Peace and Justice Post

Source:CounterPunch, July 10, 2007

“Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets”

Democratic Defectors and the Israel Lobby

BY JERRY KROTH

In November, the American electorate repudiated Bush’s Iraq debacle and established Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate promising to bring this “flawed policy wrapped in illusion” to a decisive end. Bush vetoed their withdrawal timetable, but voters urged their leaders to hold the line and not be bullied. In the end, though, 37 Democratic senators capitulated and gratuitously gave the President his $100 billion no-strings- attached blank check . . . enough money to pay tuition and fees for 1.3 million college students for four solid years!

Deep disappointment set in. Cindy Sheehan, the liberal icon, was so demoralized she resigned and returned to private life. In June, a CNN poll reported that “respect for Congress” plummeted to the lowest level “ever recorded.”

Bloggers called them “traitor Democrats”, and the descriptor is apropos. At the time of the vote, sixty-two percent of the American people favored a time-table for a withdrawal, but, more significantly, “seventy percent” of Democrats were so inclined. Voting against this burgeoning tide of anger betrayed the will of the people and party that put these Democrats in office.

Curiously, all of the traitor democrats were huge career recipients of funds from the Israeli lobby. If we took ten Democratic apostates and compared them to ten Democrats who stood by the voters, pro-Israeli PAC contributions were “ten times” greater for the turncoats than those who stayed with their constituencies ($322,000 versus $34,000 on average).

To be specific: Carl Levin, outspoken critic of the war and, we thought, a loyal supporter of the new regime to end it, defected and blithely turned his back on his Michigan support base. Despite his strident anti-war rhetoric, the Grand Rapids Independent reports Levin has supported Bush all the way “consistently funding the war and not introducing any meaningful legislation to bring it closer to an end.” Practically unknown to his constituents, Levin is one of the largest beneficiaries of Pro-Israeli PAC funds collecting $600,000 in career contributions according to the Washington Report on Mideast Affairs.

Full article

The Independent,

Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

Published: 12 July 2007

It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.

That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.

The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. “It’s not individual atrocity,” Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. “It’s the fact that the entire war is an atrocity.”

A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile.

Full article

Source: Dissident Voice

July 9th, 2007

By James Petras /

You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home and abroad.
– US Marine Colonel from Tennessee.

Everywhere I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of Afghans since 2001? Why, they ask, is a public, which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world’s major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike oil deals with Tehran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?

Absence of a Peace Movement?

Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is largely the result of the major peace organizations’ decision to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics, namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic candidates — most of whom have supported the war. The rationale offered by these ‘peace leaders’ was that, once elected, the Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office. Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders.

Full article

McClatchy Newspapers

By Jonathan S. Landay

• Posted on Tue, July 10, 2007

WASHINGTON — Struggling to stem growing opposition to his Iraq policy even among Republicans, President Bush contended anew Tuesday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States are the same as al Qaida in Iraq, a violent Iraqi insurgent group that didn’t exist until after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.

“Al Qaida is doing most of the spectacular bombings, trying to incite sectarian violence,” Bush told a business group in Cleveland, Ohio. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims.”

Al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004. While it is inspired by Osama bin Laden’s violent ideology, there’s no evidence that the Iraq organization is under the control of the terrorist leader or his top aides, who are believed to be hiding in tribal regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

Moreover, the two groups have been divided over tactics and strategy.

While U.S. intelligence and military officials view al Qaida in Iraq as a serious threat, they say the main source of violence and instability is an ongoing contest for power between majority Shiites and Sunnis, who dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Bush’s speech came as Democrats in the Senate mounted a drive for legislation that would mandate a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal or set the stage for a pullout.

Four key Republican senators have broken with Bush over Iraq, and more could desert after the administration sends a report to Congress at week’s end that is expected to chart slight improvements in security, but virtually none on political measures aimed at reconciling rival religious and ethnic groups.

In his speech, Bush cited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as the motivation behind the continuing war in Iraq. “They will kill a Muslim, a child or a woman at a moment’s notice to achieve a political objective,” Bush said. “They are dangerous people that need to be confronted, and that’s why since Sept. 11 our policy has been to find them and defeat them overseas so we don’t have to face them here at home again.”

Before the war, the president and his aides cited Iraq’s alleged illegal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs to justify the ouster of Saddam, who administration officials asserted also had ties to al Qaida.

No such programs were found, however, and U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Saddam also had no operational links to al Qaida.

CounterPunch

Weekend Edition
July 7 / 8, 2007

Back Behind Bars

The Unbreakable Mordechai Vanunu

By RANNIE AMIRI

“I said to the Shabak, the Mossad, ‘you didn’t succeed to break me, you didn’t succeed to make me crazy.'”

Mordechai Vanunu, former Israeli nuclear technician, upon being released from Ashkelon’s Shikma prison on April 21st, 2004, where he served 18 years.

They were words of courage and defiance, uttered by a man who embodied both. Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in jail, a full 11 of them in solitary confinement, for revealing Israel’s yet undeclared nuclear capability to the world. He had emerged from Shikma with arms outstretched, repeatedly flashing the victory sign ­ or was it peace? ­ and refused to answer questions posed to him in Hebrew from the awaiting media. “I am proud and happy to do what I did,” he unabashedly stated.

And what he has done since will now land him back behind bars.

An Israeli court has just sentenced Vanunu to six months in jail for violating the terms of his parole, which prohibit him from having any contact with foreigners or visiting the West Bank. As in all matters, he was fearless in doing both.

It thus behooves us to retell this man’s remarkable story, lest we forget what a person of conscience can achieve.

Mordechai Vanunu was the first to expose Israel’s dirty little secret: it was a major atomic power. He worked as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert from 1976 – 1985. Then, in a 1986 interview with London’s Sunday Times, he disclosed pictures that not only proved Israel had the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, but was actually in possession of them.

Just prior to the publication of his interview on October 5, events unfolded as if they came straight off the pages of a Robert Ludlum thriller. On September 30, Vanunu was lured by a female Mossad agent from London to Rome, where he was captured and scurried off to Israel. Behind closed doors he stood trial for treason, was quickly convicted and sentenced to an 18-year term. If the Israeli government had hoped he would quietly and contritely fade away, they were sadly mistaken.

Vanunu vociferously renewed his call for Israel to come clean regarding its nuclear arsenal (reportedly the world’s fifth largest) and open the Dimona reactor to international inspection. Israel still remains the only country in the Middle East to be a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has likewise barred entry to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) personnel.

Israeli politicians, from left, right and center, roundly heaped scorn on Vanunu after his release, whom they dubbed a “traitor.” Conditions of his parole included prohibition of traveling abroad for one year or possessing a passport, limitation of his movement within the country, speaking with non-Israeli citizens, and discussing anything related to his former work at Dimona. These restrictions were condemned by Amnesty International who demanded their rescindment, citing Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which permit a citizen to move freely about or leave the country of their citizenship.

Although the term “whistleblower” is often used to describe Vanunu, it is a rather weak and understated characterization. He was a siren, alerting the world that nuclear weapons had found their way into the Middle East, shattering Israel’s official policy of nuclear ambiguity.

Born in Morocco, Vanunu converted to Christianity before being imprisoned. He felt both his religious and political views (a staunch advocate of Palestinian rights) led to the harsh treatment he received while incarcerated, which he described as “cruel and barbaric.”

Despite interrogation by the world’s most ruthless intelligence agencies and imprisonment in what could have only been unforgiving conditions, Vanunu endured, saying:

“I am a symbol of the will of freedom, that you cannot break the human spirit.”

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient in waiting and a true hero of our time no less.

Rannie Amiri is an independent commentator on issues dealing with the Arab and Islamic worlds. He may be reached at: rbamiri@yahoo.com.

http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm

Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women
by US Occupation Forces

(Please Note: Many of the photographs showing the rape of Iraqi women and the sodomization of Iraqi POW’s at the Abu Ghraib prison are now at USA pornographic websites pointing to the possibility of collusion between the depraved US soldiers in the pictures and US based Jewish pornographers. Many of these photographs were also freely disseminated to US occupation forces, perhaps to inflame their nefarious desires and to motivate them to strike out against the Iraqi populace in these perverse ways.)

by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California – May 2, 2004 – (ACN) The release, by CBS News, of the photographs showing the heinous sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi POW’s at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison has opened a Pandora’s box for the Bush regime. Apparently, the suspended US commander of the prison where the worst abuses took place, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, has refused to take the fall by herself and has implicated the CIA, Military Intelligence and private US government contractors in the torturing of POW’s and in the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski said to the Washington Post that Military Intelligence, rather than the Military Police, dictated the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. “The prison, and that particular cellblock where the events took place, were under the control of the Military Intelligence command,” Brigadier General Karpinski said to the Washington Post Saturday night in a telephone interview from her home in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Brigadier General Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, described a high-pressure Military Intelligence and CIA command that prized successful interrogations. A month before the alleged abuses and rapes occurred, she said, a team of CIA, Military Intelligence officers and private consultants under the employ of the US government came to Abu Ghraib. “Their main and specific mission was to give the interrogators new techniques to get more information from detainees,” she said.

Today, new photographs were sent to La Voz de Aztlan from confidential sources depicting the shocking rapes of two Iraqi women by what are purported to be US Military Intelligence personnel and private US mercenaries in military fatigues. It is now known that hundreds of these photographs had been in circulation among the troops in Iraq. The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Mexican-American soldier told La Voz de Aztlan, “Maybe the officers didn’t know what was going on, but everybody else did. I have seen literally hundreds of these types of pictures.” Many of the pictures were destroyed last September when the luggage of soldiers was searched as they left Iraq, he said

An investigation, led by Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, identified two military intelligence officers and two civilian contractors for the Army as key figures in the abuse cases at the Abu Ghraib prison. In an internal report on his findings, Major General Taguba said he suspected that the four were “either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and strongly recommended disciplinary action.”

The Taguba report states that “military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. Government Agency interrogators actively requested that Military Police guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.” The report noted that one civilian interrogator, a contractor from a company called CACI International and attached to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, “clearly knew his instructions” to the Military Police equated to physical and sexual abuse. It is not known whether these instructions included, or led to, the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well.

The Guardian

It is so moving to see how a willing executioner can soften into a man of compassion – for cronies

Terry Jones
July 7, 2007

It has been a truly moving experience to witness the concern and compassion the president of the United States can show towards a convicted felon. Particularly someone accused of such grave offences as Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. On March 6 2007 Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements to the FBI, and twice committing perjury before a grand jury. According to the charge sheet, Libby “did knowingly and corruptly endeavour to influence, obstruct and impede the due administration of justice by misleading and deceiving the grand jury”. So it wasn’t a case of absent-mindedness, then.

That is why George Bush’s act of mercy is so inspiring, especially when one considers that compassion is not something generally associated with him. When he was governor of Texas, for instance, there were quite a number of convicted felons towards whom he didn’t show much compassion at all. In fact he insisted they receive the full penalty of the law, which in their case was somewhat more severe than in Libby’s. They were executed. When Bush became governor in 1995, the average number of executions in the state was 7.6 a year. During his time in office, he managed to put down a further 24 humans a year, bringing the annual number of executions up to 31.6; it is heartwarming to see how his attitude to convicted criminals has softened.

The president said the sentence imposed on Libby was “excessive”, and that he had suffered enough punishment without it. “The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is for ever damaged,” said Bush. “His wife and young children have also suffered immensely.”

Now this will be good news for critics of the current system of justice. For some time, defence lawyers have been complaining that sentences are too harsh, that defendants’ positive contributions to society are ignored, and that collateral damage caused to defendants’ families is disregarded. Only last month the US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, announced that the justice department would push for legislation to make federal sentences even tougher and less flexible. How delighted the critics of such harsh attitudes must be to see that the president has now come around to their way of thinking.

Mind you, Bush’s softening of heart can only have happened in very recent days. A couple of weeks ago, in an eerily similar case, Victor Rita was, like Libby, convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal agents, and obstruction of justice. Like Scooter, Rita has an unblemished record of public service – 25 years in the armed forces with 35 commendations, awards and medals – and yet he was handed a 33-month jail sentence without even a message of condolence from the president.

In another recent case, the justice department tried to have Jamie Olis put away for more than 24 years for accounting fraud. In the end he got six years inside. But then I suppose fiddling the accounts isn’t on a par with trying to obstruct an investigation into a breach of national security.

So I thoroughly approve of the president’s change of heart towards convicted criminals, and hope it will continue until his term of office expires – and that in the future we shall witness increasing moderation in the justice department’s insatiable urge to punish, imprison and execute.

And I sincerely hope that the commutation of Libby’s prison sentence will usher in a new era of clemency, compassion and human forgiveness, under a president who otherwise has so much blood on his hands.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
Terry-jones.net

New York Times,  July 8, 2007

By BARRY BEARAK

Published: July 8, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 7 — Amid a continuing flurry of reports about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the leader of a tribal council in Farah Province said Saturday that 108 noncombatants had been killed Friday in a NATO airstrike.

The report was denied by a NATO spokesman and could not immediately be confirmed from other sources.“NATO soldiers, along with the Afghan National Army and people from the national police, came to Shewan Village and told us they needed to search three or four houses,” the tribal chief, Hajji Khudai Rahm, said in a telephone interview. “As we talked, a firefight began and 20 houses were destroyed when the planes dropped bombs.

“We counted 108 bodies, including women and children,” he said. “Fourteen local policemen were among the dead. Right now, things are calm, but people are digging through the rubble to find more bodies.”

Also, Reuters reported that residents and officials in Kunar Province said 36 civilians had been killed in recent airstrikes, 11 of them on Thursday during a bombardment, and 25 more on Friday as they attended a funeral for the deceased.

Hajji Shalizai Didar, the governor of Kunar, said Saturday via telephone that he had heard the reports about the deaths, in Watapoor District, but had been unable to confirm them because the fighting continued.

Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for NATO, said the alliance had ordered airstrikes in both Farah and Kunar during the times in question.

“We’re aware of the reports of civilian casualties but none of it tracks with the information we have, which is pretty extensive,” he said. “In both cases, we had good reconnaissance before and after.”

American and NATO forces in Afghanistan have relied on airstrikes to help fight resurgent Taliban fighters in many parts of the country. But the rising number of civilian casualties in the bombardments has brought criticism from Afghan officials, who have accused foreign forces in the country of being cavalier with civilian lives. They have also accused the Taliban of using civilians as human shields.

Reuters | July 6, 2007
Anthony Boadle

The closest the CIA came to killing Cuba’s Fidel Castro was a 1963 attempt with a poison pill delivered by American mobsters that was to be slipped into a chocolate milkshake, a former Cuban intelligence chief said.

But the capsule stuck to the freezer where it was hidden in the cafeteria of the Havana Libre (ex Hilton) Hotel and ripped open when the would-be assassin waiter went to get the poison.

“That moment was the closest the CIA got to assassinating Fidel,” retired state security general Fabian Escalante told Reuters in an interview this week.

Castro, who seized power in a 1959 revolution that turned Cuba into a communist state 90 miles away from the United States, has survived hundreds of attempts on his life by his enemies, from car ambushes to grenade attacks in baseball stadiums, Escalante said.

Some of the most imaginative cloak-and-dagger plots were the brainchild of the Central Intelligence Agency, he said.

They included poisoned cigars, an exploding shell meant to be planted in his favorite underwater fishing location and a scuba diving wet suit tainted with toxins.

Among early attempts devised by the CIA to discredit Castro was a plan to place chemical powders on his boots that would cause his beard to fall out when he was in New York to speak at the United Nations in 1960.

When that failed, the CIA planned to slip him a box of cigars tainted with LSD so that he would burst into fits of laughter during a television interview, said Escalante, author of a book that documents 167 plots against Castro.

But it was the CIA’s plans to poison Castro with botulinum toxins in the early 1960s that came closest to succeeding.

The agency acknowledged last week for the first time that the plot to assassinate Castro was personally approved by the Kennedy administration’s CIA director Allen Dulles.

“FAMILY JEWELS”

The CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records detailing some of its illegal acts during 25 years of overseas assassination attempts and domestic spying.

The agency’s so-called “Family Jewels” describe the initial efforts to get rid of Castro by using a go-between to convince two top mobsters, Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficant, the head of the Mafia’s Cuban casino operations, to assassinate Castro. Giancana suggested poisoning him.

Six potent pills were provided in 1961 to Juan Orta, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling interests, who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind. But Orta got cold feet.

Escalante said more poisoned pills, one batch disguised in a bottle of Bayer aspirins, were delivered through the Mafia to an opposition group that almost succeeded in March 1963 when Castro went for a milkshake.

Much of the information declassified by the CIA had been released in congressional investigations in the past.

Escalante, who detailed the poison pill plot in his book “The Secret War” published in 2005, said the agency was trying to “purify” itself but continues its skulduggery today.

While there is no evidence that the CIA has plotted to kill Castro since the Ford Administration banned assassination plots against foreign leaders in 1976, Escalante sees the hand of the CIA in more recent attempts by anti-Castro militants trained by the agency for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

Despite U.S. hostility, Castro remains Cuban leader at age 80, although bowel surgery forced him to hand over formal power to his brother Raul last July.

Escalante said effective Cuban security measures around Castro and the Cuban leader’s intuitive “nose” for danger has kept him alive.

To this day, few Cubans know Castro’s whereabouts, whether he is in a hospital or at home in a residential compound in western Havana called “Point Zero.”