by Mazin Qumsiyeh
In DC last week, Huwaida Arraf of the International Solidarity movement posed two questions for the Palestinian Authority (PA) Foreign Minister:

1) Why is the PA not articulating the clear and continuing human rights violations by Israel, and

2) Since Mahmud Abbas wants Palestinians to end armed resistance to Israeli colonization why does his authority not show any visible participation or support for the Palestinian non-violence resistance?

His response was that he used to be president of an activist group and knows that activists may say a lot of things that leaders cannot and should not say. He also said that everyone knows Palestinians engage in non-violent resistance and obviously “we think it is good.”

Then Phyllis Bennis asked why he stated that the PA “did not like Bush’s written assurances to Sharon but we choose to interpret them in light of International law.” She explained that this makes little sense considering that Sharon is proceeding based on these assurances to consolidate control in the occupied West Bank, that such assurances contravene international law and that the Bush administration has a history of violating international law. He did not reply.

PA leaders are not in enviable positions. They are required by an imbalance of power to fulfill the Bush and Sharon “visions” of security for the occupier in return for positions of “leadership” over the captive Palestinians. The PA leaders claim that Israeli settlement policies are destroying the “vision of a two state solution.” But outgoing Israeli Army Chief Yaalon said it well “A two-state solution, is not relevant…it is a story that the Western world tells with Western eyes and that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, too, are sweeping it under the carpet.”

And why are the Palestinains fulfilling their obligations under an unfair road map even while Israel refuses to implement its obligations of a full settlement freeze. As for two-states, there is already a state called Israel with discrimnatory laws, with nuclear weapons and the fourth strongest army in the world. Zionism survives only in so far as it prevents Palestinians attaining their basic human rights such as the right to return to their homes and lands and the right to self-determination. Zionism and Israeli law claim all Jews around the world are nationals of the state and give them the “right” to automatic citizenship while denying Palestinian Christians and Muslims the right to return to their homes simply for being Gentiles. Palestinians by contrast are in shrinking cantons on less than 10% of their historic lands.
Full: counterpunch.org

by John Nichols
…Ultimately, now that Deep Throat has been revealed as just another cynical Washington insider working the system for all it was worth, one Watergate mystery remains. And it turns out to be a far more perplexing and troublesome one than that of some back-alley tipster’s identity.

What remains is the mystery of how America, a country that proved her ability to depose a petty crook from power in the 1970s, has drifted so far from her ethical moorings. At the most fundamental level, it is not so difficult to unravel this mystery. A simple calculation of the roles of big media and big money campaign contributions provides most if not all of the explanation that is needed. But that calculus points to the lingering quandry of our time: Will we ever muster enough outrage at a stenographic media and a compliant Congress to steer America back to that place where lawless presidents are held accountable for their lies and the deadly consequences of their misdeeds?
Full: commondreams.org

This is a dangerously naive assessment at best, a deliberate distortion at worst. Who “Watergated” Nixon and why? Why were the burglars old-time operatives from the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination, and why did they show up in the 80’s in Central America as part of Iran-Contra? They are connected to the global network of right-wing terrorists, part of the ‘Deep Politics’ which Peter Dale Scott unearthed in the 80’s and are implicated in drugs/guns/ insurgencies far beyond the borders of the United States. I would not be surprised if a great deal of the violence in Iraq is ultimately traced back to this network. Think about it: what homegrown insurgency in its right mind would deliberately unleash such horrific damage on its own people? Bush et.al. say it’s Islamists from outside Iraq. I doubt it.

by Tom Engelhardt
…Begin with those prospective bases in Romania and Bulgaria (and while you’re at it, toss in the ones already in existence in the former Yugoslavia); make your way southeastwards past “Pipelineistan,” keeping your eye out for our Turkish bases and those possible future ones in Azerbaijan; take in the 4 or 5 bases we’d like to hang onto in the embattled Iraqi heartland of the Middle East (not to speak of the ones we already control in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region); take a quick glance at “oil-rich” North Africa for a second, imagining what might someday be nailed down there; then hop over base-less Axis of Evil power Iran and land at Bagram Air Base (don’t worry, you have “access”) or any of the other unnamed ones in Afghanistan where we now have a long-term foothold; don’t forget the nearby Pakistani air bases that Gen. Pervez Musharraf has given us access to (or Diego Garcia, that British “aircraft carrier” island in the Indian Ocean that’s all ours); add in our new Central Asian facilities; plot it all out on a map and what you have is a great infertile crescent of American military garrisons extending from the old Soviet-controlled lands of Eastern Europe to the old Soviet SSRs of Central Asia, reaching from Russia’s eastern border right up to the border of China. This is, of course, a map that more or less coincides with the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.
Full: commondreams.org

And Russia and China are going to sit for this? I think it’s time to focus on how close we are to full-scale nuclear confrontation.

BAGHDAD, June 1 — On a steamy June morning two years ago, a U.S. soldier’s warning shot ricocheted off a sand berm and blew a hole in Raez Habib’s life.

The stray bullet plowed through the meat of his left thigh and shattered his right femur, leaving him bleeding in the street, Habib recalled in a recent interview. A helicopter took him to a military hospital, where doctors amputated his right leg four inches below the hip.

The shooting was an accident, a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to Habib and to statements from four U.S. service members who were at or near the scene, which Habib keeps in a tattered manila folder. He soon lost his job as a builder, because he could no longer carry heavy loads, and moved his family into his mother’s three-room clay house.

Deaf since birth, Habib, 35, communicates through muffled groans and hand signals. “I have a wife and three children and no way to provide for them,” he said, his fingers clenching the fabric of his long white robe as his younger brother Ghassan translated.

“We don’t think about who to blame. It was his destiny,” Ghassan Habib said. “It happened. We take care of him. That is all.”

The U.S. military keeps a meticulous tally of its wounded — 12,762 in Iraq as of Wednesday, along with 1,658 dead. Scenes of soldiers convalescing at well-equipped hospitals such as Washington’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center are familiar symbols of the human cost of the war.

But more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion, there is little available data on the far greater number of Iraqi civilians wounded in the invasion and subsequent violence related to the insurgency. And few of the victims’ stories have been widely reported.

While attacks on civilians are increasing, the wounded are getting little help from overburdened medical facilities, according to interviews with more than a dozen patients, physicians and health officials in Baghdad. The best rehabilitation hospital in the Iraqi capital is running out of artificial limbs and might soon close, its director said. And most of the wounded fall back on the only support network they have: their families.

Attempts to quantify civilian casualties here have largely focused on the number of dead, not the wounded. A widely criticized study by an international group of university professors released in October estimated that the invasion had caused 100,000 civilian deaths. At least 21,940 civilians have been reported killed in news stories, according to a database compiled by the group Iraq Body Count, which does not track the number of wounded.
Full: washingtonpost.com

ATLANTA (AP) – CNN should cover international news and the environment, not the “pervert of the day,” network founder Ted Turner said Wednesday as the first 24-hour news network turned 25.
Turner, an outspoken media mogul who started CNN in 1980 but no longer controls the network, said he envisioned CNN as a place where rapes and murders that dominated local news wouldn’t be emphasized, but he’s seeing too much of that “trivial news” on the network he created, now second in ratings to Fox News Channel.

“I would like to see us to return to a little more international coverage on the domestic feed and a little more environmental coverage, and, maybe, maybe a little less of the pervert of the day,” he said in a speech to CNN employees outside the old Atlanta mansion where the network first aired.
“You know, we have a lot of perverts on today, and I know that, but is that really news? I mean, come on. I guess you’ve got to cover Michael Jackson, but not three stories about perversion that we do every day as well.”
Full: apnews.myway.com

The US press seeks to distract from the real perverts.

WASHINGTON – Stung by Amnesty International’s condemnation of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere overseas, the administration of President George W. Bush is reacting with indignation and even suggestions that terrorists are using the world’s largest human rights organization.

The latest denunciation came from Bush himself during a White House press conference Tuesday. ”I’m aware of the Amnesty International report, and it’s absurd. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world,” he said, adding that Washington had ”investigated every single complaint against (sic) the detainees.”

”It seemed like (Amnesty) based some of their decisions on the word and allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people had been trained in some instances to disassemble (sic) — that means not tell the truth”, Bush went on. ”And so it was an absurd report. It just is”.

At issue is an Amnesty report released last Thursday that assailed U.S. detention practices. Since its release, a succession of top administration officials and their right-wing backers in the major media has denounced the London-based group in what appears increasingly like an orchestrated effort to discredit independent human rights critics. A similar campaign appeared to target Newsweek magazine earlier this month.

”It looks like a campaign,” Human Rights Watch advocacy chief Reed Brody said Tuesday. ”There’s been a real drumbeat since Amnesty published the report. It seems like there’s an attempt to silence critics.”

Bush’s reaction Tuesday largely mirrored that of Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview taped on Friday and broadcast Sunday evening by CNN.

”For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously,” the vice president said in response to Amnesty’s report.

”Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world.”

As to allegations of mistreatment of detainees, Cheney argued that ”if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.”
Full: commondreams.org

Amnesty and HRW practice a peculiar brand of ‘independence.’ On the one hand, they come out with reports like this one calling Guantanamo ‘the gulag of our times’: a gulag yes, but not the worst. On the other hand they sit silent about Haiti and join in with the terrified whites’ analysis of Zimbabwe. The human rights disaster in Haiti is ok with them? The entire country is a gulag. And speaking of gulags, they treat Congo as if it’s a strictly regional conflict without considering Western complicity. They seem like some kind of ‘deep cover’ group to me, and in fact George Soros is behind Human Rights watch. When I see selective outrage like this I know we’re watching some deeper machinations at work.

by Joshua Frank
“The lessons we should learn from all
The fighting in the days of old
When providence bestowed divine
The sanctuary purified
Let lightning circle all you hold
And don’t uproot the olive grove”
-Mirah, “Jerusalem”

I think it is finally time we stood up and thanked Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the darling Democrat from the Bay Area who leads her party in the House. Pelosi’s recent speech to the Israel-American lobby AIPAC, the second largest lobby in Washington, was monumental – truly unparalleled in its candor.

Despite the fact that AIPAC was recently busted for spying on the United States, Pelosi, along with many other top bureaucrats from Washington, gushed effusions of praise on the foreign power. “There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,” Pelosi said as she rallied AIPAC loyalists. “This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.”

Apparently Pelosi has never asked a Palestinian what they think of Israel’s brutality. Not that she hasn’t witnessed the occupation first hand; Pelosi is just not concerned in the least with the Palestinian resistance.

“This spring, I was in Israel as part of a congressional trip that also took us to Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq,” said Pelosi. “One of the most powerful experiences was taking a helicopter toward Gaza, over the path of the security fence. We set down in a field that belonged to a local kibbutz. It was a cool but sunny day, and the field was starting to bloom with mustard. Mustard is a crop that grows in California, and it felt at that moment as if I were home. And then we were told that the reason we had to land in that field, as opposed to our actual destination, was because there had been an infiltration that morning, and they weren’t sure how secure the area was. And that point alone brought us back to the daily reality of Israel: even moments of peace and beauty are haunted by the specter of violence.”
Full: counterpunch.org

oy vey.The Democratic Party is DEAD.

A new “scramble for Africa” is taking place among the world’s big powers, who are tapping into the continent for its oil and diamonds.
Tony Blair is pushing hard for African debt relief agreements in the run-up to the G8 summit in Scotland in July. But while sub-Saharan Africa is the object of the west’s charitable concern, billions of pounds’ worth of natural resources are being removed from it.

A Guardian investigation beginning today reveals that instead of enriching often debt-ridden countries, some big corporations are accused by campaigners of facilitating corruption and provoking instability – so much so that organisations such as Friends of the Earth talk of an “oil curse”.

Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness, which has been prominent in urging reform, said: “Western companies and banks have colluded in stripping Africa’s resources. We need to track revenues from oil, mining and logging into national budgets to make sure that the money isn’t siphoned off by corrupt officials.”

Looting of state assets by corrupt leaders should become a crime under international law, he said.

“The G8 should take the lead in this.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Yeah that’s the ticket. Send in the wolves to guard to henhouse. Geldof and Bono will be in charge.

WASHINGTON, May 31 – When he becomes president of the World Bank on Wednesday, Paul D. Wolfowitz says, Africa will be his top priority.

“Nothing would be more satisfying than to feel at the end of however long a term I serve here that we played a role in changing Africa from a continent of despair to a continent of hope,” he said Tuesday at his first news conference.

To underline that commitment, he will travel to Africa in June.
Full: nytimes.com

Oh Oh. Wolfowitz is coming to ‘change’ Africa. Run.

…As a subgroup, relos are economically homogenous, with midcareer incomes starting at $100,000 a year. Most are white. Some find the salaries and perks compensating; the developments that cater to them come with big houses, schools with top SAT scores, parks for youth sports and upscale shopping strips.

Others complain of stress and anomie. They have traded a home in one place for a job that could be anyplace. Relo children do not know a hometown; their parents do not know where their funerals will be. There is little in the way of small-town ties or big-city amenities – grandparents and cousins, longtime neighbors, vibrant boulevards, homegrown shops – that let roots sink in deep.

“It’s as if they’re being molded by their companies,” said Tina Davis, a top Alpharetta relo agent for the Coldwell Banker real estate firm. “Most of the people will tell you how long they’ll be here. It’s usually two to four years…”
Full: nytimes.com

This is what the American Dream has come to: a life no human being should live.