[Peace] News notes for AWARE meeting 2007-04-01

[C. G. Estabrook]

[1] Congress recessed this week, but not before passing two bills (one 
in each house) providing a vast amount of money to continue killing 
people in the ME.  Congress may produce a joint bill after recess (and 
probably milk and cookies and a nap), but Bush has said he will veto it 
because of suggestions (no more) from both houses about withdrawal from 
Iraq.  I actually don't believe it -- Bush can sign the bill with the 
sort of signing statement about the authority of the Commander-in-Chief 
that the administration has  used all along, and pocket the money.  The 
political parties -- both substantially to the right of the US populace 
--  will have done their job of neutralizing the vote against the war in 
last fall's election.

[2] The division between the parties and the people was on display in 
other ways this week.  House Republican leader John Boehner was booed on 
Wednesday at a construction workers’ union legislative forum when he 
said, "Who doesn't believe that if we just pull out of Iraq and come 
home that the terrorists won't follow us here and we'll be fighting them 
on the streets of America?"  Boos and catcalls grew louder as Boehner 
continued, "We have to fight the enemy at some point, and if we don't 
fight him now, when will we fight them?"
	Meanwhile, a great liberal hope, almost-senator Harold Ford of 
Tennessee, the new chairman of the rightist Democratic Leadership 
Council, this week said he does not thank that  Congress should set a 
deadline for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.  "I think most 
Americans want to win, they don't want to see us leave early, and if we 
leave prematurely, we may create a broader set of conflicts and invite a 
bigger problem in that region than before leaving."

[3] In a week in which Iran announced that it will allow the monitoring 
of its nuclear program that the UN has asked for, the Iran news in the 
West has been about the captured British sailors -- perhaps the basis 
for a Tonkin Gulf incident for the Bush administration. And perhaps to 
that end, the US rejected an exchange of the sailors for the Iranian 
diplomats that the US imprisoned in Iraq two months ago and still holds.
	The Russian government is leaking a story that the US plans to attack 
Iran this week, apparently with the intention of forestalling the 
attack.  Russian sources say a vast air attack is planned for this 
Friday, April 6 (Good Friday in the Western Christian Church)

[4] Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is one of the three upon which US 
control of the Middle East rests (the other two being Israel and Turkey) 
on Wednesday slammed the "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq in an 
opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh.  He also said that 
Arab nations would not allow any foreign force to decide the future of 
the region.  The Arab nations repeated their five-year-old Middle East 
peace plan at the summit, offering normal relations with Israel if it 
complies with UN resolutions.

[5] Two Afghanistan experts painted a sobering picture of the conditions 
there yesterday, arguing support among Afghans for NATO forces is 
plummeting, the U.S.-driven policy of poppy eradication is wrongheaded, 
and the war might not be winnable in its present form.  U.S. scholar 
Barnett Rubin and Gordon Smith, Canada’s former ambassador to NATO, 
delivered their withering comments to a Canadian House of Commons 
committee only days after Canada’s top military commander, Gen. Rick 
Hillier, touted progress being made there.

[6]In its kangaroo courts in Guantanamo, the US accepted a plea bargain 
from an Australian on the condition that he say he wasn't tortured and 
that he not talk to the press for a year (after, in other words, the 
election in Australia, whose PM supports the US war).  Meanwhile, a 
brave or foolhardy prisoner stated for the record hat he was tortured 
into saying that he had participated in the bombing of the USS Cole.
	The Wall Street Journal ran a long front-page article this week on a 
military prosecutor who refused to bring charges against a suspected 
terrorist because he the prisoner had been tortured.  Meanwhile 
long-time civil rights columnist Nat Hentoff asks what has become of the 
other disappeared prisoners whom the CIA held.

[7] In a massive display of psychological displacement, the Democratic 
party, recoiling from the possibility of actually affecting the war 
policy of the USG, has seized on some bureaucratic rearrangements in the 
Department of Justice regarding federal prosecutors and the bemused 
mendacity of Bush's latino consigliere AG Gonzales.  Feckless Democrats 
delight in watching chat on this matter drive the real story of our 
murderous policies in the ME out of the news.

[8] The Bush administration has meanwhile attended to its principal 
task, the reason for which it was put into office, and the income gap in 
the US is now the greatest it has been since 1928, before the Great 
Depression.

[9] The US-engineered Ethiopian occupation of Somalia has produced the 
worst fighting in that country since US troops left fifteen years ago.
	Meanwhile, the editor of the Black Agenda Report writes, "The flow of 
refugees now streams both ways on the border of Darfur ... To the west, 
a U.S.-dominated Chadian regime is in charge, firmly implanted in the 
matrix of the new U.S. Africa Command. Yet tens of thousands flee Chad 
*into* Darfur! [as a result of the US] imperial agenda [in Africa] -- 
under the guise of "humanitarian" assistance."

[10] Former Vice President and Academy Award winner Al Gore has been 
discussing a run for a third party nomination for president.  Ralph 
Nader has sought to recruit the former Democratic presidential candidate 
to run as the candidate of the Green Party.

[11] Finally, there was a fire in Hollywood this week , but it was 
probably not the result of the spontaneous combustion of rich liberals 
who are deciding that Hillary Clinton is too liberal on health care, and 
are therefore switching their money to a more reliably conservative 
candidate, Barack Obama -- altho' that is happening.
	At the same time, that Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz is reporting that the 
major Israeli Lobby group, AIPAC, is reassured on Obama's views on 
Israel...

[12] Don't miss Jan's response to the editorial page editor in today's 
News-Gazette.

--CGE