1. “Thoughts on the Death of Rachel Corrie
Today is the sixth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, she was run over by an armor-plated Caterpillar bulldozer, a machine sold by the U.S. to Israel, the armor put in place for the purpose of knocking down homes without damage to the machine. Rachel Corrie was 23 years old, from Olympia; a sane, articulate, and dedicated American who had studied with care the methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. At the time that she was run over, and then backed over again, she was wearing a luminous orange jacket and holding a megaphone. There is a photograph of her talking to the soldier of the Israel Defense Forces, in the cabin of his bulldozer, not long before he did it. None of the eyewitnesses believed that the killing was accidental. Perhaps the soldier was tired of the peace workers; it was that kind of day. Perhaps, in some part of himself, he guessed that he was living at the beginning of a period of impunity.
The Israeli government never produced the investigation it promised into the death of Rachel Corrie
(as her parents indicate in a statement published today). The inquiry urged by her congressional representative, Adam Smith,
brought no result from the American state department under Condoleezza Rice.
Her story was lost for a while in the grand narrative of the American launching
of the war against Iraq. Thoroughly lost, and for a reason. The rules of engagement
America employed in Iraq were taught to our soldiers, as Dexter Filkins revealed,
by officers of the IDF; the U.S. owed a debt to Israel for knowledge
of the methods of destruction; and we were using the same Caterpillar
machines against Iraqi homes. An inquiry into the killing of Rachel
Corrie was hardly likely, given the burden of that debt and that association.
Less than a month later, on April 5, 2003, the American peace worker Brian Avery was shot in the face and seriously disfigured by IDF soldiers in Jenin. The group he was with were wearing red reflector vests with the word “doctor” written in English and Arabic. As Avery later described it, they “weren’t two blocks from our apartment when an Israeli convoy of two vehicles, a tank and an armored personnel carrier, drove up the street from the direction that we were walking from. And so as we heard them coming closer, we stepped off to the side of the road to let them pass by….We stood to the side of the road, we put our hands out to show we didn’t have any weapons and weren’t, you know, threatening them in any way….And once they drove within about 30 meters of where we were standing, they opened fire with their machine guns and continued shooting for a very long time, probably shooting about, you know, 30 rounds of ammunition, which is quite a lot when you see them in action. And I was struck in the face with one of the bullets.”
Three days ago another American peace worker, Tristan Anderson, who was protesting the new security fence in the West Bank town of Ni’lin, was shot by another Israeli soldier. It now appears that Tristan Anderson will live; if so, it will be the life that follows having a portion of his right frontal lobe cut out, and a major trauma to the bone surrounding his right eye. The hole in his face was blasted by a tear-gas canister that struck him face-on. The canister was fired into the crowd by an IDF soldier from an emplacement high above. There had been sporadic rock-throwing earlier, but at the time of the incident, as more than one witness attests, the crowd was doing nothing; the canister could not have been fired in self-defense. But whether by reckless whim or premeditation, it came from a soldier in the knowledge that it does not greatly matter now if you kill a Palestinian or the occasional European or American who was working to defend the Palestinians. IDF soldiers who commit arbitrary acts of violence enjoy a presumption of innocence that approaches official immunity granted by the state. Where all of the violence performed by the state is justified by self-defense, everything is permitted.
…
Yet in both countries — though the U.S. lacks a newspaper even close to being as serious and candid as Haaretz — there is a citizenry capable of being educated and roused to punctual action in its own long-term interest. The truth about this has never altered. The commandment governing the long-term good of a country is the same as that for an individual — in the dry and accurate words of Thomas Hobbes, “Seek peace.” And in memory of Rachel Corrie, let us say also: the addiction to war and indefinite expansion is no longer an Israeli problem. How did we ever dare to suppose that it was? When Americans are shot by a gun or mauled by a bulldozer, it is as much an American problem as when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were beaten, shot, and burned, and their bodies left in a swamp, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964. “
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/thoughts-on-the-death-of_b_175395.html
2. “Kucinich requests investigation into ‘executive assassination ring’
After comments made by a New Yorker journalist about Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged involvement in a “executive assassination ring” abroad, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called Monday for a formal congressional probe.
…
Describing the allegation, Kucinich writes, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009″ in which “he stated, ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office… Congress has no oversight of it.’”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19620
3. “The Washington Post is apparently losing lots of money and may close in the foreseeable future, barring a deus ex machina intervention by some foreign billionaire such as saved the New York Times. While the decline of newspapers worldwide is regrettable, the Post‘s troubles are really good news, and bankruptcy would be a richly deserved fate for a rag that has been an enabler of every neocon fantasy for the past 20 years. Imagine no longer having to enjoy Charles Krauthammer, Fred Kagan, John Bolton, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kaplan with your morning coffee.
The Post‘s particular veneration for all things Israeli goes back quite a ways. Long-time readers can well recall the odious Herblock cartoons depicting Arabs as Dracula clones dressed in bedsheets and carrying bloody knives, while Israelis were always depicted as pleasant-looking, peaceful chaps just like you and me. It was almost like having the movie Exodus on a printed page.“
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=14411
4. “Obama Follows Bush on Detainees
Human rights activists and constitutional law experts were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the positions taken on prisoner detention and treatment in federal court last week by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which one group described as “a case of old wine in new bottles.”
While the Justice Department announced it would no longer use the term “enemy combatants” – one of the George W. Bush administration’s signature phrases – and distanced itself from Bush-era claims of unlimited presidential power, government lawyers urged the court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by four former Guantanamo detainees because “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=14417
5. Good:
“Israel’s national security aide barred from U.S.
Uzi Arad, who is expected to serve as national security adviser in the next Israeli government, has been barred from entering the United States for nearly two years on the grounds that he is an intelligence risk.
Mr. Arad, a former member and director of intelligence for the Mossad, Israel’s spy service, is mentioned in the indictment of Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst who pleaded guilty in 2005 to providing classified information about Iran in a conversation with two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).“
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/17/israels-national-security-aide-barred-from-us/
6. “So-Called Isolationists Are the True Internationalists
Among supporters of the American empire, there is no more vicious insult to toss than “isolationist.” Advocate making U.S. security and prosperity Washington’s priority, and you will be attacked for “isolationism.” Never mind that restraining U.S. intervention around the world would be the best way to promote peace at home and abroad.
…
Said Washington in his Farewell Address: “nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.” After all, he asked, why “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?”
If George Washington were alive today, he would be attacked for being an isolationist.
Yet the foreign and economic policies which he and his colleagues supported were matters of common sense. Defend America if it is attacked, but do not join other nations’ wars. Encourage private commerce with all peoples. Establish friendly political relations with countries, whether they be constitutional monarchies, autocratic empires, or revolutionary republics. Allow American citizens to travel and trade freely.
This was not isolationism, but the best sort of internationalism. Peace and prosperity were America’s international guideposts. The preservation of America’s constitutional system of ordered liberty was the government’s most important duty. Americans circled the globe, but to explore and trade, not to meddle and invade.
…
For these supposed “isolationists,” internationalism represents peaceful cooperation, free trade, cultural exchange, travel and tourism, private investment, and charitable assistance. In fact, the highest form of internationalism is private action — voluntary cooperation and exchange — rather than government intervention.
Americans should be involved in the world. But they should reclaim America’s tradition of nonintervention. Peace and prosperity should be Washington’s goal. Promoting them represents genuine internationalism.“
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=23
7. “This is not the first instance of a former prisoner “returning to the battlefield“, of course, but an honest debate about the significance of these recidivist prisoners has been scuppered by sensationalism in the media, by a refusal on the part of the Pentagon to back up its regular claims about the numbers of prisoners who have “returned to the fight” and, perhaps most importantly, by the refusal of any of the parties concerned to examine the situation at Guantánamo, and to ask why the Pentagon seems to have such difficulties ascertaining who it has been holding in the prison.
In January, when the Pentagon issued a press release announcing that 61 former prisoners had returned to the battlefield, researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, who have been monitoring the Pentagon’s regular pronouncements about former prisoners, responded by pointing out that the “DoD has issued ‘recidivism’ numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong”. Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Law School’s Center for Policy & Research explained, “Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DoD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers.” He added, “They have counted people as ‘returning to the fight’ for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival.”
This is not to deny that genuinely dangerous men have been released, but when the latest unsubstantiated figures emerged from the Pentagon, even Robert Gates, the defence secretary, distanced himself from them, explaining that in fact the recidivism rate was “four or five percent” although he added, “there’s been an uptick in recent months”. Given that the recidivism rate for violent offenders in the US prison system is about 60%, and that countries throughout the world routinely release prisoners after they have served their sentences, even though many of them then go on to commit other violent crimes, the defence secretary was responsible for injecting some sanity into the debate, implicitly asking why it was regarded as plausible that Guantánamo should have a recidivism rate of zero.“
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/12/guantanamo-bay-human-rights
8. “Judge says its okay for Navy to spray recruits with banned chemical
The Navy can spray recruits in the eyes with pepper spray, even though it has been linked to death and is banned during warfare by international law, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The decision, revealed by the blog of Legal Times, is in response to a case brought by naval officers, who argued that the practice of “subjecting trainees to a direct shot of pepper spray was dangerous and deprived them of their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. They said the Navy could rely on less intense training methods, such as smearing a small amount of the spray on the skin beneath the eyes, or forcing trainees to walk through a room that had previously been sprayed.”
But Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he wasn’t in a position to overrule the Navy’s decision to continue the practice.
…
Pepper spray is banned for use in war by Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The “spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents,” the North Carolina Medical journal wrote in a study. “Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.”
According to Legal Times, the judge threw out the navy officers’ constitutional arguments as well, saying the practice of using pepper spray didn’t “shock the conscience,” even though it’s banned for use in warfare by the chemical weapons convention. “
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Judge_says_its_okay_for_Navy_0316.html
9. “Those who plan wars and/or participate in them, yet also profess to be Christians, are explicitly rejecting the ethical teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6 and 7) and Matthew 25:31-46. Those Christians are either ignorant of or simply reject what Jesus repeatedly said about the issue of homicidal violence (in so many words, he says: “Violence is forbidden for those who wish to follow me”). And what is most hypocritical of all is the fact that pro-war or neutral Christians, by their actions, are rejecting Jesus’ Golden Rule command: “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”
The rejection of the Way of Jesus also includes the rejection of his clear teachings on how his followers are to treat the neighbor, the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the captive, the enemy and all others in need of mercy and understanding. In order to participate in the legal homicide that takes place in all wars, the followers of Jesus have to reject gospel ethics and adopt the un-Christ-like, non-gospel Just War Theory of Augustine (which first appeared 3 centuries after Jesus’ death). There seems to be no ethical way for the follower of the nonviolent Jesus to participate in or support the mass slaughter of war. The Christian has to choose between two irreconcilable realities: the Way of the God of Love or the way of the god of war.
The whole issue of the justification of war, with its inherent atrocities, never seems to be thoroughly examined in an atmosphere of openness and historical honesty. Full understanding of the realities of war and its spiritual, psychological and economic consequences for the victims – or for the victimizers, for that matter – is rarely attempted, even for people of faith. If we who are non-soldiers ever truly experienced the horrors of combat, the effort to abolish war would suddenly be a top priority (perhaps even for the current crop of unelected “Chicken Hawk” warmongers in the Bush and Obama Administrations.
If we actually knew the gruesome realities of war (or even understood the immorality of spending trillions of dollars on war preparation while hundreds of millions of people are homeless and starving) we would refuse to cooperate with the things that make for war. But that wouldn’t be good for the various war profiteers and their shareholders who profit from war. So those “merchants of death” must hide the gruesome truths and try instead to make war look like something glorious, benign, character-building or patriotic, with, for example, sloganeering like “Be All That You Can Be.” Or they might try to convince the soon-to-be-childless mothers of doomed, dead or dying soldiers that their child had died honorably fighting for God and Country instead of for domination of the Middle East’s oil reserves.“
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12760
10. “Wall Street’s and the City’s Attempt to Destabilize the EU Banking System and the Euro
The complexity of the ongoing crisis requires being extremely vigilant in identifying the trends and factors conveying real serious dangers, instead of being sidetracked by rumors and phony news.
We hope that this detailed explanation will contribute to debunk the lie orchestrated around a so-called « Eastern European financial bomb » (17) ; and that it will provide an illustration enabling each and everyone to see through first appearances, seek true facts hiding “behind the mirror” presented by mainstream media, and make up their own mind.
If the G20 Summit fails to prevent the world entering into the phase of geopolitical dislocation, similar operations of manipulation and destabilization will increase in number, each regional block trying to discredit their opponent, like any zero-sum game (18) : a player gains the other players lose.“
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12774
11. AIG bonuses:
“The accusation against Dodd is that there is nothing the Obama administration can do about the AIG bonus payments because Dodd inserted a clause into the stimulus bill which exempted executive compensation agreements entered into before February, 2009 from the compensation limits imposed on firms receiving bailout funds. Thus, this accusation asserts, it was Dodd’s amendment which explicitly allowed firms like AIG to make bonus payments that were promised before the stimulus bill was enacted.
That is simply not what happened. What actually happened is the opposite. It was Dodd who did everything possible — including writing and advocating for an amendment — which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised. But it was Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd’s proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed. The exemption for already existing compensation agreements — the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments — was inserted at the White House’s insistence and over Dodd’s objections. But now that a political scandal has erupted over these payments, the White House is trying to deflect blame from itself and heap it all on Chris Dodd by claiming that it was Dodd who was responsible for that exemption.
…
Can that be any clearer? It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future. The provision which shielded already-promised bonus payments from the executive compensation limits ended up being inserted at the insistence of Geithner.
…
I’m not defending Chris Dodd here. As I said, there are all sorts of legitimate (though still unresolved) ethical questions about Dodd’s personal financial matters. And if he were responsible for these compensation exemptions, then he ought to be blamed. But he simply wasn’t responsible. He opposed them vehemently (The Hill at the time even noted that “Dodd is not backing down” from his opposition to the exemption that Geithner/Summers were demanding, and Jane has much more evidence, including the legislative history, conclusively demonstrating what really happened here). Geithner and Summers obviously thought that the exemption was justified when they were running around protecting those past compensation agreements, and they simply ought to explain why, rather than trying to sink Chris Dodd’s political career in order to protect themselves.
The only point here is that what the White House and many journalists are claiming simply did not happen. They’re just inventing a false history in order to blame the politically hapless Dodd for what Geithner and Summers did. And they’re being aided by a right-wing noise machine that knows Dodd is vulnerable and which views the opportunity to blame the AIG bonuses on him, probably accurately, as a final nail in his political coffin (Media Matters today details today the right-wing falsehoods in the attacks on Dodd by documenting that the claims against Dodd are inaccurate, but they don’t say who was actually responsible for the exemption). The next reporter who writes a word about this or listens to anonymous White House officials blame Dodd for these provisions might want to spend a moment reading Jane’s post and looking at the evidence showing what actually happened, rather than mindlessly writing down what Rahm Emanuel these anonymous White House officials are whispering in their ears.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
