Peace and Justice Post

uruknet.info

Khalid Amayreh

Hebron, August 1, 2007 Israel occupation soldiers have vandalized and desecrated Palestinian graves near the southern West Bank town of Hebron, locals and human rights activists said. According to relatives, hundreds of soldiers and as many as 20 military vehicles stormed the small village of “Marah al- Baqqar” on Tuesday, 31 August, terrorizing locals and vandalizing property. The forces reportedly stormed the village shortly after midnight Monday amid intensive shooting. The village was placed under military curfew, locals said. At one point, a military bulldozer destroyed two graves, exposing the remains of the dead. “I don’t know if Hitler did this to the Jews, but look how they are treating us. This is the same people who make a big outcry whenever someone touches a Jewish grave in Europe ,” said Aziz Amer. Taleb Hasan Amr, an 80 -year-old, whose son’s and mother’s graves were desecrated said he never saw such a brutal ugliness in his life. “I lived under many states, but never saw some thing like this. Imagine, they are after the dead. Where is the conscience of the world? These people are worse than the Nazis.” Amr, whose son was imprisoned by Israel and eventually died of torture at the hands of Israeli interrogators fifteen years ago, said Israel gives no weight and has no concern for non-Jews whether dead or living. “Imagine how they would react if something like this happened to Jewish graves in Warsaw or Leon.” It is not clear why the Israeli army desecrated the graves at the small hamlet. An Israeli army spokesperson refused to answer questions in this regard, saying “I can’t comment on military operations by the Israeli Defense Forces.” A high-ranking Palestinian Islamic Wakf official described the desecration as “an evil act reflecting the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality.” “I am 100% sure that the Israeli army wouldn’t do this if the graves were of Jews, not non-Jews. Maybe Jews should reflect why they are hated so much around the world. Maybe they should understand that respect is a two-way street, maybe they should realize that the actions and behaviors of Jews cause anti-Semitism,” said Sheikh Taysir Tamimi, the PA supreme judge. The Israeli occupation army has been carrying out daily raids against Palestinian population centers all over the West Bank during which young people are arrested, locals terrorized, humiliated and beaten and private and public property is vandalized. Israel is holding as many as 11,000 Palestinian activists in squalid conditions in several detention camps. The largest and most notorious detention camp is known as Ketziot in the heart of the Negev desert. Many of the prisoners are held without charge or trial, and used as hostages to blackmail the Palestinian Authority and Hamas into giving political concessions to Israel . Hundreds of Sudanese refugees from the troubled region of Darfur are also languishing in the Ketziot jail, next to the Palestinians. However, the Sudanese prisoners are separated from the Palestinians and are not allowed to intermix or speak with them.

LewRockwell.com

By Eric Margolis

WASHINGTON – The capital may be buzzing with talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, but the US Air Force appears to be planning for a long stay in Mesopotamia and Central Asia.

The USAF is reported to be expanding its air bases in Iraq, including lengthening a second 11,000-ft runway at Balad Airbase, a nerve center for American air operations. There are persistent reports from the Pentagon that the US intends to keep four to six major military bases in Iraq, each with a powerful air component, and a 3,500-man helicopter-mobile, rapid reaction infantry brigade. Other US operating air bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Pakistan, and Central Asia are being steadily improved.

Bush Administration hawks hope to retain control of oil-rich Iraq, and sharply decrease the number of US battle casualties, by using American air power and Iraqi troops. Iraqi “native” troops, or “sepoys,” as the British used to call its local mercenaries, will do all the dirty work on the ground and keep the populace under control.

US air power and infantry will only intervene when Iraqi sepoys get into trouble. This is precisely the same formula use by the British Empire to rule Iraq after World War I. Winston Churchill even authorized use of mustard gas by the RAF against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen – and troublesome Pashtun tribesmen on India’s Northwest frontier.

Full article

Torture -The Guantanamo

Guidebook

Channel 4’s programme examines torture in the war on terror by exposing seven volunteers to methods reported to have been used by American interrogators on alleged terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay camp.

The Guantanamo Guidebook reconstructs the regime at the US’s Cuban base. For 48 hours, seven volunteers are subjected to interrogation techniques known to be used in the camp, ranging from harassment and abuse to sensory deprivation – with shocking results.

Dissident Voice

By Sonja Karkar / July 31st, 2007

One could be excused for thinking that Israel’s human rights violations against the Palestinians stopped since the Palestinian factions began fighting each other. Just about every report and article written in the Western media these past weeks have focused on the rift between Fatah and Hamas and US overtures to broker a peace deal that may finally allow the Palestinians a state of sorts. Any mention of Israel is in the light of urbane diplomatic discussions between it and the other main players minus, of course, Hamas with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert showing a most remarkable willingness to agree to a peace settlement that would see the Palestinians getting back around 90 per cent of the West Bank. If only there was reason to believe that the leopard has changed its spots.

The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed on the ground for the Palestinians. Israel is rolling into the occupied Palestinian territories with its tanks and armoured vehicles and using its war planes to fire rockets on an already severely beleaguered people in Gaza. Only in this past week, there were at least twenty-nine such military incursions that ended up with four Palestinian resistance fighters being executed by Israeli soldiers while a fifth Palestinian ended up dying from tank shell wounds. Palestinian civilians always bear the brunt of such incursions and eleven people were seriously wounded including five children and an elderly woman. The daily arrest of civilians has been routine for decades, but certainly the seventy-two civilians arrested this week make a mockery of the 250 prisoners just released as Israel’s goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

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AFP

Monday July 30, 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney has presided over an unprecedented power grab during his six years in the White House, former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote in a rare, scathing critique Sunday.

“The real question is why the president allows this to happen,” Mondale writes.

Mondale, the former number two to Democratic President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, in an opinion piece appearing Sunday in the Washington Post newspaper, fingered Cheney as the chief transgressor in a White House guilty of “great excess” and “exceeding its authority.”

He wrote that since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, “Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the vice president.”

“His was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the president,” he wrote, calling the George W. Bush administration “seriously off track” in the unprecedented amount of power it has ceded to Cheney.

Full article 

Information Clearing House, 30/7/07

By Noam Chomsky

THE death of a nation is a rare and somber event. But the vision of a unified, independent Palestine threatens to be another casualty of a Hamas-Fatah civil war, stoked by Israel and its enabling ally the United States.

Last month’s chaos may mark the beginning of the end of the Palestinian Authority. That might not be an altogether unfortunate development for Palestinians, given US-Israeli programmes of rendering it nothing more than a quisling regime to oversee these allies’ utter rejection of an independent state.

The events in Gaza took place in a developing context. In January 2006, Palestinians voted in a carefully monitored election, pronounced to be free and fair by international observers, despite US-Israeli efforts to swing the election towards their favourite, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party. But Hamas won a surprising victory.

The punishment of Palestinians for the crime of voting the wrong way was severe. With US backing, Israel stepped up its violence in Gaza, withheld funds it was legally obligated to transmit to the Palestinian Authority, tightened its siege and even cut off the flow of water to the arid Gaza Strip.

The United States and Israel made sure that Hamas would not have a chance to govern. They rejected Hamas’s call for a long-term cease-fire to allow for negotiations on a two-state settlement, along the lines of an international consensus that Israel and United States have opposed, in virtual isolation, for more than 30 years, with rare and temporary departures.

Meanwhile, Israel stepped up its programmes of annexation, dismemberment and imprisonment of the shrinking Palestinian cantons in the West Bank, always with US backing despite occasional minor complaints, accompanied by the wink of an eye and munificent funding.

Powers-that-be have a standard operating procedure for overthrowing an unwanted government: Arm the military to prepare for a coup. Israel and its US ally helped arm and train Fatah to win by force what it lost at the ballot box. The United States also encouraged Abbas to amass power in his own hands, appropriate behaviour in the eyes of Bush administration advocates of presidential dictatorship.

The strategy backfired. Despite the military aid, Fatah forces in Gaza were defeated last month in a vicious conflict, which many close observers describe as a pre-emptive strike targeting primarily the security forces of the brutal Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan. Israel and the United States quickly moved to turn the outcome to their benefit. They now have a pretext for tightening the stranglehold on the people of Gaza.

‘To persist with such an approach under present circumstances is indeed genocidal, and risks destroying an entire Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole,’ writes international law scholar Richard Falk.

This worst-case scenario may unfold unless Hamas meets the three conditions imposed by the ‘international community’ — a technical term referring to the US government and whoever goes along with it. For Palestinians to be permitted to peek out of the walls of their Gaza dungeon, Hamas must recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept past agreements, in particular, the Road Map of the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations).

The hypocrisy is stunning. Obviously, the United States and Israel do not recognise Palestine or renounce violence. Nor do they accept past agreements. While Israel formally accepted the Road Map, it attached 14 reservations that eviscerate it. To take just the first, Israel demanded that for the process to commence and continue, the Palestinians must ensure full quiet, education for peace, cessation of incitement, dismantling of Hamas and other organisations, and other conditions; and even if they were to satisfy this virtually impossible demand, the Israeli cabinet proclaimed that ‘the Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.’

Israel’s rejection of the Road Map, with US support, is unacceptable to the Western self-image, so it has been suppressed. The facts finally broke into the mainstream with Jimmy Carter’s book, ‘Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,’ which elicited a torrent of abuse and desperate efforts to discredit it.

While now in a position to crush Gaza, Israel can also proceed, with US backing, to implement its plans in the West Bank, expecting to have the tacit cooperation of Fatah leaders who will be rewarded for their capitulation. Among other steps, Israel began to release the funds — estimated at $600 million — that it had illegally frozen in reaction to the January 2006 election.

Ex-prime minister Tony Blair is now to ride to the rescue. To Lebanese political analyst Rami Khouri, ‘appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome.’ Blair is the Quartet’s envoy only in name. The Bush administration made it clear at once that he is Washington’s envoy, with a very limited mandate. Secretary of State Rice (and President Bush) retain unilateral control over the important issues, while Blair would be permitted to deal only with problems of institution-building.

As for the short-term future, the best case would be a two-state settlement, per the international consensus. That is still by no means impossible. It is supported by virtually the entire world, including the majority of the US population. It has come rather close, once, during the last month of Bill Clinton’s presidency — the sole meaningful US departure from extreme rejectionism during the past 30 years. In January 2001, the United States lent its support to the negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that nearly achieved such a settlement before they were called off by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

In their final Press conference, the Taba negotiators expressed hope that if they had been permitted to continue their joint work, a settlement could have been reached. The years since have seen many horrors, but the possibility remains. As for the likeliest scenario, it looks unpleasantly close to the worst case, but human affairs are not predictable: Too much depends on will and choice.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival Americas Quest for Global Dominance.

Workers World

By Deirdre Griswold

Published July 26, 2007

Pressures from the Bush administration on the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan are pushing that country into an acute social crisis.

Pakistan-USA Freedom Forum meeting in Brooklyn, N.Y., calls for end to Musharraf dictatorship. WW photo: Deirdre Griswold

Frustrated in their efforts to conquer Iraq or even poverty-stricken Afghanistan, yet reluctant to deploy their own frazzled troops in even more combat zones, the U.S. imperialist leaders have been leaning heavily on Musharraf to attack Afghan insurgents and any Pakistanis in the border region who might be sympathetic to them.

A Reuters story filed from Miranshah, Pakistan, on July 25 reported that “Several thousand villagers fled a Pakistani tribal region on Wednesday, where an army offensive was expected any day following pressure on Pakistan from the United States to act against al Qaeda cells.”

With antiwar sentiment in the U.S. shaking up the political scene and George W. Bush’s popularity still in the cellar, the U.S. president is desperately playing the Qaeda card in all his public pronouncements, using the “fear factor” generated by 9/11 to justify his continued colonial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It remains a fact, however, that the aggressive thrust of the U.S. military into this oil- and gas-rich area of the world has outraged the peoples who live there and is what has inspired many to fight against the foreign invaders. Those fitting this description are not al Qaeda but the U.S. and its partner Britain, the former colonial master in much of the Middle East and South Asia.

In Pakistan, the opposition to Musharraf comes not only from militant Islamic groups—like the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad that was brutally attacked by the Pakistan Army on July 10 on orders from Washington, causing hundreds of casualties—but from secular, democratic forces and also from the Marxist left, which in the past was often the main target of government oppression.

Musharraf came to power in 1999 through a military coup but then managed to get himself named president. This year, according to Pakistan’s constitution, he must be reelected or stand down. He precipitated a constitutional crisis when, in March, he dismissed Chief Justice Muhammad Chaudhry. Huge demonstrations supporting Chaudhry erupted all over the country.

On July 20 the Pakistan Supreme Court reinstated the chief justice, ruling that Musharraf’s dismissal of Chaudhry had been illegal. Pakistanis at home and in the diaspora joyfully celebrated this rebuke to the regime.

However, Musharraf has the army and the backing of Washington. He has 80,000 troops in the northwest areas of Pakistan, where opposition to his rule has been most militant. And, should he falter in carrying out Washington’s wishes, the U.S. has already threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age,” according to Musharraf himself in an interview with “60 Minutes” last Sept. 24.

One way or the other, the war for empire begun in Iraq is surely coming to Pakistan. This rapidly deteriorating situation is just another reason why all who struggle for peace and justice should be preparing now to make the Sept. 22-29 anti-war actions in Washington a powerful effort to pull back the imperialists as they throw more troops and money into a war for global domination that even Bush admits is “endless.”

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Guardian Unlimited, July 30, 2007

James Sturcke and agencies
Monday July 30, 2007


An Iraqi boy drinks from a tap at a camp for displaced people in Najaf. Photograph: Qassem Neim/AFP/Getty Images

One third of the Iraqi population needs emergency aid because of the humanitarian crisis caused by war and ongoing violence, according to a new report.Around 8 million Iraqis are in urgent need of water, sanitation, food and shelter, a joint report (pdf) released today by Oxfam and the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq said.

The document said that although armed violence is the greatest threat facing Iraqis, the population is also experiencing another crisis of “an alarming scale and severity”.

It was published as Gordon Brown met the US president, George Bush, determined to shift the focus in UK-US relations from Iraq to less divisive issues such as trade.

Mr Brown wants a quicker withdrawal of troops than the Bush administration. A report by the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, due in September, is expected to provide cover for a more rapid pullout.

Researchers found that 15% of Iraqis cannot regularly afford to eat, 70% do not have adequate water supplies (up from 50% in 2003), 28% of children are malnourished (compared with 19% before the invasion), and 92% of children suffer learning problems.

The report also said more than 2 million people – mostly women and children – have been displaced within Iraq and have no reliable income, while another 2 million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees, mostly to neighbouring Syria and Jordan.

The “brain drain” that Iraq is experiencing is further stretching already inadequate public services as thousands of medical staff, teachers, water engineers and other professionals are forced to leave the country, the report warned. At the end of 2006, an estimated 40% had left.

“Basic services, ruined by years of war and sanctions, cannot meet the needs of the Iraqi people,” Jeremy Hobbs, the director of Oxfam International, said. “Millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee the violence, either to another part of Iraq or abroad. Many of those are living in dire poverty.”

Mr Hobbs urged the Iraqi government, the UN and the international community to do more to help Iraqis.

“The Iraqi government must commit to helping Iraq’s poorest citizens, including the internally displaced, by extending food parcel distribution and cash payments to the vulnerable,” he said.

“Western donors must work through Iraqi and international aid organisations and develop more flexible systems to ensure these organisations operate effectively and efficiently.”

Oxfam called for a doubling of the monthly $100 (£50) cash allowances to households headed by widows, which would cost $2.4bn a year.

The UN, especially the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has a vital role to play in the provision of humanitarian assistance, the report said.

Its role would come in coordinating the assessment and delivery of needs, advising the government, mobilising resources, and advocating for enhanced civilian protection.

Oxfam has not operated in Iraq since 2003 for security reasons.

Earlier this month, a report by the world’s principal intergovernmental body on migration, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), warned (pdf) that the scale of Iraqi displacement was “fast becoming a regional and ultimately international crisis”.

The Independent, July 30, 2007

Patrick Cockburn in Sulaymaniyah

Published: 30 July 2007

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring – or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Full article

The Progressive, July 27, 2007

By Amitabh Pal,

New definition of chutzpah: You send a country to hell, and then you refuse to assist the millions of people you have caused to suffer.

The Bush Administration is showing the utmost callousness toward the more than two million Iraqis rendered nationless due to its misadventure. A recent conference in Amman, Jordan, to deal with the situation only highlights the crisis. An estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees live in Syria, and 750,000 in Jordan. (An additional two million are internal refugees—out of a population of twenty-eight million—making this a catastrophe of truly staggering proportions.)

Iraq’s neighbors, economically ill-equipped to cope with the massive population flows, are having to bear the brunt. The fact that Syria is hosting, by far, the most refugees is made even more interesting by the fact that it is on the official enemies list and has been repeatedly accused by the Bush Administration of having a negative role to play in the war. Now, the refugees have often not been treated well in these countries, but at least they have managed to find asylum there.

In contrast, what has been the sum total of Bush Administration’s efforts to alleviate the distress it has helped create? Almost zero. Since the start of the war, in four long years, the United States has allowed in just 701 refugees. The grand number of 202 Iraqi refugees were admitted to the United States in 2006, while in the first half of this year, the State Department let in sixty-eight. You read those figures right. A single town (Sodertalje: population 60,000) in Sweden (a country not exactly responsible for creating the crisis) took in last year twice as many Iraqi refugees as did the whole of the United States (population 300 million). The situation would be laughable if the effects of the Bush Administration’s pitilessness weren’t so heartrending.

In fact, the Bush Administration has limited itself almost completely to aiding the entry into the United States of Iraqis working directly with the U.S. forces in that country. This lame endeavor has also been embroiled in snafus and security checks, with even (hold your hats!) Administration officials admitting “that there remained a gap between words and action on the issue,” The New York Times states.

The consequences of inaction are grave, as a recent Amnesty International report notes.

“This is threatening to create an humanitarian crisis that could engulf the region unless concerted international action is taken now,” says Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

The numbers are so staggering that the individual stories get lost in the thicket. Nir Rosen (a contributor, I must add, to The Progressive) has a superb recent cover feature in The New York Times Magazine that lays bare many of these tales. He encounters fighters who have ironically been forced out of their country due to the violence. He tells of an Iraqi doctor named Lujai, who fled to Syria along with her family after Shiite militias killed her husband. He encounters in Cairo Muhammad Abu Rawan, who has found refuge there from the endless civil strife in Iraq. And he comes across hundreds of Iraqi Palestinians who are stranded in tents in no man’s land on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Juxtaposed with these accounts are the heartless words of John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations, who is unwilling to admit even the tiniest iota of U.S. responsibility for the situation.

“Our obligation,” he tells Rosen from his air-conditioned office at the American Enterprise Institute, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

Bolton doesn’t think that the Bush Administration should even give aid to the refugees. “Helping [them] flies in the face of received logic,” says one of the architects of the Iraq War. “You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home.”

His ex-colleagues still in the current Administration share his notions, even if they can’t afford to be as blunt as he is. “The problem is one caused by the repressive regime” of Saddam Hussein, Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, informs Rosen.

The complete lack of a moral center in this crowd is incredible.