Peace and Justice Post

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert delivers his speech during a seminar at a Tokyo hotel, 26 Feb 2008

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will continue to build in occupied east Jerusalem despite international concern that such action may harm the Mideast peace process.Israel plans to build hundreds of new apartments in Har Homa, a Jewish neighborhood in a part of Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Mr. Olmert said Monday there is, in his words, “no chance” Israel will give up a neighborhood like Har Homa.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia resumed peace talks Monday in Jerusalem despite disagreements about Israel’s construction plans.

It was their first publicly-acknowledged meeting since Israel began a military offensive against Gaza militants last month.

Palestinians carry the body of 21-month-old baby girl Salsabeel Abu Jalhoum, killed in an Israeli airstrike, during her funeral in Jebaliya refugee camp, 02 Mar 2008

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas briefly suspended the talks to protest the Israeli offensive, which killed at least 120 Palestinians, including civilians.Israel launched the offensive in response to increased rocket fire by Gaza-based militants on towns in southern Israel.

Livni said Monday that Israel will not use terrorism as an excuse to avoid negotiations with Mr. Abbas’ government.

Mr. Olmert also said that Israel will keep building in places that it plans to keep in the future, especially in Jerusalem. Israel has said it expects to retain major settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank under any peace deal with the Palestinians.

The international “road map” peace plan calls for Israel to halt all settlement activity and for the Palestinians to disarm militants. The United States has called on both sides to do more to honor their road map commitments.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

When Henry Kissinger opines in an op-ed in the Washington Post, it behooves us all to pay attention. There is a message there. Kissinger has always presented himself as the supreme “realist” proponent on U.S. imperial policy. But he has also always taken care not to distance himself too far from the conservative political Establishment.

Hence, when he opines, he is both telling us where policy is moving and pushing it slightly in a “realist” path, in conjunction with allies inside the administration. He is thus preparing us for a shift in policy. He has now written about Pakistan. What is he telling us?

First of all, he notes the stakes for the United States in Pakistan. It is a nuclear power that is incapable of maintaining control at home and therefore one that could “turn into the wildcard of international diplomacy.” Everyone knows this, he says, but “the remedy has proved elusive.” Recent U.S. policy has been to favor a coalition of Musharraf and the civilian parties – a “laudable goal” but not a “practical” one. Elections in a country that does not have a civil society “sharpen” rather than solve crises. Elections, it seems, too often result in electing the wrong people.

Continued . . .

AfterDowningStreet.Org, March 17, 2008

By Sherwood Ross

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Davis, from the Roselle, N.J., area, said while stationed at the prison he also saw an incinerator with “bones in it” that he believed to be a crematorium and said some prisoners were starved prior to their interrogation.

Another soldier that had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, M.P. Sabrina Harman—who gained dubious fame for making a thumbs-up sign posing over the body of a prisoner she believed tortured to death—said the U.S. had imprisoned “women and children” on Tier 1B, including one child was as young as ten.

“Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father,” write co-authors Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in the March 24th issue of The New Yorker magazine, which describes Abu Ghraib in a 14-page article titled “Exposure.”

Continued . . .

The Miami Herald, March 15, 2008

By DENNIS JETT In his final months in office, President Bush is desperately trying to improve his place in history. Yet last Saturday, he vetoed a bill that would have banned the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques that are not in the Army Field Manual. Ensuring his title as torturer in chief is not as inconsistent with his hopes for history as it might seem, however.

The quest for a positive legacy dictates what the president does these days. His Middle East peace conference in Annapolis in November and his follow up trip in January were designed to showcase his interest in peace. After all, not only did he spend several hours at his one-day conference, but he dedicated a whole week to visiting the region.

The goal isn’t peace

His approach to achieving peace, however, is not based on diplomacy but his experience as a cheerleader in college. With a few shouts of encouragement, he left the parties to work things out. They haven’t been able to do that for about 60 years, but and have made the most progress when the United States was actively engaged. But then, the goal is not to actually achieve peace, which is beyond the reach of a lame duck with a short attention span. It is to establish Bush’s claim of responsibility in the event anything good happens after he leaves office.

Continued . . .

On the morning of an apparent cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah militants, 11-year-old Hadi Hattab played in the street for the first time since the monthlong war began in July 2006.

Seconds later, an explosion of ball bearings shot into his skull from one of more than 4 million cluster bombs fired into southern Lebanon by the Israeli military. The boy died a few hours later.

Since the end of the conflict, Hadi and 29 other Lebanese civilians have been killed and more than 200 injured by triggering some of the unexploded cluster bombs in southern Lebanon. The United Nations estimates that about 1 million of these bombs – mostly produced in the United States – failed to explode on impact, leaving roads, schools, homes and fields littered with lethal explosives. Most of the bombs were fired by the Israeli military in the last three days of the conflict after a cease-fire had been declared.

Conitnued . . .

The New York Review of Books, Vol. 55, No. 5, April 3, 2008

By David Bromwich

In Tacitus’ Agricola, a Caledonian rebel named Calgacus, addressing “a close-packed multitude” preparing to fight, declares that Rome has overrun so much of the world that “there are no more nations beyond us; nothing is there but waves and rocks, and the Romans, more deadly still than these— for in them is an arrogance which no submission or good behavior can escape.” Certain habits of speech, he adds, abet the ferocity and arrogance of the empire by infecting even the enemies of Rome with Roman self-deception:

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them…. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.

The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence “They create a desolation and call it peace” is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.

Continued . . .

By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch. Posted March 17, 2008.

It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam,” said a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki might briefly venture into the city.Five rears after the invasion of Iraq the US and the Iraqi government both claim that Iraq is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Mr. Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armored cars, each with three machine gunners on the roof, raced out of a heavily fortified exit from the Green Zone, followed by sand-colored American Humvees and more armored cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bullet proof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have carried Mr. Maliki.

The precautions were not excessive since Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. The Iraqi prime minister was only going to the headquarters of the Dawa party to which he belongs and which are only half a mile from the Green Zone but his hundreds of security guards acted as if they were entering enemy territory.

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

Continued . . .

Khaleej Times, March 16, 2008

(AFP)

LONDON – Amnesty International on Monday said the rights situation in Iraq five years after the US-led invasion was “disastrous” and that the country had turned into one of the world’s most dangerous zones.

“Five years after the US-led invasion that toppled (former president) Saddam Hussein, Iraq is one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” it said in a 24-page report, entitled ”Carnage and Despair. Iraq Five Years On”.

Against a backdrop of insecurity, law and order and economic recovery were a “distant prospect” while most Iraqis were living in poverty, with food shortages, lack of access to safe drinking water and high unemployment.

More than four in 10 Iraqis lived on less than one US dollar a day — the UN standard for measuring poverty — while the health and education systems were at near collapse and women and girls at risk of violence from extremists.

“Saddam Hussein’s administration was a byword for human rights abuse,” said Amnesty’s director for Middle East and North Africa, Malcolm Smart. “But its replacement has brought no respite at all for its people.”

The failure to investigate alleged abuses “is one of the most worrying aspects for the future”, he added.

“Even when faced with overwhelming evidence of torture under their watch, the Iraqi authorities have failed to hold the perpetrators to account — and the US and its allies have failed to demand that they do so,” he said.

Amnesty also criticised the extensive use of the death penalty, the international community’s failure to cater for Iraqi refugees and despite the more stable situation, the lack of free speech in the Kurdistan region.

Continued . . .

Declan Walsh in Islamabad

The Guardian, Monday March 17, 2008

A salvo of suspected American missiles killed at least 20 people, including several al-Qaida militants, in Pakistan’s tribal areas yesterday, a day after a restaurant bombing in the capital, Islamabad, that wounded US and British officials. The bloody weekend underscored the extremist threat facing the new coalition government of erstwhile rivals Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari, which is due to be formed after parliament is sworn in today.

Tribesmen near Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, reported seeing up to seven missiles fired at two houses. Earlier they heard a buzzing noise – the signature sound of US Predator drones, which have carried out at least two attacks on suspected al-Qaida hideouts in the tribal areas this year.

The Pakistan army confirmed five or six explosions, but could not identify the source. The US and Pakistan have a policy of not officially recognising politically inflammatory Predator strikes.

Continued . . .

Press , March 17, 2008

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has criticized US President George W. Bush for his latest remarks and called him a genocidal terrorist.

Chavez made the remarks on Sunday after President Bush accused him of supporting ‘terrorists’ in neighboring Colombia and fueling an anti-American campaign last week.

“The president of the United States himself has come out and attacked us and attacked me personally, calling me a demagogue. Well, I am calling him a terrorist and genocidal,” AFP quoted Chavez as saying.

“And now Bush says I have Venezuelans here going hungry,” he added, insisting Bush should take a look at the economic conditions in the United States.

“Venezuelan people today are better fed than ever,” Chavez said. “The people taking hits from their own government are in the United States, which has an economic crisis. ”

Last week, the US president said that Venezuela ‘has squandered its oil wealth to promote its hostile anti-American vision, and it has left its own citizens to face food shortages while it threatens its neighbors’.

AGB/RE