Peace and Justice Post

Reuters, January 17, 2008

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) – An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally.

The document mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

CTV said the document was part of a course on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats to help them determine whether prisoners they visited abroad had been mistreated.

It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as “forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation.”

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran and Afghanistan, CTV said.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document.

“The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government,” he said.

The mention of Guantanamo Bay is particularly sensitive, since the Canadian government rejects allegations that a citizen may have been mistreated there.

Omar Khadr has been in the facility for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Right groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Ottawa firmly rejects.

A spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy said she was looking into the report. No one was immediately available for comment at the Israeli embassy.

The torture awareness course started after Ottawa was strongly criticised for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

The Independent, January 16, 2008

As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)

By Robert Fisk

Leader and Vassal

By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, January 17, 2008

After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”

To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by “terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded “terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”

Keep reading . . .

The story that the Pentagon presented to the world through the news media a week ago about the naval encounter with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz has now largely unraveled. We now know the following:

– the audio threats that appeared on the Pentagon video were spliced in.

– the Pentagon cannot say where the threats came from.

– it is now almost certain that the audio threats did not come from the Iranian boats. The radio channel on which the threat was picked up is well-known to contain “heckling” by unknown parties. The audio doesn’t have the noise that one would expect if it came from the moving Iranian boats. Farsi speakers and Iranians told the Washington Post the voice did not sound Iranian. (This was all reported last week.)

– it is not true that the U.S. was “about to fire” on the Iranian boats.

– whatever happened, it appears to not have been at all unprecedented in terms of naval encounters between the U.S. and Iran, and the immediate U.S. reaction following the incident suggests it was not initially perceived as being out of the ordinary. (These assertions are documented here.)

Therefore, a reasonable conclusion, based on what we now know, is that this was a manufactured incident, in the sense that the account that the Pentagon presented to the world through the media was significantly false, and they knew or should have known that it was significantly false when they presented it.

Continued . . .

Al Ahram 17-23 January 2008

Although the leader of the rightist opposition in Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, is known for his coldness and disinclination towards praising others, he departed from character when he gave his impression of his meeting with US President George W Bush at dawn last Thursday in Jerusalem. He expressed surprise over Bush’s insistence on putting an end to the “threat” represented by the Iranian nuclear programme — that Israeli strategists say threatens Israel in particular — as well as Bush’s insistence that Israel must strike the Palestinian resistance and “break its back”. “I came out of that meeting more reassured towards Bush’s determination to end the Iranian threat, and comfortable with his pledge to provide a cover for any military activity Israel might undertake in Gaza. If matters were left to this president, he would not allow any Palestinian terrorist to remain alive,” he told Hebrew- language Israeli radio Thursday morning.

Continued . . .

ICSSA

By Abid Ullah Jan | January 16, 2008

The result is that nearly 6-8 million Muslims have been butchered in the decades since the Jewish holocaust – The frequency of genocides has increased over the last two decades – but there is not even a whimper, let alone a standing-up to the modern day fascism and erecting of Muslim holocaust memorials or establishing of museums. May be these are actions that come with realization of guilt after the fact. On the other hand, in the case of Muslims, they are still passing through the age of holocaust. The misperceptions about Muslims are getting even stronger by the day and more and more people are crossing the line into accepting Muslim concentration camps and other inhuman treatments. And Muslim are, by and large, either silent by choice out of fear or by design and ignorance.

Keep reading . . .

Fernand Braudel Center,

Immanuel Wallerstein | Commentary No. 225, Jan. 15, 2008

On December 27, 2007, there were presidential and parliamentary elections in Kenya. The outside world was largely indifferent. Then suddenly the headlines spoke of ethnic violence on a large scale. The Western press spoke of the danger of a “meltdown” and the pervasiveness in Africa of ethnic conflicts. There were urgent appeals for the two opposing leaders to come together and make a compromise. This has not yet happened and is unlikely to happen.What took place? If we start with the immediate situation, it seems rather clear that the opposition party – the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) led by Raila Odinga – swept the parliamentary elections, and the government party – the Party of National Unity (PNU) led by outgoing president Mwai Kibaki – suffered a major defeat. The Vice-President of Kenya and over 20 ministers in the outgoing government were defeated in their parliamentary candidacies. The PNU elected 42 deputies, less than a fifth of the seats and the ODM won 99.

It seemed reasonable to assume that Odinga beat Kibaki in the presidential election. But after three days of counting, the electoral commission asserted that Kibaki had squeaked in. The immediate reaction in Kenya was that Kibaki stole the election. His furtive swearing-in on December 30, his refusal to allow any serious outside mediator to review the situation, the open doubts of international observers all seemed to point to his attempt to create a fait accompli in the hope that the turmoil will die down. Will it?

Continued . . .

Alternet

By Ira Chernus, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 16, 2008.

We’ve got to find a way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.

It’s a presidential campaign like no other. The candidates have been falling all over each other in their rush to declare the depth and sincerity of their religious faith. The pundits have been just as eager to raise questions that seem obvious and important: Should we let religious beliefs influence the making of law and public policy? If so, in what way and to what extent? Those questions, however, assume that candidates bring the subject of faith into the political arena largely to justify — or turn up the heat under — their policy positions. In fact, faith talk often has little to do with candidates’ stands on the issues. There’s something else going on here.

Keep reading . . .

WASHINGTON — Six months after taking over as president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick faced new turmoil on Wednesday over a campaign against corruption in bank lending, with the resignation of the chief of the bank’s antifraud unit.

Bank officials said that despite Mr. Zoellick’s efforts to heal the wounds left from the stormy tenure of his predecessor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the resignation of Suzanne Rich Folsom, Mr. Wolfowitz’s top deputy in his anticorruption campaign, was stirring new bitterness. They said that several of Ms. Folsom’s aides were also resigning.

Mr. Wolfowitz, who had made the battle against corruption a priority, was ousted as bank president last year after the disclosure that he had arranged a pay increase and promotion for his companion, a bank employee, in 2005.

Continued . . .