Peace and Justice Post

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, December 22 / 23, 2007

By Andy Worthington

In the last week, while the media’s attention has focused on the release of two Sudanese humanitarian aid workers from Guantánamo, the 13 Afghans who were flown to Kabul at the same time have barely been mentioned. The reasons for this oversight are clear: firstly, because one of the Sudanese ex-detainees, Adel Hamad, a hospital administrator, had become something of a celebrity after his enterprising lawyers posted a video about his case on YouTube, which prompted a group of campaigners to establish a website devoted to his plight; and secondly, because Hamad and his compatriot, Salim Adem, were released on their return, and various reporters were able to meet them.

No such luxuries were reserved for the Afghans. Few of their stories are known at all, and on their return to Afghanistan they were promptly imprisoned in a wing of Pol-i-Charki, Kabul’s main prison, which was recently refurbished by the US authorities. The oversight is disturbing because, for the most part, the stories of the Afghans demonstrate colossal ineptitude on the part of the US military and Special Forces in Afghanistan, at least equivalent to the failures of intelligence that led to the capture of Adel Hamad and Salim Adem. In addition, the imprisonment of these men in a prison wing refurbished by the US authorities raises uncomfortable questions about the role of the US military in Afghanistan, over six years after the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Keep reading . . .

RINF.com, December 22, 2007he CIA has purposely impeded the Sep. 11 Commission’s inquiry by withholding interrogation videos, say the two chairmen of the panel.

The CIA ‘clearly obstructed’ the Commission’s investigation, said Lee H. Hamilton.

“I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong,” said Thomas H. Kean, other Chairman of the Commission.

A CIA spokesman has claimed that the commission staff members never specifically asked for the videos.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelicow, the panel’s former executive director, recounts a meeting on December 2003 between Hamilton and George Tenet, then the director of the agency.

In the meeting, Hamilton told Tenet that the CIA should provide all relevant documents even if the Commission had not specifically asked for them.

According to the memorandum, Tenet in response to Hamilton made no mention of the videotapes of interrogations.

The memorandum reiterates that federal law penalizes anyone who knowingly and willfully withholds or covers up a material fact from a federal inquiry or makes any false statement to investigators.

MHE/RE

The Sunday Times,  December 23, 2007
Andrew Sullivan

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”.

Keep reading . . .

Yahoo News, December 22, 2007

By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer

ROME – The church where the tradition of celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 may have begun was built near a pagan shrine as part of an effort to spread Christianity, a leading Italian scholar says.

Italian archaeologists last month unveiled an underground grotto that they believe ancient Romans revered as the place where a wolf nursed Rome‘s legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.

A few feet from the grotto, or “Lupercale,” the Emperor Constantine built the Basilica of St. Anastasia, where some believe Christmas was first celebrated on Dec. 25.

Constantine ended the frequent waves of anti-Christian persecutions in the Roman empire by making Christianity a lawful religion in 313. He played a key role in unifying the beliefs and practices of the early followers of Jesus.

In 325, he convened the Council of Nicaea, which fixed the dates of important Christian festivals. It opted to mark Christmas, then celebrated at varying dates, on Dec. 25 to coincide with the Roman festival celebrating the birth of the sun god, Andrea Carandini, a professor of archaeology at Rome’s La Sapienza University, told reporters Friday.

The Basilica of St. Anastasia was built as soon as a year after the Nicaean Council. It probably was where Christmas was first marked on Dec. 25, part of broader efforts to link pagan practices to Christian celebrations in the early days of the new religion, Carandini said.

“The church was built to Christianize these pagan places of worship,” he said. “It was normal to put a church near these places to try to ‘save’ them.”

Rome’s archaeological superintendent Angelo Bottini, who did not take part in Carandini’s research, said that hypothesis was “evocative and coherent” and “helps us understand the mechanisms of the passage from paganism to Christianity.”

Bottini and Carandini both said future digs could bolster the link between the shrine and the church if structures belonging to the “Lupercale” are found directly below the basilica.

The Basilica St. Anastasia was the first church to rise not on the ancient city’s outskirts, but on the Palatine Hill, the palatial center of power and religion in imperial Rome, Carandini said. Though little known today, at the time of Constantine it was one of the most important basilicas for Christians in Rome, he said.

The “Lupercale” shrine — named after the “lupa,” Latin for she-wolf — is 52 feet below ground. So far, archaeologists have only been able to see it by inserting probes and cameras that have revealed a vaulted ceiling decorated with colored marble and a white imperial eagle.

Though some experts have expressed doubts that the grotto is in fact the mythological nursery of Romulus and Remus, most archaeologists believe the shrine fits the descriptions found in ancient texts, and plans are being drawn up to excavate the structure further.

——————–

Anthropology & Archaeology

Sat Dec 22, 11:13 AM ET

A view of St. Anastasia Basilica, in Rome, Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007. A recently discovered pagan shrine dedicated to Rome’s founder Romulus and his brother Remus is being linked by some experts to the first celebration of Christmas held on the date that still marks the festivity today. Last month Italian archaeologists unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been worshipped by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the legendary twins. Now, a top Italian scholar believes that a church, the Church of St. Anastasia, built on the site of the shrine, believed to be a few steps away from the church, witnessed the birth of Christmas as we know it, making it a symbolic place in efforts to link pagan practices and Christian celebrations.

(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Online Journal, December 21, 2007

It is obvious who will speak for Israel at the “peace negotiations.” Israel’s elected officials, despite some well-managed contrary rhetoric, will speak for Israel, and probably offer no significant concessions.

Israel’s Vice Premier Haim Ramon has already clarified the future of the negotiations by a statement that circulated in an Associated Press report, Dec, 9, 2007: “Israel intends to hold on to all Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, a position that undercuts the Palestinians’ claim to the eastern part of the city for their future capital.”

Who can speak for Palestine? The West Bank Palestinians are economically and politically separated from their relatives in Gaza, and both operate separately from the Palestinian community in the Diaspora. Hamas is divided. Fatah is divided. The Palestinians have no cohesion to create a unified voice, no power to present a coherent voice, no means to manage a compromising voice. It seems that the Palestinians have no voice, but the appearance is deceiving; the Palestinians have potent voices of international law and international reason. A major problem is they lack active support from an international community that has been negligent in providing the necessary means to implement United Nations (UN) resolutions and mandating accepted international laws.

Continued . . .

Indymedia, UK, December 21, 2007.

Margaret Kimberley | December 21, 2007

“She has become well paid and famous because she demonizes her fellow Muslims.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali first came to fame in the Netherlands, after emigrating there from Somalia. She was elected to the Dutch parliament and became known for criticizing that nation’s Muslim immigrant communities, especially for their treatment of women and girls. The story of a young, pretty, African woman finding success and prestige in a foreign land was tailor made for Hollywood, or for right-wingers looking for the perfect person to excuse government sponsored mass murder.

The fairy tale story is just that. Ayaan Hirsi Ali exults in the lowest depths of self-hatred. She has become well paid and famous because she demonizes her fellow Muslims. As with black Americans or any other group of despised people, the self haters, the Uncle Toms, are given a clear path to fortune and favor.

Ali’s political party soured on their relations with her when it was revealed that she lied in order to enter the Netherlands with refugee status. It turned out that the famous politician was like millions of people from poor countries who will do anything to live in wealthy western nations.

When Ali left the Netherlands to live in the United States, her true ideology came to light. She became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most powerful right-wing think tanks in the nation. Other AEI scholars include John Bolton, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Yoo.

Keep reading . . .

While some US experts doubt Israel’s ability to tackle Iran alone, David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, was quoted by Newsweek as saying that although information on the exact location of Iran’s nuclear facility is incomplete, Israel’s air strike on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility on September 6, widely discussed in foreign media outlets, could be seen as a test run for any future strike on Iran’s facilities, as well as a direct warning to Teheran.

Riedel told the magazine his impression that Israel would venture a strike on Iran on its own was formed before the publication of the joint US intelligence agencies’ report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). “This [the NIE] makes it [a strike on Iran] even more likely,” he said.

Keep reading . . .

My Way, December 21, 2007

By MATT APUZZO

(AP) David Remes, a lawyer who represents a Yemeni national and other detainees, right, walks to the… Full Image

Counterpunch, December 21, 2007

By Jacob G. Hornberger 

Neo-con supporters of the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Iraq are undoubtedly holding their collective breath in the hope that U.S. military forces have finally smashed any further violent opposition to their conquest of Iraq. The attitude would then be, “You see, this shows that we were right after all to invade and occupy Iraq and kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that U.S. soldiers have found mass graves next to a torture center north of Baghdad. In the torture center, chains were attached to blood-spattered walls while a metal bed was attached to an electrical shock system.

Hey, who knows? Maybe the torture center prevented a ticking time bomb from going off? And who’s to say that chains, blood-spattered walls, metal beds, and an electrical shock system really constitute torture? Doesn’t torture depend on each person’s subjective determination of the term?

By the way, wasn’t there torture in Iraq under Saddam Hussein? I wonder if his justifications for torture were different from those employed by those torturing in Iraq today. I wonder if they were different than those employed by current U.S. torturers.

Coninued . . . 

War In Iraq

By Press TV on: 21.12.2007

Putin named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has said that the events of the last years show the great mistake committed by the US when it invaded Iraq.

Russia considered such a decision was wrong from the start, and there is no solid argument now to change our criteria, Putin told Time magazine who named him ‘Person of the Year’ on Wednesday.

The Russian president said the Iraqi people, though a small population, are proud, and took the US-UK military occupation as a particular offense to their country, creating problems never seen in that country before.

Putin said he had differences with US President George W. Bush, particularly his arguments that he cannot set a concrete time limit for withdrawal of foreign troops.

Putin said the best thing to do is remove the troops as soon as possible to leave control with the local authorities.

ABZ/PA