Peace and Justice Post

The Palestinian Center for Detainees’ Studies issued a press release on Monday revealing that Israel is currently holding more than 365 Palestinian children captive in its prisons, including 100 children who are 13-15 years old.

The Center reported that the underage detainees are subjected to harsh treatment and torture and that their continued arrest comes in violation to the International Law and the basic principles of human rights.

The Center also stated that all of the child detainees, currently imprisoned by Israel, were kidnapped by the army since during the Al Aqsa Intifada which started in 2000.

Ahmad Shawahna, head of the center stated, that the Israeli Prison Administration is subjecting the detainees to physical and psychological pressures in addition to threatening them to attack their families if they do not confess to charges filed against them.

Shawahna appealed the International Community to practice pressure on Israel in order to stop its violations against the detainees, especially child detainees, and added that these violations should be labeled as War Crimes.

LewRockwell:com, Feb 5, 2008

by Karen Kwiatkowski

Cheney lives, and he wants more war. According to former CIA officer Phil Giraldi, Cheney remains hard at work fomenting some kind of attack or even war with Iran – and beyond that, he and George W. Bush don’t believe their own CIA’s latest intelligence assessment on Iran, indicating, in short that when it comes to Iran, we have little to fear but fear itself.

It may not matter what George W. Bush believes, or thinks. He defers to Dick on national security matters. But Dick Cheney is apparently determined to make his mark before the election of the next American president, who, if Ron Paul, will immediately work to end our foreign policy fiascos, and if it is one of the remaining Democratic contenders, will slowly and more slowly, hesitantly and more hesitantly, try to begin to withdraw from the Bush wars.

Any new president is bad news for Cheney, who operates without legal, political or moral constraints, and wishes to continue to fight everyone he can in the Middle East and beyond. But the world community and hometown America won’t stomach the selling of yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East so soon. War by accident, to quote a phrase used by Phil Giraldi in his Antiwar.com interview on January 24th, seems to be Cheney’s preferred pathway towards destruction in Iran.

Continued . . .

RINF.com, February 2, 2008

A study of the black box data provided by the government to Pilots for 9/11 Truth has confirmed the previous findings of Scholars for 9/11 Truth that no Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon on 9/11. We have had four lines of proof that no Boeing 757 hit the building, said James Fetzer, founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. This new study by Pilots drives another nail into a coffin of lies told the American people by The 9/11 Commission:The new society, an international organization of pilots and aviation professionals, petitioned the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained its 2002 report on American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 that, according to the official account, hit the ground floor of the Pentagon after it skimmed over the lawn at 500 mph plus, taking out a series of lamp posts in the process. The pilots not only obtained the flight data but created a computer animation to demonstrate what it told them.

Continued . . .

War In Iraq, Feb 5, 2008
By: Mark Glenn on: 05.02.2008

A single undersea fiber-optic cable carrying internet traffic accidentally being cut once in a year’s time is believable. 5 of them however within the span of only a few days resulting in most of the Middle East being left in the informational dark ages cannot be mere happenstance. The odds are too extreme to even contemplate it being anything but a deliberate act of sabotage, and particularly when Israel and US-occupied Iraq happen to be unaffected by it.

As of the moment of this writing, 5 internet cables–buried deep beneath the ocean floor to prevent them being accidentally dredged up by a ships’ anchor–have been cut, preventing most of the Middle East from internet access. The cables provide 90% of the region’s internet service and the countries affected most by this are Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. They have since re-routed to older, slower lines and satellites, but overall internet service is slow and in some cases–particularly Iran, there is no internet service whatsoever.

The lines–originating in southern Europe and then snaking their way southward to north Africa and then eastward through the Suez Canal and then on to India are the communication, commerce and technology lifelines for these nations. In a world where everything is dependent upon the internet, from government operations to financial markets the devastating effect this disruption could have on these nations is easy to see.

In all the media coverage of this event, it was hinted that possibly an anchor from a ship was the guilty culprit. However, shortly thereafter Egypt released a statement to the effect that video footage of the area where the cuts took place showed no surface ship activity for the previous 12 hours and added that these particular lanes are closed to maritime traffic for the express reason of avoiding damage to the cables. Interestingly, none of the stories covering this event mentioned (or even hinted, for that matter) the words ‘foul play’, and this in an age where everything from global warming to bad breath is blamed on Osama Bin Laden and his merry band of Islamic militants.

Besides the everyday issues of news and information services, telephone communications have been severely disrupted and financial markets have suffered as much as a 70% loss in trading activity. It is estimated that the earliest the problem will be fixed is the beginning of the 2nd week in February, as it takes several days for repair ships to reach the areas where the cuts took place.

Continued . . .

AFP – Wednesday, February 6, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – CIA director Michael Hayden for the first time admitted publicly Tuesday that the agency had used “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, in interrogations of three top Al-Qaeda detainees nearly five years ago.

The technique, which critics say is tantamount to torture, was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a time when further catastrophic attacks on the United States were believed to be imminent, Hayden said.

“Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” he told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu Zubaydah. And it was used on Nashiri.”

Mohammed has claimed to be the operational mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Abu Zubaydah is alleged to have been an aide to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. And al-Nashiri is alleged to have been the operational commander of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

All three were initially held and interrogated at secret CIA-run detention centers overseas before being transferred in 2006 to a military-run facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Continued . . .

Consortiumnews.com, February 5, 2008

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry

Editor’s Note: Five years ago, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations Security Council – and the world – to make a case for war that wasn’t true. He falsely claimed that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The importance of Powell’s speech cannot be overstated. It effectively sealed the deal for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, at least as far as the American news media and opinion leaders were concerned.

After Powell’s speech, Consortiumnews.com was one of the few news outlets that wasn’t onboard. We reprised an earlier series about Powell’s real history as a rank opportunist, under the title “Trust Colin Powell?” However, many people did trust Colin Powell and the results have been catastrophic.

On this fifth anniversary of Powell’s speech, we are publishing an excerpt about his testimony from the book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush. The book also contains a chapter on the real history of Colin Powell, but this excerpt concentrates on his fateful speech:

To make his case before the U.N., Bush dispatched the most credible official in his administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell.

By the time Powell was assigned to make the case for war, he counted himself among the growing list of officials nervous about the quality of the WMD intelligence. Indeed, Powell may have been one of the best positioned officials to know that the threat from Iraq was being exaggerated.

Continued . . .

Saad Tawfiq told his handlers that Saddam had shut down wmd program
By Agence France Presse (AFP)

The Daily Star, February 05, 2008

AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 – and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was Powell – Tawfiq’s television was able to receive international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door – waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying – immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows – that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Continued . . .

In These Times, Feb 4, 2008

Neve Gordon 

The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Because of the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators, leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.

Keep reading . . . 

The Independent,  4 February 2008

Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were trapped behind their closed borders again after tasting freedom for 12 days, when Egyptian forces sealed the last of the breaks in the Gaza-Egypt barrier broken down by Hamas militants.

After the metal spikes and barbed wire were in place yesterday, attention turned to how the border crossing would be run, and it appeared unlikely that the Islamic Hamas rulers of Gaza would get what they want — a role for them but none for Israel.

Egypt warned Hamas against trying to open the border by force again, as it did on Jan. 23.

“Egypt is a respected state. Its border cannot be breached and its soldiers should not be lobbed with stones,” said Suleiman Awwad, spokesman for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The border breach temporarily relieved a seven-month blockade, imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas seized Gaza by force in June.

Continued  . . .