Requesting Articles regarding saving the Iraqi Nation

In His name, the Most High

Requesting Articles regarding saving the Iraqi Nation

 

Iraq, which is one of the most important Islamic countries in the Middle East is going through important political and military changes. The most effective role in these changes is played by the American occupying forces.

America wants to steal Iraq’s natural resources, create safety for Israel, and have continuously control and put pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran through their complicated and deceptive plans of giving calculated benefits to Iraq causing the limitation and control of that country. They want to have an eternal military presence in Iraq. This is the same thing that they did after their victories in World War II against Japan, South Korea, the Philipines, and Germany.

In these sensitive conditions, America wants to profit the most with spending the absolute minimum. The most important issues for them are protecting the power of influence, their international status, and put their imperialistic power into the various countries of the world.

From the beginning the American invasion of Iraq was not accepted internationally and therefore, the continuation of the occupation and all of their movements or decisions are illegal.

America broke international treaties and United Nation’s resolutions by attacking Iraq, occupying Iraq, stealing the natural resources of Iraq, and destroying the economic, political, military, and cultural foundations of Iraq. And all this continues.

In this sensitive time which is a new chapter in the developments of the Middle East, and is a time where any change in Iraq has direct and deep military, security, political, economical, and cultural effects on our country - it is necessary for scholars, free thinkers, political and social figures, research centers, and internal and external propagational organizations to research the developments especially from the standpoint of international law.

America, with the enormous pressure that it puts on the Security Council has placed Iraq since the Ba’athist government in the United Nation’s Security Council’s seventh section of punishments. But even though Sadddam and the Ba’athist party fell and the Iraqi government changed these punishments still continue. The present Iraqi government which was elected through a democracy still faces the pressures and punishments that Saddam’s government faced. America uses these punishments to put pressure on the Iraqi government and through that make sure that their plans are implemented.

Because of these sensitive conditions and America’s plans to have complete control over the oppressed Iraqi nation and to give it legitimacy by moving on to other Islamic countries in the region. Here, we are requesting articles presenting your opinions and your legal and political suggestions regarding one of the following subjects. The articles will be published and given to the media. Send them to the addresses mentioned below.

1. What legal base did the punishments given to the Iraqi government during the reign of Saddam Hussein by the Security Council have? Did they deal with Iraq in accordance to international law?

2. Was it not possible to put an end to these punishments and to take Iraq out of the seventh section when the Ba’athist government was changed? How is the continuance of this situation in congruence with international law?

3. How is the Iraqi government supposed to legally free itself from this condition?

4. What law did America and its allies in the Security Council rely on to continue the punishments given to Iraq?

5. What effects does the occupation of Iraq have on taking Iraq out of the seventh section or keeping them in it? How do the occupiers use this to their advantage?

6. What connection does stopping the punishments have and taking Iraq off of the seventh section with the end of the war, specifying a time-table exiting the soldier from Iraq, and establishing a military base in Iraq? Is this connection in congruence to international law?

 

7. Did the attack on Iraq and its occupation have a legal base?

8. What international law is the occupation of Iraq based on? How can one use international law to put an end to the occupation of Iraq?

These articles must be completed in the fastest time possible and will be rewarded with exceptional prizes and payments.

Sina Media Institute
Lawyers without borders

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Dr. Sami al-Arian put in the SHU

 

VIRGINIA– At 1 a.m. on Saturday, Dr. Sami Al-Arian was moved by hostile prison guards from a regular holding cell at the Howard County Detention Center in Jessup, Maryland, to the “Special Housing Unit.”
The SHU is an extremely punitive and restrictive section of the prison where inmates are placed in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, usually in freezing temperatures. Prisoners are normally moved there for violating prison rules. However, in the case of Dr. Al-Arian, he has always been placed there without reason or any explanation. In the SHU, prisoners are subjected to continuous, deafening alarm sounds and have little contact with the outside world. With no medical supervision, this is an extremely dangerous place for Dr. Al-Arian to be during his hunger strike, which is on its 41st day. Dr. Al-Arian was also held in solitary confinement for 37 months before and during his trial. This was a deliberate attempt by the government to break him down physically and psychologically and to prevent him from preparing for his trial.

Amnesty International has written several letters decrying the prison conditions of Dr. Al-Arian, calling his treatment “gratuitously punitive” and “inconsistent with international standards for humane treatment.”

The Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace urges all conscientious individuals and organizations to contact the Howard County Detention Center and call for humane treatment of Dr. Al-Arian. We also call on
media outlets to cover these abuses, which so far have received no attention.

full article

The fearful lives in a land of the free

It is so sad to see Muslims scared to stand up for the truth regarding Israel, America, and their countries that they live in. Muslims, of all people, have to be revolutionary - they cant be scared. It is even more a shame that we see all of these non-Muslims standing up and protesting out against Israel and America’s war on Iraq, but you do not see many Muslims doing the same.

 

The fearful lives in a land of the free

Robert Fisk

 

Westerners assume that anyone with a Canadian passport is safe
I was given the chance to talk to 600 Muslim Canadians a few days ago.
The dinner was in an Ottawa banqueting room and the guests also
included the imam of the Ottawa mosque, the Ottawa chief of police and
sundry uniformed Canadian army officers.

The imam sat between me and the Canadian capital’s top cop – a
genuinely decent guy who wanted Muslim Canadians to regard him as a
friend – and we were even able to joke about the reality of those
“random checks” which Muslims of Middle Eastern origin and a certain R
Fisk seem to receive at North American airports. All well and good,
then, until I got up to speak.

I warned the audience they might not like all they heard from me. And
sure enough, when I told the audience that they were perfectly at
liberty to condemn Israel and America – indeed, that they should
condemn both when they abuse human rights, occupy other people’s
countries and shoot innocent civilians – but that I wanted to know why
I so rarely heard them condemn the vicious police states in the Middle
East and other areas of south-west Asia from which they originally
came, I was greeted with silence. A smattering of Muslim diplomats sat
like statues, thus identifying the cruelty of their regimes. The only
immediate applause came when I remarked that the moment Western
soldiers started shooting at Muslims in Muslim lands, it was time for
the soldiers to withdraw.

Two interesting phenomena emerged from this remark. The first was
that, when I finished, both the police chief and the Canadian army
officers joined the applause. Canada’s hopeless military involvement
in Afghanistan is a subject of considerable controversy within the
Canadian military. When the politicians have had their say, I’ve
discovered, soldiers usually let us know their views.

full article

Funding Our Decline

7 million dollars a day. If that figure is correct that is absurd. I mean even if Israel wasnt such a terrorist country that kills Palestinians with impunity it would still be too much. Do you think people know this? I dont, because if people knew this they would not take it - they would protest and try thier best to change this. Imagine what America could do with that money - end unemployment, poverty, homelessness - what else?

Funding Our Decline

By Alison Weir

April 1st I participated in a debate in San Francisco that raised the question of US aid to Israel.

It was highly appropriate that this debate was held two weeks before tax day, since in Israel’s sixty years of existence, it has received more US tax money than any other nation on earth.
During periods of recession, when Americans are thrown out of work, homes are repossessed, school budgets cut and businesses fail, Congress continues to give Israel massive amounts of our tax money; currently, about 7 million dollars per day.
On top of this, Egypt and Jordan receive large sums of money (per capita about 1/20th of what Israel receives) to buy their cooperation with Israel; and Palestinians also receive our tax money (about 1/23rd of that to Israel), to repair infrastructure that Israeli forces have destroyed, to fund humanitarian projects required due to the destruction wrought by Israel’s military, and to convince Palestinian officials to take actions beneficial to Israel. These sums should also be included in expenditures on behalf of Israel.
When all are added together, it turns out that for many years over half of all US tax money abroad has been expended to benefit a country the size of New Jersey.
It is certainly time to begin debating this disbursement of our hard-earned money. It is quite possible that we have better uses for it.
To decide whether the US should continue military aid to any nation, it is essential to examine the nature and history of the recipient nation, how it has used our military aid in the past, whether these uses are in accord with our values, and whether they benefit the American taxpayers who are putting up the money.
1. What is the history and nature of Israel?
Describing Israel is always difficult. One can either stay within the mainstream paradigm, or tell the truth. I will opt for the truth.
Drawing on scores of books by diverse authors, the facts are quite clear: Israel was created through one of the most massive, ruthless, and persistent ethnic cleansing operations of modern history. In 1947-49 about three-quarters of a million Muslims and Christians, who had originally made up 95 percent of the population living in the area that Zionists wanted for a Jewish state, were brutally forced off their ancestral land. There were 33 massacres, over 500 villages were completely destroyed, and an effort was made to erase all vestiges of Palestinian history and culture.
The fact is that Israel’s core identity is based on ethnic and religious discrimination by a colonial, immigrant group; and maintaining this exclusionist identity has required continued violence against those it has dispossessed, and others who have given them refuge.
2. How has Israel used our military aid in the past?
In all of its wars except one, Israel has attacked first.
In violation of the Arms Export Control Act, which requires that US weapons only be used in “legitimate self defense,” Israel used American equipment during its two invasions of Lebanon, killing 17,000 the first time and 1,000 more recently, the vast majority civilians. It used American-made cluster bombs in both invasions, again in defiance of US laws, causing the “most hideous injuries” one American physician said she had ever seen, and which, in one day in 1982 alone, resulted in the amputation of over 1,000 mangled limbs.
It has used US military aid to continue and expand its illegal confiscation of land in the West Bank and Golan Heights, and has used American F-16s and Apache Helicopters against largely unarmed civilian populations.
According to Defence for Children International, Israel has “engaged in gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.” Between 1967 and 2003, Israel destroyed more than 10,000 homes, and such destruction continues today. A coalition of UK human rights groups recently issued a report stating that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is collective punishment of 1.5 million people, warning: “Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.”
In addition, Israel uses US military aid to fund an Israeli arms industry that competes with US companies. According to a report commissioned by the US Army War College, “Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel.”
Israel has used US aid to kill and injure nonviolent Palestinian, American and international activists, as well as American servicemen. Israeli soldiers in an American-made Caterpillar bulldozer crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie; an Israeli sniper shot 21-year-old Tom Hurndall in the head; Israeli soldiers shot 26-year-old Brian Avery in the face. In 1967 Israel used US-financed French aircraft to attack a US Navy ship, killing 34 American servicemen and injuring 174.
Israel has used US aid to imprison without trial thousands of Palestinians and others, and according to reports by the London Times and Amnesty International, Israel consistently tortures prisoners; including, according to Foreign Service Journal, American citizens.
3. Are these uses in accord with our national and personal values?
Not in my view.
4. Do these uses of US aid benefit American taxpayers?
While some Israeli actions have served US interests, the balance sheet is clear: Israel’s use of American aid consistently damages the United States, harms our economy, and endangers Americans.
In fact, this extremely negative outcome was so predictable that even before Israel’s creation virtually all State Department and Pentagon experts advocated forcefully against supporting the creation of a Zionist state in the Middle East. President Harry Truman’s reply: “I am sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
Through the years, as noted above, our aid to Israel has not resulted in a reliable ally.
In 1954 Israel tried to bomb US government offices in Egypt, intending to pin this on Muslims.
In 1963 Senator William Fulbright discovered that Israel was using a series of covert operations to funnel our money to pro-Israel groups in the US, which then used these funds in media campaigns and lobbying to procure even more money from American taxpayers.
In 1967 Israeli forces unleashed a two-hour air and sea attack against the USS Liberty, causing 200 casualties. While Israel partisans claim that this was done in error, this claim is belied by extensive eyewitness evidence and by an independent commission reporting on Capitol Hill in 2003 chaired by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer.
In 1973 Israel used the largest airlift of US materiel in history to defeat Arab forces attempting to regain their own land, triggering the Arab oil embargo that sent the US into a recession that cost thousands of Americans their jobs.
During its 1980s Lebanon invasion, Israeli troops engaged in a systematic pattern of harassment of US forces brought in as peacekeepers that created, according to Commandant of Marines Gen. R. H Barrow, “life-threatening situations, replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniform and country.”
Through the years, Israel has regularly spied on the US. According to the Government Accounting Office, Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the United States of any ally.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard: “It is difficult for me to conceive of greater harm done to national security,” And the Pollard case was just the tip of a very large iceberg; the most recent operation coming to light involves two senior officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s powerful American lobbying organization.
Bad as the above may appear, it pales next to the indirect damage to Americans caused by our aid to Israel. American funding of Israel’s egregious violations of Palestinian human rights is consistently listed as the number one cause of hostility to Americans.
While American media regularly cover up Israeli actions, those of us who have visited the region first-hand witness a level of US-funded Israeli cruelty that makes us weep for our victims and fear for our country. While most Americans are uninformed on how Israel uses our money, people throughout the world are deeply aware that it is Americans who are funding Israeli crimes.
The 9/11 Commission notes that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “animus towards the United States stemmedfrom his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” The Economist reports that ” the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent theme in bin Laden’s speeches.”
The Bottom Line
In sum, US aid to Israel has destabilized the Middle East; propped up a national system based on ethnic and religious discrimination; enabled unchecked aggression that has, on occasion, been turned against Americans themselves; funded arms industries that compete with American companies; supported a pattern of brutal dispossession that has created hatred of the US; and resulted in continuing conflict that last year took the lives of 384 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, and that in the past seven and a half years has cost the lives of more than 982 Palestinian children and 119 Israeli children.
By providing massive funding to Israel, no matter what it does, American aid is empowering Israeli supremacists who believe in a never-ending campaign of ethnic cleansing; while disempowering Israelis who recognize that policies of morality, justice, and rationality are the only road to peace.
It is time to end our aid.
Alison Weir is Executive Director of If Americans Knew. For more information on the US-Israel relationship she especially recommends the books by Donald Neff, Paul Findley, Kathleen Christison, Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Grant Smith, Stephen Green, George Ball, and John Mulhall.

Manifest Destiny - 21st Century Style

Manifest Destiny - 21st Century Style

By Kristina M. Gronquist

04/25/05 “ICH” - - The concept of Manifest Destiny describes the 19th century conviction that God intended the continent of North America to be under the control of Christian, European Americans. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was the backbone of U.S. government efforts to colonize land inhabited by indigenous people in North America and expand the United States into Mexican territory.

Believers in Manifest Destiny asserted that U.S. rulers were predestined to spread their proclaimed superior values near and far. Propaganda, armed interventions, occupations, and terror were used in various insidious combinations. Indigenous people whose country we reside in can best attest to the results of Manifest Destiny policy, as they survived centuries of unspeakable injustices and lost millions, but courageously, have survived.

Ulysses S. Grant, that era’s most prominent military man, and himself a participant in the Mexican-American War, wrote in his memoirs, “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

Although the shameful concept of Manifest Destiny should be confined to history books, it has reared its ugly head, as reflected in our government’s 21st century mission to reshape the Middle East. Of course, the psychology of Manifest Destiny – the projection of Anglo-Saxon supremacy - never really went away, it has always been used to justify America’s expansionist adventures. Losing the Vietnam War drove it toward covert action, i.e., U.S. attempts in the 1980’s to undo the Nicaraguan revolution and support for death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. But U.S. foreign policy has consistently been based on an arrogant and racist view that “America knows best.”

For most Americans, the myth of U.S. cultural, religious, political, and social superiority has been so strongly reinforced over the years that it is taken a given, it is assumed. In the language of political science, this is called “reification,” when myths become accepted as reality. Public debate is often vacuous, because we are unable to question 1) whether or not the U.S. system of governance is desired by non-Americans, or 2) whether or not the “one size fits all” U.S. model will offer people in other lands true solutions. Without such debate, the reification process becomes frightening: If it is a given that our system and values are superior, it follows that remaking others in our image will always be the worthy “end.” Any means can be used to reach the agreed-upon (but unquestioned) worthy end.

This is why the U.S. invaded and devastated Iraq, and why our leaders and a majority of Americans can ignore 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. If it is a given that a Western-style, capitalist Iraq is the proper end, then the means by which that is achieved can be illegal, ruthless, bloody, inhumane, or whatever. The means are open-ended. We see that glazed, slightly out-of-reality look constantly in this administration’s eyes as they talk about “democracy” in Iraq. Their fixed eyes look up towards the ends, but they are never cast seriously downward to look over and evaluate the terrible means by which they are trying to reach those ends.

Of course, this “remaking Iraq” project isn’t genuinely guided by the true lofty goal of implementing democracy. Instead, its focus is synchronizing Middle Eastern social and cultural values with Western capitalist values, because that will better facilitate a global world order that revolves around the U.S. economic interests of elites.

We all recall and recoil when we remember the days shortly after the invading troops reached Baghdad, when widespread looting destroyed Iraq’s museums and libraries. The U.S. troops stood idly by as Iraq’s cultural history was being erased. There are Iraqis who now say that this was deliberate, an attempt to erase the records of Iraq’s cultural and historical achievements, to wipe the slate clean, so that Western values could be more easily imposed.

Hundreds of Iraqi youth recently came out into the streets to protest a new government order that makes Saturday an official holiday in Iraq, officially aligning Iraq’s weekend with the Western weekend. The holy day for Muslims is Friday, and most Muslim countries take off Thursday and Friday or just Friday. At Baghdad’s University of Mustansariyah, a statement read, “We declare a general strike in the University of Mustansariyah to reject this decision and any decision aimed at depriving Iraqis of their identity.”

Since the invasion, there have been scores of such changes. The CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) under L. Paul Bremer, and the interim government that followed, both gutted and reworked Iraqi legislation in many areas. The CPA’s meddling with Iraq law violates the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of the inhabitants of militarily occupied territories. Occupiers are prohibited from making major alterations to the character of the occupied society.

The press hasn’t covered the extent of the many changes. We only hear about them occasionally, as in this (2/27/05) Associated Press article that pokes fun at the protesters, portraying the Iraq students as silly for not wanting Saturday off. This patronizing and condescending tone is prevalent throughout U.S. reporting on Iraq society. The Western press resurrects and reinforces the colonialist idea that dark-skinned people in foreign lands are unable to do anything right. Their customs, religion, and culture are not properly “modern” or advanced enough, like ours, and, by God, they have to get with the program!

But many Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to get with “the program” because they have been subject to this colonial program before. Like indigenous people, who also reject attempts to assimilate them and dismantle their identity, Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to be shoved on to reservations either, left to watch the rich cities of their countries gleam and hum with U.S. oil money. Fast food joints on every corner, hotel chains, and big box stores offering lousy wages and products may be the American dream, but they are many a Muslim’s nightmare.

On February 25, a Qatar-hosted conference called for disseminating the culture of peaceful resistance to aggressive policies adopted by world powers towards Muslim countries. It was attended by a cohort of senior Muslim scientists, intellectuals, and dignitaries. Dr. Abdael Rahman al-Nuaimi, the chairman of the Arab Center for Studies and Research, said that Muslims are facing fierce campaigns from world parties attempting to impose their hegemony over Muslim people and destroy their social systems. He told the opening session of the three-day conference that the goal of such campaigns is to tarnish the image of Islam and mock Islamic values. “In response to such aggressive campaigns, the conference calls for the adoption of all peaceful means as well as the economic, media, and legal tools, to stand up to these aggressions.”

There were scant, if any, reports of this conference in the Western press. Why? Because it calls into question the “end” of making other people adapt to the assumed perfect U.S. model of governance, and it speaks to the failed psychology of Manifest Destiny that still guides U.S. thinking - that the U.S. government has a right to spread its values by any means. We cannot hear news that Muslim people en masse reject and plan to resist Western values, which are part and parcel of a specific economic system. That reality (gosh, they don’t want to be like us?) uncomfortably clashes with the reified language of Manifest Destiny, which U.S. leaders again spit forth, to convince citizens that their self-serving violent Middle East policies are worthy.

Kristina Gronquist is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. She specializes in foreign policy analysis and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. She can be reached at kgronquist@aol.com.
 

Sheikh Safdar Razi - imprisoned

It is amazing to see this. I pray sincerly for the shaykh and hope he is released as soon as possible. This is crazy because he was a very good scholar who was not political at all. It does not make any sense. Please pray for him.

A former Austin imam whose interfaith work made him one of the most recognized Muslim leaders in Central Texas is being held at a Dallas detention facility and faces deportation to Pakistan, according to his attorney and family.

Imam Safdar Razi, who led the Northwest Austin Shiite mosque the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association for six years, has been detained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency since Wednesday, said Karen Pennington, an immigration lawyer in Dallas who is representing Razi.

Razi’s wife, Safiya Razi, said her husband was taken into custody at their home in Plano on Wednesday morning.

Pennington said she is not sure why Razi was being held by the immigration agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While in detention, he was issued a notice to appear for removal proceedings, essentially a hearing for deportation, Pennington said.

Razi has lived in the United States since 2000, Pennington said, and moved his family here from Qatar.

He is seeking political asylum in the United States because his religious worker visa was turned down, Pennington said.

He hasn’t lived in Pakistan since he was a child, she said.

Pennington said deportation to Pakistan would be disastrous because Razi, a known Shiite scholar, would be a target of violent extremists from that country’s majority Sunni branch of Islam.

“Based on the situation in Pakistan, sending him there would be a death sentence,” Pennington said. “Shiites are killed there with near impunity, and his interfaith work would almost certainly make him a target.”

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to phone and e-mail messages from the American-Statesman on Friday and Saturday.

“We are not illegals; we are seeking asylum,” Safiya Razi said.

“It’s hard,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going on with our family.”

Razi had been working in Dearborn, Mich., over the past year in a job he left Austin to take. But because of visa complications, he returned to Texas.

A couple of months ago, he and his family were taken in by members of the Institute of Islamic Learning in Metroplex, which is in Plano, said Asif Effendi, one of the mosque’s directors.

Effendi said Razi called the mosque Thursday to request food because the detention center was serving pork, which Muslims avoid for religious reasons.

When members of the mosque tried to bring food, phone cards and money to Razi, a guard told them that there was no such prisoner, Effendi said.

On Friday morning, Razi called again.

“Please bring me something,” Effendi said he asked in a tired voice. “Please bring me water. I haven’t eaten in two days.”

Effendi said Razi described the center as ice cold with 50 people in one room.

Effendi said the community is devastated by Razi’s troubles, especially because Razi is known for his preaching of tolerance and respect among all faiths and because he had followed the necessary procedures to stay in the United States legally.

Razi, who, like many Shiites, follows the rulings of Sistani, is certified to interpret Islamic law and advise people on issues such as divorce and marriage.

In Austin, officers of Razi’s former mosque called an emergency meeting Friday night to brainstorm ways to help Razi, said Ali Akhtar, a member of the Ahlul Bayt Association.

“He’s the prime example of the type of Muslim leader that we want here in the U.S.,” Akhtar said.

“It’s really just baffling to me why there would be such a hurry to get him out.”

Source

Noam Chomsky : “Good News,” Iraq & Beyond

This is what the American democracy means. It is clear as day and has been the system since day one when the founding fathers invented it saying that the normal citizen does not have the ability to choose a competent leader. I dont know when my fellow Americans will wake up and understand the hypocrisy  - that we go to war to spread democracy when we do not even have it ourselves.

Noam Chomsky : “Good News,” Iraq & Beyond:

Not long ago, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the mid-term election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some
puzzlement. There should be none.

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little moment in a modern democracy. The important work of the world is the domain of the “responsible men,” who must “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,” the general public, “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “spectators,” not “participants.” And spectators are not supposed to bother their heads with issues. The Wall Street Journal came close to the point in a major front-page article on Super Tuesday, under the heading “Issues Recede in ‘08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character.” To put it more accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies focus on character (qualities, etc.). As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from the irrelevance of the population to them, they can also be dangerous. The participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both political
parties are well to the right of the general population and that their positions are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful study by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect; the same is true on domestic policy (see my Failed States, on both domains). It is important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.

The quoted admonitions, taken from highly regarded essays by the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, capture well the perceptions of progressive intellectual opinion, shared across the narrow elite spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some, like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for example, who held that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness,” essentially the perspective of
the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the “gentlemen” are transmuted into the “technocratic elite” and “action intellectuals” of Camelot, “Straussian” neocons, or other configurations.

Full article

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail

This shouldnt come as a big surprise, actually it is for me. I mean I knew that America tortures its prisoners but I did not know that they did it legally. I thought they were working above the law. If this is legal then it would be something to rally against and have the congress change the law - maybe.

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail

By Dan Eggen

thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner’s eyes poked out?

Or, for that matter, could he have “scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance” thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?

These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which “body part the statute specifies.”

But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief.

The dry discussion of U.S. maiming statutes is just one in a series of graphic, extraordinary passages in Yoo’s 81-page memo, which was declassified this past week. No maiming is known to have occurred in
U.S. interrogations, and the Justice Department disavowed the document without public notice nine months after it was written.

In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a “frog crouch.” It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

full article

Guantanamo inmate wins hearing at top Canada court

This is one of the most interesting cases at Guantanamo for me because the accused was only 15 when the alleged crime took place and is also from a western country. Seems like the Americans tortured him and put him through a difficult few years. I am happy that Canada made this decision and am waiting to see what happens.

Guantanamo inmate wins hearing at top Canada court

Canadian says U.S. interrogators threatened rape

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA, March 20 (Reuters) - Canada’s Supreme Court gave a young Canadian prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay the chance on Thursday to try to force Ottawa to release secret documents that could help show his
innocence.

Lawyers for Omar Khadr, who is charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in a firefight when he was 15, will argue before the court next week that his detention violated international law.

Khadr, now 21, was taken prisoner in 2002. He said in an affidavit that U.S. interrogators repeatedly threatened to rape him and Canadian government officials told him they were powerless to do anything.

Defense lawyers say interrogations of Khadr in Guantanamo, carried out by members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had violated Canada’s charter of rights.

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Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

Interesting to find such words in the New York Times. This just shows how much power the Zionists have over the American government. I’m sure not too many people were happy about hearing this but it’s the truth and it is something that the common American must think about.

 

Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

 

By JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN M. WALT

 

 

America is about to enter a presidential election year. Although the outcome is of course impossible to predict at this stage, certain features of the campaign are easy to foresee. The candidates will inevitably differ on various domestic issues-health care, abortion, gay marriage, taxes, education, immigration-and spirited debates are certain to erupt on a host of foreign policy questions as well. What course of action should the United States pursue in Iraq? What is the best response to the crisis in Darfur, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Russia’s hostility to NATO, and China’s rising power? How should the United States address global warming, combat terrorism, and reverse the erosion of its international image? On these and many other issues, we can confidently expect lively disagreements among the various candidates.

 

Yet on one subject, we can be equally confident that the candidates will speak with one voice. In 2008, as in previous election years, serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one foreign country-Israel-as well as their determination to maintain unyielding U.S. support for the Jewish state. Each candidate will emphasize that he or she fully appreciates the multitude of threats facing Israel and make it clear that, if elected, the United States will remain firmly committed to defending Israel’s interests under any and all circumstances. None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the United States ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. Any who do will probably fall by the wayside

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