Peace and Justice Post

Information Clearing House

By Cecilie Surasky

10/04/07 “ICH ” — – Last year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel’s occupation. My talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself “America’s pro-Israel Lobby.”

A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program’s funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.

Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.

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The Independent,October 5, 2007

By Jules Stevens in Ville Grande

Tens of thousands of disciples of the revolutionary leader Che Guevara made the pilgrimage to Ville Grande in the Bolivian jungle yesterday – the spot where he was executed exactly 40 years ago. And in a sign of the political sympathies of the hordes of students, tourists and revolutionaries setting up camp for the five-day World Che Festival, hundreds of multi-coloured chequered flags, the banner of the Campesinos – the oppressed indigenous people of the Andes – were being hoisted into the air.

Daniela Torrico, organiser of the Che festival, said: “He is like a saint to us because he fought for the Campesino people and he died for his ideals.”

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New York Times, October 4, 2007

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

This article is by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

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Global Research, October 3, 2007

By Robert Perry

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George W. Bush has transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on the suspicion that they are a threat to American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to evidence from recent court cases.

Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S. intelligence community for several years, it has now emerged into public view with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers whose defense attorneys cited “rules of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr. who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28 in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27 and the other on May 11 – because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules.

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who pick up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

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Socialist Worker, October 5, 2007

DAVID WHITEHOUSE analyzes the impact of Pervez Musharraf’s expected re-election.

PAKISTAN’S PRESIDENT Gen. Pervez Musharraf appears to have the votes lined up to assure victory in an October 6 vote, but opposition to his rule is building to a new crescendo following six months of political crisis.

The military dictator–and partner in the U.S. “war on terror”–has jailed hundreds of opponents in recent weeks and thwarted the political return of Nawaz Sharif, the civilian prime minister he overthrew seven years ago. The capital of Islamabad is on virtual lockdown, with all traffic in and out controlled by army checkpoints and assemblies of more than five are banned.

At the end of September, thousands of security forces, including Army Rangers, thrashed and tear-gassed a crowd of hundreds in Islamabad protesting the election commission’s decision to let Musharraf campaign for president while still holding the post of army chief. Those injured and arrested included lawyers, journalists, opposition members of parliament and passersby.

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Counterpunch, October 2, 2007

The Right to exist — States or People?

By Sonja Karkar

It is a curious phrase this “right to exist”. Israel wants the world to accept its “right to exist” as a state, but it denies the indigenous Palestinians their right to exist as a people in their own land. International relations only acknowledges the rights of people, not states. [1] States exist because of the formal recognition afforded them by other states, and now that Israel is recognised as a state, it in fact exists. It makes no sense to demand that a political party recognise Israel’s “right to exist”, much less punish 4 million Palestinians because a majority voted the Hamas Party into government. Yet, these are the very words that are holding the Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza, to an impossible ransom.

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The Nation, October 3, 2007

By Robert Scheer

How did it come to be that the ostensibly best-educated and most refined representatives of the United States in Iraq are guarded by gun-toting mercenaries who kill innocent civilians? More urgently, why did State Department employees and their bosses in Washington tolerate–and pay to conceal–the wanton murder conducted on their watch?

That’s the real scandal of the more than $832 million the US State Department paid Blackwater, investigated this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, headed by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). The issue is not simply that of the Blackwater forces’ horrid behavior but, more important, why the mayhem they unleashed upon innocent Iraqis was approved and covered up by the Bush Administration. For example, why did a top State Department official initially suggest a payment of $250,000 of American taxpayers’ money to conceal the uncontested fact that, as the House committee report states, “a drunken Blackwater contractor killed the guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi”?

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CNN, October 2, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The State Department’s initial report of last month’s incident in which Blackwater guards were accused of killing Iraqi civilians was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the embassy security detail, according to government and industry sources.

In this September 24 photo, an Iraqi looks at a car that was destroyed during the September 16 incident.

A source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted the two-page “spot report” on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy’s Tactical Operations Center.

That office — which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions — has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.

A highly placed industry source said that Hanner, who was listed on the report as the TOC watch officer, was working for Blackwater at the time the report was written, just after the September 16 incident occurred. He was to rotate out of Iraq this past week, the source said.

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LewRockwell.com

By James Bovard

Is a president entitled to frighten voters into submission to perpetuate his power over them? While many people are catching on to Bush’s deceits on Iraq, most Americans have forgotten the scams of his reelection campaign.

George W. Bush was reelected in large part because he boosted the number of Americans frightened of terrorism during 2004. In October 2001, 73 percent of Americans feared another imminent terrorist attack. By early 2004, only 55 percent had such fears. But by August 2004, the figure had rebounded to 64 percent. This 9 percent proved vital for Bush. People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for him by an almost 7-to-1 margin.

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