Peace and Justice Post

Saltalamacia describes “grenade” like bombs, backs up William Rodriguez’ story, numerous others that were ignored by 9/11 Commission

Prison Planet | October 12, 2007

Paul Joseph Watson

A new eyewitness who was working in the WTC on 9/11 has gone on record to describe how he heard multiple grenade-like explosions around the basement levels of the north tower, backing up William Rodriguez’ story, the WTC janitor who reported explosions before the first plane hit the tower.

Anthony Saltalamacia was a morning supervisor who managed over a hundred workers in the twin towers. He worked closely with WTC janitor William Rodriguez, eyewitness to sub-level explosions that occurred before the impact of the first plane in the north tower and representative for many 9/11 victim’s families.

Saltalamacchia was in sub-basement B1 of the North Tower, approximately 1,100 feet below the airplane’s impact point at floors 93 to 98.

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Salon.com

Why the White House should turn over secret legal memos, and why I’m sponsoring legislation to end brutal interrogations.

By Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

Oct. 10, 2007 | Last Thursday’s New York Times alerted the nation to yet another shocking fact about the Bush administration: The Department of Justice authorized the use of extreme interrogation techniques not only in 2002 and 2003, but also two more times in 2005. The Justice Department’s record is even worse than we’d realized. It’s up to Congress to act against torture because this administration can’t be trusted to do so.

We’ve been here before. Before this latest scandal, we already knew about an earlier opinion by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the use of torture — the Bybee torture memo. When it came to light along with the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib, it shamed America in the eyes of the world. We lost our moral high ground in the battle against terrorism. This memo and others like it violated the values we hold dear, undermined our intelligence gathering, encouraged our enemies to respond in kind, and made the war on terrorism harder to win.

The torture memo was wrong morally, and it was wrong legally. The Office of Legal Counsel had to withdraw it in 2004 because it was so deeply flawed. As far as we know, this was the first time that an OLC opinion had ever been overturned in the same administration.

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NY Times

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the top American commander in Iraq, in Baghdad in 2004.

By DAVID S. CLOUD

Published: October 13, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

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 Source: Salon.com

Wesley Clark’s new memoir casts more light on the Bush administration’s secret strategies for regime change in Iran and elsewhere.

By Joe Conason

Photo: AP/Susan Walsh

A Salon photo composite of Wesley Clark and a global map of the Mideast.

Oct. 12, 2007 | While the Bush White House promotes the possibility of armed conflict with Iran, a tantalizing passage in Wesley Clark’s new memoir suggests that another war is part of a long-planned Department of Defense strategy that anticipated “regime change” by force in no fewer than seven Mideast states. Critics of the war have often voiced suspicions of such imperial schemes, but this is the first time that a high-ranking former military officer has claimed to know that such plans existed.

The existence of that classified memo would certainly cast more dubious light not only on the original decision to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein‘s weapons and ambitions but on the current efforts to justify and even instigate military action against Iran.

In “A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country,” published by Palgrave Macmillan last month, the former four-star general recalls two visits to the Pentagon following the terrorist attacks of September 2001. On the first visit, less than two weeks after Sept. 11, he writes, a “senior general” told him, “We’re going to attack Iraq. The decision has basically been made.”

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Khaleej Times

BY NOAM CHOMSKY
7 October 2007

NUCLEAR-armed states are criminal states. They have a legal obligation, confirmed by the World Court, to live up to Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which calls on them to carry out good-faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. None of the nuclear states has lived up to it.

The United States is a leading violator, especially the Bush administration, which even has stated that it isn’t subject to Article 6.

On July 27, Washington entered into an agreement with India that guts the central part of the NPT, though there remains substantial opposition in both countries. India, like Israel and Pakistan (but unlike Iran), is not an NPT signatory, and has developed nuclear weapons outside the treaty. With this new agreement, the Bush administration effectively endorses and facilitates this outlaw behaviour. The agreement violates US law, and bypasses the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 45 nations that have established strict rules to lessen the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

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The Independent, October 13, 2007

AP. Published: 12 October 2007

A US attack killed 19 insurgents and 15 civilians, including nine children, in Iraq – one of the heaviest civilian death tolls in an American operation in recent months.

The military said it was targeting senior leaders of al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

American forces have applied fierce and determined pressure on militants, especially al-Qa’ida in Iraq, since the full contingent of additional US troops arrived on June 15.

But Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has recently confronted top American commander General David Petraeus about what he sees as overly aggressive US tactics that harm innocent civilians, according to Iraqi officials.

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Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 11-17 October. 2007

Saleh Al-Naami reports from Gaza on how Israeli security conditions the health of sick Palestinians on their becoming informants

Click to view caption

Israeli soldies coming back from a patrol at northern Gaza. They were passing besides barrier of blocks built by Israel to separate Gaza

His calm demeanour belies the personal tragedy he is living. Journalist Bassam Al-Wahidi, 30, is on the verge of giving in to perpetual darkness. This will happen if he doesn’t have an operation to reposition his retina, an operation that he was supposed to have had last month in a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem. Although Al-Wahidi, a news presenter on the Voice of the Workers radio station in Gaza, had completed all the necessary administrative procedures required of him to travel to Jerusalem, officers in the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, at the Erez Crossing on the northern border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, won’t allow him to cross until he agrees to become an Israeli agent and provide information on the activities, leaders and members of Palestinian resistance movements active in Gaza.

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Dissident Voice, October 10, 2007

by Gary Corseri

Christopher Columbus, crawl back in your hole!
Take you Nina, Pinta and Santa Magreedier.
We know what you did in Hispaniola!
We watched silver helmets glint in the sun.
We saw you claim our island for Spain!
Idiot!
Look what you’ve done!
How many millions of lives lost,
How many holocasusts
Would burn up the centuries
So you could fill your coffers with gold?

Christopher Columbus—take George Bush with you!
Take them all—Lincoln and Washington
And Jefferson, too.
None of them gave a damn about us.
They said we were savages,
They killed us for sport.

Continued . . . 

CounterPunch, October 10, 2007

“The Moral Reserve of Humanity”

By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

I’m convinced that indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity.”

Evo Morales, Aymara, President of Bolivia, Democracy Now! September 26, 2007.

Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas. That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding, for one thing, that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day

This year feels different in indigenous communities asthey celebrate the great victory of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the General Assembly on September 13, 2007, the culmination of a three-decadestruggle by indigenous activists at the United Nations. The UN Declaration was adopted by a majority of 144 states in favor, with only four votes against: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Interestingly, these are precisely the four nation-states where intentional genocidal policies were pursued, policies that sought to exterminate all the indigenous peoples living in the lands seized by settlers from the British Isles. The populations of those states should be ashamed, not only of their horrific pasts, but of the present refusal of their representative governments to make amends with the descendants of thos indigenous peoples who survived these genocidal policies.

Perhaps those governments and their citizens think they do not have to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples within their claimed boundaries because the populations are small. Yet, the survival and flourishing of indigenous communities and nations is important to the future of humanity and to the survival of habitation on earth.

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 16, Bolivian president Evo Morales stressed the need to understand the indigenous way of life, saying that living well in a community meant living in harmony with Mother Earth. “This new millennium must be the millennium for life, placing our bets on human dignity.” (UN webcast.)

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has published two historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960­1975 (City Lights, 2002). She can be reached at: rdunbaro@pacbell.net