Peace and Justice Post

Al-Ahram Weekly online, August 30, 2007

Mixing religion and politics was a colonial scheme that is now haunting the West
By Ayman El-Amir

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Since the attacks of 11 September, terrorism has come to be identified with Islam. Whenever there is a plane crash, a train accident, a gas pipeline explosion or a university campus shooting, investigators first ask if it is an act of terrorism and secondly whether it is the work of Muslim fundamentalists. The definition is all- inclusive and it makes no distinction between attacks on school children in Moscow, hotels in Amman, a suicidal attack on a coalition force patrol in Afghanistan, a roadside bomb blast against US occupation forces in Baghdad, or a shootout with Israeli troops in occupied Palestine. It even goes to the extreme of ostracising a majority government in occupied Palestine that has been elected according to the best tradition of Western liberal democracy. Differences have been completely blurred since the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon tutored US President George W Bush that Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation was an integral part of the global attack on democracy and deserved to be included in Bush’s global war on terrorism. Islamic extremists were painted as being behind it all. Continued . . .

Source: Rootless Cosmopolitan

Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Continued . . .

AlterNet. Posted by Liliana Segura at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2007.

Liliana Segura: Bush has more blood on his hands than anyone could possibly imagine.

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts

 

Back in his pre-coronation days, when George W. was still known as “Governor Bush,” the Campaign to End the Death Penalty had a bestselling item in its fundraising kit: a t-shirt with a mugshot of the future president splashed across the front, reading “WANTED FOR MURDER.” Bush’s crowning legacy at the time was having racked up a record-breaking 152 executions in the state of Texas–and doing so with a clear-eyed callousness that was at once startling and sickening.

Little did we know that less than ten years later, Bush would have more blood on his hands than we could possibly imagine.

He’s drenched in it. Between the massive death toll in Iraq–655,000 as of last fall–to those anguished masses who would become bloated bodies in New Orleans, Bush has shown a boundless capacity for cruel and unusual punishment for those whose lives are expendable in the racist La La land that his administration calls home.

Continued . . .

Information Clearing House,

By Paul Craig Roberts

08/29/07 “ICH” — – In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history.  

The Republicans have bogged America down in a gratuitous and illegal war. The war has destroyed Iraq, killed between 650,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians, displaced 4,000,000 Iraqis, and littered the country with depleted uranium.  Bush’s war remains unwon despite its five year duration and $1 trillion in out-of-pocket and incurred future costs.

Bush’s invasion of Iraq is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, a direct counterpart to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.  Both were based on lies and deception, and the declared reasons for both were masks for secret agendas.

Continued . . . 

The Village Voice, August 28, 2007

Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial

by Nat Hentoff

If and when there’s the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA’s secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey’s Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin’s Press) and Charlie Savage’s just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn’t let them in.

Continued . . .

Antiwar.com, August 31, 2007

By Paul Craig Roberts

The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted asGeorge W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases in countries bordering or near to Iran. US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs. The US government is financing terrorist and separatist groups within Iran. US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations inside Iran. US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries. Bush’s war threats against Iran have intensified during the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq. Continued . . .

Source: The Raw Story

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane Published: Tuesday August 28, 2007		r
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The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

The paper, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East” – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament – was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.

Continued . . .

Opednews.com, August 29, 2007

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush administration clearly pushing for war with Iran, as crazy as that would be, not just for an already over-extended, burned out military, but because of the havoc it would wreak on the global economy, it is time to call attention to a few points that are being ignored.

First of all, even US intelligence experts were saying only last year that Iran was at least 10 years away from having a bomb, so the alarmist claims being made by Bush and his gang, echoing the nonsense we heard in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, about the threat of nuclear holocaust, are simply scare tactics and should fool nobody.

Secondly, we should be asking why Iran would be trying to build a nuclear bomb in the first place, and what kind of threat it would pose if they did build one, or even several. Certainly an Iranian bomb would pose no threat to the U.S., any more than a North Korean bomb poses a threat to the U.S. With tens of thousands of bombs, including huge city-vaporizing H-bombs, in the US arsenal, no country except for Russia has the ability to seriously threaten America. The same goes for U.S. allies, whether in Europe or the Middle East. If Iran were to threaten Kuwait or Israel with nuclear attack it would simply be committing suicide because of US retaliation.

Continue . . .

Parliament not told, minister says by John Byrne

Global Research, August 26, 2007

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A new ‘super-weapon’ being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the “thermobaric” principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs. The so-called “enhanced blast” weapon uses similar technology used in the US “bunker busting” bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny. Such weapons are brutally effective because they first disperse a gas or chemical agent which is lit at a second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave. When the US military deployed a version of these weapons in 2005, DefenseTech wrote an article titled, “Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon.” According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, “The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant…. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.” A second DIA study said, “shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue… it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.” “The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense,” said a CIA study of the weapons. “Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness.” British defense officials told the UK Guardian that British bombs were “different.” “They are optimized to create blast [rather than heat]”, one said, speaking on the standard condition of anonymity in Britain. The official added that it would be misleading to call them “thermobaric.” Officials told the Guardian the new weapon was classified as a soldier launched “light anti-structure munition” and that the bombs would be more effective because “even when they hit the damage is limited to a confined area.” “The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds,” said Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell in the article. “If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult.” According to Campbell, the deployment of the weapons was not announced to Parliament.

Global Research Articles by John Byrne

CounterPunch, August 27, 2007

A Global Justice Movement

By BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst

George W. Bush has once again thrown down the gauntlet. The Mideast wars of the United States, he announced to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention on August 22, must end only with a U.S. victory. He has not wavered in this position since September 11, 2001. The unspoken but real purpose of his efforts has been and will be to concentrate increasing power over the Middle East in the hands of the small group of rich and greedy elites who rule the U.S. and Israel today, and perhaps he will achieve this goal. The more important result, however, will be the elimination of any movement toward greater global justice, stability, and peace in the world for decades to come.

Continued . . .