Peace and Justice Post

UK Independent,

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

Published: 27 October 2007

An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are “enemy combatants”.

The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as “unconscionable”.

His critique will be the centrepiece of a hearing on 5 December before the US Supreme Court when another attempt is made to shut the prison down. So nervous is the Bush administration of the latest attack – and another Supreme Court ruling against it – that it is preparing a whole new system of military courts to deal with those still imprisoned.

Continued . . .

AFP – Monday, October 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding “fuel to the fire” with recent bellicose rhetoric.

“We haven’t received any information there is a parallel, ongoing, active nuclear weapon program,” the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency told CNN.

“Second, even if Iran were to be working on nuclear weapons … they are at least (a) few years away from having such weapon,” he said, citing Washington’s own intelligence assessments.

“My fear (is) that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. The Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire.”

Continued . . .

Gulf Daily News

LONDON: Former US secretary of state Colin Powell expressed surprise at former British premier Tony Blair’s strong support for President George W Bush over the Iraq war, according to book extracts published in the Mail yesterday.

Powell said he and Britain’s former foreign secretary Jack Straw would “get (Blair) all pumped up” to talk to Bush about certain issues in the run-up to the 2003 conflict, but Blair would “lose his steam” when he saw Bush.

The comments are quoted in Blair Unbound, a new book by Anthony Seldon, a respected political commentator and biographer of Blair, which is being serialised in the newspaper.

Powell went on to express surprise at the strength of the “special relationship” between Blair and Bush over the issue.

“In the end, Blair would always support the president,” he said.

“I found this very surprising. I never really understood why Blair seemed to be in such harmony with Bush.

“I thought, well, the Brits haven’t been attacked on 9/11. How did he reach the point that he sees Saddam as such a threat?

The book said officials including Britain’s former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer tried to tell Blair’s advisers that “what is needed is a plain-speaking conversation” over Iraq.

Source: This Can’t Be Happening, October 23, 2007

By  David LindorffThe Democratic Party in Congress, and indeed the leading candidates for the party’s presidential nomination, are all dead men and women walking.

They look alive. They may even think they’re alive. But their political futures are close to moribund.

Faced with grave moral issues–a criminal and unpopular war that is costing the country the lives of thousands of its young people, and hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a president who treats the Constitution like so much toiletpaper, and an economy that is being hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin, these Democrats are doing nothing.

Repeatedly offered chances to stand up and act, they have ducked each time instead. Twice already, President Bush, himself backed by only one in four Americans today (a lower level of public support than even Nixon had after his resignation in disgrace following the impeachment vote against him by the House Judiciary Committee) has come to Congress requesting another more than $100 billion in funding for his war in Iraq, and Congress has rolled over and given it to him.

Keep reading . . . 

Source: War in Context

By Gidi Weitz and Na’ama Lanski, Haaretz, October 25, 2007

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — While George Bush warns the world that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons could lead to World War III, Israel’s foreign minister says, behind closed doors — in other words in a situation where she means what she says — that Iranian nuclear weapons would not pose an existential threat to Israel.

This should be banner headline news. The Washington press corp should be hounding administration officials, demanding an explanation for this utterly glaring clash of perspectives. Instead, what do we get? Silence.

This is what things have come down to: We live in a state where the dissemination of information is controlled much more efficiently than it was in the Soviet Union. At least the Russians understood they were being lied to. Most Americans, on the other hand, are completely ignorant of the incestuous relationship between the press and the government. In this system shaped by unspoken agreements, there is no need for some clumsy Ministry of Information. All the managing editors of the major outlets can be relied upon to shape their products (within an acceptable latitude) in alignment with political and commercial power — even when that means that they knowingly makes themselves instruments of an altogether avoidable disaster. They will plead that they are merely messengers, yet they are no less culpable than the lunatics in political office. They choose what to report and what to ignore.

The nation, October 26, 2007

By Esther Kaplan 

In the past few years, the students and faculty of Columbia University have found themselves in the midst of a culture war. They’ve seen their Middle East Studies department targeted as “anti-Israel” by one right-wing organization, the David Project. Two assistant professors, Joseph Massad and Nadia Abu El-Haj, were publicly smeared by another right-wing outfit, Campus Watch, as they underwent tenure review (see “The New McCarthyism” by Larry Cohler-Esses). And at the start of this school year their own president, Lee Bollinger, seemed to pander to this right-wing pressure by slamming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the name of “the modern civilized world.”

This week they’ve got David Horowitz, of the modestly named David Horowitz Freedom Center, best known in recent years for his ads in campus papers opposing slavery reparations, in which he argued that there is no evidence that the legacy of slavery has harmed any living African-American and demanded “the gratitude of black America” for the white Christians who “created” the antislavery movement. Now he’s here to teach them about “Islamofascism.”

His “Islamofascism Awareness Week” descended this week on dozens of college campuses across the country (he claims more than 100) with vigils here, sit-ins there and scattered forums featuring “aware” individuals such as former Senator Rick Santorum. But Columbia has been showered with special largesse: an entire week of activities, kicked off by a candlelight vigil on Monday, where a dozen or so College Republicans remembered “the untold millions who suffer under tyrannical Islamic regimes” and closing on Friday at noon with a speech by Horowitz himself (Columbia College class of ’59).

Keep reading . . . 

UK business interests in Burma are more important to this government than justice

John Pilger
Saturday October 27, 2007
The Guardian

The news is no more from Burma. The young monks are quiet in their cells, or they are dead. But words have escaped: the defiant, beautiful poetry of Aung Than and Zeya Aung; and we know of the unbroken will of the journalist U Win Tin, who makes ink out of brick powder on the walls of his prison cell and writes with a pen made from a bamboo mat – at the age of 77. These are the bravest of the brave. What shame they bring to those in the west whose hypocrisy and silence helps to feed the monster that rules Burma.

Condoleezza Rice comes to mind. “The United States,” she said, “is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma.” What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma’s offshore oilfields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labour and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice-President Cheney was chief executive.

Keep reading . . . 

t r u t h o u t | Perspective, Tuesday 23 October 2007
By J. Sri Raman

Mahatma Gandhi, the foremost symbol of India’s freedom struggle, has died several deaths. He has met his martyrdom again, every time India and Indians departed from the path of peace and equitable progress. The most painful illustration, perhaps, came when the country was proclaimed a nuclear-weapon power in 1998. Not a very distant second, to many, would be Narendra Modi’s declaration the other day that he was a devout disciple of Gandhi.

The comical absurdity of the claim should be obvious. The Mahatma fell to a fanatic’s bullet in 1948 while fighting for interreligious harmony, while Modi rose to his full stature after presiding over a grisly pogrom against the Muslim minority in the State of Gujarat in 2002. Obvious, too, to Indian observers, was the motive behind Modi’s metamorphosis. All were quick to see an electoral compulsion in his attempted new avatar.

Gujarat is going to only State-level polls, scheduled for December 11 and 16. But the elections, which will decide Gujarat’s political dispensation for the next five years, are of much wider interest – national and regional. It is Modi’s involvement that invests the event with such extra-Gujarat significance.

Keep reading . . .

AFP – Saturday, October 27, 2007

PARIS (AFP) – – French, US and German rights groups said Friday they had filed suit for “torture” against ex-US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, currently in Paris, for his role in the Iraq war and the US “war on terror”.

Around 20 campaigners gave Rumsfeld a rowdy welcome as he arrived for a breakfast meeting in Paris, yelling “murderer”, waving a banner and trying to push into the building, according to the organisers, a political magazine.

The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), the French League for Human Rights (LDH), the US Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Germany’s European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) filed the joint suit before a Paris prosecutor on Thursday.

They accuse Rumsfeld of being “personally responsible for authorising and ordering the carrying out of acts of torture” in the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, and US base in Guantanamo, Cuba, during his time as defence secretary from 2001 to 2006, according to lawyer Patrick Baudouin.

“From the moment Donald Rumsfeld sets foot on French territory, he falls within French jurisdiction with regard to the 1984 New York convention against torture,” said Baudouin.

The Paris state prosecutor’s office said late Friday it had asked the French foreign ministry for details on whether Rumsfeld was immune from prosecution and whether he was still in the country.

“France is under the obligation to investigate and prosecute Rumsfeld’s accountability for crimes of torture in Guantanamo and Iraq,” FIDH president Souhayr Belhassen said in a statement.

“France has no choice but to open an investigation if an alleged torturer is on its territory. … We call on France to refuse to be a safe haven for criminals.”

The rights groups notably cite three memorandums signed by Rumsfeld between October 2002 and April 2003 “legimitising the use of torture” including the “hooding” of detainees, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs.

Five previous torture suits have been filed against the former US defence chief: two in Germany, one in Argentina, one in Sweden and one in Spain, the FIDH statement said.

Rumsfeld’s agenda during the rest of his stay in Paris was kept under wraps for security reasons.