Peace and Justice Post

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.

Multimedia

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.”

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 Monthly Review, November 2007

By Samir Amin

All the currents that claim adherence to political Islam proclaim the “specificity of Islam.” According to them, Islam knows nothing of the separation between politics and religion, something supposedly distinctive of Christianity. It would accomplish nothing to remind them, as I have done, that their remarks reproduce, almost word for word, what European reactionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (such as Bonald and de Maistre) said to condemn the rupture that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had produced in the history of the Christian West!

On the basis of this position, every current of political Islam chooses to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture—but “culture” reduced in actual fact to the conventional affirmation of belonging to a particular religion. In reality, the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothing but works of charity and means for indoctrination. They are not means of support for the struggles of the popular classes against the system responsible for their poverty.

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The Bush administration has offered the former World Bank president a new public service position.

By Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK

Dec 10, 2007 Issue

Don’t ever say the Bush administration doesn’t take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he’s in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. “We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job,” said one senior official.

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By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted November 26, 2007.

For decades, the Bush family has operated above the law, using powerful connections to brush aside evidence that would put lesser Americans in the slammer.

In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.

When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.

If there’s any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it’s their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light.

For decades — arguably going back generations — the Bushes have been protected by their unique position straddling two centers of national power, the family’s blueblood Eastern Establishment ties and the Texas oil crowd with strong links to the Republican Right. [For details on this family phenomenon, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

This reality was underscored again by how major news outlets and the right-wing press reacted to a new piece of evidence implicating George W. Bush in a criminal cover-up in the “Plame-gate” scandal.

Though the evidence is now overwhelming that President Bush was part of a White House cabal that leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA officer and then covered up the facts, major newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to pooh-pooh this extraordinary scandal.

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Middle East Times, December 3, 2007

EDITORIAL: One important but little-noticed feature of the Annapolis talks was that the Quartet of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations no longer seems to have much of a role. The Americans have taken over.

“The United States will monitor and judge the fulfillment of the commitment of both sides of the road map,” says the joint Israeli-Palestinian document committing them to pursue a peace deal by the end of next year. Note that potent word, “judge.””And note also that while excluding the Russians may be difficult, and excluding the U.N. may be foolish, excluding the EU could carry serious financial consequences.

The EU has long been the main financial supporter for the Palestinians. In 2007, the EU and its 27 member nations gave almost $1.5 billion in mostly humanitarian aid. To help make the Annapolis process work, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the EU should be prepared to raise another $500 million for job-creation projects. But will it?

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Published on Saturday, December 1, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

by Christopher Brauchli

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.
– Samuel Johnson

Mr. Bush is not disappointed in them. Quite the contrary. He’s envious. Although sharing their goals, he is far less successful than they. They have shown how democracy works in an ideal world. Mr. Bush, of course, has the misfortune to be the President of the United States that is not an ideal democracy notwithstanding his efforts to make it so.

On November 21 Mr. Bush gave ABC news an interview during the course of which Perez Musharraf’s name came up. Describing Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Bush said that he “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.” According to reports, the reporter interviewing Mr. Bush asked if there was any line Mr. Musharraf should not cross to which Mr. Bush said: “He hasn’t crossed the line. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that he will cross any lines.” Mr. Bush went on to say that it was a good sign that on the same day he was being interviewed Mr. Musharraf had released thousands of people from jail. (The reporter could have asked Mr. Bush if it was so good for Mr. Musharraf. to release people from jail why Mr. Bush didn’t follow his lead and let some folks out of Guantanamo who have no business being there. He might have gone so far as to point out to Mr. Bush that releasing people from jail who should not be in jail was not half as good for democracy as the act of putting them in jail was bad for democracy.

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Axis of Logic, November 27, 2007

Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight and mount instead a diplomatic assault?

– Leonard Fein, Forward
November 7, 2007

IntroductionAs the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, opposing a new Middle East War. While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig, November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict, attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a more stringent and accurate assessment pits the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate.

There is a great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they concern the future of the United States.

Continued . . .