Peace and Justice Post

The Guardian | Friday December 28, 2007

Tariq Ali

Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies – both while she was in office and more recently – are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.

An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order – and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country’s supreme court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.

How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?

Keep reading . . .

Reuters, December 27, 2007

By Augustine Anthony

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by a suicide bomber on Thursday, plunging the nuclear-armed country into one of the worst crises in its 60-year history.

Her death after an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi triggered a wave of violence, especially in her native Sindh province, and was likely to lead to the postponement of January 8 polls meant to return Pakistan to a civilian-led democracy.

Bhutto, 54, had hoped the huge popular following she enjoyed among the Pakistani poor would propel her to power for the third time as prime minister in an election meant to stabilize a country wracked by Islamist violence.

She died in hospital in Rawalpindi, the home of the Pakistan army and the same city where her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 after being deposed by a military coup.

Continued . . . 

WSWS

By Jean Shaoul | 24 December 2007

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Israeli military incursions into Gaza and targeted assassinations of militants have become an almost daily occurrence since last month’s Annapolis summit. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in such attacks.

Attended by representatives of 40 nations, including 16 Arab states, Annapolis was billed as a restart to negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians that would resolve all the core issues involved in the long-running conflict by the end of 2008. But it was little more than a crude attempt by President Bush to provide a cover for the Arab regimes’ support for Washington’s preparations for an assault on Iran.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah president of the Palestinian Authority, was told in no uncertain terms that his task was to ensure the “security of Israel” by crushing all resistance to the occupation and regaining control of Gaza from Hamas. Any future Palestinian state was dependent on whether the United States determined that he had carried out this assignment. Implicit in this ultimatum was the threat that if he was not up to the job, Israel would intervene against Hamas.

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AFP – Thursday, December 27, 2007

ANKARA (AFP) – – Turkey praised the United States on Wednesday for providing intelligence in support of attacks against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, as it confirmed its third such air strike in 10 days.

“Things are going on well at the moment. Intelligence is being shared” between the two NATO allies, Anatolia news agency quoted President Abdullah Gul as saying.

US support “befits our alliance,” Gul said, adding: “Both of us are satisfied. This is how it should be. We could have come to this point earlier.”

But the White House expressed concern to Ankara over the possible escalation of Turkey’s attacks inside Iraq, especially “anything that could lead to … civilian casualties,” spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Wednesday’s air strike was the third against Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq that the military has confirmed since December 16, in addition to a cross-border ground operation.

Continued . . .

Source: Information Clearing House

In case you missed it

No Bravery

A nation blind to their disgrace. Click to view

The Huffington Post

Posted December 26, 2007

PHILIP GIRALGI

Personal accountability has all but disappeared from the American political system. Bill Clinton lied to his entire cabinet about Monica Lewinsky and not a single cabinet member resigned in protest after he was forced to recant. When Alberto Gonzales lied repeatedly during testimony before Congress everyone knew exactly what he was doing but no leading Democrat was willing to impeach him. The hopelessly incompetent Michael Brown was able to resign from FEMA without sanction to “avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission” and later even blamed everyone else for his shortcomings. Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul Bremer were all rewarded for their incompetence, some with medals and some with promotions. Recent resignations from the Bush administration stemming from the massive policy failures of the past seven years have frequently been couched in terms of “wanting to spend more time with my family” though sometimes a bit of candor creeps in a la Trent Lott, who believes it is time to step down and follow the money as a lobbyist. Public Diplomacy Tsarina Karen Hughes arguably plans to do both, returning to Texas to rejoin her family while also cashing in through lucrative speaking engagements. During her two and a half years of Texas-style soccer mom diplomacy at State Department and in spite of a large budget, Hughes only succeeded in increasing the number of foreigners who actively dislike the United States. Never is a resignation from government service framed in terms of “Hey, I screwed up.”

Keep reading . . .

Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.

There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.

And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know – it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture – information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary – and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique – information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.

Keep reading . . .

Havana — Fidel Castro remains on the mend, gaining weight, exercising twice a day and continuing to help make the Cuban government’s top decisions, his brother Raul Castro says.

The island’s acting president gave the first clues about his brother’s health in weeks, saying during a Monday speech that he has a “healthier mentality, full use of his mental faculties with some small physical limitations.”

At 76, Raul is five years younger than his ailing brother, who has not been seen in public since announcing he had undergone emergency intestinal surgery and was stepping down in favour of a provisional government in July 2006.

But the younger Castro said his brother remains a key voice in government and that Communist Party leaders support his re-election to Cuba’s parliament, the National Assembly — a move that could allow Fidel Castro to keep his post as president of the Council of State.

Keep reading . . .

Free and Fair Elections Impossible With Dismantled Judiciary

Source: Human Rights News

(New York, December 19, 2007) – Scores of lawyers, judges and other government critics remain detained in Pakistan despite the lifting of the state of emergency on December 15, Human Rights Watch said today in a new report. President Pervez Musharraf’s dismantling of an independent judiciary and the crackdown on the vocal lawyers’ movement mean free and fair elections, scheduled for January 8, 2008, will be impossible.

The lawyers’ movement had done more in eight months to challenge the pillars of military rule than the political opposition had done in eight years. Ali Dayan Hasan, South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch

The 84-page report, “Destroying Legality: Pakistan’s Crackdown on Lawyers and Judges,” presents eyewitness accounts of police violence, arbitrary arrests, and mistreatment of detained lawyers across Pakistan since November 3, 2007. The report details police beatings of lawyers peacefully protesting government policies from within the grounds of Pakistan’s high courts. It is the most detailed account to date of the November crackdown, showing how Musharraf used the emergency as an excuse to disempower the judiciary, the legal profession and civil society in the name of fighting terrorism and Islamic extremists.

Keep reading . . .