a global conflict.” |
Torturers in the White House: Why Is This Story Being Ignored?
April 17, 2008
The biggest news of the last week went virtually uncovered by the mainstream, print media. ABC News first reported last Wednesday that top Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.
The group signed off on specific techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, pushing, and waterboarding, and gave instruction “so detailed … some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed, down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”
If John McCain is seriously considering Condoleezza Rice as a running mate, the former POW should keep in mind that Rice not only condoned torture, but chaired the National Security Council’s “Principals Committee” meetings to plan the details of torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was so troubled by the meetings, he was moved to object: “Why are we discussing this in the White House?” he asked, according to ABC. “History will not judge this kindly.”
On Friday, ABC added this blockbuster: Bush himself was aware of the meetings. Unlike Ashcroft, he had no compunctions. There was nothing “startling” about the revelations that his top advisers were directing the waterboarding of individual prisoners, Bush told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue and I approved,” Bush said.
Why is this not bigger news?
U.S. won’t get a gold medal for human rights
April 17, 2008Are we really having discussions about whether or not to participate in the 2008 Olympics? Are people actually sitting in coffee shops discussing whether the civil rights violations in China warrant a U.S. boycott of the opening ceremonies or even the games themselves?
Man, this country really cracks me up.
Extraordinary men and women, the absolute cream of our athletic crop, who have — for likely as long as they’ve walked — trained for the moment when they could participate in the Olympic Games, have now become the political pawns of our human rights discussions. And I’m not just talking about discussions with China; but discussions about China by a country that has no right to talk.
Remember us? We invaded a sovereign nation and blew it to smithereens. And according to a BBC report last week we have more than 28,000 Iraqis detained without charges. An earlier report in the international journal The Guardian states that in 2006, “several detainees reportedly died … and some of their bodies bore injuries consistent with torture.”
So we’re invaders and we detain people, again from The Guardian, in a manner that is “arbitrary and indefinite.” On top of that, some die while in our custody and there is evidence that the detention itself may have caused their deaths.
Yeah, let’s just preach to other countries about human rights.
New Lobby Seeks to Redefine ‘Pro-Israel’
April 16, 2008Jim Lobe | Antiwar, April 16, 2008 (Inter Press Service)
A new group of prominent U.S. Jews who believe that the so-called “Israel Lobby” has been dominated for too long by neoconservatives and other Likud-oriented hawks has launched a new organization to help fund political candidates who favor a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a stronger U.S. role in achieving it.
Almost two years in the making, the J Street project plans to spend some $1.5 million – about half of which has been pledged to date – in its first year of operation, a portion of which will go to supporting half a dozen congressional campaigns for candidates who share its pro-peace and pro-Israel views.
“For too long, the loudest American voices on Israel have come from the far Right,” noted Jeremy Ben-Ami, a founder and director of both J Street and its political-action affiliate, JStreetPac.
“Those voices have claimed that the only way to be pro-Israel is to support military responses to political problems, to refuse to engage one’s adversaries in dialogue and to put off the day of reckoning when hard compromises will be required to achieve a peaceful and secure future for Israel and the entire Middle East,” he told reporters via teleconference Tuesday.
“These are not the kind of smart, tough views that serve the long-term interests of the state of Israel, of the United States – or frankly, the American Jewish community,” he added.
Iran – The New Motivation for US War in Iraq
April 16, 2008CRAWFORD – The US rationale for war in Iraq has morphed from ousting strongman Saddam Hussein, to countering Al-Qaeda militants to its latest incarnation — facing down what officials in President George W. Bush’s administration call the Iranian “threat”.
“Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century: Al-Qaeda and Iran,” Bush said last week, renewing accusations that the Islamic republic is backing Iraqi militias hostile to US forces and covertly seeking nuclear weapons.
“If we succeed in Iraq after all that Al-Qaeda and Iran have invested there, it would be a historic blow to the global terrorist movement and a severe setback for Iran,” he said.
With Saddam dead and Al-Qaeda weakened — according to Bush — Iranian-financed extremists, which top US commander in Iraq David Petraeus has called “special groups,” have emerged as a key reason for maintaining US troop levels in Iraq.
“Unchecked, the ’special groups’ pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq,” Petraeus said last week as he told US lawmakers of military strategy in Iraq for the coming months.
However, exactly what steps the United States may take to counter this “threat” remain unclear, and depend largely on Bush’s decisions in his remaining nine months in the White House.
Elections in America: Millionaires Accusing Each Other of Elitism
April 16, 2008By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2008
This country can’t afford to have another election decided by the idea that a member of the ruling class is “genuine” and others are “elitist.”
Millionaire lawyers, politicians and journalists are all savaging Barack Obama for being an elitist.
Obama’s particular crime in this case was saying that Democrats have done a lousy job of dealing with the concerns of working-class Americans, thus allowing the Republicans to swoop in with their God-Guns-n-Gays brand of politics that scapegoats homosexuals, illegal immigrants and George Clooney as the prime culprits behind blue-collar woes. This is not a particularly new argument, and has been a popular theme in mainstream discourse ever since author Thomas Frank published his excellent book What’s the Matter With Kansas? in 2004. Nevertheless, both the media and the rival candidates pounced on Obama’s statements and accused him of making “outrageous San Francisco remarks” and of “offending small town America.” Worst of all, Obama’s words rendered him an “elitist” in the eyes of his critics, which in American political discourse is akin to being a child molester or a Frenchman.
But is Barack Obama really an elitist as his opponents claim? Well of course he is — he’s running for president of the United States! He wouldn’t have gotten this far in life if he’d spent the past 20 years driving a truck or moonlighting as a fry cook at Arby’s. Like every other successful politician in the United States, Obama is a member of America’s political ruling class, which means that like every other presidential candidate in recent memory, he is typically insulated from the lives of ordinary people. Does Obama really have any idea what it’s like to live like a “Real American?” Of course he doesn’t, and neither do John McCain and Hillary Clinton! Does any rational person out there believe that Obama, Clinton and McCain spend their free time away from the campaign trail hanging out at Jimmy Ray’s Chicken’n’Beer Depot playing darts with the common folk?
Amnesty calls for action as China executes 8,000 people a year
April 16, 2008The Independent, UK, April 15, 2008
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Nearly 400 prisoners will be put to death across China while the world’s elite athletes compete for Olympic glory in Beijing, a leading human rights organisation warns today. Amnesty International disclosed that China used capital punishment far more than any other country, executing an estimated 8,000 offenders every year. That is equivalent to 22 prisoners being killed every day, or 374 executions during the 17 days of the Beijing Olympics in August.
Amnesty called for the world community, including the International Olympics Committee (IOC), to use the games to press the Chinese government to reduce the use of capital punishment, and urged Beijing to end its secrecy over the issue.
Kate Allen, Amnesty’s UK director, said: “Yet again China has executed more people than any country in the world and even now, in Olympics year, China is secretly executing people after unfair trials and alleged torture. As the world’s biggest executioner, China gets the ‘gold medal’ for global executions.”
Bush’s Torture Quote Undercuts Denial
April 15, 2008Jason Leopold | Consortiumnews. Com, April 15, 2008
President George W. Bush’s comment to ABC News – that he approved discussions that his top aides held about harsh interrogation techniques – adds credence to claims from senior FBI agents in Iraq in 2004 that Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.
When the American Civil Liberties Union released the FBI e-mail in December 2004 – after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – the White House emphatically denied that any such presidential Executive Order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”
President Bush and his representatives also have denied repeatedly that the administration condones “torture,” although senior administration officials have acknowledged subjecting “high-value” terror suspects to aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “waterboarding” – or simulated drowning – of three al-Qaeda detainees.
But the emerging public evidence suggests that Bush’s denials about “torture” amount to a semantic argument, with the administration applying a narrow definition that contradicts widely accepted standards contained in international law, including Geneva and other human rights conventions.
The FBI e-mail – dated May 22, 2004 – followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.
According to the e-mail, Bush’s Executive Order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, “stress positions,” sleep “management,” loud music and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.” to extract information from detainees in Iraq.
Imperialism: In Tribute to Harry Magdoff
April 15, 2008By William K. Tabb | Monthly Review, March 2007
Imperialism is the system by which a dominant power is able to control the trade, investment, labor, and natural resources of other peoples. It takes different forms in different stages of capitalist development and has elements in common with the imperium of ancient empires. I want to lay out these structural elements, contrast them with the mainstream economists’ view of exchange regulated by free market principles, and then discuss the specific form imperialism takes in our own time. Any essay on this subject written from the left must acknowledge the influence of the writing of Harry Magdoff and on this occasion his influence is highlighted.
Empire and the Stages of Imperialism
Within an imperial system there may be one or more empires, which directly or indirectly control territories, their people, and their resources through the deployment or threat of military force. Different empires may compete within a larger imperial order; domination may be informal and control indirect. There were of course empires before there was capitalism. Athens exercised imperial control through the Delian League in an imperium financed in part by its tribute-paying allies who were formally sovereign governments, generally with their own democratic assemblies. The decisions that mattered with regard to foreign policy and even their significant domestic matters were decided by the Athenians. These allies employed the Athenian currency in their commercial dealings and Athens installed garrisons among the allies to keep them in line.
