LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

By Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org in Uruknews
February 24, 2006

Announcement: United for Peace and Justice is Partnering with MediaChannel.org to Focus Attention on Media Complicity in the Iraq War.

Last week, new photographs of detainees abused by US soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib gulag in Iraq surfaced. They were discovered by the American Civil Liberties Union. The story was covered on TVS in Australia.

The most elaborate statistics on the abuse scandal appeared in the press.
1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse
93 video files of suspected detainee abuse
660 images of adult pornography
546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees
29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts
This information made headlines in the Guardian newspapers in England.

Meanwhile, in the United States, all of the networks covered a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who once famously said, “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Now, the Pentagon’s Rumsfeld is declaring a new war - on the press. The Washington Post reports:

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday called for the U.S. military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, faster and nontraditional information campaign to counter messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media. Rumsfeld lashed out at the U.S. media, whose coverage he blamed for effectively halting recent military information initiatives, such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers.”

Read the rest here.

“News Dissector” Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. For more on the protest: www.UFPJ.org.

By CHRISTOPHER REED, Counterpunch, 23 February 2006

Japan is marching back to military power, or more precisely, “is being marched” by the United States toward a new militarism, as its neo-nationalist prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who like many hawks has never served in the military, acts as eager drill sergeant. Meanwhile the putative army, the Japanese people, remains unenthusiastic.

The nation and its population are unique in the world, having honored 60 years of official pacifism since their disastrous imperialist wars from 1931-45. These ended in defeat with three million Japanese dead, and a US occupation force writing a new constitution that renounced war “forever.” That was then. Now, despite opinion polls still showing a pacifist public in the high 60s percentage, Japan’s warmongers exert their influence. The new militarism is not trumpeted, even the Pentagon’s drums are muffled, but almost every week an event occurs to push six decades of peace further into history.

Read the full article here.

Bush and Blair are gearing up for it, and they are preparing us, too - just as they did before attacking Iraq. But where is the threat?

By: John Pilger, 02/09/06, Stop The War.org

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. “He lacked [John] Kennedy’s ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking,” she wrote. “Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions.”

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises “a crushing response”, you sense he means it.

Read the rest of the article here.

With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger’s new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11851.htm

I weep for our errors in Iraq
By Clare Short
Published: Tuesday, 21 February, 2006, The Independent, UK

NOT many years ago, I used to say that our troops were some of the best peacekeepers in the world. Having learned their lessons in Northern Ireland, their performance in Bosnia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone ā€“ and in leading the establishment of the peace-keeping force in Kabul ā€“ was exemplary.

The Department for International Development provided small pockets of funding, and the troops worked in ways that enabled them to get to know the local people. They helped with emergency repairs, set up football clubs, and got involved in other activities. The secret of the troopsā€™ success was that they treated local people with respect. And so ā€“ despite all the deceit on the road to war in Iraq ā€“ it was easy to believe the claims that life was better in Basra than Baghdad partly because our troops knew how to behave.

On top of this, we have seen more despicable photos of the mistreatment by the American military of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Quite apart from anything else, they are a reminder that at no time since the scandal first emerged in 2004 has there been a proper inquiry into it, and that nobody in a position of authority has been held to account.

All this in a week when a UN report called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and our courts have told the Government that it should make representations on behalf of the British residents held in Guantanamo Bay who were given asylum in the UK but of whom the Government has washed its hands. We may have to revise that opinion now. The video that has come to light showing the deliberate beatings of young men by British troops ā€“ and the decision of the people of Basra to refuse all contact with British forces ā€“ suggests that all is not as we were led to believe. Sadly, we can no longer feel the same pride in the performance of our armed forces. And their loss of reputation makes them more vulnerable in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US defence is that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are war criminals who will be held for as long as the war lasts. But just as this argument was being propagated, a senior British policeman told us that the war on terror is likely to last for as long as 50 years. Against this backdrop, Labour MPs voted in overwhelming numbers for a system of creeping compulsion in the introduction of ID cards and for the insidious new criminal offence of “glorifying terrorism”. I could weep for the accumulating errors that are being made, and for the violence and bloodshed that are likely to continue to spread across the world for many decades to come.

And it gets worse. The prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been thrown away, and the man who is almost certain to become Israelā€™s next Prime Minister ā€“ Ehud Olmert ā€“ has made clear that he will implement his predecessor Ariel Sharonā€™s plan to contain the Palestinian population in a series of Bantustans on just 15% of the land of historical Palestine. This means the conflict will continue into the indefinite future. No Palestinian leadership could ever accept such a settlement together with the loss of East Jerusalem. The politics of the Middle East will remain poisoned, the anger of the Muslim world undiminished.

The International Crisis Group last week published a study of the insurgency in Iraq, and concluded that it was becoming better organised, less fragmented, more conscious of the need not to alienate Iraqi opinion and that it is increasingly confident it can win. And educated Iraqi families who survived the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War, sanctions, and the evils of the Saddam Hussain regime are leaving in droves because the present situation is unbearable. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent, and the country has become an anarchic state, with the likely prospect of an endless war paralleling the situation in Colombia. The decision to deploy British troops to one of the most dangerous areas of the country risks increasing loss of British soldiersā€™ lives in a hopeless, endless war.

Thus the world is in desperate trouble, and British foreign policy is a major part of the problem. At a time when we desperately need international co-operation to deal with the problems of global warming, poverty, population growth and loss of environmental resources, we have growing bitter division, an undermining of the UN, and of international law. People frequently compare the errors of Iraq to the Suez adventure. Iā€™m afraid it is much more serious than that, and on top of this we have the prospect of an attack on Iran to prevent its developing nuclear capacity.

Meanwhile, our constitutional structures are malfunctioning. Deceiving Parliament was always seen as the unforgivable crime in our constitutional arrangements. But there has been no holding of the prime minister to account for his deceit over Iraq, and the main opposition party is busy repairing its relationship with the Bush administration. The traditional Labour Party is in despair, membership collapsing and the recent by-election defeat a sign of things to come. The problem is that no solution is in sight and therefore the people are increasingly contemptuous of the political establishment.

It will get worse before it gets better. There will be no peace until a future American administration understands the trouble they are in and the need for a just settlement in the Middle East. And in the UK, we will not get the change we need unless we achieve a hung parliament which could lead to a change in the electoral system to halt the concentration of unaccountable and incompetent policy-making in No 10. These are gloomy times and we need to face just how bad they are in order to begin to build the movements that will start to put things right. ā€“ The Independent

* Clare Short was Britainā€™s Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 to 2003.

Campaigners ask courts to rule Iraq war a ‘crime of aggression’
By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor, The Telegraph, UK
(Filed: 20/02/2006)

Britain’s most senior judges will be asked today for a ruling that could lead to the war in Iraq being declared an illegal “crime of aggression”.
Until now, the courts have taken the view that they cannot rule on the Crown’s prerogative powers to wage war. But today the law lords will start hearing appeals by peace protesters who claim they were entitled to commit “criminal” acts in an attempt to prevent what they saw as the greater crime of launching an illegal war.

Nobody has been punished for aggression in international law since the Nuremberg Tribunal executed former Nazi officers in 1946. The new International Criminal Court does not yet have jurisdiction over the crime, partly because of difficulties in agreeing a definition of it. But the Government has been told by its senior legal adviser that ministers could face such charges under English law. In the Attorney General’s advice to the Prime Minister of March 7, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said: “Aggression is a crime under customary international law which automatically forms part of domestic law. It might therefore be argued that international aggression is a crime recognised by the common law which can be prosecuted in the UK courts.”

Read the rest here.

Related News: Law lords to rule on activists’ direct action to stop ‘illegal’ Iraq war (The Guardian)
Useful Sites: The Guardian’s Anti-War section & Guide to Anti-War websites

Earlier in the month, the Arab Lawyers’ Union organised the world’s first Arab Tribunal on the war in Iraq. Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Chairman of the Perdana Global Peace Forum, was the presiding Judge in the mock trial of United States President George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The panel of judges agreed that the leaders of the US, Britain and Israel were guilty of crimes committed against humanity and were pronounced guilty of bombing private houses, public buildings, hospitals and schools. They were also found guilty of obstructing supplies of food and medicine, destroying water and electricity supplies in Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere. They were found guilty of the arrest, detention and torture of innocent civilians.

Although the mock trial had no legal powers to enforce the verdict, it at least “provides a forum by which the international community would know how much suffering the occupation and armed aggression of the occupiers inflicted on the civilian populations,” Mahathir said. He agreed with most participants at the mock trial that the crimes committed against humanity by the three leaders must not be forgotten or belittled.

Following are excerpts from an interiew with Former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad, which aired on New TV on February 15, 2006. The video clip of the interview is available from MEMRI TV at this link:

Interviewer: We are here in Cairo and we have to ask you first of all because your visit here is about a tribunal that judges George Bush, Tony Blair, and Sharon. Why did you bother yourself to come here and… you are a politician… to be as a lawyer or in the head of this tribunal?

Mahathir Mohammad: I think this trial is important because there needs to be a lot of publicity regarding the crimes committed by these three people. So far they have been able to get away, literally, with murder, but nobody seems to pass any judgment on them. So we think that this trial would enable the public ā€“ the people here ā€“ to make a decision on their behavior presently.

[…]

Interviewer: What are the main characters, the main… Why did you choose these three people? And is it a real court?

Mahathir Mohammad: It’s… The charge was made by the Egyptian lawyers. They decided to have this court. This court is… Of course it’s not the normal, official court. It is a court of the people, so to speak.

Interviewer: What do you think that the reaction would be? Do you think that George Bush is aware of this court?

Mahathir Mohammad: Well he’s incapable of noticing anything. But still, we need to have our say.

Interviewer: What are the results that you expect?

Mahathir Mohammad: Well, as one of the judges of course I’m not supposed to pass judgment until the evidences are finished, so I think so far, of course, we have heard the prosecution’s case. We have not heard the defense. So when we hear the defense, we’ll make a decision.

[…]

Interviewer: They accused you that you are an anti-Semite. So are you the enemy of the United States or an anti-Semite?

Mahathir Mohammad: They always like to label people as being anti-Semitic, so that even if you do and say innocent things you are supposed to be unfair. But other people are subject to criticism, subject to condemnation ā€“ including the Muslims. Now if you can condemn the Muslims ā€“ as terrorists, for example ā€“ why is it that when the Jews do something that is wrong, that is criminal, we cannot say anything? Why is it that they are supposed to be exempted from normal opinions of people?

[…]

Mahathir Mohammad: Ahmadinejad asked for the elimination of Israel, but Israel has actually eliminated Palestine. Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian state to exist. It is really called the Palestinian Authority. Now if Israel can insist that Palestine does not exist, why cannot some other person say that Israel shouldn’t exist? Or if it wants to exist, it should exist in Europe, [from] where the Zionists came? Or in America? How about giving a little bit of Texas to make the State of Israel?

[…]

Interviewer: What do you think about George Bush and his behavior in the Arab world… and he wins the election, he is re-elected again? What do you think about the policy of the Bush administration also?

Mahathir Mohammad: Well, Bush is a very aggressive person, and he has no hesitation about using military power to achieve his objective. If thousands of people are killed ā€“ that’s too bad. 500,000 children in Lebanon were killed, in this…

Interviewer: In Iraq.

Mahathir Mohammad: In Iraq, were killed… That’s all right, as long as they achieve their objective. Such a person should never lead a powerful nation. It’s very dangerous, because he’s going to use military means to achieve his objective. He’s going to kill people in order to achieve his objective.

Interviewer: You said once that the reelection of President Bush will cause sufferings for Muslims in the world. How can we stop this?

Mahathir Mohammad: The only thing, the only way to stop this is to ask the American people… There are a lot of very decent American people. Unfortunately, they are not too knowledgeable about the rest of the world. We have to inform them [about] the kind of damage that is being done by their leader, Bush, and they should not vote for a man who obviously told an open lie. He lied about the weapons of mass destruction, and yet he was able to win the election. It is very disappointing. It shows that a lot of Americans are not knowledgeable about what is being done by their leader. So we have a need to explain to the American people that this… We are not against America, we are just against the policies of certain governments. So Americans should choose their leaders very carefully.

This is an article on a January tribunal against US President George Bush which was organised by the Bush Crimes Commission. The commission “documents the evidence on wars of aggression, detention and torture, destruction of the global environment, sabotage of global health programs, and the abandonment of New Orleans.”

Bush on Trial for Crimes against Humanity
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t, 24 January 2006

The International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration convened last weekend in New York City’s Riverside Church. Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait hangs in the foyer. Dr. King delivered his historic 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Place to Break the Silence,” opposing the war and calling for the removal of all foreign troops from Vietnam, in that same church.

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, who delivered a keynote address to the commission of inquiry, invoked Dr. King’s words from 1967: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” The following year, the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal put the US government on trial for “crimes without precedent” it was committing in Vietnam. In the tradition of the Russell tribunal, the panel of judges at the commission of inquiry heard evidence of George W. Bush’s war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, GuantC!namo Bay, and elsewhere.

Ratner said that Bush openly and notoriously “laid the plan for coup d’C)tat in America” with a small paragraph in his “signing statement” attached to the McCain anti-torture amendment. Bush wrote that his commander in chief power allows him to do anything he thinks is necessary, including torture, notwithstanding the amendment passed by Congress. Ratner called that a “historic, unprecedented grab for power” that spells the end of checks and balances in our government. Bush, according to Ratner, has declared that George Bush is the law.

Harry Belafonte gave the other keynote address. “When a government fails to protect justice,” Belafonte declared, “it is the responsibility of the people to rise up and change the guard, change the regime.” In a hoarse voice, the legendary singer charged, “Those who fail to answer that call should be charged with patriotic treason.”

Read the rest of the article here and click here for the exclusive interview with Janis Karpinski: Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.

By Julian Borger, Washington
The Age, Australia, February 17, 2006

THE Bush Administration has made an emergency request to the US Congress for a seven-fold increase in funding to mount a huge propaganda campaign against the Tehran Government. In a further sign of the worsening crisis between Iran and the West, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the $US75 million ($A101 million) in extra funds, on top of $10 million already allocated for this year, would be used to broadcast US radio and television shows into Iran, help pay for Iranians to study in America and back democracy groups inside Iran.

US officials acknowledge the limits of such a campaign, but the State Department is determined to bring in measures such as extending the government-run Voice of America’s Farsi service from a few hours a day to round-the-clock coverage. The sudden budget request, which follows an outlay of only $4 million over the past two years, is to be accompanied by a diplomatic drive by Dr Rice to discuss Tehran’s suspect nuclear weapons program. She is to begin with a visit to Gulf states.

Read the rest here.

By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, 13 February 2006

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to the leaders of Hamas to come to Moscow killed two birds with one stone: it elevated his international stature to statesmanlike proportions, and it showed up American policymakers as a bunch of petulant ideologues. Putin not only invited Hamas for talks, but explicitly rejected the U.S.-Israeli position that Hamas is a terrorist organization with which it is impermissible to deal. “Maintaining our contacts with Hamas, we are ready in the near future to invite the Hamas authorities to Moscow to hold talks,” said Putin:

“We haven’t considered Hamas a terrorist organization. Today we must recognize that Hamas has reached power in Palestine as a result of legitimate elections and we must respect the choice of the Palestinian people. ā€¦ We are deeply convinced that burning bridges is the easiest, but not a very promising activity.”

This is a direct challenge to the Americans, whose ties to Israel prevent them from looking at the region in more realistic terms ā€“ and even from pursuing their own national interests instead of Israel’s. It is also a political masterstroke, with Putin moving quickly into the yawning gap between American rhetoric about “democracy” and Washington’s reaction to the results of the Palestinian poll.

Read on.

By David Swanson, OpEdNews.com

Simple acts and a little courage have worked wonders in the world. Nonviolent people’s movements won democratic reforms in Russia, booted the British out of India, resisted the Nazi occupation in Denmark, drove a dictator out of El Salvador and another out of the Philippines, ended Jim Crow, crushed Soviet power in Poland, toppled military regimes in Argentina and Chile, ended Apartheid, and brought democracy to the Ukraine. George W. is no match for a force this powerful.

As powerless as we may feel in the United States right now, we have at our disposal the tools needed to end the war in Iraq and to impeach the criminals who began it. The impeachment may have to precede the peace, but, in one order or the other, we can achieve these two goals.

There is a multitude of ways in which each of us can alter our daily habits to help make this happen. While there may be a value to picking one or two angles of attack and focusing our collective energies there (and while I will recommend some priorities), it is also worthwhile to pursue the many avenues of resistance to the war machine in which every little bit of pressure will help. Different tactics appeal to different individuals and groups, and it is a multifarious movement that will restore the rule of law to the United States and the world. Most of the tactics I’ll mention are easy and legal. Some are hard. Some involve civil disobedience.

Read the rest of this article here.