Peace and Justice Post

‘Imploding’ presidency in no mood for celebration on Independence Day

The Independent, July 4, 2007

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

For Americans, the 4th of July is a time for celebration. For George Bush however, today’s Independence Day holiday is another date in the calendar of an imploding presidency without parallel in recent history.

The latest, albeit probably relatively minor, blow to Mr Bush’s standing was his move on Monday to commute the 30-month jail sentence imposed on Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, for perjury in the CIA leak case.

The decision has been greeted with predictable outrage by Democrats, who accuse Mr Bush of cronyism and contempt for the law. But although polls have shown that some 70 per cent of Americans opposed any idea of a pardon for Libby, so weak has Mr Bush become that the decision could actually strengthen him – by shoring up support among the conservative faithful, Mr Bush’s core constituency, who believe the real outrage was Libby’s conviction in the first place.

“I am very happy for Scooter Libby. This will allow a good American, who has done a lot for his country, to resume his life,” said Fred Thompson, unabashed conservative and soon-to-be-declared Republican presidential candidate, who helped organise a Libby defence fund.

At his daily briefing yesterday, the White House spokesman Tony Snow not only defended the decision to commute the prison term, but even held the door open to a full pardon.

Although Libby has been spared jail, he still faces a $250,000 (£124,000) fine, two years’ probation, and the lasting blot on his reputation of a felony conviction’s – not to mention an estimated $5m in legal costs that friends are scrambling to cover. “This is hardly a slap on the wrist, it’s a very severe penalty,” said Mr Snow, denying that the commutation was to prevent Libby from revealing embarrassing secrets as he continued his appeal efforts from behind bars.

But the Libby affair may be quickly supplanted by new pressures on Mr Bush. The Democrat-controlled Congress is raining subpoenas on White House and Justice Department officials over scandals involving warrantless domestic wiretapping and the dismissal of eight federal attorneys last year.

As a court clash with the legislature looms, the President is under continuous pressure to sack the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, an old Texas friend, and much of that pressure is coming from Mr Bush’s Republicans on Capitol Hill, a sign of how he is losing control of his own party.

Thus far, the most vivid evidence of his crumbling authority was the Republican rebellion that led to defeat of immigration reform, a measure vigorously championed by the President. Its demise ended Mr Bush’s last hope of a significant second term legisative achievement, and sealed his status as the lamest of lame ducks.

But a more ominous challenge looms in September when – barring clear evidence that his troop surge is working – Republicans could join with Democrats to force a change in strategy on Iraq, the issue that above all is destroying his presidency. Thus far, his own party has kept ranks behind him. But with the 2008 elections less than 18 months away, the cracks are growing, and last week saw the most important defection yet, of Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Bush’s unpopularity is now challenging long established records. Some presidents briefly have been more disliked: Jimmy Carter slipped to a 21 per cent approval rating in July 1980, four months before he was trounced by Ronald Reagan in that year’s election. But even at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson’s approval ratings averaged above 40 per cent in 1967-68.

Not since Harry Truman in the early 1950s has a president been as unloved for as long as Mr Bush. He slipped below the 50 per cent mark in spring 2005, and for the past year and a half, he has been stuck in the mid-30s. In one poll he fell to 28 per cent, worse even than his father at his lowest before he lost to Bill Clinton in November 1992.

With public dissatisfaction over Iraq continuing to grow, and the “right track, wrong track” barometer showing an unprecedented 74 per cent of Americans convinced the country is heading in the wrong direction, Mr Bush will probably remain deeply unpopular for the 18 months remaining until he leaves office in January 2009.

the Guardian/UK

Published on Wednesday, July 4, 2007

By Simon Tisdall

Opponents frequently accuse George Bush of being in denial over Iraq. But in recent weeks the dire urgency of the situation, in both Baghdad and Washington, appears to have penetrated even the insulating layers normally enveloping the Oval Office.

The White House is increasingly alarmed at the widely shared belief that the progress report to Congress in September by the Iraq commander, General David Petraeus, and the US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, will mark the beginning of the end of the occupation.

The 29,000-strong military surge, ordered by Mr Bush in February, has already been written off as a failure, or not nearly successful enough, by many in Congress and beyond. With US casualties running at roughly double last year’s level, pressure for withdrawal may become irresistible almost whatever Gen Petraeus says.

“The real debate is not about whether the US should pull out troops. That is now inevitable,” said columnist EJ Dionne. “The real challenge is to figure out the right timetable, whether a residual force should be left there, and which American objectives can be salvaged.”

According to foreign policy analysts Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh in the Washington Post, “what the US needs now is a guide to how to lose – how to start thinking about minimising the damage to American interests, saving lives, and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco”.

Nor is this defeatism (or realism) confined to Democrats and liberals. Richard Lugar led a charge against Mr Bush’s policy last week by Republican senators who, like many of their House colleagues, believe the war is seriously harming both the country and their party’s 2008 electoral prospects. Mr Lugar said, in sum, that domestic divisions had already fatally undermined the surge. “The strident, polarised nature of this debate increases the risk that our involvement in Iraq will end in a poorly planned withdrawal that undercuts our vital interests.”

Democrats, spurred on by polls showing that most Americans want out of Iraq and are impatient for Congress to act, are doing their best to exploit doubts. Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will call a series of Iraq votes this month, on pullout timetables, funding, and length of combat tours, to force Republicans to show where they stand.

Meanwhile, members of both parties are calling for a revival of the independent Iraq Study Group, whose findings last autumn were initially spurned by Mr Bush. At the same time, the anti-war movement is targeting electorally vulnerable Republicans in 15 states.

Mr Lugar’s broadside sent national security adviser Stephen Hadley scurrying up to Capitol Hill to rally the troops. Mr Bush’s dawning realisation that he is on the brink of losing control of Iraq policy has prompted steps to regain the initiative.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, has started playing down the importance of the September reports, suggesting they will just be a snapshot of a work in progress. Gen Petraeus’s deputy, General Raymond Odierno, suggested that the surge may continue until next spring or even longer.

US benchmarks for progress by Iraq’s government have largely not been met, although a draft oil law was reportedly agreed yesterday. Mr Bush has taken to stressing instead that local and provincial advances are more important.

“We need to look at Iraq from the bottom up,” he said at the Naval War College in Rhode Island last week. “This is where political reconciliation matters most, because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support the new Iraq.” This looked like an attempt to pre-empt political failure in Baghdad.

Yet still trying to avoid a train wreck – and showing unaccustomed energy – the president is cajoling and pressurising Iraq’s leaders, holding frequent teleconferences with the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. A stream of senior officials has been sent to Baghdad. Discarding its usual secretiveness, the White House wants these contacts to gain publicity, to show it is trying.

A “desperate” Mr Bush is “running out of time” at home and in Iraq, said veteran commentator David Broder. The president’s attempt to avoid a September showdown with Congress looks likely to fail. What the upshot of that showdown will be is still in doubt.

Source: Progressive (7-4-06)

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

By: Iran Daily on: 02.07.2007

(1430 bytes) [c]

Arabs, Mossad Plan Nasrallah’s Assassination

Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah

DOHA, Qatar, July 1–Lebanese informed sources on Sunday revealed Arab officials are cooperating with Israel’s intelligence services Mossad to assassinate Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Ali Al-Jefal, the Damascus-based Iraqi reporter, wrote in Almedar weekly, “Arab intelligence officials, including Mohammad Dahlan, the former head of security organization and current advisor of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is aware of Mossad’s plans to assassinate Nasrallah.”

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi ambassador to Washington (1983 to 2005), has also allegedly cooperated with Mossad over the issue, Mehr News Agency reported. Al-Jefal adds in his report that Dahlan and Prince Bandar also made efforts to capture Hezbollah’s headquarters in southern Lebanon.

According to the weekly, the two officials have been in constant touch with Mossad.
Following the recent control of Hamas forces over Fatah offices, confidential documents revealing Fatah leaders’ relations with Mossad and the US officials were released to the media. These documents reveal Mohammad Dahlan’s close cooperation with Mossad.

A few months ago, Prince Bandar’s involvement in the US arms sale to terrorist groups was headlined in many newspapers in the West.

http://www.iran-daily.com/1386/2881/html/

Doha Time, July 3, 2007

Vanunu sentenced to six-month jail term

JERUSALEM: An Israeli court yesterday sentenced Mordechai Vanunu, who in 2004 completed an 18-year prison term for spilling nuclear secrets, to six more months behind bars after he violated a ban on speaking to foreigners.

Israel has barred Vanunu from travelling abroad and monitored his movements since he left jail, alleging that he has more details on the Dimona atomic reactor to divulge. Vanunu denies that but says he will pursue anti-nuclear activities.

“I don’t want to live here. I have the right to be free,” Vanunu, 52, said after the sentencing at Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. “I want to be free and I want to leave.”
The court, which also handed Vanunu a six-month suspended sentence, held off on jailing him to allow for appeals. Vanunu’s lawyer, Michael Sfard, said he had until September 9 to decide on a course of action but hinted he might not fight the prison time.

“This is a cruel sentence in a case that has nothing to do with national security or social values. It’s a measure of the vindictiveness of the state of Israel,” Sfard said.
“While Vanunu has perfect grounds for an appeal, we will have to give thought to whether that is what is wanted.”

Vanunu was jailed on treason charges in 1986 after giving an unauthorised interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level Dimona technician. The disclosures all but blew away the secrecy around an assumed Israeli atomic arsenal.
Since his release Vanunu has campaigned for the Jewish state to be disarmed. He openly defied an order, issued by Israel’s military top brass and upheld by the Supreme Court, that sought to curb his contacts with foreigners and international media.

“While returning a man to prison after he served 18 years there does not bring joy to anyone, there was no other choice but to take this step to make clear that the nation will defend its secrets and protect its security,” prosecutor Dan Eldad said in a statement issued by the justice ministry.

Vanunu’s April conviction centred on comments to US, British, Australian and French media in which he said Israel assembled hydrogen and neutron bombs at the Dimona reactor and was annually producing 40kg of plutonium, enough to make 10 atom bombs.

Those statements appeared largely to be a retread of Vanunu’s 1986 interview with Britain’s Sunday Times. – Reuters

Source: RINF.com

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

By Tim Shipman

Vice-President Dick Cheney was personally responsible for American policies that subjected terrorist suspects to cruelty and denied them the right to a fair trial, according to revelations from senior US government officials.

	Dick Cheney now looks like a ‘comic book villain’

The details have laid bare more than ever before the remarkable influence of Mr Cheney in shaping the prosecution of the war on terror which led to the scandals at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The claims that Mr Cheney manoeuvred to circumvent both American and international law came as the vice-president last week faced three new congressional demands that he release information on his activities.

Even his supporters admitted that the disclosures have left Mr Cheney looking like a “comic-book villain” whose contempt for process, including within the White House, has undermined public support for President Bush.

A year-long investigation by The Washington Post uncovered details of how in November 2001 – two months after the September 11 atrocities – Vice-President Cheney went behind the backs of the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to deny foreign terrorist suspects access to a court.

In a private dinner with President Bush, Mr Cheney presented him with an order written by his own lawyer, David Addington, denying suspects a civilian trial or a court martial and ordering that they could be confined indefinitely without charge.

Within an hour of the meal, the document had been signed by the president, having been whisked straight to his desk on Vice-President Cheney’s orders, without being seen by senior White House staff. Miss Rice was described as “incensed” and when Mr Powell learnt of the decision from television news he snapped: “What the hell just happened?”

Mr Cheney then ordered his legal team secretly to draw up orders for intelligence agencies to intercept letters, telephone calls and electronic communications to and from America, without a warrant – something forbidden by federal law since 1978.

Last week, the powerful Senate judiciary committee issued subpoenas to Mr Cheney and the White House, demanding access to documents relating to that decision.

Then, in January 2002, Mr Cheney decided that America must abandon the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of enemy prisoners, which outlawed torture.

He personally commissioned legal opinions that would maintain a ban on torture but permit “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation methods. A document drawn up by Mr Addington was adopted, verbatim, by President Bush.

In August that year, the vice-president’s lawyer inserted a paragraph into a memo of instructions for the CIA on torture which claimed that laws forbidding any person to “commit torture do not apply” to the president because that would be a restriction of his right to wage war.

The US Supreme Court has since given three rulings contradicting Vice-President Cheney’s view of the president’s powers, culminating in June with a demand for the Guantánamo inmates to face trial.

But Mr Cheney is accused of continuing to try to bypass international law. When the Senate voted in 2005 to support the Geneva Conventions, Vice-President Cheney – defying opposition from the CIA, the Pentagon, and state and justice departments had a clause inserted into the bill, which meant that the US military is bound by it but not the CIA.

The revelations paint a picture of a man obsessed by secrecy and the accumulation of power. The vice-president keeps even routine papers in a safe in his office, refuses to disclose the names or the size of his staff and has ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs.

He has even created his own security designation, stamping “Treated As: Top Secret/SCI” (special compartmented intelligence) on mundane papers, in an attempt to protect what are in fact unclassified documents. The classification suggests that their disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security”. He even put the Top Secret stamp on a paper detailing talking points for officials to use with the press – information he actually wanted to be made public.

Mr Cheney also ordered that images of his official residence be pixelated on the Google Earth website, which features satellite photographs, while the White House and Capitol remain fully visible.

He is now under investigation by the House of Representatives committee on government oversight for refusing to follow a long-standing directive ordering his office, among other government agencies, to hand over to the National Archives details of how he uses classified information. When challenged, he recommended abolition of the archive office.

Last week Mr Cheney and Mr Addington tried to argue that he was not bound by the rules, claiming that he is not part of the executive branch of government because he also acts as president of the Senate. They abandoned that position when congressional Democrats threatened to strip him of his executive funding. “He’s saying he’s above the law,” said Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the oversight committee.

Vice-President Cheney has previously claimed executive privilege – the opposite excuse – in refusing to hand over details of which oil companies he consulted when drawing up American energy policy.

The Washington Post series also detailed how he ordered the diversion of a river to irrigate farms in Oregon, in pursuit of farmers’ votes, despite scientific evidence that this would endanger two protected species of fish. The move killed 80,000 salmon. Last week that issue became the subject of an inquiry by another House committee.

Allies say Mr Cheney is unrepentant. “The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington is Dick Cheney,” said a former White House ally.

“What both of them miss is that in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration – a complete and total indifference to public opinion.”

Published on Sunday, July 1, 2007 by Reuters

HAVANA – Convalescing Cuban President Fidel Castro charged on Sunday the release of classified CIA documents detailing past abuses was a smoke screen behind which the Bush administration hoped to hide even worse methods.

“I think that this action could be an attempt … to make people believe that these methods belong to another era and are no longer used,” Castro wrote in an editorial published by the communist country’s official media.

“Everything described in the documents is still being done, only in a more brutal manner around the entire planet, including an increasing number of illegal actions in the very United States.”

The CIA declassified on Tuesday hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detailed some of the agency’s worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.

The documents are known in the CIA as the “Family Jewels” and some describe the agency’s efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, believed to be a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro.

“Sunday is a good day to read what appears to be science fiction,” Castro began his three-page editorial, titled “The Killing Machine.”

He went on to quote extensively from material covering the attempt on his life, as well as a New York Times analysis of all the documents.

Cuba charges that Castro has been the target of hundreds of assassination attempts. The Cuban leader has said numerous times that President George W. Bush has ordered him killed.

Castro also reiterated in detail his long-held belief that U.S. President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, was the victim of a plot involving elements of the CIA and militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

Castro, a master sharp-shooter with a telescopic rifle, insists Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the only shooter in Dallas.

“You loose the target after every shot even if it is not moving and have to find it again in fractions of a second,” he said.

Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July last year, when he handed over power temporarily to his younger brother, Raul.

But the 80-year-old revolutionary has returned to public life since March by writing occasional articles, called “Reflections of the Commander in Chief.” He has been writing more frequently in recent weeks, fueling speculation that his health is improving.

The New York Times,

By BARRY BEARAK and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

Published: June 30, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 29 — Four civilians were killed early Friday by American and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan, according to the leader of a small human rights group who gave an account of the deaths entirely at odds with that of the United States-led coalition.

Enlarge This Image

Rahmat Gul/Associated Press

A boy wept after two of his uncles were killed and his father was detained in an American raid on several family compounds in eastern Afghanistan.

“The soldiers claimed they were looking for three Taliban suspects, and they blew out the door of the house that belongs to Haji Muhammada Jan, who was about 80 years old, killing him and two of his sons and a grandson,” said Lal Gul, chairman of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organization and a resident of the area in Nangarhar Province where the killings took place. “There were no Taliban here.”

The American-led coalition offered a markedly different version, saying its forces had been fired upon after “credible intelligence” led them to three separate compounds suspected of harboring Taliban fighters. It said that three militants were killed in the ensuing combat. A search of the compounds yielded rocket-propelled grenade launchers and grenades, Maj. Christopher Belcher said. Sixteen militants were taken prisoner, the coalition said.

Such competing versions of reality have become an almost daily part of the war in Afghanistan, where the nation’s president and many of its people vehemently complain that American and NATO military forces are causing needless civilian casualties.

On Friday, the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, addressed the matter in remarks made in Macedonia, promising, “We will do our utmost to reduce the loss of civilian life.” He continued, “Let me make one point unmistakably: NATO has never and will never intentionally kill innocent civilians.”

But the issue is not one of intent. Last week, President Hamid Karzai rebuked the United States military and NATO for “careless operations.” He spoke after a week in which more than 100 civilian deaths were reported from airstrikes and artillery fire against the Taliban. Among his specific criticisms were what he called “the disproportionate use of force to a situation and the lack of coordination with the Afghan government.”

If Mr. Gul, the human rights advocate, is correct, the events in Nangarhar on Friday may have been a result of another in a series of tragic mistakes. “The people who were taken away are not members of the Taliban,” he said in a telephone interview. “They are mostly farmers. The version being given by the coalition is baseless and a lie.”

Two weeks ago, seven Afghan policemen were killed by Americans in the same region when the two forces mistook each other for insurgents.

Also on Friday, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, visited Afghanistan for the first time in his present job, meeting with Mr. Karzai and the commander of NATO forces here, The Associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the United Nations, Adrian Edwards, said the visit was aimed at “ensuring solid coordination between the U.N. and Afghan government in their joint efforts here,” The A.P. reported.

Global Research, June 30, 2007

Tony Blair: Orwellian Nightmare. War Criminal becomes Envoy of Peace

By Mohammad Kamaali

As Tony Blair left Downing Street, leaving Britain’s Prime Ministership to his long time rival and co-leader of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown, the protesters outside Blair’s office were greeted with the news that Blair had just been appointed as the new “Middle East Envoy” for the Quartet. (US/EU/UN/Russia)

Looking at the realities of the Middle East today and reviewing Blair’s contribution to the current mayhem, one is left wondering whether this decision is born out of delusional thinking, sheer cynicism, or is there any possible constructive utility in this appointment?

During his ten years in office, Tony Blair was, by all accounts, the most media-obsessed Prime Minister Britain has ever seen. Perhaps his decision to put himself forward for this job must also be viewed in that light, as a last attempt by an increasingly unpopular politician to save his face at home rather than a genuine attempt to work towards any real prospect of a safer world.

Perhaps the one major highlight of Blair’s negotiation skills was the Good Friday Agreement that he helped bring about in Northern Ireland in 1998. But not only was the groundwork for this laid down by his predecessor, what is also often forgotten, is that this was an isolated problem, in his own backyard; while the Middle East is an entirely different situation with a complicated web of stake holders where problems cannot be viewed in isolation from each other.

The very fact that Blair seems to see himself as ‘fit for purpose’ shows a lack of understanding of the political situation in the Middle East and the root causes of the ongoing problems.

His conduct and miscalculations in his shameless refusal to call for a ceasefire during Israel’s attack on Lebanon last summer, which led to the destruction of southern Lebanon , cost him the little credibility he had previously earned by projecting an image of himself as a restraining force in preventing George W. Bush from attacking Iraq without a second UNSC resolution. Of course that resolution was never passed and they both went ahead with their long time planned invasion.

In any conflict, it is reasonable to expect the mediator to be respected by both parties to the conflict as unbiased and one who will act in competence and honesty to bring about a fair and appropriate resolution. Blair’s appointment as an envoy was immediately welcomed by Israel and the US . But is this a view that is shared beyond the ‘allied’ countries? It is inconceivable to think that Blair and his advisors are not aware of his image in the Middle East . As such one is led to believe that he is quite simply “not bothered” about it. This is what I refer to as “sheer cynicism”.

More

RINF News, 27.06.2007

The US armed forces have been using torture indiscriminately, a human rights group charged Monday.

“Moreover, more than 100,000 pages of government documents released in response to [an] American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] Freedom of Information Act request reveal that a pervasive and systemic pattern of harsh interrogation techniques have been used by military personnel indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay,” the ACLU said in a statement Monday.

“The documents include evidence that detainees have been beaten; forced into painful stress positions; threatened with death; sexually and religiously humiliated; stripped naked; hooded and blindfolded; exposed to extreme heat and cold; denied food and water; isolated for prolonged periods; subjected to mock drownings; and intimated by dogs,” the group said.

The ACLU and other human rights groups hope that the Democratic-controlled 110th Congress will act on their reports to rein in the Bush administration and force it to change its interrogation policies. Congress has already stepped up its efforts to monitor such secret activities in the war on terror.