Peace and Justice Post

The New York Times, December 7, 2007

By Mark Mazzetti

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

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Letter From U.S. Attorney on Existence of Tapes (pdf)

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Sept. 11 commission releasing its report on July 22, 2004.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A.” and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether agency officials withheld information from Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

Keep reading  . . . 

Counterpunch, December 3, 2007

By STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN

In the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, as many as three and a half million people experience homelessness in a given year (1% of the entire US population or 10% of its poor) and of that, 1.37 million (or 39%) are children under the age of 18.

The total number of billionaires in the world is 793 with 371 of them being in the United States of America, that’s about 322 more than there were 20 years ago.

If it can be said that people with money and power run the world, then 1% of America’s wealthiest and most powerful run America behind a façade of democracy. The façade is coming apart and the true nature of this government is plain to see.

After four years of a useless war, costing Americans their lives and treasury, and enriching the multitude of corporate entities slurping up billions at the Iraqi trough, we have allowed the new robber barons, Bush and his crony capitalist friends to continue conning us out of house and home, our country. Our constitution is in shreds and our economy is about to crash. Don’t let any of the Wall Street freaks try to fool you. They’re as scared as we are.

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The News International, December 6, 2007

ISLAMABAD: Authorities have ordered two US human rights activists out of the country after they held a vigil to protest against the detention of an opposition lawyer, one of the activists said on Wednesday. Security officials picked up the two, Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry, in Lahore on Tuesday and held them for several hours before ordering them to leave the country and releasing them. “They are revoking our visas and instructed us to leave the country today,” Benjamin, an activist from the Code Pinkanti-war group, told Reuters by telephone from Lahore. Benjamin said authorities had given no reason for deporting them: “They said in an emergency, they did not need to give a reason for their actions.” “If they can do this to a US citizen who has all kind of liberties and rights, imagine what they can do to their own people,” she said. “This action shows there is no democracy. There is dictatorship. They wanted to terrorise us.” “In such a situation, you cannot expect a free and fair election,” said Benjamin. She said she would stage protests outside the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Published on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

by Walter Cronkite and David Krieger

The American people no longer support the war in Iraq. The war is being carried on by a stubborn president who, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, does not want to lose. But from the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war that, like the Vietnam War, has diminished respect for America. We believe Mr. Bush would like to drag the war on long enough to hand it off to another president.

The war in Iraq reminds us of the tragedy of the Vietnam War. Both wars began with false assertions by the president to the American people and the Congress. Like Vietnam, the Iraq War has introduced a new vocabulary: “shock and awe,” “mission accomplished,” “the surge.” Like Vietnam, we have destroyed cities in order to save them. It is not a strategy for success.

The Bush administration has attempted to forestall ending the war by putting in more troops, but more troops will not solve the problem. We have lost the hearts and minds of most of the Iraqi people, and victory no longer seems to be even a remote possibility. It is time to end our occupation of Iraq, and bring our troops home.

Keep reading . . .

Asia Times, December 5, 2007

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Wednesday December 5, 2007
The Guardian

US president George Bush speaks during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

President George Bush insisted yesterday that US foreign policy towards Iran will remain unchanged in spite of an American intelligence report confirming the country had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.Bush, at a hastily-organised White House press conference, said: “Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

But a major re-evaluation of policy towards Iran is under way in capitals round the world in light of the report.

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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 3, 2007.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear the next major challenge to Bush’s imperial power grab, AlterNet talks with Michael Ratner, who has been at the center of the battle over the administration’s human rights assault.

This week, the next round in the Bush administration’s epic struggle against 800 years of Anglo-American legal tradition will unfold as the Supreme Court hears the latest in the “Guantanamo cases.” The case will hinge on the question of whether detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base have the right to a day in court to challenge the circumstances of their imprisonment. At issue is the more fundamental matter of whether the president of the United States has the power to detain people indefinitely and without due process under the rubric of a nebulous “war on terror.”

Since the attacks of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights and its president, Michael Ratner, have been at the center of the battle; CCR’s played David to Bush’s Goliath from the very beginning.

Ratner and his colleagues are not new to using the legal system to keep the government in check, nor are they unfamiliar with the controversy that inevitably surrounds that process. The Center, born of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, has been at the forefront of human rights litigation ever since. CCR pursued the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in courts around the world and sued both the first Bush administration in an attempt to stop the Gulf War and the Clinton administration for bombing Kosovo. Ratner served as a special adviser to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president of Haiti who was deposed in a U.S.-supported coup, and won a key war crimes case against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

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Scoop, Monday, 3 December 2007

By Maya Schenwar

Monday’s “declaration of principles” between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki indicates the US will maintain a “long-term” presence in Iraq and involve itself closely in the Iraqi oil trade, backsliding on rules made in this year’s two largest defense laws.

The 2008 Defense Appropriations Act, which Bush signed into law in mid-November, bars the United States from establishing permanent bases in Iraq and from exerting control over Iraqi oil. The 2008 Defense Authorization Act, which has passed the House and Senate and is expected to be sent to the president sometime in the next few weeks, contains similar language.

Under both acts, the US is forbidden “to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq.” Although when Bush approved the Appropriations Act, he released a signing statement exempting himself from several of the law’s provisions, the proscription against permanent bases was not one of them.

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New York Times, December 4, 2007

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, discussed Iran’s nuclear program at the White House.

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

Senator Harry Reid said the assessment was “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric” on Iran.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely to keep its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Keep reading . . .