Peace and Justice Post

US envoy urges Pakistan’s president to lift state of emergency as thousands more are detained

Peter Beaumont in Islamabad
Sunday November 18, 2007
The Observer

The bruises suffered by Hassan Tariq, a senior barrister in Sindh province, extend in large purple patches from his hip to his rib cage. According to his own account, he was beaten with ‘a hard object’ and kicked and punched by officers for refusing to chant slogans in favour of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf.

He was seized on 8 November, but it was five days later when police brought him to the hospital in Nawabshah where doctors found that he had fractured ribs and internal bleeding to his lungs. After the operation to clear his lungs, he discovered the police who had been stationed outside his door had fled, leaving him a free man.

Keep reading . . .

The Times, November 17, 2007

By Philip Webster

Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict.

He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that so damaged him, and was almost certainly one of the factors that contributed to him leaving office sooner than he wanted.

In frank remarks in a BBC documentary, Mr Blair confirmed openly the belief of many of his closest supporters that he never used his position as America’s strongest ally to try to force Mr Bush down the diplomatic rather than the military route.

It was never a “bargaining chip” for him and he was never looking for a way out, he told David Aaronovitch, of The Times, in interviews for The Blair Years. “It was what I believed in, and I still do believe it,” he said.

Keep reading . . .

Information Clearing House

By Paul Craig Roberts

11/14/07 “ICH” — — Experts in the West and ordinary people in Arab lands have understood for many years that the United States does not have an independent policy toward the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter, a man of good will, tried to use American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East. However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while blaming Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a Palestinian state. Israel did not want any such state, because obvious military aggression is necessary in order to steal the territory of an official state with defined borders. It is much easier to steal land from a non-state.

By preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able to continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who have not been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off from schools, hospitals, water, and their olive groves and farmlands. In a recent book, President Carter called the existing situation “apartheid.” Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but some experts consider Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for the continuation of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is testimony to the power of the Israel Lobby.

Keep reading . . .

AFP – Saturday, November 17

CARACAS (AFP) – – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Friday that Spain’s King Juan Carlos apologize for telling him to “shut up” during a summit in Chile last week.

Chavez said Juan Carlos should “offer some type of apology.”

A diplomatic row erupted at the Ibero-American Summit last Saturday when the king told Chavez to “shut up” when the leftist Venezuelan leader called former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar a “fascist.”

“The least I’m entitled to as head of state is that the King of Spain — who is not the king of Latin America — offer some type of apology for attacking me,” Chavez told state-run television VTV.

Chavez claims he neither saw nor heard the king, as he (Chavez) was addressing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at the Ibero-American summit.

“If I had heard him … I would have stared him down like an Indian, because I am an Indian and a little bit black and white,” he said.

Zapatero on Thursday said the king was merely defending him when he intervened at the summit — Chavez interrupted Zapatero’s speech several times before the king told him “why don’t you just shut up.”

The Spanish prime minister said the incident “took on great significance” because television cameras picked it up.

The populist and virulently anti-American Chavez made his comments during the television interview on the eve of a foreign visit that begins on Saturday with the OPEC summit in Riyadh, followed by a trip to Tehran and a visit to Paris for his first meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

albawaba.com, November 14, 2007

Head of Assembly of Experts, Chairman of the Expediency Council and former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Wednesday that a “hellish power” in the region is determined to loot Iran’s rich natural resources by weakening the Islamic Republic of Iran.

According to Irna, Rafsanjani made the remarks in a meeting with a group of people from provincial cities of Saveh and Zarandieh in Markazi province.

“Those who created and brought up terrorist groups to confront the Islamic Revolution, rushed to suppress their own puppets and now they admit that terrorism have engulfed the entire region,” he was quoted as saying.

Given the goals behind the US masterminded greater Middle East plan, he said the plot was to bolster Israel and weaken Iran but this was to no avail, Rafsanjani said. “Devoted Iranian people are the bastion in the campaign against enemies and it is the duty of the officials to be at their services by all means,” Rafsanjani stated.

© 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

Jurist, November 16, 2007

JURIST Guest Columnist Sadaf Aziz of the Lahore University of Management Sciences Faculty of Law in Lahore, Pakistan, says that the government’s use of plainclothes thugs to brutally suppress dissent and protest in the present “emergency” makes it clear that Pakistan’s citizens have been divested of basic rights to the point where they have no obligation to abide “rules” decreed by power….

[complete article]

Asia Times, November 15, 2007

By Jonathan Schell

The journey to the state of emergency just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, General Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global George W Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either 100% with us, or 100% against us.”

The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Abdul Qade Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its “war on terror” turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

Keep reading . . .

By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet. Posted November 16, 2007.

Lying to the people and the Congress was the most despicable violation of the rule of law by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, but many more followed.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. –Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution (emphasis added)

The mainstream Democrats — represented, say, by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd — have not levied war against the United States. Their treason lies instead in committing the second offense: They adhere to enemies of the country, giving them aid and comfort.

The enemies are President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. Like no other president and vice president in history, these men attacked their country.

It was not our geography George Bush and Richard Cheney invaded. Instead they abandoned and subverted the bedrock institution of our constitutional democracy: the rule of law. By word and deed, Mr. Bush repeatedly and arrogantly sets himself above the law, claiming obedience to be a matter of presidential choice. Mr. Cheney orchestrates, coaches, applauds and iterates.

Keep reading . . .