Peace and Justice Post

Khaleej Times, Feb. 16, 2008

(AP)

GAZA CITY — The eight-month closure of Gaza has created “grim and miserable” conditions that deprive Gazans of their basic dignity, the UN’s top humanitarian affairs official said during a visit, urging that the territory’s borders be reopened.

Later Friday, a mysterious explosion brought down the three-story house of a senior Islamic Jihad activist in a Gaza refugee camp, killing him, his wife, a daughter and three neighbours. Medics said at least 40 people were wounded in the blast, 12 of them critically.

Hamas police said the cause was not clear, while Islamic Jihad blamed an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military denied it carried out an airstrike in the Bureij camp.

The UN official, Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes, toured Gaza’s largest hospital, speaking with dialysis patients and inspecting the neonatal unit, and then visited an industrial zone that once employed 1,800 Palestinians but has been idled by the border closure.

Israel and Egypt severely restricted access to Gaza after the Islamic militants seized the territory by force in June. Since then, only a few dozen trucks carrying food, medicine and other basics have been permitted into Gaza every day, while most exports are banned. The closure has driven up poverty and unemployment, and the UN says some 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.4 million people now get some food aid.

Continued . . .

Herald Sun, Australia, Feb. 15, 2008

Article from: AFP, Feb. 14, 2008

CUBA has demanded the US return Guantanamo Bay to the island nation and denounced the “war on terror” prison, where six detainees could face the death penalty.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque claimed today that suspects held in the US naval base in the southeastern tip of Cuba have been subjected to torture and face unfair legal treatment.

Cuba rejects “the violation of human rights, unjust incarceration of prisoners held there without charges, and their appearance in courts without guarantees and in which they are convicted in advance,” he told reporters.

He did not directly refer to the case of six detainees facing charges that carry the death penalty.

“We demand again the closure of the indecent Guantanamo prison, the return of the territory illegally occupied to our fatherland,” Perez Roque said.

The United States, which has occupied Guantanamo for more than 100 years, signed in 1934 a lease agreement with the Cuban government that could not be altered without agreement by both countries.

Since 1960, a year after it came to power, Fidel Castro’s communist government has refused the annual lease payment of 5000 dollars from the United States.

The US Defence Department announced Monday that military prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against six Al-Qaeda detainees on murder and conspiracy charges in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The Palestine Chronicle, Feb. 11, 2008

By Ron Forthofer

The U.S. corporate mainstream media have done a terrible job covering the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, a catastrophe created by Israeli assassinations, raids and blockade.

Here are a few statements that demonstrate the deliberate creation of the crisis and how dire this situation is. In February 2006 former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s adviser Dov Weissglas shockingly admitted the goal for the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as: “We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die.”

In October 2006 John Dugard, a South African law professor and the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, stated that Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians where life is “intolerable, appalling, tragic” and appears to have thrown away the key.

Earlier this year Dugard called the Israeli government’s actions “serious war crimes” for which its political and military officials should be prosecuted and punished.

In a June 23, 2007 article, Ilan Pappe, a Jewish professor and one of the leading historians of the Middle East, described the situation as genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

These statements were before Israel totally sealed Gaza on Jan. 18, 2008. After this hermetic closure, Karen Koning AbuZayd, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, stated: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would say-encouragement of the international community.”

Continued . . .

[Does not Musharraf thinks himself to be more important than Pakistan or the people of Pakistan??]

David Edwards and Nick Juliano | The Raw Story, February 14, 2008

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made clear that he does not respect western human right standards and would not make a priority of upholding them.

“Pakistan is more important than human rights,” Musharraf said recently during a global economic forum in Sweden. “Human rights serves Pakistan; Pakistan does not serve Human rights.”

A video of Musharraf’s comments was released by Human Rights Watch. He is answering a question from a HRW representative who is questioning widespread reports of human rights abuses in Pakistan.

Musharraf accuses his questioner of trying to impose a “Western Human rights considerations and standards” on Pakistan and seems to argue his country would be thrown into turmoil if it upheld such standards.

“[Human rights] functions in accordance with our environment,” he said. “Now if somebody, whether he’s anybody, is trying to create such anarchy that maybe Pakistan’s integrity is at stake maybe our economy … will collapse. I don’t consider any human rights in such situations. We will deal with it, whatever it costs because Pakistan is more important than human rights.

Continued . . .

Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

Immanuel Wallerstein | Commentary No. 227, Feb. 15, 2008

Except for a hardy band of neo-con optimists and the official apologists of the Bush regime, almost everyone is agreed today that the United States has gotten itself into a nasty, self-wounding mess in Iraq where it is fighting a drawn-out guerrilla war it cannot win. At the same time, a very large number of the critics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, both in the United States and in Europe, repeatedly say that nonetheless the United States cannot just “walk away.” What not walking away means is not very clear, but it seems to mean maintaining U.S. troops and bases in Iraq for a considerable length of time while the United States tries, vainly, to enable the Iraqi government under its tutelage to assert some kind of reasonable control over its territory and restore a modicum of peaceful life to its citizens.

Let us explore why it is said that the United States cannot just “walk away.” There is a long list of supposed consequences that all seem plausible on the surface. One is that it would result in unconstrained civil war in Iraq. This may be true, although many Iraqis feel that they are already living in precisely such a civil war, even with U.S. troops on the scene.

Continued . . .

Consortiumnews.com, Feb 10, 2008

By Morgan Strong

Editor’s Note: When Americans wonder how the arrogant and corrupt Bush family managed to seize so much power for so long, part of the answer is that the electorate lost control of its history during the long Cold War and into a new era of secrecy called “the war on terror.”

Cold War secrecy gave the rich and powerful extraordinary abilities to hide information from the American people, including the unsavory history of the Bush family, as journalist/historian Morgan Strong observes in this guest essay:

To fully understand the present manifestation of the Bush family and its excesses, one must consider its history over several generations, a difficult and painful undertaking since it reveals so much about the self-destructive apathy of the American people.

James Madison wrote passionately in the Federalist Papers that in order for a democracy to function and not descend into a tyranny of the wealthy and the well-connected, the citizenry must stay well informed. In Madison’s view, a democratic society was wholly dependent on an informed citizenry.

Much of the responsibility to inform was placed on the press and the educational system. Indeed, the Founders gave the press the unchallenged right to seek out and publish information under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In recent years, however, the U.S. press has failed in that responsibility dreadfully. Education in this country also has been a dismal failure. But in the end, it is the citizens who bear the principal duty to make themselves informed.

Below, in a bleak and foreboding history, is what occurs when the citizenry is deprived of meaningful information and then fails in its obligation to find out the facts and exercise the critical judgment required for self governance.

The Bushes

In the late 19th Century, Samuel Bush moved to Ohio from Orange, New Jersey, where he had attended the nearby Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. He made the first big move in his manufacturing career as an engineer with Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which produced gun barrels and railroad parts.

Samuel Bush became a confidante of the company’s president, Frank Rockefeller, a brother of the enormously wealthy and powerful John D. Rockefeller, who owned Standard Oil. Another participant in Buckeye Steel was railroad baron E.H. Harriman.

Continued . . .

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers, February 14, 2008

Human Rights Watch said a journalist made the recording during a telephone interview with Attorney General Malik Qayyum when Qayyum took a second call without disconnecting the first, allowing his end of the second conversation to be overheard and recorded.

In the recording, Qayyum, Pakistan’s top legal officer, can be heard advising the caller to accept a ticket he is being offered by an unidentified political party for a seat, Human Rights Watch said.

“They will massively rig to get their own people to win,” Qayyum said, according to a transcript released by Human Rights Watch. “If you get a ticket from these guys, take it.”

Continued . . .

wsws.org

By Jean Shaoul

15 February 2008

Israeli armed forces are engaged in a sustained offensive against the Gaza Strip with the aim of eliminating Hamas’s military and political leadership. Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said Israel should go after Hamas’s political leaders, and not just its gunmen. Israeli defence officials said they were considering stepping up their air strikes to target Hamas political leaders in Gaza.

In another announcement, Defence Minister Ehud Barak ordered the army to prepare for a major operation to end rocket fire from Gaza. Vice premier Haim Ramon said Israel would maintain its blockade on Gaza and reduce supplies of electricity and fuel, tightening once again its grip on Gaza.

Continued . . .

uruknet.info,

John Tirman, E & P

The author commissioned the “Lancet” study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a “hatchet job,” fraudulent or based on innuendo. (February 14, 2008) — (Commentary) One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties. The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious. Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America. This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas, and political vendettas. The upshot is that the American public—and U.S. policy makers, for that matter—are badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort. As an academic interested in the war’s violence, I commissioned a household survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best professionals available—the Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere. Their survey of 1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the first 40 months of the war. The survey was extensively peer reviewed and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006. The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush, during a press conference, called the results “not credible”) and stirred a very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods. By and large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper reports. Continued . . .

Xinhuanet

GAZA, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) — Israeli special forces arrested 30Palestinians in southeast Gaza Strip early Thursday, an Israeli army spokesman said.

The forces infiltrated into area around the destroyed airport at southern Gaza’s Rafah town after midnight and took away 30Palestinians for interrogation in the security operation there, according to the spokesman.

Palestinian residents at the area also confirmed the reports. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli forces arrested 13Palestinians during operations conducted last night, Israeli radio reported.

The radio quoted military sources as saying that most of the detainees were arrested in Hebron and other West Bank cities, adding that they were held for being wanted by the Israeli army. The soldiers also found weapons and ammunition with some of the detainees, according to the radio.