Peace and Justice Post

China View, April 14, 2008

ISLAMABAD, April 14 (Xinhua) — The National Assembly on Monday adopted a resolution calling for United Nations (UN) probe into the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, official Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

The resolution, moved by minister for Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Farooq H Naik and adopted unanimously, urged the government to approach the UN for forming an international investigation commission called Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Commission.

The commission should seek to probe and identify the culprits, perpetrators organizers and financiers behind this heinous crime and bring them to justice, said the resolution.

The NA, through the resolution, also mourned the tragic assassination of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto which it said, resulted in colossal loss to the people of Pakistan as well as the world.

Benazir Bhutto was killed in gunshots and suicide blast, which occurred when Benazir was going out of the Liaquat Bagh park after an election rally on Dec. 27 last year.

The Pakistan People’s Party, led by Benazir’s widower Asif Ali Zardari, has been seeking UN probe into Benazir’s death.

International Socialist Review, ISR Issue 58, March-April 2008

A speech by WILLIAM BLUM, author of Rogue State

UP UNTIL recently I had been in effect banned from speaking on college campuses. This ban lasted for a full year, ever since January of last year when Osama bin Laden, in one of his audiotapes, recommended that Americans read my book Rogue State. With this announcement I was swamped by the media—CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and many others. People who called in to the TV and radio programs I was on attacked me as if I and bin Laden were friends and I had asked him for the endorsement. I had to point out that he and I were not really friends; in fact, I hadn’t spoken to him in more than a month.

Interviewers pressed me to repudiate bin Laden’s support. Wolf Blitzer on CNN was genuinely annoyed with me because I wouldn’t do so.

My reply was this: “There are two elements involved here: On the one hand, I totally despise any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by such, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the other hand, I’m a member of a movement that has the very ambitious goal of slowing down, if not stopping, the American Empire, to keep it from continuing to go around the world doing things like bombings, invasions, overthrowing governments, and torture. To have any success, we need to reach the American people with our message. And to reach the American people we need to have access to the mass media. What has just happened has given me the opportunity to reach millions of people I would otherwise never reach. Why should I not be glad about that? How could I let such an opportunity go to waste?”

Continued . . .

Zionists have managed to unforgivably drag their religion’s name through the mud for more than 60 years

Seth Freedman | The Guardian, April 14, 2008

Though my detractors often claim otherwise, I see myself as anything but a “self-hating Jew”, and the more vocal I am in my criticism of the Israeli government’s crimes, the more credence I give that claim. I passionately love my religion, and just as fervently defend its teachings to the hilt when it comes to how to treat our fellow man. That Zionism has come along, hijacked Jewish doctrines, and twisted them to form part of an all-out supremacist movement is not something I can swallow if I want to stay loyal to the true values of Judaism.

Unfortunately, by demanding that the world sees Zionism as a philosophy essentially based on Jewish principles, Zionists have managed to unforgivably drag the religion’s name through the mud for over 60 years. However, I drew some comfort from an unlikely source after talking to a boy my age in the Deheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem.

I was there as part of a marathon tour that took in Hebron, the village of al-Nueman, the Machpelah mosque, the Church of the Nativity and various other stops along the way – including the pitiful, crumbling buildings of Deheisha. Half-way through the trip, my eyes began to glaze over, as I sought to put a barrier between myself and the relentless barrage of proof we were shown of how cruelly the authorities deal with the Palestinians.

Continued . . .

Haaretz, Israel, April 14, 2008
By Gideon Levy

Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 – as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend – chose to make his private “atonement” by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation – but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy – who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation. Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation – a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly – cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

Continued . . .

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The White House, Justice and State departments and the CIA refused comment Thursday, as did a spokesman for Tenet. A message for Ashcroft was not immediately returned.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as “yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture.”

Continued . . .

Press TV, Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:16:45

Representative John Yarmuth

Democratic Congressman, John Yarmuth has linked the costly occupation of Iraq with growing economic troubles in the United States.

The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq “is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it,” Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address.

“General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker failed to offer a plan to change direction in Iraq and redeploy our troops,” Yarmuth said. “Instead, they offered more of the same, with U.S. troops and taxpayers paying the price.”

He slammed the Bush Administration for spending “more than half-a-trillion dollars” in support of the war effort, while that money could be spent on pressing needs in this country.

This is while US president George W. Bush has denied that there’s any link between the faltering US economy and $12 billion a month being spent on the ongoing occupation in Iraq.

“I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs…because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting,” he said in the NBC’s Today Show on Feb 18th.

MT/RA

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

“Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people.” Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

Continued . . .

The Nation, April 9, 2008

L.H. Lossin

The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago this week, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)–one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI’s were told, “We are soldiers, not policemen” or “our orders do not extend to protecting this [building].” American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

Continued . . .

World Socialist Web Site, April 8, 2008

By Joe Kay

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In tax filings released last week, Democratic Party presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, reported earnings of some $109 million in the years 2000 to 2007.

These figures put the Clintons, who have become something of a political dynasty, among the top .01 percent of taxpayers in the US, according to the Wall Street Journal, or among the 14,500 richest families, according to Britain’s Sunday Times. By either calculation, they are firmly entrenched in the wealthiest portion of the population.

The total income translates to about $13.6 million a year. Even after taxes, the Clintons pulled in $10 million a year, or about 200 times the median family income in the United States.

The Clinton duo’s income has risen astronomically over the past eight years and its meteoric rise began immediately after the end of the president’s term in office in 2001. Forbes magazine noted, “In 2000, Bill Clinton’s final year in office, the First Couple’s income was $350,000; the next year, it rose to $16 million. Their most lucrative years were 2004 and 2007, when they twice made $20 million.” In other words, in 2007 the Clintons made 57 times more than they did in 2000. These are remarkable figures.

Particularly significant is the utterly shameless manner in which Bill Clinton has leveraged his status as a former president and “celebrity” into a personal fortune.

Continued . . .