Peace and Justice Post

New Statesman, February 21, 2008

Chris Amis

A scribbled reference to Israel in the margin of a withheld draft of the Iraq dossier is revealed. Chris Ames who has doggedly pursued the government on the issue responds

The Guardian has today revealed the contents of the margin note that the Information Tribunal allowed to be removed when ordering the Foreign Office to publish the John Williams draft of the Iraq dossier.

It reveals that a senior government official or minister suggested at the time of the dossier (September 2002) that Israel had brazenly flouted the UN’s authority in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. A reference to Israel in the margins of the Williams draft is linked to an assertion in the text that Iraq is unique in this respect. It is clear that the author of the reference thought that the same charge might be levelled against Israel.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the witness statement given to the Tribunal by Neil Wigan, Head of the Foreign Office’s Arab, Israel and North Africa Group. He told the Tribunal:

“I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Wigan asserted that the comment would ‘seriously damage Britain’s bilateral relationship with Israel’. He stated that Israel would believe that the FCO had compared it with Saddam Hussein’s regime and that this would confirm its view that elements of the FCO are prejudiced against it.

I attended the Tribunal hearing in December and was aware that Wigan was giving evidence in secret. When the Tribunal issued its decision last month it ordered that the note should be removed from the document, which was finally published on Monday. It also kept secret its reason for doing so, although it stated that it related to the exemption under Section 27 of the Freedom of Information Act, that publication would damage international relations.

When Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, originally blocked my 2005 FOI request for the Williams draft, he made no mention of this exemption, relying instead on the Section 36 exemption relating to government confidentiality.

The Foreign Office has refused to say who wrote the marginal note, saying that it does not comment on leaked documents. It is clear from documents on the Hutton Inquiry website that Straw was one of a small number of people within the Foreign Office who followed the drafting of the dossier at this time. He almost certainly saw the Williams draft, which the FCO described as ‘advice to ministers’.

Labour MP Lynne Jones said: “The Government’s timid refusal to make an accurate reference to Israel’s flouting of UN authority over its WMD shows their lack of objectivity on breaches of international law, which damages our Country’s moral authority.

“The reticence over this issue is mirrored by the unwillingness to push for enforcement of human rights provisions of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”
Plus don’t miss Martin Bright’s analysis The truth is more tawdry than the lies

War In Iraq | By various on: Feb. 20, 2008

(2104 bytes) [c]

Three U.S. soldiers killed in Baghdad-army

Baghdad – Voices of Iraq
Wednesday , 20 /02 /2008 Time 10:13:19

Baghdad, Feb 20, (VOI)- The U.S. army said on Wednesday three service members were killed when their patrol vehicle was struck with a roadside bomb in northwestern Baghdad.

“Three Multi-National Division – Baghdad Soldiers were killed at approximately 10:30 p.m. Feb. 19 when their vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device in northwestern Baghdad,” the U.S. army said in a statement received by Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq- (VOI).
The press release gave no further details.
The deaths bring the number of the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to 3,966, according to statistics released by the U.S. army.
Of this number, 20 U.S. soldiers have been killed so far in February 2008.
November 2004, which witnessed fierce battles between U.S. forces and armed groups in Falluja city, Anbar province, remains the month that saw the highest U.S. death toll with 137.
April 2004 comes second with 135, followed by May 2007 during which 126 U.S. soldiers were killed.
SK

http://www.aswataliraq.info/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=70232&NrIssue=2&NrSection=1

Palestinian Information Center

December 20, 2008

GAZA, (PIC)– The Israeli leftist movement Peace Now reported that the two and a half months since the Annapolis conference had witnessed a big increase in the Zionist settlement activity in occupied eastern Jerusalem compared with the past five years.

Peace Now quoted senior Israeli officials as saying that the IOA would still publish many bids for the construction of thousands of settlement units.

The movement said in its report that since the holding of Annapolis conference last November, the Israeli government had issued many bids for building a number of major settlement projects in eastern Jerusalem including 44 units in Talbiot, 300 units in Har Homa and 50 units in Gilo.

In another context, Dr. Yousef Al-Mansi, the minister of endowments and religious affairs in the caretaker government in Gaza, strongly denounced the PA unconstitutional government in Ramallah for its decision to allow foreigners to purchase Palestinian lands, considering anyone involved in such sale an accomplice in high treason.

Dr. Mansi highlighted that the whole land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment until the day of resurrection and it is not Islamically permissible to sell or relinquish an inch of it.

Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the lawyers’ movement, says the sacked Supreme Court judges must be reinstated © AP

By Andrew Buncombe in Islamabad and Omar Waraich in Lahore

The Independent, Feb. 21, 2008

The US and Britain are pressing Pervez Musharraf’s victorious opponents to drop their demands that he resign as president and that the country’s independent judiciary be restored before forming a government.

In a strategy some Western diplomats admit could badly backfire, the Bush administration has made clear it wishes to continue to support Mr Musharraf even after Monday’s election in which the Pakistani public delivered a resounding rejection of his policies. “[The US] does not want some people pushed out because it would lead to instability. In this case that means Musharraf,” said one Western diplomat.

Officials say the policy is driven by concern about possible instability in the aftermath of the election in which the president’s parliamentary allies were soundly beaten. In such circumstances US and its Western allies are urging the election’s winners – the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N)- to quickly move forward and form a coalition that includes all “moderate” elements.

Continued . . .

The Nation, Feb. 20, 2008
Ross Tuttle

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned in October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior Defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

Continued . . .

Bush’s Life of Constitutional Crime

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | The Counterpunch, Feb. 20, 2008

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.

Continued . . .

• Richard Norton-Taylor
• The Guardian, Thursday February 21 2008

Crowds attending an Israel solidarity rally in Trafalgar Square in 2002. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian.

The document reveals how the Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier. At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN’s authority on weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier was made public this week, but the Foreign Office succeeded before a tribunal in having the handwritten mention of Israel kept secret.

The FO never argued that the information would damage national security. The Guardian has seen the full text and a witness statement from a senior Foreign Office official, who argued behind closed doors that any public mention of the candid reference would seriously damage UK/Israeli relations. In the statement, he reveals that in the past five years there have been 10 substantial incidents and 20 more minor ones relating to Israeli concerns about attitudes to their government within Whitehall.

Continued . . .

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Continued . . .

By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, February 19, 2008

It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime’s lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the “surge” is working.

Launched last year, the “surge” was the extra 20,000-30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.

This claim never made any sense. The extra troops didn’t raise the total number of U.S. soldiers to more than one-third the number every expert has said is necessary in order to successfully occupy Iraq.

The real purpose of the “surge” was to hide another deception. The Bush regime is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack U.S. forces. That’s right, 80,000 members of an “Awakening group,” the “Sons of Iraq,” a newly formed “U.S.-allied security force” consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack U.S. troops. Allegedly, the Sons of Iraq are now at work fighting al-Qaeda.

This is a much cheaper way to fight a war. We can only wonder why Bush didn’t figure it out sooner.

Continued . . .

Four out of every ten people killed or injured by cluster bombs are children, delegates at a major conference on cluster munitions being held in Wellington were told today.

About 560 delegates from 122 countries have converged on Wellington for the conference which aims to draft a treaty text, to be negotiated in Dublin, Ireland, in May.

The attempt to achieve a treaty, known as the Oslo Process, was started last year by New Zealand and six other countries.

Opening the conference, Disarmament Minister Phil Goff said a strong declaration on cluster bombs at the conference would mark a pivotal step in getting the weapons banned.

More than half of the 76 states in the world that stockpile cluster munitions are taking part in the negotiations, along with a majority of the weapon producers.

However, major producers such as the US, Russia, China and Pakistan have not joined the process and have no observers at the conference.

Cluster bombs are built to explode above the ground, releasing thousands of bomblets primed to detonate on impact. But combat statistics show between 10 percent and 40 percent fail to go off and lie primed in the target area to kill and injure civilians.

UNICEF deputy executive director Hilde Frafjord Johnson, speaking on behalf of 14 United Nations entities that form the United Nations Mine Action Team, said the UN wanted cluster bombs banned.

She said the weapons had a horrendous humanitarian, development and human rights impact.

Ms Johnson said the extensive use of cluster munitions in southern Lebanon in 2006 was a tragic reminder of how they caused death and serious injury of civilians.

“Sometimes, the presence of unexploded sub-munitions forced populations out of their homes and prevented those already displaced from returning home to rebuild their lives and communities.”

Ms Johnson spoke of 12-year-old Hassan Hemadi, who in 2006 picked up an object outside his home in southern Lebanon while he was watering the family garden.

“‘I saw a metal object,”‘ Johnson said, quoting Hemadi.

“‘I did not know what it was and so I picked it up. I started playing with the ribbon on the end, twirling it around. Then I don’t know what happened, it exploded. Now I have lost the fingers on my hand.”

Mr Goff urged delegates to tackle difficult areas to come up with a declaration that provided a “solid foundation” for the May negotiations.

“It is now time to put the fence at the top of the cliff, and not simply be the ambulance at the bottom.”

“We need to eliminate the use of cluster munitions where they have an unacceptable effect on civilian populations,” Mr Goff said.

But Amnesty International spokeswoman Margaret Taylor said any declaration that fell short of calling for a complete ban on the destructive weapons would be a failure.

Ms Taylor said cluster bombs, which could be fired, launched or dropped by aircraft or artillery, were more lethal than landmines yet there was no international treaty on their use.

Amnesty opposed the manufacture, stockpiling, transfer and use of cluster munitions.

© 2008 TV 3 News New Zealand