Peace and Justice Post

Boston.com, January 26, 2008

AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez, Israel’s border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny territory by Israel’s military establishment and want to see an end to the 40-year-old occupation.

Israel’s minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off Gaza’s “infrastructural oxygen” – water, electricity, and fuel – as a response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday, Ramon’s wish came true: Israel’s blockade forced Gaza’s only power plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.

Continued . . .

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, January 26 / 27, 2008

The Blockade of Gaza

By URI AVNERY

It looked like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet – to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place.

The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.

That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.

* * *ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended: It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!

Months ago, the two Ehuds – Barak and Olmert – imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it. Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more, so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip. Last week they made the blockade absolute – no food, no medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity – incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.

Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic. That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily, the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning. Apart from that, the blockade remained total.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.

Continued . . .

RINF.com, January 26, 2008

Rights activists have staged demonstrations in London to denounce Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s ‘human rights abuses’.

The demonstration, organized by human rights group Amnesty International, came on Saturday at Downing Street, prior to a meeting between Musharraf and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday.

“British Prime Minister Gordon Brown should tell visiting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that free and fair elections will be impossible without the full restoration of Pakistan’s judiciary,” said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch.

On November 3, 2007 Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s Constitution, fired much of the country’s senior judges and arrested thousands of opponents, most of whom were eventually released because of international pressure.

“An independent judiciary is vital for people to have an avenue to contest the results of this election conducted in an environment of bias and intimidation,” said Adams.

He urged Brown to press Musharraf to rescind these measures, set up an independent election commission and a neutral caretaker government to oversee elections.

SB/RE

Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the war in Iraq in the Bush administration who became World Bank president only to resign in a pay scandal, was named Thursday as head of a US government advisory panel.

The State Department announced Wolfowitz’s appointment as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s chairman of the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB).

ISAB, the department said, is “a source of independent insight, advice, and innovation on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, political-military issues, and international security and related aspects of public diplomacy.

“The ISAB provides analysis and insight into current issues-of-interest for the secretary on a regular basis,” according to a statement.

Wolfowitz has been serving as a visiting scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies development issues.

Wolfowitz, widely credited with raising Africa’s profile in the World Bank’s lending activities, agreed to leave his post on June 30 in the face of accusations he violated bank rules in arranging a promotion for his girlfriend, a bank employee.

Wolfowitz consistently argued that he had acted in good faith in the matter.

Under President George W. Bush, he served as deputy defense secretary where he was a proponent of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

In his decades of public service, he was also Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, US Ambassador to Indonesia, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs and Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State.

© 2008 Agence France Presse

· Troops were kept in dark about ban on hooding
· Defence secretary promises further inquiry

Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday January 26, 2008
The Guardian

Serious failings in army leadership, planning and training – particularly about treating civilians in an occupied country – led to the abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers, a Ministry of Defence investigation has found.

Soldiers were not told about their obligations under international law or about a specific ban on hooding imposed by the government 36 years ago, said the report by Brigadier Robert Aitken, the army’s director of army personnel strategy. Troops were given “scant” information on how to treat civilian detainees and needed “a better understanding between right and wrong”.

His report, released yesterday, is a severe indictment of the overall failure to plan for the invasion and its aftermath. It was ordered after a string of cases alleging ill-treatment by British troops, notably the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel receptionist, in September 2003.

Continued . . .

RINF.com, January 24, 2008

By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC LICHTBLAU

The Justice Department lawyer who wrote a series of classified legal opinions in 2005 authorizing harsh C.I.A. interrogation techniques was renominated by the White House on Wednesday to a senior department post, a move that was seen as a snub to Senate Democrats who have long opposed his appointment.

The lawyer, Steven G. Bradbury, who has run the department’s Office of Legal Counsel without Senate confirmation for more than two years, has been repeatedly nominated to the job of assistant attorney general for legal counsel.

But the earlier nominations stalled in the Senate because of a dispute with the Justice Department over its failure to provide Congress with copies of legal opinions on a variety of terrorism issues. Under Senate rules that place a time limit on nominations, Mr. Bradbury’s earlier nominations expired.

Late last year, Democrats urged the White House to withdraw Mr. Bradbury’s name once and for all and find a new candidate for the post after it was disclosed in news reports in October that he was the author of classified memorandums that gave approval to harsh interrogation techniques, including head slapping, exposure to cold and simulated drowning, even when used in combination.

Mr. Bradbury’s memorandums were described by Democrats as an effort by the Bush administration to circumvent laws prohibiting torture and to undermine a public legal opinion issued by the Justice Department in 2004 that declared torture to be “abhorrent.”

Continued . . .

10 Die in Mistaken Afghan Firefight

New York Times, January 25, 2008

By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

Shir Ahmad/Reuters
Protesters in Ghazni, south of Kabul, chanted anti-American slogans on Thursday after a search for Taliban left nine Afghan policemen and a civilian dead.

 

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least nine Afghan police officers and a civilian were killed early Thursday in a firefight between American forces and the officers in Ghazni Province, just south of the capital, local officials said.

 

The American forces were searching houses in a village on the outskirts of Ghazni town and blew open the gates of a house, according to local Afghan officials. District police officers heard the explosion and rushed to the scene, suspecting that the Taliban were in the area, but were themselves mistaken for Taliban and shot by the American soldiers, the officials said. Aircraft supporting the operation fired on one of the police cars.

The killings set off protests in the town on Thursday afternoon, and demonstrators blocked the main highway and prevented a government delegation from reaching the town from a nearby airfield, local officials said.

“Another big cruelty was made by American forces this morning,” said Khial Muhammad Hussaini, a member of Parliament from the province who was among the elders and legislators who had traveled to the town to try to calm people and persuade them to reopen the highway.

Zemarai Bashary, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul, confirmed the shooting and called it a “misunderstanding,” but said he had information on only eight deaths.

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