Peace and Justice Post

By Mark A. Goldman

12/02/08 “ICH ” — – If I have my facts straight, Hitler killed only one person in his lifetime: himself. All the other atrocities that are attributed to him were carried out by people who were only following orders.

If it is true that the war in Iraq is illegal, as I and others believe it is—including the Secretary General of the United Nations—then all the deaths and atrocities that have occurred to date, inflicted by our coalition forces, are the acts of individuals who, knowingly or unknowingly, with good intentions or not, have been willing to break the law in order to follow the orders of superiors.

Each member of the US military took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Each also took a pledge to follow the legal orders of the Commander in Chief. Under the Constitution, no soldier is required to follow an illegal order. But that’s what many Americans have been doing now for quite some time. And this is not confined to our military personnel, but also to members of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA (the folks who have been carrying out those illegal wire taps), outsourced contractors, the media, and perhaps most egregious of all— elected members of Congress, who for all intents and purposes, put their conscience and oversight responsibilities on hold as they get their marching orders from the Oval Office or from party leaders.

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The Independent, UK, Feb 12, 2008

By Andrew Gumbel

The United States military announced yesterday that it was bringing death penalty charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other men suspected of orchestrating the September 11 attacks, and intended to try them under the Bush administration’s much-criticised military tribunal system, which is subject only to partial oversight by the civilian appeals system.

The decision to use Mohammed and the others as guinea-pigs in a constitutionally dubious legal proceeding is likely to trigger a firestorm of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world and spark a fractious domestic debate in an already highly charged presidential election year.

Concerns were raised last night of political interference by the White House in the military’s decision to go to trial in the middle of an election campaign in which the Republican frontrunner, John McCain, has made the fight against al-Qa’ida central to his election bid.

Keep reading . . .

After half a dozen years of waterboarding, genital zapping, sleep deprivation and brainwashing, the Pentagon has finally found six patsies who will readily welcome their 72 virgins and take the fall for 9/11, providing debunkers with ample ammunition to dismiss questions about the gaping holes in the official story of the terror attacks.

“Among those held at Guantanamo is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the attack six years ago in which hijacked planes were flown into buildings in New York and Washington. Five others are expected to be named in sworn charges,” reports the Associated Press.

The fact that KSM’s confession included a plan to target the Plaza Bank building in Washington state, which was not founded until 2006, four years after the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind’s arrest, should provide a clue as to the reliability of the “terror mastermind’s” culpability for 9/11.

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 Mother Jones, Feb 12, 2008

By Michael Schwartz 

A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq—and it isn’t the usual violence that Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out. To be sure, it’s rooted in that violence, but this tsunami of misery is social and economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from their homes, tears them from their material possessions, and carries them off from families and communities. It leaves them stranded in hostile towns or foreign countries, with no anchor to resist the moment when the next wave of displacement sweeps over them.

The victims of this human tsunami are called refugees if they wash ashore outside the country or IDPs (“internally displaced persons”) if their landing place is within Iraq’s borders. Either way, they are normally left with no permanent housing, no reliable livelihood, no community support, and no government aid. All the normal social props that support human lives are removed, replaced with…nothing.

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By: Bulov on: 12.02.2008
Source:
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/103963-1/

This Government tortures people, states former President Jimmy Carter, who claims that for the first time in his life, he has seen the United States of America abandoning the upholding of human rights as a mainstay of its policy.

In an interview with CNN this week, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America between 1977 and 1981, declared that far from believing that the Bush Government commits torture, he knows it for certain. Denying the veracity of George Bush’s claim on Thursday that “This Government does not torture people,” he added that “Our country, for the first time in my life, has abandoned the basic principle of human rights. We have said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply for those detained in the prison in Abu Ghraib and in the base at Guantanamo, and we have decided that we can torture prisoners.”

For Jimmy Carter, the influence of Vice President Cheney on foreign affairs in general and over George Bush in particular, has been “disastrous” for the USA.

The declarations of Jimmy Carter, who through the Carter Centre, in its own words, is “committed to advancing human rights and alleviating unnecessary human suffering… creating a world in which every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to enjoy good health and live in peace” has travelled the world promoting human rights, comes at the same moment when Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, has admitted that this Agency used torture against three detainees.

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Published: February 11, 2008 7:30 AM ET

FORT CARSON A Fort Carson soldier who says he was in treatment at Cedar Springs Hospital for bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse was released early and ordered to deploy to the Middle East with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

The 28-year-old specialist spent 31 days in Kuwait and was returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 31 after health care professionals in Kuwait concurred that his symptoms met criteria for bipolar disorder and “some paranoia and possible homicidal tendencies,” according to e-mails obtained by a Denver newspaper.

The soldier, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and because he will seek employment when he leaves the Army, said he checked himself into Cedar Springs on Nov. 9 or Nov. 10 after he attempted suicide while under the influence of alcohol. He said his treatment was supposed to end Dec. 10, but his commanding officers showed up at the hospital Nov. 29 and ordered him to leave.

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Is extraordinary rendition really a “state secret” anymore?

By Maya Harris, ACLU Northern California. Posted February 10, 2008.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of the United Kingdom, was abducted in 2002 by masked men and flown, blindfolded, from Pakistan to Morocco. For 18 months, Mohamed was regularly beaten into unconsciousness by his interrogators. After a scalpel was used to cut into his body, hot, stinging liquid was poured into his wounds.

Mohamed is just one victim of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which the Bush administration has defended openly, yet is now arguing it cannot discuss without endangering national security.

The government is calling for the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit — brought on behalf of Mohamed and four other rendition victims — against the San Jose Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. for its alleged participation in the rendition program. The Bush administration has intervened in the case and is invoking the “state secrets” privilege to avoid accountability for its illegal torture policies. A hearing on the government’s motion was held Feb. 5 in San Jose and we are awaiting a decision.

The “state secrets” privilege has historically been used to exclude discrete pieces of evidence from lawsuits in order to protect national security, not to throw out entire cases. But the Bush administration has begun to misuse the privilege by routinely waving the “state secrets” flag in an effort to quash lawsuits that might expose its illegal conduct. In addition to this case, the “state secrets” claim has been raised in an effort to throw out other torture and illegal wiretapping suits.

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Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2008

Israeli border police take position during a protest against the Israeli wall in the West Bank village of al-Khader, 8 February 2008. (Luay Sababa/MaanImages)

“The next logical step” for the Israeli government “will have to be a decision whether to target the top political leadership” of Hamas. So said an Israeli official quoted in The Jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed the call, arguing that “There’s no difference between those who wear a suicide suit and a diplomat’s suit.” Following a cabinet meeting on 10 February, Israel’s Interior Minister Shimon Sheetrit specifically called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the democratically-elected Hamas prime minister, and added that for good measure “We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map.”

Last September, Yossi Alpher, the co-founder of the European Union-funded publication Bitterlemons, wrote an article advocating “decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and ‘civilian.'” Alpher, a former special adviser to Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak when the latter was prime minister, worried that Israel would “pay a price in terms of international condemnation,” for “targeting legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election,” but that overall it would be well worth it.

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Consortiumnews.com, Feb 10, 2008

By Nat Parry

Only days before the make-or-break “Super Tuesday” primaries, Hillary Clinton dipped into her personal finances to lend her campaign $5 million, a move she kept secret until the day after she had battled Barack Obama to a standstill in the coast-to-coast voting.

If she had disclosed the loan before Super Tuesday, it might not only have generated troubling questions about the financial health of her campaign; it might have focused unwanted attention on the sources of the Clintons’ money.

Unlike other well-to-do politicians, the Clintons did not inherit their wealth or amass a fortune during a prior business career. Just seven years ago, on leaving the White House, the Clintons were millions of dollars in debt due to the costs of fighting legal battles.

Since then, they amassed a personal fortune – now estimated at about $30 million – largely from book contracts and the cachet of a former U.S. President, whose status attracted lucrative business deals and speaking tours, many involving overseas interests.

The proximity between the Clintons’ new-found wealth and Hillary Clinton’s presidential run raised eyebrows over whether the $5 million loan – and any future financial help she might give her campaign – could constitute backdoor financing from benefactors beyond what they could legally donate.

On Feb. 6, Sen. Clinton told reporters that the loan was “my money,” apparently meaning that she was not relying on the funds of her husband or anyone else. A Clinton spokesman later added that the loan was from her “share of their joint resources.”

Since 2001, Sen. Clinton has reported earning $9.9 million from Simon & Shuster for her memoir, Living History, on top of her Senate salary of $169,300 a year.

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