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by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
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[PART I]
Whoever is elected president in the coming November 4 American election will inherit a most miserable situation on nearly all fronts. This is because George W. Bush has been one of the worst presidents the U.S. has ever had, if not the worst. It is widely recognized that he was a below average politician who led his country on the wrong track, both domestically and internationally. Today, only a meager 9 percent of Americans dare to say that their country is moving in the right direction. As a matter of fact, a very large majority of Americans— both Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and of rural areas, high school graduates and college-educated— all say that the United States has been headed in the wrong direction under George W. Bush’s stewardship. Bush’s approval rating reflects the lack of confidence that Americans have in him and his administration. In fact, George W. Bush has recorded the lowest approval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll. And, around the world, the United States has never had a leader who commands so little respect and confidence. Most people in the U.S. and abroad will find satisfaction in seeing his term come to an end.
This is a terrible indictment of the Bush Administration that has presided over America’s destinies for the last eight years. What is more disconcerting, this all came after George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2000, with fewer popular votes than Democratic candidate Al Gore, after a one-judge-majority decision of the Supreme Court, in effect, gave him the presidency. Therefore, this is an administration that had no widespread democratic mandate to do what it has done. And it has done a lot of things wrong. In fact, many people think this has been a morally bankrupt administration. International disaster: An Illegal and Immoral War of Aggression At the center of this fiasco, is the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration and its neocon cohort rushed to exploit the 9/11 terrorist attacks and used this as a pretext to implement a preconceived pro-Israel and pro-oil plan in the Middle East. This led them to adopt a simplistic response to Islamist terrorism, barging into complex Middle East societies on elephant feet. But in the process, they have only succeeded in making matters worse and in encouraging more hatred against the U.S. and more terrorism. Indeed, George W. Bush will be remembered above all as the man who launched an illegal and immoral war of aggression against another sovereign nation, on false pretenses and forged documents, destroying in so doing the entire country of Iraq, and damaging perhaps irreparably the U.S. reputation in the world. As Scott McClellan, Bush’s former Press Secretary during seven long years, stated, Bush and his advisers [in launching the Iraq War] “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candour and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war”. Bush’s deception and lies about Iraq in order to initiate a war of aggression, an aggression that is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the U.S., are well documented. Thus, historians will have no difficulty in establishing the fact that the United States, under Bush, acted as a lawless international aggressor. In initiating a war of aggression, Bush did violate the United Nations Charter, which “prohibits the use of military force” against any nation without the specific approval of the United Nations Security Council. The Security Council never approved the American-led military invasion of Iraq. Therefore, Bush and his crew had no international legal basis to invade Iraq. And they cannot pretend that Congress gave them such an authorization, since it is well known in law that no domestic law can override a signed international treaty in good standing. In a domestic parallel, George W. Bush and his administration have set up what is probably the most widespread war profiteering system in modern history, through which billions and billions of dollars were misappropriated and wasted. At the same time as they were adopting a permanent war posture abroad, they were irresponsibly calling at home for a 674 billion dollar tax cut for their rich supporters and pushing up the deficits, of which a large proportion was financed by borrowing abroad. Illegality and Immorality On the legal front, this is an administration that has shamed the United States with its illegal actions, with its deliberate and dishonest lies, with its war crimes, its disregard for international treaties, and with its overt disregard of constitutional government. On the question of lawlessness, the list of missteps the Bush-Cheney administration took outside of the law is too long for a short article as this one. But there are numerous documents to be consulted and it is possible to attempt a short summary. From the very beginning, the Bush-Cheney administration has dismissed international law and disregarded domestic law. They began by either repudiating or refusing to honor the United States’ international commitments and obligations, thus showing indifference, if not outright hostility, toward international law. They opted out of five important international treaties and commitments: the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty and the International Criminal Court. In so doing, the United States, under the Bush-Cheney administration, has betrayed its international commitments and has moved away from being a moral state, and more and more toward the status of an international rogue state. This was all confirmed when the Bush-Cheney administration adopted, in September 2002, the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, an internationally illegal and immoral program. Indeed, under existing international law, no country may attack another under false pretenses, nor use military force unilaterally. This was followed by the even more dangerous and hairy Cheney Doctrine (or the One Percent Doctrine) which is anti-human rights, anti-rule of law and anti-Constitution, because it posits that if there is even a 1% chance American interests are in jeopardy somewhere in the world, unilateral American military interventions are justified, and this without conclusive evidence or extensive analysis. Such hubristic and shoot-from-the-hip foreign policies are a true recipe for international anarchy and thus render a great disservice to humanity. Domestically, President George W. Bush has introduced the unconstitutional practice of adding signing statements to new laws, stating that he has the right, as President, to violate any section of a law, should he deem it in the national interest to do so. For example, on January 28, 2008, Bush signed into law the repeal of the “Insurrection Act Rider” in the 2006 defense appropriations bill. That rider had given the President sweeping power to use military troops in ways contrary to the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act and authorized the president to have troops patrol American streets in response to disasters, epidemics, and any “condition” he might cite. But in signing this repeal, Bush attached a signing statement that he did not feel bound by the repeal, thus opening the possibility he could ignore the law any time he saw fit to do so. Disrespect for Liberty and the U.S. Constitution As if this were not enough, there was the attempt by the Bush-Cheney regime to suspend and even permanently abolish the more than eight centuries old right of Habeas Corpus. And when the Supreme Court, in a far-reaching decision on June 12, 2008, rebuked the B-C administration’s argument that it had a right to establish concentration camps on U.S.-run properties around the world and hold prisoners indefinitely with no legal recourse, especially at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, President George W. Bush had the gall to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision while on a trip to Europe. Then Bush embarked upon a program of domestic spying on Americans never before seen in a democracy. He, indeed, removed most of the safeguards that had been erected to protect citizens from illegal and warrantless spying activities by government, thus making a mockery of the U.S. Constitution. In particular, the Bush-Cheney administration did not respect key parts of the U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It must said, however, that some Bush Democrats, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Democratic House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D – MD) have also willfully and enthusiastically collaborated with George W. Bush in enlarging the government’s spying powers over citizens. On his own, however, George W. Bush did his utmost to make permanent the President’s War Powers, thus making sure that the United States could remain on a permanent war path and be in a position to suspend at will basic constitutional rights. On top of everything, George W. Bush will be remembered as a politician who authorized torture and indefinite detention of prisoners. Indeed, after Bush willfully suspended the rights accorded prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions, he was, in fact, officially turning the United States into an immoral nation that openly and unashamedly resorts to torture, thus violating basic rules of morality, international law and a host of international treaties adhered to by the United States. In fact, the Geneva Conventions in its article 3 does not only prohibit torture, but also any cruel, inhuman, degrading, and humiliating treatment of a detainee “in all circumstances.” However, it is not only on the issue of torture that the United States under Bush has become an international pariah. The Bush-Cheney administration has also operated concentration camps in many countries, holding captive tens of thousands of detainees and hiding them from the Red Cross, the body empowered to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions. The Bush-Cheney administration has placed itself outside the civilized world and was nearly alone, last May (2008), in trying to undermine a treaty banning cluster bombs, a type of bombs which have killed so many civilians, when 111 countries signed a treaty outlawing these inhuman weapons. On this occasion, the United States, under Bush-Cheney, sided with a handful of weapons makers and users, none of them known as great defenders of human rights and democracy: Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. The Bush-Cheney administration has truly been a shamelessly immoral administration. (PART II on Global Research next week) Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at: rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com. He is the author of the book ‘The New American Empire’. Visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author’s Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/ Check Dr. Tremblay’s coming book “The Code for Global Ethics” at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ |
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Posts Tagged ‘United States’
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Print this articleTens of Thousands of Iraqis Mass for Anti-SOFA Protest
October 18, 2008At least 50,000 Iraqis joined a protest in the streets of Baghdad today, organized by followers of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, chanting anti-US and anti-occupation slogans and waving banners opposing the controversial Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which would keep US troops in Iraq through 2011.
Though Sadr was not personally present at the rally, he did address the crowd in a message directed at Iraqi lawmakers, read by Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammadawi. In the statement he urged Iraq’s parliament to “champion the will of the people over that of the occupier” and oppose the pact. He also cautioned that passing the deal “will stigmatize Iraq and its government for years to come.”
Sadr is just one of many influential religious leaders, both Sunni and Shi’ite, speaking out against the SOFA. The high attendance for the rally underscores a growing popular hostility for the deal, which faces a long battle for approval in the Iraqi government.
Though it is unclear at this point whether the terms of the deal are finalized, officials reported this was the case earlier in the week though White House Press Secretary Dana Perino denied it yesterday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari says it would be “difficult to reopen the text” and that it was time for parliament to either ratify or reject the deal. He added that “the next few days are very crucial for Iraqi leaders to decide.”
Popular and religious opposition to the deal as well as a splintering coalition government will make it extremely difficult for Iraq’s parliament to pass the deal. And even though a simple majority is all that is required for passage, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reportedly intends to submit it for consideration only if he is confident it will receive a two-thirds majority, fearing criticism if the vote is close.
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U.S., Iraqi Officials Question Terms of Draft Security Deal
October 18, 2008At Issue: Legal Authority Over Troops
By Mary Beth Sheridan and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers, Saturday, October 18, 2008
BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 — A number of senior Iraqi and U.S. politicians expressed strong reservations Friday about the terms of a draft agreement that gives Iraq the “primary right” — subject to U.S. acquiescence — to try American soldiers accused of serious crimes committed during off-duty hours outside U.S. military bases here.
Some political leaders in Baghdad, who got their first look at the controversial agreement to extend the U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond 2008, said it did not go far enough in guaranteeing Iraqi sovereignty. The bilateral accord was presented Friday to the Political Council for National Security, an advisory body including political, legislative and judicial leaders, whose support is necessary before it can be submitted to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki‘s cabinet and then to parliament for final approval. After an initial review, the council said it would continue discussions next week.
In Washington, congressional Democrats questioned ceding any authority over U.S. troops to Iraq. “I am very concerned about reports that U.S. service personnel may not have full immunity under Iraqi law,” said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the House Armed Services Committee chairman. The Bush administration allowed a small group of senior congressional aides to read the document at a White House briefing this morning but did not allow copies to be made.
A provision in the draft would give the United States “primary” jurisdiction over military personnel and Defense Department employees who are on bases or engaged in authorized military operations.
Iraq, it says, would have the “primary right to exercise judicial jurisdiction” over “premeditated and gross felonies . . . committed outside the agreed facilities and areas and when not on a mission.” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Friday that any disagreement would be resolved by a joint committee. “If the crime is very grave or serious, the U.S. may waive its jurisdiction,” he said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that “there is not a reason to be concerned.” He said top U.S. military officials “are all satisfied that our men and women in uniform serving in Iraq are well protected.” U.S. officials have emphasized that off-duty American troops in Iraq rarely, if ever, venture outside their bases, and said that they consider language in the document vague enough to ensure absolute U.S. control in all circumstances.
Administration officials also said they are confident that withdrawal dates in the document — June 30, 2009, for U.S. forces in Iraqi cities and Dec. 31, 2011, from all of Iraq — contain sufficient caveats to address any future downturn in the security situation. Before the final deadline, the draft says, “on the basis of Iraq’s assessment of conditions on the ground,” the Iraqi government could ask for U.S. troops to remain for “training purposes” or to “support Iraqi security forces.”
The accord also would prohibit U.S. forces from detaining any Iraqi citizen without an Iraqi warrant, and says any detainee would have to be handed over to government custody within 24 hours. All Iraqis in U.S. custody as of Jan. 1 — when the agreement would go into effect upon expiration of the current U.N. mandate authorizing foreign troops here — would have to be turned over to the Iraqi government. Home and property searches also would require an Iraqi warrant, except during certain combat situations.
U.S. and Iraqi officials confirmed the wording of the document, portions of which were widely circulated in both capitals Friday.
The sensitivity of the draft agreement, which has been under negotiation since March, was illustrated when Maliki lashed out at the top American commander here for saying that U.S. intelligence indicated Iran was trying to bribe Iraqi lawmakers to reject the pact.
“The American commander has risked his position when he spoke in this tone and has complicated relations in a deplorable way,” Maliki told a group of Kuwaiti journalists in an interview broadcast by Iraqi state television Friday. Maliki expressed astonishment at the remarks from U.S. Gen. Ray Odierno, whom he described as a “kind and good man.” Iraqi members of parliament, he said, had not accepted any bribes.
Maliki was reacting to a Monday article in The Washington Post in which Odierno said Iran was conducting a “full-court press” with its Iraqi contacts to sabotage the pact, including “coming in to pay off people to vote against it.” A U.S. military spokesman later said there was no confirmation that bribes had been accepted by lawmakers.
A number of Iraq’s leading political leaders spent years in exile in Iran during the presidency of Saddam Hussein and maintain warm relations with the Tehran government. Several expressed sharp offense at Odierno’s comments.
Jalal al-Deen al-Saghir, a top lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Maliki’s main political partner, said in an interview that he saw “serious problems” in the proposed accord, “especially after Odierno’s statements.”
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Friday that there was a misunderstanding about Odierno’s comments. “I don’t think General Odierno was implying that there are crooked Iraqi politicians, but rather that there are Iranian agents who, in their attempt to derail the [agreement], are trying to bribe Iraqi politicians,” he said.
In Najaf, the religious capital of Iraq’s Shiite majority, a leading cleric blasted the idea of giving U.S. forces any immunity from Iraqi law. “We consider this a basic point because it represents sovereignty,” Sadir Addin al-Qobanchi said in a sermon at the city’s grand mosque. “If someone commits a hostile act against your house and family, and you say it is fine and don’t hold him responsible, it means that you don’t have dignity or sovereignty.”
U.S. military and political officials have expressed concern that the agreement may not make it through Iraq’s slow-moving political process by year’s end. An extension of the U.N. mandate, the most likely option if a final agreement is not reached, poses political and legal complications for both sides.
Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker, said the agreement could gain the approval of the political council and the cabinet. But in parliament, supporters of the agreement “will face opposition,” he said. The accord, which must win a majority in the 275-seat parliament, is strongly supported by the Kurdish bloc, the second-biggest with 54 seats. Various Sunni and independent parties representing scores of seats have also indicated their approval.
But Othman said the backing of some politicians was not solid.
“They tell the Americans, ‘We are okay, we’ll sign it.’ Then they tell their people in parliament not to vote for it,” he said.
The U.S. Congress does not have similar veto power over the agreement, which requires only a presidential signature. But senior Democrats, and a number of Republicans, have questioned its terms. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement Friday that complete American jurisdiction over U.S. service members was “critical” and that they could not be “subject to criminal prosecution in an Iraqi judicial system that does not meet due process standards.” Levin said he would “reserve judgment” on the draft until he was given an opportunity for a “complete review” of its terms.
DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson in Washington and special correspondent Qais Mizher in Baghdad contributed to this report.
The torture time bomb
October 18, 2008The Bush administration’s approval of the abuse of detainees is a toxic legacy for the next US president
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- Philippe Sands The Guardian, Saturday October 18 2008
As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation – including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA – which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.
The torture issue’s cancerous consequences go deep, and will cause headaches for the next president. New evidence has emerged in Congressional inquiries that throw more light on the extent to which early knowledge and approval of the abuse went to the highest levels. What does a country do when compelling evidence shows its leaders have authorised international crimes?
For three years I have followed a trail which leads unambiguously to the conclusion that the real bad eggs were not Lyndie England or others on the ground in Abu Ghraib, but the most senior officials in the White House, the Pentagon and the department of justice. Over recent months, Congress has been looking into the role of senior officials involved in the development of interrogation rules. These have attracted relatively scant attention; little by little, however, senators and congressmen have uncovered the outlines of a potentially far-reaching criminal conspiracy.
The first hearings were convened before the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, at the instance of its chairman, Congressman John Conyers, apparently off the back of my book Torture Team. Parallel hearings have been held before the Senate armed services committee.
The evidence that has emerged is potentially devastating. It confirms, for instance, that the search for new interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo began not with the local military but in the offices of Donald Rumsfeld and his chief lawyer, Jim Haynes. It shows that when the career military expressed objections on legal grounds, Haynes intervened to stop the normal process of review. And it shows a previously unknown interplay between the department of defence and the CIA: a visit to Guantánamo in September 2002 by the administration’s most senior lawyers was followed days later by a senior CIA lawyer, to brief on the new techniques. “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used,” he explained, “the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”
Last month the Senate armed services committee received new material from Condoleezza Rice, the first cabinet-level official to confirm high-level involvement in discussions on interrogation techniques. “I participated in a number of meetings in 2002 and 2003 … at which issues relating to detainees in US custody, including interrogation issues, were discussed,” she said. Those present at such meetings included Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and CIA director George Tenet. The meetings, which concerned the CIA programme, “occurred inside the White House”. Rice confirmed she was aware of the existence of, but did not read, the justice department legal advice of August 1 2002 that abandoned the international definition of torture and replaced it with a definition drawn from a US Medicare statute.
Buried away in this testimony lies the most dangerous material of all: evidence which may establish that abuses on detainees in Iraq in September 2003, in the period perhaps including the events at Abu Ghraib, were the result of decisions taken at the highest levels of the administration. The administration has long proclaimed it did not allow aggressive interrogations in Iraq, since the Geneva conventions applied. Last month we learned this was false: not everyone had protection under Geneva. If you were considered to be a terrorist, you had no protection at all. A senior US intelligence officer visited Iraq in September 2003. He witnessed abusive interrogation techniques that violated Geneva and complained. The response? He was told the techniques “were pre-approved by DoD GC or higher”. DoD GC is the general counsel at the department of defence, Jim Haynes. Who could be higher? His boss: Rumsfeld.
I have testified before Congress on these issues, and have been asked if there should be criminal investigations and prosecutions. At the very least, the next US president must ensure the full facts are established. It will then be for others to decide what follows. But if the US doesn’t get its own house in order and restore its reputation for the rule of law, others will surely step in.
• Philippe Sands QC is professor of law at UCL, a barrister at Matrix Chambers and author of Torture Team p.sands@ucl.ac.uk
Antiwar vets attacked by police outside debate
October 17, 2008report on how police met antiwar dissent with batons and horses at the last presidential debate in New York.
Socialist Worker, October 17, 2008
Nassau County police injured several people in their assault on antiwar protests outside the presidential debate
WHILE BARACK Obama and John McCain were getting makeup touchups for their Wednesday night debate at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y., police outside made sure that the voices of antiwar veterans wouldn’t be heard.
Officers of the Nassau County Police Department reacted with reckless violence to a protest organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) outside the debate site. Among several people injured in the assault, former Army Sgt. Nick Morgan was knocked unconscious and his cheekbone broken when he was trampled by a police horse.
“We were there to force the issue that the leaders of this nation are not listening to or are not caring about veterans,” said IVAW member Matthis Chiroux, who was among several veterans and activists arrested. “And they couldn’t have done a better job of proving us right. They stomped my friend Nick’s face into Jell-o. I put this on both candidates, on the major press and on the Nassau County police.”
The IVAW had sent a request to the debate moderator that they be allowed to ask their own questions of the candidates at the Hofstra event, but this was ignored–and so the third and final presidential debate passed without an antiwar voice being represented.
That night, IVAW organized a nonviolent demonstration to request entry into the debate. Marching in uniform and in formation, IVAW members led several hundred activists to an intersection in front of the Hofstra campus gates–where they were confronted by an army of mounted police and riot cops.
Ten IVAW members were arrested, apparently for no more than insisting on their right to be heard. Mounted police then pushed the crowd back onto the sidewalk, recklessly pulling their horses around and at times backing them into the crowd. The police continued to drive protesters back, pinning the crowd up against a fence.
Riot cops reached past the IVAW members at the front of the crowd, grabbing protesters behind them and dragging them into the street. A mounted cop leapt with his horse onto the sidewalk and trampled protesters, including Morgan.
Chiroux said the police took Morgan aside and bandaged him, but then placed him in a truck with other arrestees to go to processing and detention.
“He was incoherent, he couldn’t even say his name,” Chiroux said. “He had blood running down his face. We kept telling the police he needed immediate medical attention. One officer said, with a smirk, ‘Get him to say it. He has to say it.’ I said, ‘He can’t even talk!’ The officer said, ‘Tough luck.’ Finally, we said, ‘Nick, you have to say I need to go to the hospital.’ We got him to say it, and they took him in.”
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CHIROUX SAID that while they were detained, he and his fellow IVAW members were verbally harassed by police. “They called us traitors, cowards, idiots,” he said.
Three women IVAW members who had been arrested were handcuffed to a bench, and “the male officers kept coming closer to them, verbally sexually harassing them,” Chiroux said. “One kept holding up Marlisa’s ID to her face and saying, ‘Wow, you look like you came out of a Barbie magazine.'”
Morgan was brought back from the hospital, still incoherent and in great pain. He was left chained to a bench for five hours without further medical attention, Chiroux said. IVAW members repeatedly asked officers for their names (they weren’t wearing badges) or to contact lawyers–they were refused on all counts.
When most of the IVAW members were finally released at 2:30 a.m. (according to reports, one vet remained in custody as this report was written), they went, still in uniform, to a nearby diner–where the same group of cops who had detained them were eating.
Chiroux went up to them and asked again for their names. One officer “got up in my face,” he said, “screaming and waving his finger at me and saying, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass if you keep asking that.'”
The IVAW members say they wanted to ask Barak Obama if he would support soldiers who refuse to serve in Iraq, since in the past, he had called the Iraq war illegal. They also wanted to question John McCain about his votes to cut veterans benefits.
“Neither of the candidates have shown real support for soldiers and veterans,” said Jason Lemieux, a former sergeant in the Marine Corps and a member of IVAW who served three tours in Iraq.
“We came here to try and get serious questions answered–questions that we, as veterans of the Iraq war, have a right to ask–but instead we were arrested. We believe that the time has come to end this war and bring our troops home, and we will be pushing for that no matter what happens in this election.”
IVAW members thanked activists for coming to support the march and for enduring the police violence.
“For many of our members, this was their first protest,” said Hannah Fleury of the Campus Antiwar Network, which mobilized chapters from as far away as Boston for this protest. “Now that we see what we’re up against, we’re going to fight even harder on our campuses to end the war, and to support the veterans.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union is asking for an immediate investigation into the use of horses at the demonstration. “It is shocking that someone who served his country would be treated so disgracefully by the Nassau County Police Department,” Tara Keenan-Thomson, director of the group’s Nassau County chapter, said in a press release.
As Chiroux said, “Both candidates claim they support veterans. And this is how we got supported last night: by being pushed back, trampled and arrested.
“We demonstrated to the country and the world that democracy is not dead in the United States–that the people in the U.S. still ultimately hold the power. They can try to force our voices to be silent, to block us out of the media, but we won’t let these people shut us down.”
The reality of war in Afghanistan
October 16, 2008Despite their differences over how to pursue the US war in Iraq, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama both want to send more American troops to Afghanistan. Both are wrong. History cries out to them, but they are not listening.
Both candidates would do well to gaze for a moment on a painting by the British artist Elizabeth Butler called “Remnants of an Army.” It depicts the lone survivor of a 15,000-strong British column that sought to march through 150 kilometers of hostile Afghan territory in 1842. His gaunt, defeated figure is a timeless reminder of what happens to foreign armies that try to subdue Afghanistan.
The McCain-Obama approach to Afghanistan, like much of US policy toward the Middle East and Central Asia, is based on emotion rather than realism. Emotion leads many Americans to want to punish perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They see war against the Taliban as a way to do it. Suggesting that victory over the Taliban is impossible, and that the United States can only hope for peace in Afghanistan through compromise with Taliban leaders, has been taken as near-treason.
This knee-jerk response ignores the pattern of fluid loyalties that has been part of Afghan tribal life for centuries. Alliances shift as interests change. Warlords who support the Taliban are not necessarily enemies of the United States. If they are today, they need not be tomorrow.
In recent weeks, this elemental truth has begun to reshape debate over Western policy toward Afghanistan. Warlords on both sides met quietly in Saudi Arabia. The Afghan defense minister called for a “political settlement with the Taliban.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates would not go that far, but said he might ultimately be open to “reconciliation as part of the political outcome.”
Gates, however, struck a delusionary note of “can-do” cheeriness by repeating the McCain-Obama mantra: More US troops can pacify Afghanistan. Speaking days after a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the United States was caught in a “downward spiral” there, Gates asserted that there is “no reason to be defeatist or underestimate the opportunity to be successful in the long run.”
In fact, long-run success in Afghanistan – defined as an acceptable level of violence and assurance that Afghan territory will not be used for attacks against other countries – will only be possible with fewer foreign troops on the ground, not more.
A relentless series of US attacks in Afghanistan has produced “collateral damage” in the form of hundreds of civilian deaths, which alienate the very Afghans the West needs. As long as the campaign continues, recruits will pour into Taliban ranks. It is no accident that the Taliban has mushroomed since the current bombing campaign began. It allows the Taliban to claim the mantle of resistance to a foreign occupier. In Afghanistan, there is none more sacred.
The US war in Afghanistan also serves as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. It is attracting a new stream of foreign fighters into the region. A few years ago, these jihadists went to Iraq to fight the Great Satan. Now they see the United States escalating its war in Afghanistan and neighboring regions of Pakistan, and are flocking there instead.
Even if the United States de-escalates its war in Afghanistan, the country will not be stable as long as the poppy trade provides huge sums of money for violent militants. Eradicating poppies is like eradicating the Taliban: a great idea but not achievable. Instead of waging endless spray-and-burn campaigns that alienate ordinary Afghans, the United States should allow planting to proceed unmolested, and then buy the entire crop. Some could be turned into morphine for medical use, and the rest destroyed. The Afghan poppy crop is worth an estimated $4 billion per year. That sum would be better spent putting cash into the pockets of Afghan peasants than firing missiles into their villages.
Deploying more US troops in Afghanistan will intensify this highly dangerous conflict, not calm it. Compromise with Al Qaeda would be both unimaginable and morally repugnant, but the Taliban is a different force. Skillful negotiation among clan leaders, based on a genuine willingness to compromise, holds the best hope for Afghanistan. It is an approach based on reality, not emotion.
Amnesty accuses Spain of allowing CIA flights to Guantanamo
October 12, 2008RINF.COM, Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Madrid – The human rights group Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday accused the Spanish government of not having tried to prevent US flights transporting terrorist suspects to illegal detention centres across Spanish airspace.
At least 90 flights linked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made stopovers at 15 Spanish airports, mainly on the Canary Islands, between 2002 and 2007, the Spanish section of AI said in a report.
About 200 people were taken to the US prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, on flights that took off from US military bases in Spain or crossed the Spanish airspace, AI charged.
The group urged the government to cooperate with an ongoing judicial investigation into the flights.
Other European countries allowed similar flights, AI conceded.
JOEL BRINKLEY: Evidence grows that Israel, with U.S. aid, is preparing to attack Iran
October 11, 2008For the last few weeks, all eyes have been on North Korea, as the nation’s idiosyncratic leadership began reopening a plant that manufactures weapons-grade plutonium. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state, met, to no effect, with North Korea’s leaders in Pyongyang last week – a visit that would have been inconceivable while hawks still dominated the Bush administration.
But, as anyone might guess, the problems in Iran did not suddenly freeze while everyone looked east. In fact several recent developments leave the strong suggestion that Israel is preparing to attack Iran – with significant help from the United States.
The likelihood of an American attack has diminished. American commanders “think it would complicate the situation in Iraq and the region,” John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador, told me. He favors an attack but says “the Bush administration was much more inclined to do it a few years ago.” Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, at State and Defense – relative moderates within the Bush administration – now dominate discussion of issues like this.
Would Washington support an Israeli attack? Recently, the administration has given clear signals that it would not. But then, why did the Pentagon announce last month that it planned to sell Israel 1,000 new GBU-39 bunker-busting bombs? They are small weapons that can be dropped from the wings of the fighter jets in Israel’s air force. Each can penetrate 6 feet of reinforced concrete. If several aircraft hit the same target the total penetration could be much deeper.
Why does Israel need those bombs? Israeli military analysts have been saying they are for attacking underground weapons depots in Gaza or southern Lebanon. Perhaps.
But then, why about the same time did the Pentagon agree to sell Israel sophisticated upgrades for the country’s Patriot anti-missile missiles – and send more than 100 technicians to install them? If Israel attacked, Iran has warned that it would fire volleys of ballistic missiles in response.
And there’s more: Just last week came the news that the United States has deployed an advanced early-warning radar system in Israel for detecting incoming missiles. It is so sophisticated that, for now, U.S. Army crews will be stationed there to operate it.
Bolton and others advised against “reading all of that into this,” as he put it. The United States continually sells military equipment to Israel. Most years the United States gives Israel about $2 billion in military aid, and it must be spent on American arms.
What is more, Abbas Milani, an expert on Iran at Stanford University, told me that the Iranian press of late has been saying “the time is past” when the United States might attack. And while there is some concern about Israel, the Iranian papers correctly note that the country is locked in negotiations to form a new government that aren’t likely to be settled for several weeks. Israel would not attack before a new government forms.
At the same time, though, Israelis certainly saw Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, telling the United Nations last month that “the Zionist regime is on a definite slide toward collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of this cesspool.”
Still, all of this may be a hall of mirrors. The United States may be arming Israel purely for defensive reasons. Israel’s military exercises and blustery threats may simply be the state’s way of warning Iran. On the other hand, the Bush administration’s statements cautioning Israel may simply be an attempt to prevent Iran from blaming Washington if Israel does attack.
In any case, Bolton said, “Israel’s decision will not be based on what the Pentagon wants.” And if Israel does attack, Iran will consider Washington responsible, no matter what the administration has said.
“So if the U.S. is going to be blamed anyway,” Bolton offered, “we ought to go ahead and assist them.”
Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkley@foreign-matters.com
Peace and Justice Post 
World Peace is More Than Just the Silencing of the Guns
October 21, 2008By Peter Chamberlin | Information Clearing House, Oct 20, 2008
World peace is more than just the silencing of the guns, it is the elimination of the injustice that has compelled the men to reach for those guns in self-defense against the aggression. In the currently building world war (which is based on lies and deceptions), the mission is to identify all of the men who believe in self-defense and eliminate them. Both sides believe that everyone has the right to self-defense, but the aggressors in this war believe that they have a “divine right” (because of their intellectual superiority) to disarm and rule the rest.
The “war on terror” is the intellectual’s war, the neocon intellectuals. To them, most of the human race is an inferior species, sheep, to be led for their own good. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at the economy, to see how smart they really are and just exactly where they are leading us.
We are standing at the edge of the abyss because we have gone along with all the lies. Without “acceptable” lies, the neocons are nothing but arrogant snobs. Without public acceptance of the “official version” of events, there would never have been a terror war. Without the attack upon our families in New York and Washington in 2001, we would not have been “tickled” into taking-up arms in self-defense against the henchmen and patsies our government offered-up to us to cover its own crimes.
For there to be peace in the midst of a war engineered by a would-be master race the cold penetrating light of reality must emasculate the acceptable lies agreed to in secret back room meetings, which allow sheer gangsterism and extortion from weaker adversaries to masquerade as “diplomacy and negotiations.”
The incessant lies emanating from the Pentagon, the White House and especially from the CIA have to be silenced. If the war of terror, based on lies is to be turned into a world at peace, based on simple truth, then we have to illuminate the secret killings in dark places that show the true face of the war against innocence being waged by Nazi-like regime.
It must be shown that we have been embracing the force of true evil that runs and ruins this Nation today. By exposing the accepted lie that the innocent Muslim people who are merely resisting our aggressions upon their homelands are “terrorists,” we remove the blinders we have accepted from the true authors of terror in the terror war. By accepting US and Pakistani military reports on “collateral” kills, we embrace the popular lie that only “militants and terrorists” were killed by the one-eyed “Terminator” drones. We dishonor ourselves and our ancestors by accepting the lies that babies were “militants!”
We have to get solid evidence out to the world. A good place to start would be to follow the wise example set by the Israeli human rights organization “B’Tselem,” by supplying camcorders to Pakistani families in North and South Waziristan, to document the indiscriminate killing of entire families, the “tickling” operations described so cleverly by CIA Director Michael Hayden. With video evidence (translated into English) of the aftermath of American genocidal attacks it would be much easier to organize resistance to those attacks and serve as evidence in later war crimes trials. It would be beautifully ironic if the American-adopted Israeli tactic of “targeted assassinations” with missiles is exposed by the same video tactic that has revealed Israeli brutality against the helpless in occupied Palestine.
According to Director Hayden, the real value of these attacks with “Hellfire” missiles upon mud-brick family dwellings and religious schools is in the reactions caused by the killings. In other words, the value of the attack is as much in the number of male family members who rise to avenge these terror attacks as it is in the “high value target” occasionally killed. The tactic described by Hayden is the latest manifestation of contemporary American “counter-insurgency” techniques.
The main idea involved in fighting an “insurgency” within a populated area in this manner is to find and co-opt local leaders, like Baitullah Mehsud, around which to create the impression of a growing shadowy “counter-insurgency.” These inept local “contras” get blamed for the ensuing wave of violence committed by US Special Ops, their in addition to the gangster-like attacks they carry-out on their own. These units perform the same task as the Terminator-drones, that of initiating the cycle of retribution. They bomb and murder civilians, in order to motivate their male relatives to take-up arms and avenge their relatives, focusing in particular upon killing of local Shia, to instigate inter-faith conflict.
The concept of fighting a global war by limited means is an evil idea, concocted by the vainest, most self-centered self-worshippers the planet has ever been plagued by. The idea that your intellect is so superior to every other human mind that the best thing that could ever happen to the human race would be for you to rule over them, no matter what it cost in human lives to place you in that position of power, is the idea that drove Adolf Hitler. The men who have brought us the neocon war plan of total world conquest, by limited means, are no less evil, nor less vain than Hitler (the neocon’s favorite bogeyman).
By choosing to fight “the long war,” on a limited basis, they have accepted the idea of killing a major portion of human life, even risking the destruction of the entire planet. The idea of a generational war serves as a sorting mechanism, a gory laboratory for identifying and separating those who will willingly accept the unfair suffering life forced upon them and their families under the new “matrix,” from those persistent independent-minded souls who will resist. The war of terror is to identify potential resisters and to eliminate them, leaving behind only docile malleable slave sheep, to serve as functional “copper-tops.”
The idea that there could ever be world peace as long as the matrix exists is part of the illusion that hinders the formation of a real resistance.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari warned on Friday:
“world peace efforts hampered by credit crunch…The international financial crisis is hampering efforts towards world peace.”
The former Finnish president said a lack of economic development in war-torn countries would make it harder to resolve conflicts:
“It will not help us to solve conflict with no economic development in those countries. It is becoming more and more difficult…We are avoiding taking the tough decisions that are needed.”
This is pure B.S. Contributing to the war of aggression by aiding in reconstruction efforts, while hostilities continue will never bring anything like world peace. The whole idea of “good faith” re-construction by the same monstrous war machine from which the original devastation flowed is an exercise in propaganda and disinformation intended to distract those of us who would form an army of worldwide resistance.
This requires a change of attitude on the part of the aggressor, first, admitting that the US and its allies are the aggressors. The entire terror war has been a manufactured event designed to maintain the US position of global authority. We have to refute the acceptable lie that we have been a victim and that our great war plan simply failed, while we openly admit that the war has been a criminal act of aggression in every conceivable way, from the very beginning. We have committed the most serious crimes in pursuit of our plans to plunder and subjugate the earth, crimes against the human race, crimes against Our Creator, Himself.
We have destroyed entire nations in our mad rush to fend for ourselves and perpetuate our system of inequality that creates immense wealth for true believers by siphoning-off the bread of life from the rest. Until this warfare of greed stops decimating the human race there can never be world peace.
For their ever to be peace, there must be an end to the hostile force that drives men’s aggression and turns simple day-to-day existence into a daily fight for life. The forces that are driving the individual wars that are being merged into one big war, must be stopped. The lands and peoples devastated in their aggression must be rebuilt and compensated for the crimes committed upon them, out of the US Treasury, with money which would formerly have been allotted to further military aggression.
peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com
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Tags:aggressors, calling Muslims terrorists, CIA Director M. Hayden, killing of Pakistanis, master race, Matti Ahtissari, military aggression, neocon intellectuals, self-defence against aggression, United States, war on terror, world peace
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