Peace and Justice Post

World Socialist Web Site, 19 December 2007

By Bill Van Auken

The Democratic-led US Senate voted by a wide margin Tuesday night to approve $70 billion to continue funding the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, without seeking to impose any conditions or pass any proposals for withdrawing a single soldier from either country. The vote came as the body also approved a $516 billion domestic budget bill passed a day earlier by the House.

With just days to go until Congress begins its holiday recess, the Democratic leadership has once again orchestrated a legislative capitulation to the White House that will ensure that the war in Iraq—which they claim to oppose—continues, while making no major substantive changes in the domestic agenda set by the Bush administration.

The House on Monday passed the domestic spending bill by a comfortable margin of 253 to 154, despite charges by the Republican leadership that the measure contained an excessive amount of “earmarks,” specific funding mandates for pet projects sought by legislators for their home districts.

Continued . . .

The New York Times, December 19, 2007

White House lawyers who were involved in discussions with the C.I.A. on its interrogation videotapes, from left: Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington.

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

 WASHINGTON — At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

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What is religious fundamentalism? Who promotes it? What purpose does it serve? And how to curtail it?

by Rev Richard Skaff

Global Research, December 17, 2007
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A recent report by Jason Leopold a senior editor of truthout, stated that:

‘The Defense Department allegedly provided two fundamentalist Christian organizations exclusive access to several military bases around the country. This access became official sanction for these groups to proselytize amid the ranks, despite the fact that such activities were in violation to federal law. In addition, the evangelical Christian groups have posted detailed instruction guides on their web site that advises their members about tactics to use to win over soldiers, or “Pre-Christians,” to evangelical Christianity when visiting military installations around the country.

The report also added that “according to a week-long investigation by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a government watchdog organization, the evidence it has uncovered proves the pentagon has been engaged in a pattern of widespread evangelizing in violation of clause 3, article IV of the constitution, which forbids a religion test for any position in the federal government, and the Establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Right, which says congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of a religion. Furthermore, individuals representing a specific denomination may only offer spiritual guidance to soldiers and are prohibited from using “the machinery of the state” to proselytize or try to convert members of the military.” (Leopold, 2007).

Religious fundamentalism is a giant movement that stresses a strict attitude, a literal adherence to a set of basic principles, and a literal interpretation of religious books.

History can be compelling and illuminating if people take the time to learn it. However, knowing history has never deterred man from repeating it.

Brief history:

The Anglo-American intelligence services began the infiltration and the financing of Islamic groups in the 60s and 70s starting with the Moslem brotherhood in Egypt, and ending with many others in which they orchestrated and created.

Continued . . .

While the Western propaganda machine primes the public for war on Iran, it is Tel Aviv and Washington that author the worst atrocities, writes Haim Bresheeth

Al-Ahram, Issue No. 875, 13-19 December, 2007

So as the war drums are beating again in the political jungle that “the West” has become, Russia’s Vladimir Putin manages to perceive the danger in this new global hysteria better than more democratic leaders in Europe and the US. His comparison of the sanction- wielders against Iran to “maniacs with razor blades” slashing all about them is apt if somewhat limited; if only we were facing maniacs with razors — those maniacs have every conceivable weapon that man has ever created, including nuclear bombs waiting to be directed at Iranian targets. The fire of this particular, well-orchestrated hysteria was stoked, as usual, in Washington, but the script was written in Tel Aviv, it seems. It is almost a year now since the public campaign for a war on Iran has been launched by Israel, with many of its politicians, generals and pundits hammering the message incessantly — Iran is dangerous because it is about to get nuclear weapons. Well, Israel should know, shouldn’t it?

For more than three decades, Israel has defied the international community, by illegally and covertly producing hundreds of nuclear weapons — reportedly between 300 and 400 devices. For even longer, it has been producing chemical and biological weapons based on research in a secret lab in Nes Ziona, near Tel Aviv. Those facts are no secret — one can find them in any defence publication dealing with the Middle East, and The Sunday Times has brought the story to world readers through the evidence of Israel’s courageous whistle-blower, Mordechai Vanunu. Despite this knowledge, the Western powers are, yet again, hell-bent on a search for weapons of mass destruction where all know they do not exist.

Continued . . .

Information Clearing House
By Ghali Hassan

12/16/07 “ICH” — — The history of trying to obfuscate the truth and distort the image of Iraq has always been the aim of the U.S. aggression against the people of Iraq. There is the added factor now of new breed of ‘journalists’ and ‘bloggers’ ever on the lookout for a story that will tell Westerners all they need to know about Iraq, its problems, dangers, and prospects. Despite all of this, Iraq remains a nation of proud people struggling to liberate themselves from a murderous colonial Occupation.

In a recent interview (“Iraq Doesn’t Exist Anymore”) with the self-described ‘leftists’ blogger Mick Whitney, Nir Rosen made untruthful and unsubstantiated statements regarding the situation on the ground in Iraq and the Occupation of that country by U.S. forces and their collaborators.

Let’s start with the fact. Nir Rosen is an Israeli-American (‘dual loyalty’) citizen of Iranian descent. Before he was recruited for the war on Iraq, Rosen once wrote; “I had dreamed of joining Israel’s elite special forces” to murder defenceless Palestinians and Arabs. Like many of the new breed of journalists who have been drafted into service, Rosen was an embedded ‘reporter’ with U.S. Armoured Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq. Embedded journalism is the antithesis of independent journalism. In embedded journalism, journalists have to serve power and cover-up war crimes. With his “Middle Eastern appearance”, Rosen is the perfect face of U.S. imperialism.

Continued . . .

RINF.COM, December 16, 2007

Gideon Levy

“We have to make you do a little sports,” the Shin Bet interrogator said, launching four successive days of questioning accompanied by brutal physical torture. The result: Luwaii Ashqar can no longer stand on his feet. He sits in his wheelchair, dressed in a fashionable quasi-military suit, super-elegant, new Caterpillar-brand shoes on his paralyzed feet.

“I love this color,” he says about his uniform. “It’s the color of the soldiers who came to arrest me for the interrogation that did all this to me.”

His smile is captivating, his Hebrew rich and incisive. He is a young man whose world fell apart. He entered prison sound of body and mind and emerged a broken man. For four days and four nights nonstop, he says, he was interrogated and subjected to torture of the most brutal kind. The result is the person we see before us in the wheelchair , in the elegant home high in the village of Saida, north of Tul Karm, which was placed at his disposal by a friend after he was released from Israeli prison a month ago.

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Published on Monday, December 17, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

by Medea Benjamin

With only three weeks left until elections on January 8, Pakistan’s President Musharraf is trying to set the stage for free and fair elections by lifting the Emergency Rule he had imposed on November 3. While declared in the name of the war on terror, the 42-day Emergency Rule was used to eviscerate the judiciary by sacking independent judges and replacing them with Musharraf supporters. It was also used to crack down on the press, a press that had become one of the few checks on the military government. It’s hard to consider the upcoming elections as legitimate when two key democratic institutions-the judiciary and the press-have been destroyed.

In the crackdown on the press, Musharraf did not go after the print media, since just a small fraction of Pakistanis read newspapers. Instead he targeted TV and radio stations, closing them down, beating journalists, seizing equipment. To return to the air, the stations had to sign a code of conduct promising not to broadcast anything that “defames or brings into ridicule the head of state or the military.” Most of the stations signed this under duress and resumed broadcasting, but journalists all over the country continue to protest the restrictions and the nation’s Press Clubs have become centers of anti-Musharraf activities.

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The Smirking Chimp, December 17, 2007
by Stephen Lendman

Year end is a good time to look back and reflect on what’s ahead. If past is prologue, however, the outlook isn’t good, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise. Voters last November wanted change but got betrayal from the bipartisan criminal class in Washington. Their attitude shows in an October Reuters/Zogby (RZ) opinion poll with George Bush at 24% that tops Richard Nixon’s worst showing of 25% at his lowest 1974 Watergate point. And if that looks bad, consider Congress with “The Hill” reporting from the same RZ Index that our legislators scored a “staggering 11%, the lowest (congressional) rating in history,” but there’s room yet to hit bottom and a year left to do it. Why not with lawmakers’ consistent voter sellout and failure record that keeps getting worse.

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Blunt assessment delivered as British hand over security to Iraqis
Mona Mahmoud, Maggie O’Kane and Ian Black

The Guardian | Monday December 17, 2007

The full scale of the chaos left behind by British forces in Basra was revealed yesterday as the city’s police chief described a province in the grip of well-armed militias strong enough to overpower security forces and brutal enough to behead women considered not sufficiently Islamic.

As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, marking the end of 4½ years of control in southern Iraq, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. “They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world,” he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.

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Source: ZNet, December 16, 2007

By John Pilger

When Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke recently about his government’s devotion to the United States, “founded on the values we share”, he was echoing his Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, who was preparing to welcome the Saudi dictator to Britain with effusions of “shared values”. The meaning was the same in both cases. The values shared are those of rapacious power and wealth, with democracy and human rights irrelevant, as the bloodbath in Iraq and the suffering of the Palestinians attest, to name only two examples.

The “values we share” are celebrated by a shadowy organisation that has just held its annual conference. This is the British-American Project for the Successor Generation (BAP), set up in 1985 with money from a Philadelphia trust with a long history of supporting right-wing causes. Although the BAP does not publicly acknowledge this origin, the source of its inspiration was a call by President Reagan in 1983 for “successor generations” on both sides of the Atlantic to “work together in the future on defence and security matters”. He made numerous references to “shared values”. Attending this ceremony in the White House Situation Room were the ideologues Rupert Murdoch and the late James Goldsmith.

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