Peace and Justice Post

Source: CommonDreams.org, October 10, 2007

by Stephen Zunes

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Congressional vote granting President George W. Bush unprecedented war-making authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing. Had a majority of either the Republican-controlled House or the Democratic-controlled Senate voted against the resolution or had they passed an alternative resolution conditioning such authority on an authorization from the United Nations Security Council, all the tragic events that have unfolded as a consequence of the March 2003 invasion would have never occurred. As a result, the responsibility for the deaths of nearly 4000 American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the waste of over a half trillion dollars of our national treasury, and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism that has come as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq rests as much in the hands of the members in Congress who authorized the invasion as it does with the administration that requested it.

Those who express surprise at the refusal of today’s Democratic majority in Congress to stop funding the war should remember this: the October 2002 resolution authorizing the invasion had the support of the majority of Democratic senators as well as the support of the Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate.

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Posted: 2007/10/11 From: Mathaba

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) — The Bush administration does torture prisoners in violation of international law, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday.

President George W. Bush recently defended his administration’s techniques used to interrogate terror suspects, insisting that “this government does not torture people.”

However, Carter disagreed with Bush in an interview with CNN.

“That’s not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored — certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated,” he said.

Responding to the remarks, a senior White House official said, “Our position is clear. We don’t torture.”

The official added, “It’s just sad to hear a former president speak like that.”

In the interview, Carter also criticized some of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates, calling former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani “foolish” for his contention the United States should be open to use force on Iran.

“I hope that he doesn’t become president and try to impose his conviction that we need to go to war with Iran,” Carter said.

Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, both forerunners among the Democratic presidential candidates, also drew Carter’s criticism for refusing recently to pledge to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of their first terms if they win the presidency in 2008.

“I disagree with their basic premise that we’ll still be there; I think the American people want out,” Carter said.

The Independent, October 11, 2007

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

New York’s Columbia University, usually regarded as a bastion of liberal thinking and tolerance, became the latest flashpoint on the ever-incendiary American issue of race yesterday after a hangman’s noose was pinned up on a black psychology professor’s office door.

The noose, evoking memories of the worst days of segregation in the American South, sparked noisy campus protests and an official hate-crime investigation. University leaders said they had no idea whether a student or a faculty member was responsible.

The professor, Madonna Constantine, was said to be devastated by the incident. A specialist in race relations, she works in a graduate department called Teachers College, whose mission in the early part of the 20th century included hiring black teachers prevented from working in their native Southern states.

Continued . . .

Counterpunch, October 10, 2007

Horowitz’s Latest Hate Campaign Heads for Campus

By GARY LEUPP

With much fanfare, a collection of far-right ideologues backed by right-wing “think tank” money are proclaiming an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses beginning Oct. 22. It is a calculated effort to vilify Islam in general, place Muslim Student Associations on the defensive, and generate support for further U.S. military action in the Islamic world.

Muslims constitute about a quarter of the world’s population and around two percent of the U.S. population. They include members of many ethnic groups. Arabs are a minority in the Muslim world; the most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh) are non-Arab. The Muslim world is complex and divided, religiously (into Sunni, Shiite, and other groups) and politically. There are Muslim absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies, secular states and Islamic republics. To understand this world, one needs to dispassionately examine it, avoiding stereotypes.

But immediately after 9-11, the Bush administration, having no patience with “nuance,” set about trying to link the secular republic of Iraq with the (mostly Saudi) al-Qaeda religious fanatics. It believe that having been attacked by al-Qaeda most Americans would support an attack on the completely unrelated target of Iraq. But what did al-Qaeda and Iraq have in common? The former hated the latter for its suppression of Islamic religious activism, and its tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities. But somehow Bush was able to conflate the two, so that even today about a third of Americans believe Saddam was involved in 9-11. Those on the Christian right are most inclined to this view, and to embrace sentiments like those expressed by right-wing extremist Ann Coulter in National Review Sept. 13, 2001: “We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” But they’re joined by secular neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz who has called on Bush to bomb Iran, which he calls “the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology.”

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Swissinfo, October 10, 2007 – 10:02 PM

Image caption: A Muslim woman walks in front of women in traditional Swiss dress (Keystone)

A Swiss official has warned at an anti-discrimination conference there is a marked risk of increasing intolerance against Muslims in Europe.

Anton Thalmann, the deputy state secretary of foreign affairs, told swissinfo that intolerance based on religion was a dangerous tendency that also affected fundamental Swiss values.

He told the meeting, organised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), that co-existence between people with different religions was a daily challenge.

Thalmann – who addressed the Conference on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Muslims in Cordoba, Spain on Tuesday – welcomed the visit of OSCE special representative Ömür Orhun to Switzerland in November.

Continued . . .

Canadian Dimension

Special to Canadian Dimension October 9, 2007

The words “Support Our Troops” stain the rear bumpers of thousands of cars. The slogan, however, conceals a more pernicious demand: “Support Our Mercenaries.” Yes, in Iraq, the mercenaries – euphemistically called “paid contractors” – outnumber US troops, 180,000 to 160,000. These contractors do more than provide armed security for US personnel. They do chores that previously belonged to regular army staff.

Private security companies employ for high pay former US soldiers, ex-kidnappers and torturers from Pinochet’s secret police, death squad heavies from a variety of Central and South American countries and a few leftover South African apartheid thugs as well. The companies collect billions from US taxpayers. A typical U.S. soldier serving in Iraq makes about: $57 a day. The estimated daily take for a Blackwater security guard there runs between $500- $600. (FACING SOUTH A News and Politics Report Sept. 26, 2007)

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salon.com, October 9, 2007

Together, an enigmatic billionaire and a resurgent Bibi Netanyahu could put Israel on the war path. Dick Cheney, AIPAC and Iran are all watching closely.

By Gregory Levey

One of this year’s nominees for Israeli TV’s “Man of the Year in Politics” award doesn’t speak Hebrew. He has vast wealth and a shady past. He was once a circus worker. He isn’t even a politician, at least not yet.

But over the past several years Arcadi Gaydamak, an enigmatic Russian-Israeli billionaire, has managed to become a widely influential figure in Israel. And he is now at the center of a right-wing political alliance — featuring Israeli über-hawk Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu — that could dramatically influence the country’s direction. If the rising alliance takes power in the next election, it could push Israel toward military confrontations with Iran, Syria or Hezbollah, while extinguishing any remaining flickers of hope in Israel’s peace camp regarding the Palestinians.

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Oped news, October 9, 2007

By Hamad Alomar

Democracy without wisdom and justice is chaos. Democracy is the rule of law and equal opportunity for every one. US democracy is not the ultimate one. It is quite the opposite to what Francis Fukuyama thinks. With the faults, deadlocks and misgivings of American democracy as it unfolds, the history has just begun. Money and the Media play a major role in American democracy .

He who has the money and controls the media can influence the course of the political scene. The number one enemy for democracy is greed. The second one is ignorance. The third is intolerance. We should not be lead by the success of American democracy or discouraged by Iraq failures when we try to evaluate democracy. American democracy has succeeded because of four factors which are not available to any other country in the world. Hence it is a mistake to expect others to follow the American model.

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Common Dreams, October 8, 2007

by Scott Ritter

Iran has never manifested itself as a serious threat to the national security of the United States, or by extension as a security threat to global security. At the height of Iran’s “exportation of the Islamic Revolution” phase, in the mid-1980’s, the Islamic Republic demonstrated a less-than-impressive ability to project its power beyond the immediate borders of Iran, and even then this projection was limited to war-torn Lebanon.

Iranian military capability reached its modern peak in the late 1970’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. The combined effects of institutional distrust on the part of the theocrats who currently govern the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the conventional military institutions, leading as it did to the decay of the military through inadequate funding and the creation of a competing paramilitary organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command (IRGC), and the disastrous impact of an eight-year conflict with Iraq, meant that Iran has never been able to build up conventional military power capable of significant regional power projection, let alone global power projection.

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