Peace and Justice Post

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 12 November 2007

Leading Palestinian and Israeli scholars and activists will be among the speakers at an unprecedented conference to explore a one-state solution, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London on 17-18 November.

Organized by the London One State Group and the SOAS Palestine Society, the conference, “Challenging the Boundaries: A Single State in Israel/Palestine,” will explore new models for a just peace including binationalism, secular democracy, a ‘state of all its citizens’ and federalism.

The London conference comes as prominent politicians including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband have recently warned that the window for implementing a two-state solution is fast closing. Israel has continued to block the establishment of a Palestinian state by accelerating its colonization of the occupied West Bank and tightening its starvation siege of the occupied Gaza Strip, even as Rice makes last ditch efforts to implement a partition.

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Published on Sunday, November 11, 2007 by The Washington Times

 

by Valerie Richardson

DENVER – Antiwar veterans passed out leaflets and carried signs opposing the war in Iraq yesterday after winning a last-minute right to march in this city’s annual Veterans Day parade.About 50 marchers displayed peace signs and banners with messages like “Iraq is Just Vietnam in the Desert,” “Bring Our Troops Home Where They Belong,” and “Bush Lies.”

They were greeted with bursts of applause by some parade-watchers and shouts of criticism by others.

“Go find another parade!” yelled one man.

“Leave your politics at home! This is about veterans, not politics,” shouted Alex Cuellar, who attended the event with his wife and two young children.

He called the eleventh-hour decision to include the antiwar veterans groups in the parade “disgraceful.”

“This is supposed to be for the veterans. It’s not about whether the war was right. The soldiers don’t choose the war,” said Mr. Cuellar.

The United Veterans Council of Denver had excluded the antiwar groups, citing complaints about disruptions during last year’s parade, until the city brokered a deal Friday afternoon allowing Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War to participate.

“We’re happy to be included,” said Frank Bessinger, founder of the Denver chapter of Veterans for Peace. “We’ve asked everyone to keep it respectful. Our intent has never been to disrupt or offend.”

As the marchers passed the reviewing stand, a few parade-watchers asked why they hadn’t displayed an American flag. The marchers carried organizational flags but not the Stars and Stripes.

“They weren’t carrying an American flag and a couple of the veterans standing nearby asked why they weren’t, but they didn’t say anything,” said Jerry Hageman, president of the United Veterans Council of Denver.

Otherwise, Mr. Hageman said, the event was a success. “It went off real well. They [antiwar veterans] did what they said they were going to do,” he said.

In last year’s parade, one antiwar marcher shouted at Sen. Ken Salazar, Colorado Democrat, as they passed the reviewing stand. The marchers also chanted antiwar slogans, resulting in complaints from some parade-watchers.

Mr. Hageman said the antiwar groups were excluded because the city’s rules expressly forbid “politicking and soliciting” by marchers. But city officials agreed to allow the organizations to march after they promised not to “embarrass the city,” said Mr. Bessinger.

Marchers didn’t chant this year, but they did hand out copies of an article criticizing the war in Iraq, cards printed with the Bill of Rights, and postcards that said “Funding the War is Killing Our Troops.”

The parade featured about 3,000 marchers, with the antiwar veterans bringing up the rear. “We’re kind of like Santa Claus, coming at the end,” said Mr. Bessinger.

Denver wasn’t the only municipality wrestling with how to handle antiwar groups. In Boston, Veterans Day organizers struck a deal with Veterans for Peace that allows them to march at the end of the parade. In Long Beach, antiwar veterans were banned from marching in the city’s parade after organizers said they wanted to keep politics out of the event. Long Beach City Attorney Bob Shannon backed parade organizers despite complaints from the groups.

© 2007 The Washington Times

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted November 11, 2007.

Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars. That’s not an accident; it’s policy.

On November 6, the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of the campaign to get the military to take the mental health of America’s vets seriously.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident; it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

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Al-Ahram Weekly, 8-14 November 2007

Only sustained action, not piecemeal and polite entreaty, can help block America’s voracious military-economic machine from devastating the region, writes Azmi Bishara

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A Pentagon general returning to work today after 20 years of retirement would be in for a surprise. Two decades ago his country had just emerged victorious over the international communist order after some 40-odd years of political, cultural, economic and intelligence warfare, which erupted in countless regional conflicts, revolutions and coups in various areas of the globe, and in which his agency had invested all its energies and resources. So he would have set off into his golden years confident that America was safer and more secure now that it had bested what Ronald Reagan had dubbed the “Evil Empire”. His confidence would have been fortified by the fact that the last arms appropriations bill that president had submitted to Congress amounted to a half a trillion dollars in today’s terms, the effect of which was to lure the shattered Soviet economy into another arms race. Imagine that retired general’s surprise, 20 years down the line after his government laid to rest that mortal enemy to freedom and the American way of life, that his president, today, in 2008, has asked Congress to approve a military budget for this era of peace equivalent in actual terms to the size of the 1987 budget, which is to say in the area of $505 billion.

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War In Iraq, November 10, 2007

Paul Icamina – AHN News Writer

Islamabad, Pakistan (AHN) – U.S. military trainers are scheduled to begin arriving early next year to train Pakistanis in battling militants, reflecting an expanded American presence in the volatile country.

Long before President Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of civil liberties, U.S. trainers were ordering equipment and surveying training facilities outside Islamabad.

However, senior military officials have privately voiced concern that the unrest in Pakistan threatens to disrupt the plan’s momentum. Both because of developments in Washington, where members of Congress seek to restrict aid, and in Islamabad, where the emergency rule has focused Pakistan’s military on curbing popular dissent, the Washington Post reports.

The initiative is unprecedented in recognizing Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as one of the U.S. military’s top concerns. The rugged, virtually impenetrable tribal region along the Afghan border is a sanctuary for al-Qaeda fighters and Taliban insurgents. From that area, the militants can stage cross-border attacks into Afghanistan and they can potentially plan strikes elsewhere.

The initial program will last five to seven years and it will cost $75 million to $100 million a year. That includes the cost of trainers, training facilities and light infantry weapons such as machine guns, as well as mortars, body armor, helmets, radios and trucks.

However, the initiative goes beyond security. It also includes a plan to combine efforts by several U.S. and Pakistani agencies to provide economic development, health-care and literacy programs to the area.

The U.S. military depends heavily on Pakistan to facilitate air and ground transit for more than half the fuel and other supplies for the 25,000 U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009116698

Information Clearing House
By Charles Sullivan

11/09/07 “ICH” — – We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, when evil, rather than justice, prevails. The schoolyard is terrorized by thugs and punks with names like Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Robertson, Clinton, Rockefeller, Rice, Rumsfeld, Perle, Kristol and Giuliani—pedigreed people all.

In an inconspicuous corner of the schoolyard, the good people—and they are legion—keep to themselves, afraid. No one wants to be hurt; and the thugs and punks are dangerous, even criminally insane people. They have terrible weapons and criminal gangs who patrol the schoolyard to intimidate and terrorize, looking for those who talk to others; looking for signs of organization and resistance. The good people have witnessed their maiming and killing countless times. They have every reason to be afraid.

An aberration of nature, the blood of the punks and thugs is not red like ours; it is green, the color of money. They have an insatiable thirst for blood—our blood; the blood of all innocents. Blood money is their currency. Through some kind of strange alchemy, they are able to convert blood into money to own the world.

Every aspect of the schoolyard: the church, the Federal Reserve, the banks, the workplace, the corporation, and the militia are under their control. Not only do the thugs and killers have weapons, they have chemical and nuclear weapons, doomsday machines by the dozen. They have no regard for life, human and non-human alike. They are incapable of rational thought guided by just principles. The world, every inch of it, belongs to them. They are its rightful masters, so they think—holding patents on life’s genetic blueprints; gods among mortal beings, without limitations. They are our all knowing superiors and we are their helpless, foolish children tugging anxiously at their pant legs, vying for attention.

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Freed opposition leader makes U-turn over fired lawyers and calls on her supporters to march.
By Peter Beaumont
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer

President Pervez Musharraf began buckling to international pressure yesterday as Pakistan’s attorney-general, Malik Mohammad Qayyum, suggested the state of emergency – announced eight days ago amid his ‘post-modern coup’ against his own regime – could be lifted within a month.

It came as the temporary house arrest imposed on former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, to prevent her from addressing a rally of tens of thousands of her supporters in Rawalpindi on Friday, was also lifted.

The latest concession by the President and chief of the army to the demands of Washington and London, which have been attempting to broker a power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto, comes after Musharraf suggested elections, originally planned for January, would go ahead by 15 February.The reversals came as Bhutto aligned herself for the first time with deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. The move by Musharraf is unlikely to be enough to end days of protests – led by lawyers and journalists – over Musharraf’s purging of the country’s Supreme Court, which had sought to hold the regime accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.

The drama has given the impression of a series of contrived set-piece performances designed to bolster the individual standing of Musharraf and Bhutto. As such it has appeared to diplomats as an increasingly cynical game, divorced from the realities of a country being pulled apart by Islamist extremism, Musharraf’s dictatorial tendencies and the political opportunism of Bhutto.

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Boston Globe, November 10, 2007

Globe Editorial

Pakistani make-believe

THOUGH THE international stakes in Pakistan’s stability are high, that country’s domestic power struggles remain intensely intramural. It is all too easy for foreigners, and even gullible sectors of the Pakistani public, to be fooled by appearances.

A case in point was the high drama yesterday, when twice-removed prime minister Benazir Bhutto declared she would lead a rally of her Pakistan People’s Party against General Pervez Musharraf’s state of emergency. The world saw soldiers preventing the march by surrounding her house with barbed wire and rounding up her party’s activists. The effect was to make Bhutto look like a brave leader of the opposition to military dictatorship.

The reality is less clear-cut.

The parties involved have spoken openly about American sponsorship of a political deal between Musharraf and Bhutto. A complicating factor in their negotiations is that neither one wants to appear to be the pawn or the favorite of Washington.

Consequently, the two sides are fulfilling elements of the deal while insisting they have not been able to come to terms with each other. Musharraf, after all, had corruption charges dropped against Bhutto, enabling her to return from exile. In return, legislators from her Pakistan People’s Party allowed Musharraf to be reelected president last month by the outgoing Parliament, despite a constitutional prohibition against one person simultaneously holding the positions of army chief and president.

The elegance of their unacknowledged understanding is that each still holds a card of great value to the other. Musharraf needs Parliament to accept the legitimacy of his election by the previous federal and provincial assemblies. This is a favor Bhutto may eventually be able and willing to grant. And for Bhutto ever to regain the office she covets, Musharraf will have to undo the constitutional ban prohibiting anyone from serving more than two terms.

The fact that Bhutto was allowed to speak on government television yesterday, denying that she has been talking directly to Musharraf and demanding that he end the state of emergency, suggests that the two sides are continuing to coordinate their actions. She is leaving the door open for Musharraf to remain in power; he is protecting her from suicidal assassins while giving her a platform to appear the people’s democratic champion.

This is a political shadow play. Many Pakistanis know that Bhutto’s family and entourage presided over egregiously corrupt and incompetent governments, and that Musharraf’s military cronies have been placed in key business sinecures from which they control a large swath of Pakistan’s economy.

Amid all this intrigue, the current prime minister, the apolitical former Citibank executive Shaukat Aziz, has fostered stunning economic growth in the last few years, without the corruption of his predecessors. His stewardship comes much closer to the ideals of competence, transparency, and accountability than to Bhutto’s penchant for feudal privilege or Musharraf’s for Napoleonic authoritarianism. Whatever the outcome of the Bhutto-Musharraf shadow play, Pakistan needs the kind of good governance it has had from Aziz.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Guardian, November 8, 2007

By MATTHEW PENNINGTON
Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) – Thousands of black-suited lawyers facing police batons and tear gas to protest the declaration of emergency rule have become Pakistan’s political conscience.

Enraged by President Pervez Musharraf’s assault on independent judges, the legal community has eclipsed discredited opposition parties as the torchbearers for democracy.

The general’s botched attempt to oust Pakistan’s top judge this spring sparked a mass movement against military rule, with lawyers in the vanguard. That put wind in the sails of a defiant Supreme Court, which challenged Musharraf’s dominance and the secret workings of Pakistan’s spy agencies.

Fearing the court would declare his recent presidential election victory illegal, Musharraf finally pulled the plug on its activism on Saturday by suspending the constitution and purging its ranks. Deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, now under house arrest, has urged lawyers to revolt.

“With one stroke of his pen, Musharraf has removed the entire Supreme Court of a country – it’s incredible,” said Nadeem Hasan, one of dozens of lawyers who gather daily in Islamabad’s legal district to protest. “We can’t digest it.”

Continued . . .

Los Angeles Times

A group reports that 88 of 122 Jewish communities in the West Bank are being expanded. Officials do not dispute the findings.

By Richard Boudreaux, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
November 8, 2007

JERUSALEM — Israel is enlarging 88 of its 122 West Bank settlements despite an agreement to halt the spread of Jewish communities in Palestinian territory, the watchdog group Peace Now said Wednesday.

A report by the group, which documented the construction of new homes with aerial photography and on-site visits, heated up the debate here over a key issue for the U.S.-sponsored peace summit planned by year’s end.

Israel wants to keep large blocks of settlements in a final peace accord, but the Palestinians demand the entire West Bank for a future state. Under a 2003 U.S.-backed plan known as the “road map,” Israel agreed to stop the expansion of settlements as a first step toward negotiations on final borders.

During a visit this week to prepare for the summit, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice won renewed pledges from Israel and the Palestinians to abide by the long-ignored road map. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while acknowledging that both sides had failed to live up to the plan, did not say when Israel would move to stop settlement expansion.

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