Peace and Justice Post

by Peter Phillips | Dissident Voice, March 22nd, 2008

Will November 2008 bring a meaningful change to America? Will getting rid of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney without impeachment or indictment really make a difference? Will a 600 billion dollar war/defense budget be cut in half and used for desperately needed domestic spending? Will the ninety-three billion dollars profits in the private health insurance companies­­—those parasitic intermediates between you and your doctor—be used instead for full health care coverage for all? Will Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus be restored to the people? Will torture stop and the US withdraw from Iraq immediately? Will all students in public universities be able to enroll for free? Will the US national security agencies stop mass spying on our personal communications? Will the neo-conservative agenda of total military domination of the world be reversed?

The answer to these questions in the context of the current billion dollar presidential campaign is an absolute no. Instead we have a campaign of personalities and platitudes. There is a race candidate, a gender candidate and a tortured veteran candidate, each talking about change in America, national security, freedom, and the American way. The candidates are running with support of political parties so deeply embedded with the military industrial complex, the health insurance companies, Wall Street, and corporate media that it is undeterminable where the board rooms separate from the state rooms.

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CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, March 22 / 23, 2008

Worth the Sacrifice?

By RALPH NADER

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the Fabricator-in-Chief made a speech at the Pentagon, whose muzzled army chiefs had opposed his costly, ruinous adventure from the start for strategic, tactical and logistical reasons.

As benefits the dictatorial monarch of yesteryear, evicted by America’s first patriots, this modern-day King George blistered the truth, somersaulted the facts and declared that a “strategic victory” in Iraq is near. He called the war “a just and noble cause.” Sugarcoating the terrible, impoverished state of daily life in Iraq, he acknowledged “the high cost in lives and treasure,” but said the recent situation in Iraq made it all worthwhile. “Worth the sacrifice” is how he put it often in previous statements.

At the same time, his V.P. his Prince Regent, Dick Cheney was having this exchange with ABC’s Martha Raddatz:

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Desert Peace, March 22, 2008 at 9:06 pm

By Khalid Amayreh

Israel and powerful Zionist circles in Europe and North America have been seeking of late to spread the message that criticizing Israel and her brutal policies and actions in occupied Palestine borders on anti-Semitism.

The ultimate purpose of this campaign is obviously to silence critics of Israel in order to allow the racist entity to murder Palestinians as quietly as possible and to steal their land as quietly as possible, and to get away with impunity.

Meanwhile, Israeli and Zionist hasbara doctors from Sydney to Los Angels are wasting no time inciting hatred against Islam and Muslims.

It is not difficult to figure out what these self-worshiping Zionists are up to. They simply want to demonize Muslims as much as it takes to prompt the Zionist-controlled American government to invade Muslim countries and murder millions of innocent people.

Demonizing a given racial or religious community is after all the penultimate step before extermination. one can safely argue that Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and Treblinka wouldn’t have occurred if the decade-long anti-Jewish hysteria, including the publication and wide dissemination of a book by Adolph Hitler titled “My struggle,” had not taken place.

Today Zionist Jews are doing exactly what their Nazi mentors had done in the 1930s, with Arabs and Muslims being the target.

In Israel itself, the writing is on the wall: Arabs to the ovens! We will inflict on them a greater holocaust! Don’t spare their children! Don’t rent houses to the Arabs! Don’t buy from them or sell them!

And in North America, parts of Europe and Australia, the message is too clear and equally ugly: Kill the Muslims , kill the Arabs, kill the “terrorists”, the Muslims are coming, they are taking over Europe, the Judeo-Christian civilization is facing a mortal danger at the hands of the Islamofascists!!

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Chilean Envoy to U.N. Recounts Threats of Retaliation in Run-Up to Invasion

By Colum Lynch | Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, March 23, 2008

UNITED NATIONS — In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting “bitterness” and “deep mistrust” in Washington’s relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Mu¿oz, Chile‘s ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book “A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons,” set for publication next month.

“In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished” for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein‘s government, Mu¿oz writes.

But the tough talk dissipated as the war situation worsened, and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Mu¿oz’s account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration’s standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

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US fears as new coalition government plans to negotiate with its ‘own people’ – the extremists

• Jason Burke
• The Observer,
• Sunday March 23 2008

Paramilitary soldiers guard the streets in Quetta, Pakistan. Photograph: F Ahmed/EPA

Pakistan’s newly elected government will seek to negotiate with Islamic militants and demilitarise the campaign against them to end the violence racking the country, leaders of the major coalition parties who will take power next week have said.

The explicit declaration of a desire to talk to extremists and to reduce the role of the army marks a major change for the strategically crucial country and will confirm fears among American policymakers that the heavy defeat of President Pervez Musharraf at recent elections will lead to Pakistan scaling back its support for the US-led ‘war on terror’ in the region. Pakistan’s rugged western frontier is seen as a haven not just for Pakistani militants but also for al-Qaeda and the Taliban and has been the site of fierce combat for several years.

This week a new Prime Minister and cabinet is expected to be sworn in in Islamabad, following an accord between opposition parties. The party of assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto yesterday nominated the former National Assembly speaker Yousaf Raza Gilani as its candidate for premier. The unprecedented ‘grand coalition’ he is likely to lead is expected to seek ways to permanently remove Musharraf, a loyal US ally who was re-elected president for a five-year term last year, from power.

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New Statesman, March 19, 2008

Lindsey Hilsum

The last thing China wanted, in the year it is to host the Olympic Games, was the world watching its army brutally suppressing protesters

Things are not going as planned. The emblematic images of China in 2008 were supposed to be the magnificent “Bird’s Nest” sports stadium, and millions of proud Chinese applauding their country’s success in hosting the Olympic Games. Instead, the world is seeing gangs of angry Tibetan rioters attacking their Han Chinese neighbours, and Buddhist monks demonstrating against Chinese rule.

Since the 1989 unrest, which centred on Tiananmen Square but spread to Tibet, any protest has been suppressed quickly and effectively. But this time, initially, the Chinese hesitated. The government knew that nothing could be worse for China’s reputation in this Olympic year than Tiananmen-type images of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army firing on Tibetan demonstrators. So it flooded the streets with armour, in the hope that intimidation would do the trick. By Monday, Beijing had moved troops and paramilitary riot police into all sensitive areas, hoping to quash protest with a show of strength.

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Joseph Gerson | UK Indymedia. 22.03.2008 14:40

Victories are within sight for people in a growing number of nations where communities that host U.S. foreign military bases have long fought to get rid of them.

Ecuador’s decision not to renew the U.S. lease for the forward operating base at Manta (see Yankees Head Home) is the culmination of just one of many long-term and recently initiated community-based and national struggles to remove these military installations that are often sources of crime and demeaning human rights violations. A growing alliance among anti-bases movements in countries around the world, including the United States, is preventing the creation of new foreign military bases, restricting the expansion of others, and in some cases may win the withdrawal of the military bases, installations and troops that are essential to U.S. wars of intervention and its preparations for first-strike nuclear attacks.

The Challenge

Of course, there is still plenty of bad news. The Bush Administration is currently negotiating what is, in essence, a security treaty with the Maliki puppet government in Baghdad to secure one of the principle Bush-Cheney war aims: permanent military bases for tens of thousands of U.S. troops. The goal is to transform Iraq into an U.S. unsinkable aircraft carrier in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. Unfortunately, the plan for Iraq is only one part of the vast and expanding U.S. infrastructure of nearly 1,000 military bases and installations strategically scattered around the world.

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Jesse Rosenfeld, The Electronic Intifada, 21 March 2008

“The Israelis tied my hands, blindfolded and then beat me all the way to the interrogation center. I was then cuffed to a chair for four days where interrogators prevented me from sleeping. I was tied in painful stress positions, and on one occasion the agents grabbed me while I was cuffed to the chair and shook me severely, I passed out when they started shaking me by the head,” says “Samer” a former student activist at Birzeit University who was arrested in 2006.

Nonetheless, this isn’t torture according to Canadian foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier and the Harper government. After it was exposed that Canada had Israel and the United States listed as offenders in a training manual for diplomats about torture, the two countries were promptly dropped on 19 January with Bernier’s expression of regret and embarrassment.

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New York Times, March 22, 2008

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – About one thousand people protested in central Amsterdam on Saturday against right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders and the imminent release of his film expected to be critical of the Koran.

Anti-racism protesters clad in winter clothing against the freezing cold and drizzling rain held placards that said “Enough is enough” and “Stop the witch-hunt against Muslims.”

Pop and hip-hop groups entertained the crowd in between speeches by social groups.

“We can no longer remain silent. There is a climate of hate and fear in the Netherlands,” said spokesman Rene Danen from anti-racism organization Nederland Bekent Kleur (the Netherlands recognizes color differences), which had organized the protest.

There should be restrictions on what Wilders can say, said Rieke, a 61-year-old Amsterdam arts teacher who declined to give her last name.

“I think it is embarrassing what Wilders says, for example about tearing up the Koran. It is a very bad example to people to let him say whatever he wants,” she said.

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Online Journal, March 19, 2008

My contributory remembrance to this fifth anniversary of Bush’s infamous invasion of Iraq is neither a journalistic peace memorial to that holocaustic, still ongoing conflict; nor is it a disguised book review of Bilmes’ and Stiglitz’s “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” It has little to do with the infamy of a man presiding over the annihilative power of the United States, and his incompetent, amoral administration; or, for that matter, with the cold economic tabulation of war costs made in unsustainable, borrowed greenbacks.

Instead, it has to do with a cost that Americans — an overwhelming majority of the adult population of this nation — are unwilling to acknowledge, much less face: that the Iraq adventurous fiasco may have started as a criminal act of a few, but it’s continuing as a criminal replication of the many . . . ultimately resulting in total hardening of the nation’s compassionate arteries, and a complete loss of conscience and national shame.

Why, why have Americans hardened their hearts, encrusted and cauterized them with an impenetrable wall to feelings, emotions and morality? Have Americans in their self-indulgence for material things become so callous to the needs of others? Or even to the pain and suffering of their fellow men, particularly those beyond America’s borders? Have our people reached the culmination of insensitivity by permitting death when life is always an option at hand?

Sixty-two years ago, with Adolph Hitler dead, the Allies tried to find justice in Nuremberg by putting on trial 24 key individuals from the Third Reich. These “dirty two-dozen” were indicted for crimes of conspiracy against peace; and/or, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; and/or war crimes; and/or crimes against humanity. And at the end of the trial, half of them were condemned to hang.

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