|
Global Research, January 22, 2008
|
|
|
Nato must prepare to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks to ward off the use of weapons of mass destruction by its enemies, a group of former senior military officials has warned.
Calling for a major change to Nato’s approach to defending its members and their interests, the authors of the report, which has been handed to Nato and Pentagon chiefs, said the first-strike use of nuclear weapons was a “indispensable instrument”. The authors of the blueprint for reforming Nato are understood to include Lord Peter Inge, the former British chief of the defence staff and US General John Shalikashvili, the former Nato commander in Europe and chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. “The risk of further proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible,” the report said. “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” The document reportedly includes Lord Inge’s comments on the controversy surrounding nuclear weapons policy: “To tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence.” The report called for a wholesale reform of Nato and a new pack between Nato, the US and the European Union in order to tackle modern military and terrorist threats to the West. It warned the spread of nuclear technology meant there was “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”. Terrorism, political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism were major threats to the West, and organised crime, climate change and migration on a mass scale posed dangers to the way of life of Nato members. The report’s authors also cited the weakening of global alliances, including the United Nations. The authors have proposed major changes to the way Nato operates, including abandoning consensus decision making so fast action can be taken without the threat of vetoes and caveats imposed by some nations. They also called for military action without ratification by the UN in cases where “immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings”. The report was compiled after authors were briefed by senior serving military officials who are unable to speak publicly about their concerns with Nato’s military strategy. The document may be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April. The other three authors are Klaus Naumann, a German former military commander, Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch military official, and Jacques Lanxade, the former French admiral and chief of defence. |
Former senior military officials: “NATO must prepare to launch nuclear attack”
January 23, 2008
Email this article to a friend
Print this articleAmerican pressure thwarts UN censure of Gaza Strip blockade
January 23, 2008Information Clearing House
By Shlomo Shamir and Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondents, and News Agencies
21/01/08 ” Haaretz.” — – -The United Nations Security Council will not approve a resolution condemning Israel over the closure of the Gaza Strip, due to pressure applied by the United States.
The council will instead issue a Presidential Statement on the matter when it meets to discuss the situation in Gaza.
According to a draft of the statement obtained by Haaretz, the Security Council will express “its deep concern about the deterioration of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
“The Security Council also expresses concern in particular about the steep deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, due to the continued closure of all of the Gaza Strip border crossings and the recent decision by the Israeli government to reduce fuel supplies, to cut off electric power, and to prevent the delivery of food and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip,” the draft says.
“The Security Council calls upon Israel to abide by its obligations under international law including humanitarian and human rights law and immediately cease all its illegal measures and practices against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip,” continued the draft statement.
The Emails that Dick Cheney Deleted
January 23, 2008RINF.com, January 22, 2008
Harper’s Magazine
Late last week, right after official White House spokesmen made a series of either evasive or completely false statements about the mysterious case of the vanishing, then reappearing, then perhaps no really vanished White House emails, Henry Waxman and his Oversight Committee announced some of the conclusions they had reached.
Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson published an account of it on Friday in the Washington Post:
The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat. The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).
War in Congo kills 45,000 people each month
January 23, 2008· Decade-long conflict is most deadly since 1945
· Half of dying are small children, survey shows
Chris McGreal in Johannesburg
Wednesday January 23, 2008
The Guardian
Congolese children show off war-themed toys made from clay in a UN refugee camp. Photograph: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP
A decade of fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo is continuing to kill about 45,000 people each month – half of them small children – in the deadliest conflict since the second world war, according to a new survey.
The International Rescue Committee said preventable diseases and starvation aggravated by conflict have claimed 5.4 million lives since the beginning of the second Congo war in 1998, equivalent to the population of Denmark. Although the war officially ended in 2002, malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition continue to claim thousands of lives.
Some Israeli Organizations Call for Urgent Action in Gaza
January 22, 2008| Written by AIC, Bat Tsafon, Gush Shalom, ICAHD, PHR, Women’s Coalition for Peace | |
| Alternative Information Center | Monday, 21 January 2008 | |
Destroyed apartment blocks in the Gaza Strip (AIC archive photo).
We, the Israeli organizations signed below, deplore the decision by the Israeli government to cut off vital supplies of electricity and fuel (and therefore water, since the pumps cannot work), as well as essential foodstuffs, medicines and other humanitarian supplies to the civilian population of Gaza. Such an action constitutes a clear and unequivocal crime against humanity. Prof. John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, called the Israeli government’s actions “serious war crimes” for which its political and military officials should be prosecuted and punished. The killing of more than 40 civilians this past week violates, he said, “the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It also violates one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law that military action must distinguish between military targets and civilian targets.” Indeed, the very legal framework invoked by the Israeli government to carry out this illegal and immoral act—declaring Gaza a “hostile entity” within a “conflict short of war”—has absolutely no standing in international law. We call on the Secretary General of the UN, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, to lead the Security Council to a decisive decision to end the siege on Gaza when it meets in emergency session on Wednesday. We call on the governments of the world, and in particular the American government and the European Parliament, to censure Israel’s actions and, in light of recent attempts to revive the diplomatic process, to end all attacks on civilians, including the continuing demolition of Palestinian homes at an alarming rate. We call upon the Jews of the world in whose name the Israeli government purports to speak, and upon their rabbis and communal leaders in particular, to speak out unequivocally against this offense to the very moral core of Jewish values. And we call upon the peoples of the world to let their officials and leaders know of their repudiation of this cruel, illegal and immoral act—an act that stands out in its cruelty even in an already oppressive Israeli Occupation. We condemn attacks on all civilians, and we acknowledge the suffering of the residents of Sderot. Still, those attacks do not justify the massive disproportionality of Israeli sanctions over a million and half civilians of Gaza, in particular in light of Israel’s oppressive 40-year occupation. Such violations of international law by a government are especially egregious and must be denounced and punished if the very system of human rights and international law is to be preserved. The Israeli government’s decision to punish Gaza’s civilian population, with all the human suffering that entails, constitutes State Terrorism against innocent people. Only when Israeli policy-makers are held accountable for their actions and international law upheld, will a just peace be possible in the Middle East. The Alternative Information Center * Bat Tsafon * Gush Shalom * The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) * Physicians for Human Rights * The Women’s Coalition for Peace |
Philip Agee: US spy turned good
January 22, 2008Green Left online, 19 January 2008
Philip Agee passed away in Cuba on January 7 at the age of 72. He was a former agent for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who broke ranks in 1968 to expose its role in intervening into foreign countries on behalf of US corporate profits. For this act of bravery, his passport was revoked and US pressure saw him expelled from a number of European countries. Marcel Hatch, education coordinator for Cuba Education Tours in Vancouver (http://www.cubafriends.ca) pays tribute.
Born in 1935, Agee joined the CIA as a youth to help “save” the US from global “bad guys”. Over time he came to the conclusion that the real bad guys were the CIA, Washington, and the NY Stock Exchange.
In fact, he decided they were the forces behind most of the real bad guys in Latin America and thus shamelessly outed CIA criminal activities. Having made this discovery as a CIA agent, Agee went on to become the most prominent anti-imperialist whistleblower of the last quarter of the 20th century.
Dr Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
January 22, 2008by Pappe, Ilan Source: Flashpoints
Dr. Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in a speech on the history and ongoing reality of Israel’s colonization program. Broadcast Tuesday, December 25, 2007 on Flashpoints.
Ilan Pappe’s ZSpace Page
Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/ilanpappe No Biography available |
|
 |
Ilan Pappe’s ZNet Articles
|
 |
Ilan Pappe’s AudiosUS Weapons Sales: President Bush Arming Fellow Tyrants Globally
January 22, 2008|
by Sherwood Ross
|
|
|
Global Research, January 19, 2008
|
|
|
“In the last six years, Washington has stepped up its sales and transfers of high-technology weapons, military training, and other military assistance to governments regardless of their respect for human rights, democratic principles, or nonproliferation,” according to a report in the current(Jan.-Feb.) “Arms Control Today,” published online by the Arms Control Association (ACA). “All that matters is that they have pledged their assistance in the global war on terrorism.” You read it right. The Bush regime has been using 9/11 as an excuse for the reckless sale of weapons around the globe, working $16.9 billion in new arms deals in 2006, 41.9 percent of the world’s total. This compares to runners-up Russia, $8.7 billion, and Great Britain, $3.1 billion, writes Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information(CDI), which tracks such data. Despots once banned from getting U.S. weapons and training are being showered with both. “By providing military assistance with a disregard for human rights(HR) conditions, the U.S. is not only giving up the opportunity to use military assistance as leverage to improve (HR conditions), but is also rewarding abusive governments for their unconscionable actions,” Stohl writes. Noting that U.S. aid is growing “at the same time as human rights conditions are worsening,” Stohl cites the example of Ethiopia, “which is carrying out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign within its own borders” and Nepal, whose security forces “opened fire on peaceful strikers and anti-government demonstrations.” Bush is also funneling millions into Uzbekistan, where thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned without due process and many tortured to death. |
|
Email this article to a friend
Print this articleEuropean collusion in Israel’s slow genocide
January 22, 2008Never against!
Counterpunch, January 21, 2008
By Omar Barghouti
The European Union, Israel’s largest trade partner in the world, is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege around Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of kidney dialysis and heart patients, prematurely born babies, and all others dependent on electric power for their very survival.
By freezing fuel and electric power supplies to Gaza, Israel, the occupying power, is essentially guaranteeing that “clean” water — only by name, as Gaza’s water is perhaps the most polluted in the whole region, after decades of Israeli theft and abuse — will not be pumped out and properly distributed to homes and institutions; hospitals will not be able to function adequately, leading to the eventual death of many, particularly the most vulnerable; whatever factories that are still working despite the siege will now be forced to close, pushing the already extremely high unemployment rate even higher; sewage treatment will come to a halt, further polluting Gaza’s precious little water supply; academic institutions and schools will not be able to provide their usual services; and lives of all civilians will be severely disrupted, if not irreversibly damaged. And Europe is apathetically watching.
No light, no heat, no bread: stark reality for the powerless in Gaza
January 22, 2008Besieged civilians pay the price for Israel’s hardline response to rocket attacks
Rory McCarthy in Khan Yunis, Gaza
Tuesday January 22, 2008
The Guardian
A Palestinian boy waits to pump air by hand into his bedbound brother’s lungs in case his respirator cuts out during blackouts. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters
When it opened its doors seven years ago, the European Gaza hospital was one of the biggest foreign investments in the long-troubled Gaza Strip and one of the leading medical centres in the Palestinian territories. Yesterday, the 250-bed hospital was sliding rapidly into crisis, turning away patients for routine operations and struggling to manage emergency cases, as the sole power plant in Gaza halted electricity production after Israel stopped all fuel supplies.
Israel said its closure of the Gaza strip was intended to halt the firing of makeshift rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel.
Yet Israel’s stark new policy has meant no fuel or food aid has come into Gaza since last Thursday. Large parts of the overcrowded strip had no power, leaving it without lights and heating, closing bakeries and forcing hospitals to rely on generators and their own limited fuel reserves. As night fell nearly all Gaza City was in darkness. Simply put, it was “collective punishment,” said the European commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
