Peace and Justice Post

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 10 August 2007

Sabotaging Palestine behind closed doors: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas meets with the Council of Ministers in the West Bank city of Ramallah, 4 July 2007. (Omar Rashidi/MaanImages/POOL/PPO)

“Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was apparently more delighted by the banquet prepared for him by the wife of Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat than he was with meeting President Mahmoud Abbas in Jericho the day before yesterday,” the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported on its website on 8 August, citing Israel’s Channel 10 television station.

Channel 10’s correspondent spoke of the “hospitality and warmth” that marked Abbas’ reception of Olmert and his delegation, noting that “Erekat’s wife insisted on personally preparing and serving” the banquet. Olmert, the report added, “was unable to conceal his delight and appetite for the rich food and for the hospitality and generosity” the Israelis received from their Palestinian hosts.

Behind all the theater, the results of the meeting were as meagre as can be expected. Olmert publicly affirmed his commitment to the “two-state solution,” while spokesmen briefed the press that Israel was not ready to discuss any fundamental issues, such as borders, halting colonial settlements, or the rights of refugees. The exercise was aimed at maintaining the fiction of a “peace process” from which Abbas will supposedly one day be able to deliver results.

Yet while he treats Olmert to delicacies in Jericho, Abbas is doing his best to ensure that Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer and starve due to the closure of the commercial and civilian crossings and tightened siege imposed by Israel since Hamas fighters routed US- and Israeli-backed Fatah militias in early June.

A source who works directly with Abbas’ ministers in the unelected and illegal “emergency government” of Salam Fayyad in Ramallah wrote to me that “Abbas has explicitly ordered the Rafah border to close and remain closed with the purpose of strangling Hamas.” The source, who was motivated to speak out by his outrage, but requested anonymity because he fears reprisals, added that Abbas “is ready to see his own people die for his political games.” The source added that while Abbas’ official public relations pronouncements are that the border is to be opened at once, “what is going on in the meetings is the opposite.”

What my source confirmed had already been revealed by Haaretz in a 8 July article that reported that Abbas “asked Israel and Egypt prevent the movement of people from Egypt to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing” and that “Abbas and a number of his aides asked that the request not be made public” (“Abbas asks for Rafah Gaza-Egypt crossing point to remain closed,” Haaretz, 18 July 2007).

Abbas’ policy of colluding with Israel to starve his own people is having its effect. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA issued a desperate appeal for the borders of the besieged strip to be reopened. Filippo Grandi, the agency’s deputy commissioner general warned in a 9 August statement that within weeks Gaza could “be one hundred percent aid dependent” (Press Statement by Filippo Grandi, Deputy Commissioner General, UNRWA, Gaza City, 9 August 2007.)

All 600 garment factories in Gaza have shut down because they cannot import raw materials and 90 percent of factories involved in the construction industry have closed, the BBC reported on 9 August, citing figures given by the UN. As many as 120,000 workers in Gaza are likely to lose their jobs, and even UNRWA and the United Nations Development Programme have had to halt construction of shelters for refugees. (“UN warns over Gaza economic woe,” BBC News, 9 August 2007.)

In what might be a tacit admission of Abbas’ complicity, Grandi made a direct appeal not only to Israel, but to the “Palestinian authorities” to take “immediate steps to open up the Karni Crossing, to imports and exports, as well as humanitarian goods.” He added, “Only this will allow the little that remains of Gaza’s economy to survive.”

As the people in Gaza suffer strangulation, thousands of their relatives were stranded in desperate conditions on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, refugees exiled even from their place of exile. Many are people in poor health who went to Egypt to seek medical treatment, and at least 31 have died while waiting to return home.

On the political front, Hamas has continued to react to Abbas’ escalating war with equanimity, issuing daily calls for dialogue, reconciliation and a return to a national unity government. Despite the siege, it has also continued to hold its own successfully, paying the wages of thousands of government employees whose salaries Abbas and Fayyad had confiscated.

Abbas, while literally embracing the occupier and colonizer, has continued to angrily reject any intra-Palestinian dialogue. Yet it is doubtful how long this position will be tenable. Abbas, under a veto from the Bush administration refuses to talk, even as some senior Israelis have started to advocate direct dialogue with Hamas.

One of those is Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Halevy said, “I don’t say we should talk to Hamas out of sympathy to them. I have no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I think they are a ghastly crowd … But I have not seen anybody who says the Abbas-Fayyad tandem is going to do the job” (“What if Israel Talked to Hamas? Ex-Spymaster’s Plan, Seen as Heresy by Some,” Wall Street Journal, 1 August 2007).

Halevy expressed doubts about the US strategy of trying to prop up Abbas and isolate Hamas, calling it “political fantasy.” He called for Israel to negotiate a long-term truce with Hamas, something the movement has already offered. Halevy, the Journal reported, “is part of a small band of public figures who now say that, because of Hamas’s growing clout, it is becoming impossible to avoid such a dialogue. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined the group in a recent interview with National Public Radio.”

Unashamed, Abbas carries on; he recently received another large arms shipment — 1,000 rifles — coordinated by Israel and Jordan to strengthen his militias against Hamas. All these provocations are having an effect. While Hamas’ civilian leadership continues to offer olive branches, the rank and file of the resistance movement are showing signs that their patience is wearing thin.

Following Fayyad’s recent call for all resistance forces to unilaterally disarm in front of the occupation, and the subsequent publication of his “government program” that omitted mention of armed struggle, the Palestinian Resistance Committees (PRC) issued an ominous warning. In a 28 July press conference a spokesman for the group — a coalition of resistance fighters from various factions including Fatah, responsible for capturing the Israeli prisoner of war Gilad Shalit — “dubbed Abbas, Fayyad and other members of the government the ‘Ramallah traitors’ and vowed they will receive an ‘identical response as to the Israeli occupation'” (“PRC: Fayad and ‘Ramallah traitors’ targets for attack,” Haaretz, 28 July 2007).

Meanwhile, another Hamas member, Mou’aiad Bani Odeh, 22, died in an Israeli hospital after being transferred from al-Juneid prison, run by Abbas’ forces. Bani Odeh, Hamas alleges, succumbed to injuries resulting from torture inflicted by Abbas’ men, who continue their campaign of repression against Hamas members throughout the West Bank. (“Hamas member dies after being tortured in jail run by Palestinian Authority,” Ma’an News, 10 August 2007.)

The signs are that unless Abbas and his entourage reverse course and end their war against the Palestinian people, the apparent calm that now prevails will soon be shattered by another storm.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Pales

McClatchy Newspapers, August 9, 2007

By Warren P. Strobel, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON — President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn’t specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president’s top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran’s support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn’t clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.

For now, however, the president appears to have settled on a policy of stepped-up military operations in Iraq aimed at the suspected Iranian networks there, combined with direct American-Iranian talks in Baghdad to try to persuade Tehran to halt its alleged meddling.

The U.S. military launched one such raid Wednesday in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Sadr City district.

But so far that course has failed to halt what American military officials say is a flow of sophisticated roadside bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq. Last month they accounted for a third of the combat deaths among U.S.-led forces, according to the military.

Cheney, who’s long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposes this idea, the officials said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated publicly that “we think we can handle this inside the borders of Iraq.”

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that “the vice president is right where the president is” on Iran policy.

Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran.

“One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for . . . people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that kill Americans in Iraq,” he said.

He also appeared to call on the Iranian people to change their government.

“My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government,” he said. “You don’t have to be isolated. You don’t have to be in a position where you can’t realize your full economic potential.”

The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq’s security troubles on Iran.

Last week, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military commander in Iraq, said Shiite militiamen had launched 73 percent of the attacks that had killed or wounded American troops in July. U.S. officials think that majority Shiite Iran is providing militiamen with EFPs, which pierce armored vehicles and explode once inside.

Last month, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a multinational force spokesman, said members of the Quds force had helped plan a January attack in the holy Shiite city of Karbala, which lead to the deaths of five American soldiers. Bergner said the military had evidence that some of the attackers had trained at Quds camps near Tehran.

Bush’s efforts to pressure Iran are complicated by the fact that the leaders of U.S.-supported governments in Iraq and Afghanistan have a more nuanced view of their neighbor.

Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they’d played a constructive role in the region.

Asked about that, Bush said he hadn’t been briefed on the meeting. “Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don’t believe they are constructive. I don’t think he in his heart of hearts thinks they’re constructive either,” he said.

Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai differed on Iran’s role when they met last weekend, with Karzai saying in a TV interview that Iran was “a helper” and Bush challenging that view.

The toughening U.S. position on Iran puts Karzai and Iraqi leaders such as Maliki in a difficult spot between Iran, their longtime ally, and the United States, which is spending lives and treasure to secure their newly formed government.

A senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said the Iraqi government received regular intelligence briefings from the United States about suspected Iranian activities. He refused to discuss details, but said the American position worried him.

The United States is “becoming more focused on Iranian influence inside Iraq,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks with the Americans. “And we don’t want Iraq to become a zone of conflict between Iran and the U.S.”

Proposals to use force against Iran over its actions in Iraq mark a new phase in the Bush administration’s long internal war over Iran policy.

Until now, some hawks within the administration — including Cheney — are said to have favored military strikes to stop Iran from furthering its suspected ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Rice has championed a diplomatic strategy, but that, too, has failed to deter Iran so far.

Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said a strike on the Quds camps in Iran could make the nuclear diplomacy more difficult.

Before launching such a strike, “We better be prepared to go public with very detailed and very convincing intelligence,” Clawson said.

The Guardian, August 9, 2007

Expectations of an early withdrawal from Iraq are premature. Only broader resistance is likely to break the American grip

By Seumas Milne

Whatever else they might disagree about, Iraqis, Americans and Britons have something crucial in common: large majorities in all three countries oppose the occupation of Iraq by US and British troops and want them brought home. Recognition that the war has been a political and human catastrophe is now so settled that politicians are obliged to pay at least lip service to the pervasive mood for withdrawal. Gordon Brown’s studiedly suggestive remarks on the White House lawn about plans to move British troops from “combat to overwatch” in Basra, where two more British soldiers have been killed this week, were clearly aimed at anti-war opinion in Britain.

Meanwhile, speculation about scenarios for withdrawal is rampant in Washington and Iraq itself. But that doesn’t mean it’s about to happen – and there’s a danger that pressure in the US and Britain to end the occupation could be relaxed in anticipation of a full-scale pullout that is still not seriously on the cards. After all, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 on a promise to end the Vietnam war and American troops were still there five years later.

What is clear is that the US has already suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. A flagrant act of aggression intended to be a demonstration of untrammelled US imperial power to impose its will on the heart of the oil-producing Arab and Muslim world has instead demonstrated a fatal vulnerability to “asymmetric warfare”. It’s also true that, as a senior US intelligence officer told the Washington Post this week, “the British have basically been defeated in the south”. Far from keeping rival militia from each other’s throats, over 80% of violent attacks in the area are directed against British troops.

But, given the political embarrassment a British pullout would represent for the Bush administration in Washington, it’s hard to imagine Brown’s government ordering a comprehensive withdrawal any time soon. So British soldiers will have to expect to go on paying Tony Blair’s blood price for the much-vaunted special relationship.

Despite the congressional bluster, a better guide to US intentions was given by the defence secretary, Robert Gates, a couple of months back, when he declared that the US was looking for a “long and enduring presence” in Iraq – reflected in plans to consolidate 14 “enduring bases” across the country. Given the huge US strategic interest in Iraq and the region – and its determination to halt the spread of Iranian influence – that seems unlikely to change in the event of a Democratic presidential victory in 2008. In other words, the price of staying in Iraq will have to rise still further if the US is going to be forced out and Iraq regain its independence.

Inside Iraq, that price can only be exacted by increased resistance. More than any other single factor, it has been the war of attrition waged by Iraq’s armed resistance – or insurgency as it is usually described in the western media – that has successfully challenged the world’s most powerful army and driven the demand for withdrawal to the top of the political agenda in Washington. Two years ago the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, insisted the insurgency was in its “last throes”. But while the outside world has increasingly focused on al-Qaida-style atrocities against civilians and sectarian killings, the guerrilla war against the occupation forces has continued to escalate. There are now over 5,000 attacks a month, a more than 20-fold increase on four years ago, and the US and British death toll is rising. Opinion polls show there is majority support for armed resistance across Iraq; in Sunni areas it is overwhelming.

The mainstream resistance movement has often been dismissed in the US and Britain as politically incoherent, obscurantist or tarred with the brush of al-Qaida (which accounts for a minority of attacks, though perhaps a majority of suicide bombings). That has been made easier as it operated underground, communicating mainly through the internet or occasional statements to the Arabic media. Now that is changing. Last month, I interviewed leaders of three Sunni-based Islamist and nationalist-leaning resistance groups which are joining four others to launch a political front in advance of an expected American withdrawal. The recent cross-party Iraq Commission report cites four of the seven as among the “four or five main groups” the insurgency has now consolidated around. All have signed up to an anti-sectarian, anti-al-Qaida platform, oppose attacks on civilians, and call for negotiated withdrawal and free elections.

The greatest danger to both the resistance and the wider campaign to end the occupation remains the Sunni-Shia split, fostered since the invasion in classic divide-and-rule mode. Throughout the occupation, armed resistance has been concentrated in mainly Sunni Arab areas. Whenever it has spread to the Shia population – as it did in 2004, when Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army fought the Americans – the potentially decisive threat to US control from a genuinely nationwide resistance movement has become clear. Now armed resistance by the Mahdi army has re-emerged, against the British in Basra and the Americans in Baghdad, where the US lieutenant general Raymond Odierno has claimed that most attacks during July were by Shia fighters.

But while acutely aware of the need to make common cause with Shia groups and the danger of the breakup of the country, the new Sunni-based resistance front refuses to have anything to do with the Mahdi army because of its role in sectarian killings and on-off participation in the floundering US-sponsored government. Meanwhile, the US is seeking to draw some on the margins of the Sunni-based resistance into the orbit of its anti-Iranian, anti-Shia regional alliance.

The history of anti-colonial and anti-occupation resistance campaigns shows that success has almost always depended on broad-based national movements. But the embryonic resistance front has got to be a positive development if it holds together. Not only could the creation of an alliance with a common programme help open up cooperation with Shia anti-occupation forces now, but if there is going to be a stable post-occupation settlement in Iraq, that will have to include all those with genuine support on the ground. Sooner or later, the Americans are going to have to negotiate with these groups.

CommonDreams.org, August 8, 2007

By David Goodner

Deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have neared one million people, a body count higher than the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan combined, according to a new report released by Just Foreign Policy.

That brings the U.S. caused death count in the Middle East to over three million people, and that’s not even counting fatalities in Afghanistan or Palestine.

The Just Foreign Policy report is an update to two controversial studies published by the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet. In 2003, the Lancet reported over 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq were attributal to the U.S. invasion. That study may be read here.

In 2006, the Lancet updated their study and found over 600,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. That study may be read here.

The killing of Iraqis since the U.S. invasion includes violence caused by the overwhelming air and ground power of U.S. military forces, mortalities caused by the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and disappearances and murders caused by sectarian conflict and internal power struggles among different Iraqi factions.

The report’s methodology is controversial because it bypasses the normal model of death verification – which requires documenting each and every individual body tallied by governments, hospitals, and morgues – and instead uses a model first developed to estimate deaths caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters, where bodies are often never found.

Many defenders of the occupation of Iraq claim that a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq would spark a genocide as sectarian conflict and civil war escalated out of control. Indeed, violence may increase temporarily in the short term following a U.S. withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacum and competition among Iraqi factions for power may increase as they rush to fill the void.

However, what is clear is that the U.S. invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq in and of itself constitutes a kind of genocide. American economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s killed one million civilians, according to a 2003 study by the Centre for Population Studies. And the U.S. funded both sides of the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980’s, contributing to well over one million Arab and Persian casualties, according to Farhang Rajaee in a 1993 article published by the University of Florida titled The Iran-Iraq war: the politics of aggression.

Now an additional 996,836 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion in 2003. The instability and sectarian conflict were stoked by this unilateral, preemptive, and illegal invasion, and there is little hope of the internal conflict ending while Iraq is under foreign military occupation.

This situation is historically similar to the colonial period, where infighting between African and other indigenous tribes around the globe increased because of the havoc wreaked by colonial powers and their divide-and-conquer strategies.

Indeed, the seeds of conflict and disputes between ethnic groups, e.g. in Rwanda, were planted by Western colonialism. People of color around the world reap what we sow.

The immediate future of Iraq looks grim, with solutions ranging from bad to worse. Our only hope of ending the senseless violence is an unconditional and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, followed by some kind of responsible assistance by the U.N. and Arab peacekeeping forces.

If the Iraqis have to go to civil war to sort out the mess that our government has left them in, let them. It will eventually burn itself out like in Lebanon and, without any further interference from the West besides reconstruction and reparations, the Iraqis will be able to begin rebuilding their devastated country.

David Goodner is senior at the University of Iowa majoring in international studies and human rights.

The Nation, August 6, 2007

By John Nichols

Things got a little testy at the Camp David Summit between Afghan President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and American President George Bush.

Karzai, who when he is in the U.S. is expected to act as a puppet of the Bush administration, made the mistake of actually speaking his mind. In a CNN interview broadcast Sunday, the Afghan president said terrorism in Afghanistan is getting worse, that the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is at a standstill and, then, he described Iran as a positive player — “a helper and a solution” — in the region.

All of these statements are objectively true.

But George Bush does not deal in the realm of truth. And he certainly does not like his puppet presidents getting off their strings.

On the eve of the summit, Karzai told CNN that:

1. “The security situation in Afghanistan over the past two years has definitely deteriorated. The Afghan people have suffered. Terrorists have killed our schoolchildren. They have burned our schools. They have killed international helpers.”

2. “We are not closer (to catching bin Laden), we are not further away from it. We are where we were a few years ago.”

3. “So far, Iran has been a helper (in the fight against terrorism).”

All of those statements, made by Karzai in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the eve of his trip to Camp David, were corrected by Bush upon the Afghan president’s arrival.

On the security situation, Bush told Karzai not to believe what he was seeing on the ground in Afghanistan. “There is still work to be done, don’t get me wrong,” Bush said. “But progress is being made.”

On the bin Laden search, Bush spoke of how the hunt is progressing and declared that, “With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done.”

On Iran’s positive role in the region, Bush again told Karzai not to believe his own experience but instead to accept the neoconservative version of events. “I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force,” the American president pointedly told the Afghan president.

So there you have it, a meeting of the minds Bush-style.

A foreign leader from a region of supreme interest to the United States comes to Camp David to brief the American president on what is going on. The foreign leader speaks his mind, offering his best assessment of the experience he is living. Then the president tells the visitor from abroad that he is wrong.

As Bush famously declared at a policy session in 2005, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

And it is just so damned inconvenient when a puppet who is supposed to help spread the propaganda instead messes everything up by talking about what is really happening.

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Granma Internacional, August 2, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3. — Interrogation techniques used by the CIA on alleged terrorists can cause serious mental damage and are illegal in the United States, according to a report released Thursday by two non-governmental organizations, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First.

The report, titled “Leave No Marks, ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality,” was drafted by medical and legal investigators from both groups and based its conclusions on extensive medical documentation and various cases of torture survivors.

Researchers analyzed CIA techniques, which include sensory and sleep deprivation, exposing prisoners to excessive heat and/or cold for long periods, placing prisoners in “stress” (extremely uncomfortable) positions, sexual humiliation and simulated drowning of prisoners via a technique known as “water-boarding.”

The report found that these practices can cause long-term consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, substance abuse, and suicide, and for that reason are illegal, the AP reported.

SFGate: World News, August 7, 2007

George W. Bush, Jr. and his sidekick, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Team Bush’s hand-picked head of its puppet government in Kabul, got together at Camp David earlier this week to catch up, ride a golf cart and offer some contradictory policy pronouncements to reporters.

Larry Downing/Reuters

Golf-cart diplomacy: Bush and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, at Camp David earlier in the week

Afghanistan was, of course, the real breeding ground of the kind of international terrorism Bush had vowed to eradicate when he launched his ill-fated Iraq boondoggle back in early 2003. For Team Bush, though, Afghanistan has always been an after-thought.

Nevertheless, as Bush told reporters at a press conference with Karzai, who sometimes appeared alongside his host during his visit wrapped in an swath of green cloth, like an Afghan taco: “Our enemy is still there, defeated but still hiding in the mountains. And our duty is to complete the job, to get them out of their hide-outs in the mountains….” Bush was referring to Afghanistan-based terrorists like those who have been associated with Osama bin Laden‘s al-Qaeda organization. Reuters notes: “Bush, who has been on the defensive about the failure to find…bin Laden, said he was confident [that] U.S. and Pakistani forces would track down the militant group’s leaders. But he stopped short of saying whether the United States would seek Pakistan‘s permission before going after those militants. The subject is a sensitive issue in Islamabad.”

Full article

Global Research, August 3, 2007

By Felicity Arbuthnot

Britain’s new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown announced a ‘war on poverty’ at the United Nations on 31st July, aiming to: ‘..eradicate the great evils of our time – illiteracy, disease, poverty, environmental degradation and underdevelopment’. This from the man who failed to mention exactly that, which he had been responsible for, in Iraq and Afghanistan’s invasions – for which, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had written the cheques for the UK’s involvement, in the total decimation of all which can be called normality. Those elephants in the Bush-Brown meeting at Camp David and at Brown’s UN., foray, were seemingly un-noticed; the horrors air-brushed out.

Brown of course stayed silent, both in opposition and since becoming Chancellor in 1997, at one of ‘the great evils of our time’, the silent holocaust which was the thirteen year embargo on Iraq – and there has not been a squeak from him over what one could be forgiven for thinking has become a genocide since the 2003 illegal invasion. What else can describe a possible million dead and four million displaced and one third of the country in absolute poverty? There has not been a glimmer of compassion from a man who suffered the agony of watching a baby of his own lose her fight for life, not a spark of empathy of the searing grief of others, from a man whose small son suffers a serious health condition – for whom he can demand the best treatment, whilst in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, parents watch in helpless heartbreak and trauma, because little or none is available.

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Global Research, July 30, 2007

By Jerry White

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Over the last two weeks the Bush administration has orchestrated yet another campaign to sow fear and anxiety among the American people with unsubstantiated claims that signs are mounting of a looming Al Qaeda terrorist attack.

Not a day goes by without suggestions by Bush or top Homeland Security officials that an attack perhaps on the scale of 9/11, or worse, is being prepared. As always, the mass media dutifully report such claims as authoritative, without questioning the lack of evidence beyond the bald assertions of intelligence and other government officials.

The deliberate cultivation of a climate of fear is a basic modus operandi of the Bush White House. Can it be an accident that Bush is once again resorting to scare tactics at a time when his poll numbers are dropping to record lows, popular opposition to the war in Iraq is rising, and the administration is openly declaring that its war policy will not be bound by elections or debates in Congress? The sudden reemergence of Al Qaeda as a supposed threat to the safety and security of every American coincides with a political counteroffensive in which critics of Bush’s military escalation are branded as either dupes or aiders and abettors of the terrorists.

The terror scare serves three basic political functions: to divert public attention from the disaster in Iraq and the social crisis within the US, to justify a foreign policy based on militarism and war, and to provide a pretext for police state measures at home.

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Source: War In Iraq

John Diaz
Sunday, August 5, 2007

THE FIFTH AMENDMENT WAS WRITTEN FOR GOOD REASON: It’s dangerous to give the government unchecked authority to seize private property without judicial review.
The founding fathers knew that people in power were not always going to be reasonable or ethical – or competent.

It doesn’t require a subpoena of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or a brave whistle-blower to find President Bush’s latest affront to the U.S. Constitution. It’s in plain view on the White House Web site: “Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.”

This far-reaching order of July 17 may be Bush’s most brazen defiance of the Constitution, which is no small feat for an administration that thinks it can set its own rules on electronic surveillance, torture, kidnapping, rendition, and the designation of “enemy combatants” who can be arrested on U.S. soil and held indefinitely without judicial review.

This one is a frontal assault on the Fifth Amendment, which decrees that the government cannot seize an individual’s property without due process.

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