Peace and Justice Post

By Dr Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, 22/02/08

President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.

The fight over the Protect America Act has everything to do with our safety, only not in the way that Bush and McConnell assert.

Bush says the Democrats have put our country more in danger of an attack by letting the Protect America Act lapse. This claim is nonsense. The 30 year old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the executive branch all the power it needs to spy on terrorists.

The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.

To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush’s accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bushs illegal spying.

Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10488458/ when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

Bush pressured telecom companies to break the law in order to enable his illegal spying. In court documents, Joseph P. Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications International, states that his firm was approached more than six months before the September 11, 2001, attacks and asked to participate in a spying operation that Qwest believed to be illegal. When Qwest refused, the Bush administration withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nacchio himself was subsequently indicted for insider trading, sending the message to all telecom companies to cooperate with the Bush regime or else. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/16/former-telcom-ceo-bushs-illegal-spying-began-months-before-911-attacks/

Bush has not been held accountable for the felonies he committed and for leading telecom companies into a life of crime.

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bushs illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.

With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, wont be safe unless Bush is very powerful.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.

Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.

Republicans have used the war on terror to create an unaccountable executive. To prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorial office, it is crucial that Congress cease acquiescing in Bushs grab for powers. As the Founding Fathers warned us, the terrorists we have to fear are the ones in power in Washington.

The al Qaeda terrorists, with whom Bush has been frightening us, have no power to destroy our liberties. Compared to the loss of liberty, a terrorist attack is nothing.

Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

The Independent, UK, Feb. 23, 2008

By Jerome Taylor

British soldiers in Iraq may have tortured, mutilated and executed up to 20 Iraqi detainees four years ago, according to five Iraqi civilians who say they saw the murders.

Lawyers acting for the five men produced a dossier yesterday which alleges the British Army executed the detainees at the Abu Naji military base where they had been taken after a three-hour gun battle near the southern Iraqi town of Majat-al-Kabir in May 2004.

The allegations, which the Ministry of Defence strongly denies, first came to light four weeks after Mehdi Army militia ambushed British troops on a main highway between Baghdad and the southern city of Basra but this is the first time witnesses have come forward with allegations of an execution.

The Army has always claimed 28 gunmen were killed after the ambush which came to be known as the “Battle of Danny Boy” and that 20 bodies and a number of prisoners were taken to the nearby Camp Abu Naji for identification.

Continued . . .

Electronic Intifada: Human Rights

Report, PCHR and Hickman and Rose, 21 February 2008

On 10 January 2002 Israeli bulldozers flattened 59 houses in the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza Strip. Residents fled their homes in heavy rain, most losing all their possessions in the process. Among those made homeless were a number of children who were terrified and traumatized by what happened. It appears that the motive for the destruction was retaliation for an unrelated attack by militants that resulted in the death of four Israeli soldiers. The commanding officer who authorized the demolitions was Major General (Reserve) Doron Almog.

The extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The collective punishment of civilians is also forbidden under the Geneva Conventions. Over the years, many Palestinian civilians have tried to obtain redress, peacefully and lawfully, through the Israeli courts for incidents of this nature. Sadly, the courts have declared these matters to be non-justiciable (itself arguably a further Convention breach).

Continued . . .

MR Zine, Feb. 22, 2008

By Analytical Monthly Review

Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Its February 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed.

In the aftermath of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, many of our friends persuaded themselves that the high tide of the danger of Sangh Parivar-BJP fascism had passed. Regrettably, looking at things early in 2008, that appears to have been an illusion. After the victory of the bloodstained Narendra Modi in the Gujarat assembly election of December 2007 and the BJP victory in assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh, a more lively awareness of the danger of fascism has re-emerged. In the coming year there will be elections in eleven states, and parliamentary elections no later than in early 2009. Without making a fetish of these electoral exercises, it can be safely predicted that they will take the temperature of the more basic disease of fascism in India, a threat far deeper than any one election result or another.

It is no coincidence that the flourishing of fascism has accompanied the establishment of the neoliberal regime at the centre. The India to which neoliberalism has given birth, with one-fifth engaged in consumer excess as never before and four-fifths in deep misery, can only with difficulty persist alongside the maintenance of civil rights, democracy and periodic elections. If the fundamental social question, imperialist capitalism vs. socialism, were ever to be put at the centre of things, the continued existence of the landlord-big business regime that has ruled since independence would be in danger, and a truly explosive situation result.

Continued . . .

Stars and Stripes, Feb. 22, 2008

By Seth Robson

Seth Robson / S&S Spc. Benjamin Stewart, center, leaves the Vilseck Court house after being convicted Wednesday of missing movement. He received a six-month prison term and a bad-conduct discharge.

VILSECK, Germany — A soldier who refused to deploy with his unit to Iraq because of a “deeply held personal belief” that he should not take a human life will spend the next six months in jail before being thrown out of the Army.

Spc. Benjamin Stewart, 25, of the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, pleaded guilty Wednesday to missing movement on Jan. 7, 2008, when he was scheduled to deploy to Iraq. Stewart had already been convicted — and reduced in rank from sergeant to specialist — of being absent without leave when the bulk of the regiment deployed last summer.

Stewart told the court that he refused to deploy because of what he experienced during his last deployment to Mosul, Iraq, from 2004 to 2005.

“I saw a mother and her infant child get killed in crossfire. I saw children lose their limbs in a car bomb. One boy lost an arm and another lost both legs,” he said.

After that mission, Stewart said, he decided he could not deploy again.

“I’m not a pacifist or peacenik or against the war in Iraq. From the beginning, I believe the war was justified, (but) I could not live with myself if I killed another person,” he said.

Continued . . .

The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2008

By Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON — American officials reached a quiet understanding with Pakistan’s leader last month to intensify secret strikes against suspected terrorists by pilotless aircraft launched in Pakistan, senior officials in both governments say. But the prospect of changes in Pakistan’s government has the Bush administration worried that the new operations could be curtailed.

Among other things, the new arrangements allowed an increase in the number and scope of patrols and strikes by armed Predator surveillance aircraft launched from a secret base in Pakistan — a far more aggressive strategy to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban than had existed before.

But since opposition parties emerged victorious from the parliamentary election early this week, American officials are worried that the new, more permissive arrangement could be choked off in its infancy.

In the weeks before Monday’s election, a series of meetings among President Bush’s national security advisers resulted in a significant relaxation of the rules under which American forces could aim attacks at suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the tribal areas near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

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Haaretz.com, Feb. 21, 2008-02-22

By Amira Haas

Not long ago the greengrocer in Ramallah recalled – between weighing locally grown zucchini and stripped hyssop leaves – that his family owns the land on which the gas station at the old entrance to the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank is located. He would not be surprised by the figure that the Peace Now movement has succeeded in officially extracting from the defense establishment, after more than a year of fighting for the freedom of information: About one-third of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank (44 out of 120) were built on privately owned Palestinian land that was seized, by means of confiscation orders, for “security needs.”

From the data it emerges that at least 19 of the 44 settlements were built on private land, even after prime minister Menachem Begin decided in 1979 that the construction and expansion of settlements would take place only on state-owned land.

Peace Now has revealed here another act of hypocrisy, even though the Supreme Court is no longer impressed even by this: It did, after all, legitimize the construction of the settlement of Matityahu on land owned by inhabitants of Bil’in.

Continued . . .

War In Iraq
By: RIA Novosti on: 21.02.2008

MINSK, February 21 (RIA Novosti) – The Belarusian defense minister accused the United States on Thursday of using the destruction of a defunct NASA satellite to test a new space weapon.

An SM-3 missile fired at 3:26 a.m. GMT this morning from the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, hit the bus-sized satellite about 247 kilometers (133 nautical miles) above the ocean to the northwest of Hawaii.

“The cruiser that launched the missile has participated in a number of missile tests, and here they have got a perfect opportunity to conduct a real launch,” Leonid Maltsev said. “Any military commander would have used such an opportunity.”

The satellite was launched in 2006 and malfunctioned almost immediately. On board was around 1,000 pounds of propellant fuel (hydrazine), a hazardous material.

President George W. Bush had authorized the destruction of the satellite using a sea-to-air missile “to mitigate the risk to human lives by engaging the nonfunctioning satellite.”

Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news conference in the Pentagon earlier today that the missile hit the disabled spy satellite, sending it falling to Earth, but said he couldn’t rule out that hazardous material would also fall to the Earth.

“We’re very confident that we hit the satellite. We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank,” he said, adding that it could take at least another 24 hours to know for sure that the tank containing toxic fuel had been destroyed.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday it would closely monitor the consequences of the operation.

“We will study the results of this operation,” Col.-Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy Air Force commander said. “The satellite’s trajectory was far from Russia and the Russian Federation was not threatened by the hit.”

http://en.rian.ru/world/20080221/99798634.html

Reuters

David Miliband told MPs that two CIA flights landed at the RAF air base on Diego Garcia (above)

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor

The Independent, February 22, 2008

A British territory in the Indian Ocean was used for American “torture” flights, despite categorical denials of Britain’s involvement from both Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the Government admitted yesterday.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, had to make a humiliating apology to the Commons after it emerged that the US failed to tell British officials that two CIA rendition flights carrying suspected terrorists landed on the island of Diego Garcia in 2002. Six years on, one of the suspects is still being held by the US at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The other has been released.

Mr Miliband denied there was a deliberate cover-up and said he believed the US had acted “in good faith”. However, Gordon Brown, attending an EU summit in Brussels, expressed his “disappointment” and said Washington’s failure to disclose the flights earlier was “a very serious issue”.

Continued . . .