Peace and Justice Post

• The Observer,
• Sunday March 2 2008

Three Palestinians were killed on Saturday and at least six children were wounded in an Israeli missile strike on a house in Gaza City. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Israel’s military killed at least 60 Palestinians yesterday – almost half of them civilians, including four children – in its most violent assault on the Gaza Strip since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized power last June.

The latest deaths bring the number of Palestinians killed since a rocket fired from inside Gaza killed a 44-year-old Israeli in the town of Sderot last week to 80. Two Israeli soldiers also died in the fighting. Late last night, the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was attacked by an Israeli aircraft, which hit the building with three missiles. Although no casualties were reported, witnesses said the building was destroyed.

The latest bloodshed comes as an Observer investigation revealed how Israel is again deliberately obstructing the transfer of urgent medical cases for treatment outside Gaza, in the latest extension of its policy of collective punishment of Palestinians.

Continued . . .

The Reichstag fire helped transform Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship. What can we do to avoid a similar outcome?

By David T. Z. Mindich, AlterNet. Posted February 29, 2008.

On a cold January morning in 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of one of the world’s great democracies. While the world has duly noted its 75th anniversary last month, it is not the cold January morning but a hot February night that should command our greatest attention. It was 75 years ago this week that the parliament building, the Reichstag, was set ablaze. As the Reichstag burned, Hitler was busy converting the chancellorship into a dictatorship.

As we engage in the democratic process of picking a new president, a look back at Hitler’s dizzying rise is an instructive reminder of the fragility of democracy, then and now.

During the period of long simmering fears over an amorphous international threat — communism — German opposition forces were willing to give Hitler the chancellorship despite his capturing only a minority of votes during the recent election. But it was the Feb. 27 Reichstag fire, a fire that the Nazis accused a Dutch Communist of setting, that sent the country on a quick road to fascism. Within 60 days, Hitler had begun the process of arbitrary arrests, warrantless surveillance and searches, incarceration without charges, suspension of habeas corpus, the implementation of torture, the mustering of a private army, and was pushing through the passage of the “Enabling Act,” which gave Hitler and his henchmen the power to ignore the legislative branch and write laws themselves.

Continued . . .

Hijacker had post-9/11 flights scheduled, files say

Larisa Alexandrovna | Raw Story, Feb. 28, 2008

Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.

The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.

The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Though referenced repeatedly in the footnotes of the final 9/11 Commission report, the timeline has not previously been made available to the public.

The FBI timeline is dated Nov. 14, 2003 but appears to have been put together earlier (since the last date mentioned in the document is Oct. 22, 2001) and was provided to the 9/11 Commission during its 2003 investigation. The final Commission report cites the FBI timeline 52 times.

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Kuwait Times, March 1, 2008

JERUSALEM: A senior Israeli defence official said yesterday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced “new Nazis”.

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes yesterday, said most of those killed were militants. Israeli leaders said cross-border rocket fire may leave them no choice but to launch a broader military offensive against Hamas, which seized Gaza in June after routing forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

One Israeli was killed in a rocket attack on Wednesday in the southern border town of Sderot. Hamas raised the stakes by using Soviet-designed Grad missiles, more powerful and accurate than improvised Gazan Qassams, to strike deep into the larger city of Ashkelon, home to 120,000 people. Visiting Ashkelon, Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 10 television an Israeli response was “required” and that “Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results”.

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The Boston Globe, March 1, 2008

By Shuja Nawaz

AFTER THE recent elections in Pakistan that were marked by their relative peace and the return of the two leading parties that dominated the scene before General Pervez Musharraf’s coup in 1999, some commentators in the United States fear that a civilian government and a more assertive parliament will be less willing to fight America’s “war on terror” than Musharraf. They are also concerned that the new government might be affected by the generally anti-US sentiment that appears to have gained ground in Pakistan. Such views are based on false assumptions and are likely to confuse Pakistanis into thinking that elements in the United States prefer to deal with autocrats rather than popularly elected governments. The people of Pakistan seem to have more confidence in the changes that have occurred than their erstwhile friends in the United States. While the noise of parliamentary democracy rises in Pakistan, hope is also on the rise.

Continued . . .

Telegraph, UK, March 1, 2008

By Tim Butcher

America deployed a warship off the coast of Lebanon yesterday prompting anger from Iran-backed Hizbollah and surprise from the pro-Washington Lebanese prime minister.

Fouad Saniora said that he had not requested the display of naval power.

The USS Cole, a guided missile destroyer that was almost sunk by al-Qa’eda in a terrorist attack off Yemen eight years ago, was steaming in international waters just off the Lebanese coast.

An unnamed US military source said the deployment was meant as “a show of support for regional stability” because of Washington’s concern about the political crisis in Lebanon.

Squabbling between the pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian factions has paralysed Lebanese politics for months, leaving the country unable to pass any basic legislation, including the national budget, or chose a head of state or president.

Members of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement supported and financed by Teheran, were critical of the move.

“This decision proves it’s the United States which is interfering in Lebanese affairs and that this interference has taken on a military slant,” Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hizbollah MP, said.

By Wired.com Staff : Disturbing New Photos From Abu Ghraib

MONTEREY, California – The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed social psychologist said Thursday.

Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a “Lucifer effect” as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.

“If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse,” Zimbardo said to a stunned audience the included famous actors, entrepreneurs and politicians.

“Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months … Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose.”

Zimbardo, 75, is renowned for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the university’s campus in Northern California.

The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for the students.

Zimbardo detailed stark parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people into heroes or demons.

“I was shocked when I saw those pictures but I wasn’t surprised,” Zimbardo said of the images he was privy to while a member of a legal defense team for a sergeant charged in connection with prison abuses.

“Because I had seen those cells before at Stanford. The power is in the system. It’s not bad apples, but bad barrel makers.”

Zimbardo, wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a devil flanked by two angels, paced the stage as images of horrors flashed on large screens. He lays out his conclusions in a recently released book titled “The Lucifer Effect.”

“There is an infinite capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, or make some of us heroes,” Zimbardo said, convinced that environment dictates the outcome far more than people’s characters or personalities.

“The Stanford prison experiment shows the power of institutions to change behavior. We took good apples and put them in a bad situation.”

As a witness for a US military police reservist that was a guard at the Abu Ghraib interrogation center when abuses occurred, Zimbardo got access to records and pictures gathered in the case.

The guards were told to “soften” prisoners to make them more cooperative with military intelligence interrogators, according to Zimbardo.

Photos showed naked and hooded prisoners beaten bloody and being made to commit humiliating acts such as human pyramids or simulating homosexual sex. Soldiers posed proudly with battered corpses and nude, injured prisoners.

A picture shows a soldier firing a bullet into a camel’s head at point blank range.

“They took pictures of everything,” Zimbardo said.

A “hero” at Abu Ghraib turned out to be a lowly private that called for abuses there to be stopped, according to the professor.

“Heroism is the antidote to evil,” Zimbardo said. “Let’s focus on justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing.”

© 2008 Agence France Presse

What It Means for Americans

Karen Kwiatkowski | Information Clearing House, Feb. 28, 2008

The following is the text of a speech given at Virginia Tech on February 12, 2008.

I want to thank the Libertarians at Virginia Tech, the Political Science Club and the Institute for Humane Studies for the kind invitation to speak to you tonight.

I want to talk about the “Causes and Consequences of our Foreign Policy in the Middle East and What it Means for Americans.” The original title of this speech was “Causes and Consequences of our Foreign Policy in the Middle East and What it Means for Libertarians.” But I interchanged Americans for Libertarians. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy in Berlin, 1963, in times like these, when the American dream seems overwhelmed by what has become known as the American empire, perhaps we are all libertarians.

Let me start first with the consequences of our foreign policy in the Middle East, circa 2008.

• We are nearly five years past the moment where George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.”
• 400,000 to 1.2 million Iraqis are dead by our decisions and actions. Over two million are internally displaced, and over two million Iraqis have fled the country.
• 5,000 Americans are dead (soldiers and contractors) as a result, 30–50,000 physically injured, and over 100,000 mentally disturbed, receiving or awaiting treatment.
• Army and Marines are morally and physically bankrupt – and burdened by executive pressure for more forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan and trouble in Iran.
• A trillion dollars has been spent, another trillion to be spent before we are finished – and if McCain has his way, we will never be finished, and we will bleed ourselves for the duration of the 21^st century.
• Beyond Iraq, we have Secretary of Defense Bob Gates alternately screaming in an empty room and crying in despair because NATO won’t pick up the slack of propping up our preferred government in Kabul.
• The one republic with nuclear weapons and a means to deploy them is led by an unstable dictator, threatened by his own subordinates, at odds with his very powerful and well-funded intelligence arm, and disliked by the majority of his citizens. And in case you were wondering, I am talking about Perez Musharraf.
• Jordan, once reliable and trustworthy, is feeling the heat of over two million unemployed and impoverished Iraqis swelling their refugee camps.
• Syria – who helped us with torture and renditions after 9-11 – has been both accused and attacked by her neighbor, our other nuclear-armed friend in the region.
• Lebanon suffered a silly war in the summer of 2006 – a war that was considered an embarrassing defeat for Israel, and a war that Washington, D.C. collaborated on and quietly cheered.
• Our steadfast friends, the House of Saud, don’t understand us anymore.
• We publicly threaten Iran for all kinds of reasons, even though Tehran is signatory to and compliant with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and even as we happily work with all kinds of Iranian-backed interests in southern Iraq.
• Four key undersea communication cables get cut in a week, isolating and seriously degrading much of the banking and communication traffic for our friends in the region, including in Dubai, which just bailed out some of our banks and credit card companies. Instead of decrying bad cable construction, and offering to send our own teams to help repair these cables in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, our government has said nothing. The entire region thinks we did it, either to send a message, test a military strategy, or to funnel information into a channel our vast intelligence bureaucracy can monitor.
• The price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is not yet at the level of the 1979 oil crisis. But it is within 10% of that. Given the drastic increase in global demand for oil today, relative to that in 1979, our foreign policy in the Middle East might be said to be harmful, but not disastrous. But you must consider two things – the amount of oil the United States imports from the Middle East is around 10–15% of all the oil we import – but interfering with the free market in this region costs the American taxpayer billions and billions every year in maintaining a large overseas military presence, military and economic aid to major and minor allies in the region, the costs of periodic off-the-book interventions, like Iraq, and the costs involved with protecting your countrymen from people who hate you enough to want to kill you and topple your tall buildings.

Such is the state of the Middle East, and such indeed are the consequences of our foreign policy.

Continued . . .