[Peace] News notes, for the AWARE meeting 2007-06-10

[C. G. Estabrook]

SUNDAY 10 JUNE 2007

[1] WAR. The war faction in the US government is working desperately to 
get hostilities underway with Iran.  (There are reports that "a senior 
aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting 
with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think 
tank, and more than one national security consulting house and 
explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President 
Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts ... Cheney is 
planning to deploy an 'end run strategy' around the President if he and 
his team lose the policy argument" 
<http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002145.php>.)
	Sen. Joseph Lieberman today called for "aggressive military action" 
against Iran.  He said that the US should bomb Iran to stop the Iranian 
government's alleged support for Iraqi militia.  Lieberman was the 
Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000.  Democratic and 
Republican nominees for president this year have refused to rule out 
attacking Iran, even with nuclear weapons.

[2] OCCUPATION. The Washington Post leads today with with a planted 
article about how American military officials envision a long-term 
presence in Iraq.  This is a back-up for the White House's presentation 
last week of South Korea (where the US has had tens of thousands of 
troops for fifty years) as the model for Iraq.  That has of course 
always been the US policy -- and the Democrats agree -- but the 
administration is slowly admitting it, in what's meant to be a 
reassuring way.  The Pentagon argues in passing that even a total 
pullout from Iraq would take almost a year to execute (which is strange 
-- it didn't take them that long to get in there, against opposition: 
and now the Iraqis want them to go).
	In Baghdad, Iraqi lawmakers passed a resolution to require the 
al-Maliki government consult lawmakers before extending the US military 
mandate in Iraq. The move was spearheaded by supporters of the Shiite 
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as well as several Sunni parties. The US is 
worried about Muqtada's overcoming the sectarian enmity that American 
policy has encouraged. (Some suspect the US of using death squads -- as 
it has in Latin America and SE Asia -- to promote a "divide and rule" 
strategy.)

[3] IRAQ. Meanwhile, leaders of Iraq’s oil workers strike say the Iraqi 
government has issued warrants for their arrest. More than six hundred 
workers have walked off the job to oppose the proposed Iraq oil law, 
which the US Congress and administration are insisting upon. Iraqi Prime 
Minister Nouri al-Maliki said this week he would respond “with an iron 
fist.”
	The US air war in Iraq has greatly intensified in recent months. US 
aircraft dropped more bombs and missiles in the first four and a half 
months of 2007 than all of last year. At the same time, the number of 
civilian Iraqi casualties from US airstrikes appears to have risen 
sharply. The United Nations now estimates 4.2 million Iraqis have been 
forced to flee their homes because of the Iraq war and US occupation.

[4] MILITARY. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to break with 
precedent and not renominate Marine Gen. Peter Pace as chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff in September, because there would have to be 
Congressional hearings about the war, and the administration wants to 
avoid that.  Pace was also Rumsfeld's flunky, and Gates wants his own. 
Iraq commander Gen. Petraeus led a military cabal against Rumsfeld's 
officers, and they've won.  Gates will appoint as the new chairman of 
the JCS Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Mullen, who was not 
involved in the planning of the Iraq invasion.

[5] ADMINISTRATION. President Bush’s “war czar” nominee Lieutenant 
General Douglas Lute explained that National Security Adviser Stephen 
Hadley would no longer play a major role in advising on Iraq and 
Afghanistan.  Then he hastily withdrew the assertion.  The Pentagon 
announced this week that the US military death toll in Iraq has now 
passed the thirty-five hundred mark.

[6] BUSH. In Rome yesterday tens of thousands turned out for anti-Bush 
protests. Bush met the pope, who was said to have raised concerns about 
"the worrying situation in Iraq."
	Elsewhere in Italy, the trial began this week for twenty-six American 
agents (in absentia) and five Italians accused of kidnapping a Muslim 
cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003 and sending him to Egypt, where 
he says he was tortured during a four-year imprisonment.

[7] TORTURE. The Council of Europe reports that the CIA, from 2003 to 
2006, used NATO agreements to bypass civilian control, establish secret 
prisons, and torture terror suspects in Poland and Romania.  Council of 
Europe investigator Dick Marty says prisoners were held at the prisons 
with the full cooperation of leaders of the countries involved. Marty 
says top suspects Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were 
imprisoned at a site in Poland. Marty has previously accused fourteen 
European countries of collaborating with the CIA in its kidnapping and 
imprisonment of prisoners.
	A coalition of human rights groups have filed suit against the Bush 
administration to release information about thirty-nine people it says 
are being secretly imprisoned. The groups, including Amnesty 
International and Human Rights Watch, say that suspects” relatives have 
also reportedly been detained, including children as young as seven 
years old.

[8] SOMALIA. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has announced its transferred a new 
prisoner to Guantanamo Bay. Abdullahi Sudi Arale is believed to have 
come from a secret US detention facility in Somalia. The US says he 
played a leading role in the popular government overthrown by 
U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces last year.

[9] CORRUPTION. Saudi Prince and Bush family friend Bandar bin Sultan 
secretly received as much as $2 billion from a major British arms dealer 
for negotiating a contract with the Saudi Arabian government. BAE 
Systems is said to have sent up to two hundred forty million dollars per 
year to Prince Bandar’s Washington bank account while he was Saudi 
ambassador to the US  British PM scandalously suppressed an 
investigation of the matter and then had his government lie to European 
authorities in the name of "national security."  Apparently he was doing 
it for a friend.

[10] GLOBALIZATION. At the G-8 summit, Russian President Putin once 
again proposed an alternative to the American plans to locate a missile 
defense system in Europe, which he considers a threat. (How strange.) On 
Thursday, he proposed Azerbaijan; Friday, Turkey. Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice scoffed at the plan. The G-8 also pledged $60 billion 
to fight AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in Africa. Human rights 
activists said it was not enough and did not keep pace with previous 
funding promises.
	The Bush administration successfully pressured G8 leaders to backtrack 
on a two-year old pledge to fund universal access to medical care for 
sufferers of AIDS. World leaders agreed to reach ten million AIDS 
patients at the Gleneagles summit in 2005. Under US pressure, the G8 
will now propose to cut that number by half to around five million.

[11] IMMIGRATION. On Thursday the administration's immigration-bill 
collapsed in the Senate. The bill was an uneasy compromise between the 
xenophobia the administration has stoked in a time of increasingly 
inequality, and the desire by its business supporters for a docile 
working class -- which is encouraged by expanding the labor pool with 
politically quiescent illegal immigrants.  More than a century ago the 
American robber baron Jay Gould, referring to the violent labor history 
of the US, said, "I can always hire on-half of the working class to kill 
the other half": the US is trying to globalize the point.

[12] ISRAEL. This week marks the 40th anniversary of Israel's war 
against the Arab states. There was a march in Washington today calling 
for an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza 
Strip.  The US/Israeli policy is encompassing nothing less than the 
death of a nation.

[13] SPYING. A former senior Justice Department official has revealed 
Vice President Cheney personally blocked the promotion of a government 
lawyer who had raised objections to the Bush administration’s domestic 
surveillance program. In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, former deputy attorney general James Comey says Cheney’s 
office intervened to prevent the promotion of Patrick Philbin because of 
Philbin’s vocal concerns. Comey also disclosed Cheney told Justice 
Department officials he disagreed with their objections to the program 
at a White House meeting in March 2004. The meeting was held one day 
after administration officials tried to get then-Attorney General John 
Ashcroft to sign off on the program as he lay recovering from major 
surgery in his hospital bed.

[14] JUDICIAL. US military judges have dropped all war crimes charges 
against the first two Guantanamo prisoners facing trial by military 
tribunal. The judges said they lacked jurisdiction under the strict 
definition of those eligible for trial under the Military Commissions 
Act, enacted by Congress last year. Charges were dropped against Omar 
Khadr, a Canadian captured in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old. 
Charges were also dropped for Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, who is 
accused of driving and guarding Osama bin Laden.
	The ACLU said the Bush administration should try the prisoners in 
ordinary courts martial or civilian courts.  Despite Monday's rulings, 
both of the Guantanamo prisoners will remain in the detention camp.  But 
the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a bill that would restore 
habeas corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which may be a comfort to 
them in their continued captivity.

[15] DARFUR. Finally, as President Bush ordered new sanctions to be 
placed on the Sudanese government (apparently to torpedo a possible 
settlement), Democracy Now presented its first account of how the media 
and the Save Darfur Coalition have been misrepresenting the situation in 
Darfur: <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1334230>.

--Carl Estabrook <www.newsfromneptune.com>
<http://counterpunch.org/estabrook06072007.html>