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The U.S. chose to respond to the 9/11 terror attack with war, and violence has intensified worldwide ever since. Under 21st century conditions of growing interconnectedness, spreading individual awareness of events, and spreading individual access to technology, is war a rational foreign policy strategy?
The Nation
Jeremy Scahill | comment | posted December 6, 2007 (December 24, 2007 issue)
Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled “criminal.” Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of “significant tax evasion.” The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces “murderers.” With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.
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It is called the Bombay Hotel but there is no service to speak of.
Indeed, the 8,000 or so Muslim families who live in this flyblown shantytown on the edge of the Gujarati city of Amhedabad make do without running water and regular electricity, never mind such luxuries as bathrooms and medical facilities.
With a widely watched election taking place in Gujarat next week, this shantytown is a crucial backdrop to the contest being played out in one of India’s most restive states, between the ruling right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the centrist Congress Party, the party of Jawaharlal Nehru.
The people living in the Bombay Hotel area rushed there for safety in the aftermath of Gujurat’s 2002 violence during which up to 2,000 people killed and thousands more wounded, most of them Muslims. The attacks were carried out by Hindus, partly in retaliation for an alleged arson attack on a train in which more than 50 Hindu pilgrims were killed. The killings, spread over three months, represent India’s deadliest religious violence since Partition in 1947.
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.
Related
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.
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By Bill Van Auken |
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Global Research, December 5, 2007 |
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President Bush used a White House press conference Tuesday to defend his administration’s policy of aggression towards Iran. He insisted that new findings by US intelligence agencies that Teheran has no active nuclear weapons program would not change his policy in the slightest. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was issued on Monday, reflecting the assessments made by 16 US spy agencies, reversed the conclusion made two years earlier that Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and instead claimed the country had “halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.” It also expressed the opinion that Iran would be unable to produce a nuclear weapon, if it were to attempt to do so, before the year 2015. These findings constitute a damning indictment of the Bush administration’s relentless fear-mongering in relation to an alleged nuclear threat from Iran. They demonstrate that just as in the buildup to the war against Iraq five years ago, the White House has been engaged in a systematic campaign to drag the American people into another war based on lies. |
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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.
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.
Asia Times, December 5, 2007
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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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