Peace and Justice Post

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet. Posted January 29, 2008.

Protesters who re-enacted one of Blackwater’s worst civilian massacres in Iraq got jail time, while the real killers remain free.

Last week in Currituck County, N.C., Superior Court Judge Russell Duke presided over the final step in securing the first criminal conviction stemming from the deadly actions of Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration’s favorite mercenary company. Lest you think you missed some earth-shifting, breaking news, hold on a moment. The “criminals” in question were not the armed thugs who gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded more than 20 others in Baghdad’s Nisour Square last September. They were seven nonviolent activists who had the audacity to stage a demonstration at the gates of Blackwater’s 7,000-acre private military base in North Carolina to protest the actions of mercenaries acting with impunity — and apparent immunity — in their names and those of every American.

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The News International, Wednesday, January 30, 2008

By Rauf Klasra

LONDON: The British media has told President Pervez Musharraf that if he is serious about giving Pakistan a real transition to democracy, then he should heed the timely advice of 100 retired military officers, who now want him to resign, as many of them once “trained the future president”.

This single advice given by a leading British newspaper, the Guardian, sums up the outcome of the four-day long stay of Musharraf in London in his bid to win the hostile British media, public and its think-tanks since he removed judges, detained lawyers, beat the members of civil society, curbed media freedom followed by assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

At the end of Musharraf’s visit to Europe, the British media has come out with its own analysis of the speeches and commitments he made with the European leaders during his eight-day-long trip to four countries.

Prominent among many reviews published on the visit of Musharraf, the Guardian has simply told Musharraf to hear the voices of those who want him to resign.

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World Socialist Web Site, January 30, 2008

By Peter Symonds

The death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto on Sunday at the age of 86 has elicited a stream of tributes from world leaders and in the international press. There is something both disturbing and ominous about praise for a man who was responsible for the murder of at least half a million people in the 1965 coup that brought him to power and the deaths of another 200,000 following the 1975 Indonesian annexation of East Timor.Suharto’s funeral, with full military honours, took place on Monday in the central Javan city of Solo. While he was forced to step down in 1998, the regime that Suharto established remains largely intact, despite its more recent democratic trappings. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, himself a Suharto-era general, presided over the lavish ceremony, hailing the dead dictator as “a loyal fighter, a true soldier and a respected statesman”.

While no prominent US official attended, a White House spokesman announced that President Bush had sent “his condolences to the people of Indonesia on the loss of their former president”. Two of South East Asia’s longstanding autocrats—former Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore’s elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew—flew to Indonesia to pay their last respects to the military strongman.

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Dissident Voice, January 29, 2008

By Lee Salisbury

Creationism seems to be gaining credence far beyond its actual influence in the world of science. Even American presidential candidates, lest they offend the religious right, reject evolution in favor of creationism. Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson and Mit Romney endorse creationism. President George Bush suggests students ought to hear all sides of the argument, as if creationism or its bastard offspring Intelligent Design is a science topic worthy of mention. In spite of the pro-evolution 2006 verdict in Dover, PA, creationists persist seeking to influence and intimidate uninformed school boards in Ohio, Florida, and Texas. This is clearly a culture war with creationist/biblical literalists leading the anti-science, pro-creationist charge.

Creationists usually have two basic assertions: 1) that they are the ones who know true science and 2) that it is they and they alone who are the guardians of true faith in the written and revealed word of their deity. Both are of concern as surely as they are false, but it is the first assertion that we must deal with here.

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Foreign Policy In Focus, January 28, 2008

By Stephen Zunes

President George W Bush announced during his recent Middle East trip that he is formally serving notice to Congress of his administration’s decision to approve the sale of bomb-guidance kits to Saudi Arabia. This announcement follows notification on five other arms deals to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait that are part of a $20 billion package of additional armaments over the next decade to the family dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf emirates announced by President George W. Bush last summer.

At that time, the Bush administration also announced taxpayer-funded military assistance totaling an additional $13 billion over this same period to the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt. Also part of this package is an additional $30 billion worth of sophisticated weaponry bound for Israel.

Altogether, these arms deals represent a major setback for those struggling to promote peace and democracy in that volatile region.

The Democratic-controlled Congress has the authority to block any or all of these proposed sales. It could also refuse to approve the military assistance packages, which altogether total $63 billion. Congress has until February 13 to block the latest portion of the arms package, consisting of 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, valued at $123 million. In addition to these highly advanced satellite-guided bombs, the Bush administration’s proposed arms sales to the Gulf monarchies include sophisticated guided missiles, new naval ships, and upgrades to fighter aircraft for Saudi Arabia and the five other Gulf monarchies.

However, no one among the top House or Senate leadership in either party has yet to come out in opposition to any aspect of the administration’s plans to dangerously escalate the regional arms race.

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The Guardian, January 28, 2008

Diplomatic pressure from the European Union has been credited as being partly responsible for how Israel allowed some deliveries of food, medicine and fuel to Gaza over the past few days.But you would never guess that senior EU officials had been flexing their metaphorical muscles if you saw one particular document distributed to the Brussels press corps.

This was a transcript of a speech given by the European commission’s vice-president, Franco Frattini, during a visit to Israel.

In a week when the UN berated Israel for violating international law by blockading Gaza, it seems extraordinary that Frattini should indulge in some flagrant fawning towards his hosts.

According to his prepared script for a conference entitled Israel at 60: test of endurance, Frattini did not allude once to the blockade imposed on Gaza, even though the UN considers it to be an illegal act of “collective punishment”.

Instead, he insinuated that opponents of Israel in Europe were guilty of antisemitism. “This prejudice, this stance against Israel and Jews, has no place in today’s Europe,” he said.

Read those words again: “This stance against Israel and Jews”.

How can opposition to a country’s government be equated with hostility towards adherents of a religion?

Keep reading . . .

· Controversial works will be secure, says spokeswoman
· Muslim society vows to ignore ‘provocation’
Robert Tait
Wednesday January 30, 2008
The Guardian

Denmark’s national library is to risk re-opening an international political storm by housing the cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad that provoked violent convulsions throughout the Islamic world two years ago.

The royal library in Copenhagen – founded in the 17th century by King Frederik III and home to many historic treasures – has declared the drawings to be of historic value and is trying to acquire them for “preservation purposes”.

The library, widely acknowledged as the most significant in Scandinavia, has agreed to take possession of the caricatures on behalf of the museum of Danish cartoon art, a spokesman told the Art Newspaper.

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When Did Cheney Enter the Underground Bunker?

David Ray Griffin | RINF.com, January 24, 2008

With regard to the morning of 9/11, everyone agrees that at some time after 9:03 (when the South Tower of the World Trade Center was struck) and before 10:00, Vice President Dick Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), sometimes simply called the “bunker,” under the east wing of the White House. Everyone also agrees that, once there, Cheney was in charge—that he was either making decisions or relaying decisions from President Bush. But there is enormous disagreement as to exactly when Cheney entered the PEOC.

According to The 9/11 Commission Report, Cheney arrived “shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58” (The 9/11 Commission Report [henceforth 9/11CR], 40). This official time, however, contradicts almost all previous reports, some of which had him there before 9:20. This difference is important because, if the 9/11 Commission’s time is correct, Cheney was not in charge in the PEOC when the Pentagon was struck, or for most of the period during which United Flight 93 was approaching Washington. But if the reports that have him there by 9:20 are correct, he was in charge in the PEOC all that time.

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By Saul Sadka

28/01/08 “Haaretz ” — — London – Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger has been quoted as calling for Gazans to be transferred to the Sinai Peninsula, to a Palestinian state which he said could be constructed for them in the desert.

In an interview in English with the British weekly The Jewish News, the chief rabbi also said that while peaceable Muslims should be allowed to pray in Jerusalem mosques, they should recognize that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews. Muslims have Mecca and Medina, he was quoted as saying, adding that “you don’t need a third place.”

Metzger called for Britain, the European Union and the United States to assist in the construction of a Palestinian state in Egypt’s Sinai Desert.

According to Metzger, the plan would be to “take all the poor people from Gaza to move them to a wonderful new modern country with trains buses cars, like in Arizona – we are now in a generation where you can take a desert and build a city. This will be a solution for the poor people – they will have a nice county, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace.”

Metzger was quoted as telling the paper that the plan was new and he had not presented it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

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By Daniel Levy, Washington Monthly. Posted January 29, 2008.

Can Israelis ever recover from the self-inflicted damage of becoming a brutal occupier?

Edith Zertal and Akiva Eldar end their exhaustive study of Israeli settlement policy with a poignant question: Is it possible, they wonder, that Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will become a “first step in Israel’s journey of liberating itself from the enslavement to the territories that it occupied in 1967, and which have occupied [it] since then and have brought it to the verge of destruction”? Negotiations that have been set in motion by the Annapolis peace conference in November will likely provide a partial answer. Zertal, a leading Israeli historian, and Eldar, a chief political columnist and a former Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, have recently published Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. It is a detailed history of Israel’s nearly forty-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with a painful contention at its core. The occupation, say Zertal and Eldar, has wounded Israel’s very psyche, damaging both its sense of self and its moral standing in the world. “The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments,” write the authors, “and have brought Israel’s democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss.”

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