Peace and Justice Post

Axis of Logic, February 23, 2008

By James Petras*

The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced and aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of Washington’s Middle East policy.

The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation.

Continued . . .

Petros Karadjias/Associated Press

Supporters of President-elect Demetris Christofias of Cyprus shouted slogans during victory celebrations on Sunday evening outside his campaign headquarters in Nicosia, the capital.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (Reuters) — The Communist Party leader Demetris Christofias won Cyprus’s presidential election on Sunday and agreed to meet the leader of the island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot community to revive reunification efforts.

The Turkish Cypriot president, Mehmet Ali Talat, called Mr. Christofias to congratulate him, and they agreed to meet “at the earliest possible date,” Mr. Talat’s spokesman said.

Mr. Christofias’s election has revived hopes of reunifying Cyprus, divided along ethnic lines since 1974, when Turkey invaded after a brief Greek-inspired coup.

Reunification efforts broke down in 2004 when Greek Cypriots rejected a United Nations plan, and Cyprus joined the European Union a short time later as a divided island.

Mr. Christofias’s supporters poured into the streets waving red party banners and Cypriot flags. He won 53.4 percent of the vote, and his right-wing rival, Ioannis Kasoulides, had 46.6 percent.

Mr. Christofias, 62, told a noisy crowd, “From tomorrow we unite our strengths. We shall work collectively and in unison to achieve reunification of our homeland.”

He will be Cyprus’s first Communist president and the only one in the 27-member European Union. Although proud to be a Communist, he says he will leave the free-market economy alone.

His party, Akel, has busts of Lenin and red flags at its headquarters but it also owns a number of large businesses on the island. It has been instrumental in electing presidents but had never fielded its own candidate.

The island’s division between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is a major obstacle to neighboring Turkey’s aspirations for European Union membership. The division also is an obstacle to better ties between NATO allies Greece and Turkey, who have come close to war over the island.

The surprise elimination of President Tassos Papadopoulos in the first round of voting on Feb. 17 raised hopes the Greek Cypriots might be ready for a deal. Turkish Cypriots, who have watched wealthier Greek Cypriots enjoy the benefits of European Union membership, welcomed the result, saying they were eager for new talks.

“We see the change as an opportunity, and we expect negotiations to start immediately and without the need for preliminaries,” said Hasan Ercakica, a Turkish Cypriot spokesman.

Initial reaction from Turkey was more lukewarm. “We are a little cautious at the moment,” said a Foreign Ministry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We have to see whether Christofias gave promises to Papadopoulos or not,” adding that Mr. Christofias “will face a sincerity test.”

The Toronto Star, Feb. 22, 2008

David M. Crane | The Toronto Star, February 22, 2008

They stood in the warm sun of the dry season. Seasoned combat veterans of years of conflict, their eyes darted nervously back and forth, glancing at me from time to time, not sure what to make of the situation they found themselves in. The breeze stirred the lush green trees of the bush upcountry in Sierra Leone, near Kabalah. United Nations peacekeepers fanned out around the perimeter nervously holding their weapons at high port.

The Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone was about to hold a town hall meeting with several hundred child soldiers who were now back in school trying to make some sense of their ruined lives. Standing before the prosecutor were murderers, rapists, mutilators and pillagers of all kinds, their average age around 15.

I took the bullhorn from one of the peacekeepers and asked them in Krio how they were all doing. They all mumbled “body fine.” I stepped among them and for almost two hours talked to them and listened to them, developing a sense of what it must be like to be a member of what I call the lost generation of children in West Africa; children forced to kill their parents and then rip their way across the countryside in a whirlwind of terror the likes of which civilization rarely has seen, if at all.

Continued . . .

Palestine Chronicle, Feb. 20, 2008
Riding Roughshod: How to Choose Your Neighbours

By Ingrid B Mørk – Norway

You steal their land and their water,
Destroy their hopes and their dreams,
You break their bones with bloody great stones,
`Cause nobody heeds their screams.

You can lock them up in your prisons,
With no form for legal appeal,
Freeze them and harm them
Hunger and starve them
`Till despair is all that they feel.

Destroy their homes and their culture,
Every dream, every seed that they sow,
Beat them and bruise them and if you can, use them,
They are DIS-POSE-ABLE don’t you know.

Show no mercy for the sick or the hungry,
The dying, the dead or the lame,
No worries about world opinion,
Since no one gives much of a damn.

They’ve been demonised by world leaders,
The press and the “anti-Islam,”
No worries about retribution,
The “Bushies” will keep us from harm.
They lie for us, they die for us,
They will for us, they kill for us
The US, our giant pet lamb.

Make certain they constantly suffer,
That their days are a living hell,
That they’re battered and torn, wish they’d never been born,
With a neighbour like Israel.

By Paul Richter and Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers | Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2008

Two victorious opposition parties may not embrace U.S. anti-militant aims. Some critics fear Washington will interfere on Musharraf’s behalf.

WASHINGTON — The legislative elections that radically reshuffled political power in Pakistan this week also have thrown the Bush administration’s efforts in the country into even deeper disarray.

The election handed new power to two opposition parties that are at best ambivalent about Washington’s chief interest in the South Asian country: the military pursuit of Islamic militants.

And it gave rise to widespread suspicions that U.S. officials are maneuvering to preserve the dwindling power of their chief ally, President Pervez Musharraf. The administration has invested $10 billion in foreign and military aid to Musharraf’s government since 2001, much of it to encourage Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts.

The elections concentrated the country’s parliamentary seats among members of the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated late last year, and the party led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The outcome greatly reduced the influence of Musharraf’s party.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration would continue to deal with Musharraf as president but that it was up to Pakistanis to organize their government.

The White House is viewed in Pakistan as the former general’s chief protector, and Washington’s staunch support for him during six weeks of emergency rule last year, a period widely seen as martial law, is recalled with resentment.

Continued . . .

By Noam Chomsky | Information Clearing House, February 23, 2008

THE US occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. Its December 2007 report of a study of focus groups was uncharacteristically upbeat.

The report concluded that the survey “provides very strong evidence” to refute the common view that “national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible”. On the contrary, the survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups … and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.”

This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results”, Karen deYoung reports in The Washington Post.

The “shared beliefs” were identified in the report. To quote deYoung, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.”

So, according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.

Continued . . .

The Huffington Post, February 22, 2008

By Elizabeth Holtzman

For the first time since the Bush administration took office, three members of the House Judiciary Committee, Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), are calling for hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Richard Cheney.

Their position, while courageous, is not surprising. What is surprising is that it took this long for members of Congress to invoke impeachment, and that even now, they do so against enormous political resistance and cyncial indifference from the media.

No serious student of the Constitution would question that sufficient grounds exist to impeach both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The Constitution provides that an Executive who puts himself above the law and abuses the powers of his office may be impeached, a point confirmed in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, for abuses such as illegal wiretapping.

There is little serious debate about whether Bush administration actions — wiretapping without court approval (violating the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act), authorizing and facilitating mistreatment of detainees (violating US treaties and criminal laws), starting the Iraq war on a basis of lies, exaggerations and misstatements (an abuse of power) — meet the constitutional standard.

Continued . . .

Socialist Worker, February 22, 2008 | Page 16

NICOLE COLSON reports on the worsening crisis that U.S. and NATO forces face in Afghanistan–and the price being paid by the Afghan people.

AFGHANISTAN WAS hit by the worst suicide bombing since 2001 in mid-February, offering further evidence that the “other” U.S. occupation continues to falter–and that growing numbers of ordinary people are paying with their lives in the “war on terror.”

More than 100 people were killed and another 100 injured in the February 17 bombing, which occurred at a crowded festival held on the outskirts of Kandahar, in the southern part of the country.

The next day, a car bombing that was targeted at a Canadian military convoy killed at least 35 civilians and wounded 28 others, including three Canadians, at a crowded market in the town of Spin Boldak, also in southern Afghanistan.

The attacks show that despite the presence of approximately 50,000 foreign troops (26,000 of them from the U.S. and the rest from other NATO countries) and some 140,000 Afghan soldiers, the Taliban have largely regrouped as a fighting force and continue to control many parts of the country.

Continued . . .

swiss.info.ch, Feb. 22, 2008

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) – Three days after stepping down as Cuban leader, Fidel Castro was back in the fray on Friday rebutting U.S. presidential hopefuls who called for political change in Cuba.

Castro said he was “exhausted” by the “days of tension” leading up to his retirement after 49 years in power and needed a holiday, but could not keep silent over the reactions in the United States to his departure announcement on Tuesday.

Castro said in a newspaper article that the reactions to his retirement, including calls for “liberty” in Cuba, forced him to “open fire” again on his ideological enemies.

“I enjoyed seeing the embarrassing position of all the presidential candidates in the United States,” he wrote in a column published by the Communist Party daily Granma.

“One by one, they felt obliged to proclaim their immediate demands of Cuba so as not to risking losing a single vote,” Castro said.

“‘Change, change, change!'” they cried in chorus. I agree, ‘change!’ but in the United States,” he wrote.

Continued . . .

If He Doesn’t Vacate Office, He Should be Charged with Treason

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN | Counterpunch, Feb. 22, 2008

Pervez Musharraf, who usurped power in Pakistan on November 3, 2007 by virtue of his Proclamation of Emergency, refuses to relinquish the office of the President, an office he unlawfully occupies against the will of the people and contrary to the Constitution of Pakistan. This essay argues that if Musharraf does not voluntarily vacate the Presidency, Pakistan’s newly-elected Parliament is authorized to pass an Emergency Bill to capture him, charge him with treason, and prosecute him under Article 6(1) of the Constitution, under which: “Any person who abrogates or attempts or conspires to abrogate, subverts or attempts or conspires to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means shall be guilty of high treason.”

Arresting Pervez Musharraf will establish the sovereignty of the Parliament, fulfill the demands of justice, and restore the rule of law for which the judiciary and lawyers of Pakistan have paid a heavy price. Any compromise with Musharraf that keeps him in office might please foreign constituencies. But it will be lethal for democracy and constitutionality in Pakistan. Any such compromise will encourage future military coups. The time has come for Pakistan to show to the world that a fearless democracy can remove usurpers in a strong but lawful manner.

Incarceration, not Impeachment

Article 47 of the Constitution of Pakistan furnishes a procedure to impeach the President. The President is impeached if he violates the Constitution or engages in gross misconduct. The National Parliament comprised of the Senate and the Assembly investigates the charges. During the investigation, the President has the right to appear before the joint sitting of the two Houses. If, after investigation of the charges, a two-thirds majority of the Parliament passes an impeachment resolution, “the President shall cease to hold office immediately on the passing of the resolution.”

Continued . . .