Peace and Justice Post

Counterpunch, March 11, 2008

By ED O’LOUGHLIN

Gaza

SAFA ABU SEIF, 12, was fatally wounded as she stood in an upstairs room of her home in the Gaza City district of Jabaliya 10 days ago.

She was one of 27 children identified by United Nations staff among the 107 Palestinians who were killed in five days last week. Another 25 dead, including five women, were identified as unarmed non-combatants. The status of 13 more dead victims could not be determined. At least three of the children were reportedly shot in their homes by Israeli small arms or sniper fire.

A Palestinian gunman killed eight Israeli students on Thursday before he was killed himself. An Israeli soldier was also killed that day. Two Israeli soldiers died in action in the early stages of a three-day incursion into Jabaliya, and an Israeli civilian was killed by Palestinian rocket fire on the first day of the surge in violence.

Asked by the Herald to comment on allegations that its troops had killed children in the area, the Israeli Defence Force blamed the violence on terrorist groups who exploited Palestinian civilians as human shields while firing rockets intended to harm Israeli civilians.

“IDF operations in the Gaza Strip are aimed solely at the Hamas terror infrastructure, armed terrorists and rocket launchers,” its statement said.

A security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Civil Administration – Israel’s military government for the occupied territories – had received no complaints about shootings of civilians, and no investigation was underway.

Yet the family of the Palestinian television journalist Mahmoud Al Adjrami said that when Safa was struck Israeli troops were occupying their house, 90 metres across a stretch of open space from the window she was struck through.

They say the invading soldiers smashed up their tile floor to get sand to fill sand-bags for firing positions in first-floor windows facing the Abu Seif house. The discarded sand, together with the smashed door and tiles, spent bullet cases and heaps of Israeli ration boxes and discarded snack wrappers, were still in the house a day after the troops withdrew.

It is standard Israeli military procedure during tank raids to take over civilian homes as snipers’ nests and hideouts, holding the occupants at gunpoint. According to the testimonies of victims and from Israeli soldiers themselves, this process can frequently involve theft, vandalism and violence against unarmed civilians.

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Foreign Policy In Focus, March 7, 2008

by John Lindsay-Poland

Absent in the discussion of the conflict brewing in the Andes over a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to kill a guerrilla leader is the role of U.S. military in the conflict. It goes well beyond providing satellite intelligence on the location of guerrilla camps: the two countries have opposing responses to Washington’s attempt to militarize the hemisphere. Ecuador’s constituent assembly proposes prohibiting all foreign military presence, while Colombia seeks ever greater U.S. military hardware, intelligence and troops. The U.S. response has been quite undiplomatic.

While visiting Italy last October, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa made a modest proposal: if the United States allows his country to set up a military base in Miami, his government would renew the lease for a U.S. base in the coast city of Manta. Otherwise, U.S. troops and operations will have to leave the when the base lease ends next year.

Less than a month later, Correa passed through Miami on his way to China, and U.S. Customs police treated the president as an ordinary foreigner. It wasn’t the first time Correa and his vice-president had been denied diplomatic treatment. Ecuador’s foreign minister called the incident a “humiliation of a head of state, from arrogance by a country that believes itself above all others.”

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Doug Lorimer | Green Left online, 9 March 2008

While the Western corporate media was swooning over the tour of army duty in war-torn Afghanistan by Prince Harry, the third in line to the British crown, scant coverage was given to US national intelligence director Vice-Admiral Mike McConnell’s admission that the situation facing the US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan is “deteriorating”, despite a doubling of their occupation forces since 2004.

There are currently 28,000 US troops in Afghanistan, with another 3200 due to arrive later this month. More than half of the US troops in Afghanistan — 15,000 — operate under the command of the US-led NATO military alliance. There are also 28,000 non-US troops operating as part of the 43,000 NATO commanded International Security Assistance Force. The largest non-US ISAF contingent — 7700 troops — is from Britain, while 970 Australian troops constitute the largest non-NATO contingent.

‘Classic insurgency’

Testifying before the US Senate armed services committee on February 27, Connell said that after six years of US and allied military support and billions of dollars in foreign aid, the US-installed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai — derided by critics as being little more than “the mayor of Kabul” — controls only 30% of the country.

McConnell said 60% of the country was controlled by local warlords, while the Taliban anti-occupation guerrilla fighters controlled 10-11%, mainly in the south. “Taliban forces have expanded their operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul”, he added.

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China View, March 9, 2008

Asif Ali Zardari (R), widower of slain Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, shakes hands with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif during a joint news conference in Bhurban near Islamabad March 9, 2008.(Xinhua Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif (L) and Asif Ali Zardari (R), widower of the slain opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, speak during a joint news conference in Bhurban near Islamabad March 9, 2008. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

ISLAMABAD, March 9 (Xinhua) — Pakistani’s two leading political leaders said Sunday that they had agreed to form a coalition government with the prime minister from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

“We undertake to form a coalition together for Pakistan, as the people of Pakistan had given mandate to the democratic forces on February 18,” said Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) at the news conference after his meeting with PPPCo-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari at the scenic town of Murree in eastern Pakistan.

“We have fruitful meeting today, we are at the verge of making history, it was the desire of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto,” Zardari, former PM Benazir Bhutto’s widower, told a joint news conference with Sharif.

In a joint declaration at the end of their talks, Sharif and Zardari agreed to reappoint the Supreme Court justices, especially Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who were ousted by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Nov. 3, 2007 when he imposed the state of emergency.

They agreed that the deposed judges would be restored through a parliamentary resolution within 30 days, according to the joint declaration.

Parliamentary elections took place on Feb. 18 this year, and according to the Election Commission results, the PPP has secured 120 seats for the 342-seat National Assembly, the PML-N has 90 and the PML-Q, which backs Musharraf, has 51.

The Awami National Party, a nationalist secular party mostly centered in the North-West Frontier Province, which has also announced to join the coalition, has bagged 13 National Assembly seats.

Independent victors and smaller groups are expected to join the coalition which will enable the coalition to gain the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to impeach Musharraf and to amend the constitution.

WASHINGTON — A new article on CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon confirms that his public statements last fall ruling out war against Iran last fall were not coordinated with the White House and landed him in trouble more than once with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In an admiring article on Fallon in Esquire, former Pentagon official Thomas P.M. Barnett writes that Fallon angered the White House by “brazenly challenging” Bush on his aggressive threat of war against Tehran. Barnett also cites “well-placed observers” as saying Bush may soon replace Fallon with a “more pliable” commander.

Barnett’s account, which quotes conversations with Fallon during the CENTCOM commander’s trips to the Middle East, shows that Fallon privately justified his statements contradicting the Bush policy of keeping the “option” of an unprovoked attack on Iran “on the table” as necessary to calm the fears of Egypt and other friendly Arab regimes of a U.S.-Iran war.

Barnett recalls that when Fallon was in Cairo in November, the lead story in that day’s edition of the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette carried the headline “U.S. Rules Out Strike against Iran” over a picture of Fallon meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

That story, published Nov. 19 and not picked up by any U.S. news media, reported that Fallon had “ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said Washington was mulling non-military options instead.”

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The Independent, UK, March 10, 2008

PETER DEJONG/AP

Arab builders working on new housing in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Givat Ze’ev

By Eric Silver in Jerusalem

Israel approved plans yesterday to build 330 new homes in a suburban West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem. The move was denounced by the Palestinian Authority as “a slap in the face of the peace process” and called on the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia to “act to get Israel to revoke the decision”.

Saeb Erakat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, said: “This is a provocative action by Israel that demonstrates its intention of further strengthening illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory.”

He branded the timing of the decision as “outrageous” because it came on the eve of American-Israeli-Palestinian talks to assess the two sides’ performance under the international road map for peace. Expansion of settlements is supposed to be frozen under the terms of the peace process. The settlements, illegal under international law, already account for nearly 40 per cent of West Bank territory. The UN warned recently that they are making the achievement of an eventual two state solution elusive.

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New York correspondent Ed Pilkington explains the reaction in the US to the president’s support for what human rights campaigners view as torture

The New York Times, March 8, 2008
By JANE PERLEZ

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Beside racks of hanging meat and barrows of oranges in the alleys of the old town here, Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers movement in Pakistan, was back on the campaign trail Saturday, calling for the release of the nation’s detained judiciary leaders.

Fresh from being released after four months in detention, Mr. Ahsan said that the recent parliamentary elections were not enough proof that President Pervez Musharraf’s government was dedicated to democracy. He insisted that the next step had to be the release of the former chief justice, Mohamed Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was fired along with most of the Supreme Court during a state of emergency imposed by Mr. Musharraf on Nov. 3. Mr. Chaudhry and nine other justices remain in detention.

“Our struggle is to make Pakistan a state where the judiciary is independent, and what Musharraf did to the chief justice is an example of how under him no judge is ever independent,” Mr. Ahsan said to a crowd of lawyers who chanted for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation. The rally here on Saturday was part of a series of marketplace demonstrations between the capital, Islamabad, and this nearby city to show support for the lawyers movement. The lawyers are planning a week of anti-Musharraf demonstrations, called Black Flag Week after the protesters’ flags and armbands.

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By Ashfaq Yusufzai

An election meet by women of the Awami National Party, victorious in the Feb 18 polls Credit:Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

PESHAWAR, Mar 7 (IPS) – Saeeda Anwar is a 38-year-old Pakistani schoolteacher. She works in a school here in the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), but she is not allowed to exercise her franchise.

“My family is strictly against women voting. They don’t like us to vote. Although, I am allowed to work as a teacher because I give them all my salary,” she says of the male members of her family.

Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the NWFP. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’.

Here women are banned from participation and decision-making — a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to or whether they can go out of the house, also who their daughters should marry and when.

Yet, 15 women challenged political exclusion and contested the Feb. 18 polls to parliament and the national assembly from the NWFP. Not one won, and polling by women, both in the province and in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), was once again the lowest in Pakistan.

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The New Yorker, Feb 25, 2008

Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

by Paul Kramer

A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote.

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

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