Muslim protest in Alquds

ArayaHuman Rights Organization

منظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان

Arayahro@yahoo.ie

25/10/2009
Muslim protest in Alquds
Condemnation of the Israeli army for going into the AlAqsa Mosque. Entering places of worship without permission is against human rights rule for respecting other religion’s places of worship.
1981 Declaration of the General Assembly
Art. 6 (a) : The right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief includes the freedom, "To worship or assemble in connection with a religion or belief, and to establish and maintain places for these purposes;".
Commission on Human Rights resolution 2005/40
4 (b) : The Commission on Human Rights urges States, "To exert the utmost efforts, in accordance with their national legislation and in conformity with international human rights law, to ensure that religious places, sites, shrines and religious expressions are fully respected and protected and to take additional measures in cases where they are vulnerable to desecration or destruction;".
4 (d) : The Commission on Human Rights urges States, "To ensure, in particular, the right of all persons to worship or assemble in connection with a religion or belief and to establish and maintain places for these purposes [.];".
Human Rights Committee general comment 22
Para . 4 : "The concept of worship extends to [.] the building of places of worship."
We urge the human rights organization to stand firm against this desecration of the AlAqsa Mosque.
We request the Israeli government to stop its bad intervention in the Alaqsa Mosque and to stop frightening the worshippers.
We urge the UN human rights to bring those involved to the international court of Justice.
Administration

استنكار لما يحدث في الحرم القدسي
نستنكر وبشدة ما يحدث من انتهاكات في الحرم القدسي. ان الدخول الى اماكن العبادة بالقوة شئ لا يتماشى مع حقوق الانسان ولا مع الراي العام العالمي , ويعتبر جريمة.
إعلان الجمعية العامة لحقوق الانسان 1981م:
فقرة 6 أ. حق حرية التفكير, الرأي, الدين او الاعتقاد ويشمل الحريات "للتعبد او الاجتماع اجتماعا متصلا بمعتقد ديني او بمعتقد. واقامة وصيانة اماكن خاصة لهذا الغرض."
الهيئة العامة لحقوق الانسان 2005. 40
4.ب. الهيئة العامة لحقوق الانسان تطالب الحكومات بان " تمارس اقصى جهدهم بما يتماشى مع قوانينهم وقوانين الهيئة العامة لحقوقو الانسان , بان اماكن العبادة ومواقعها والمباني وتعبيراتها يجب ان تحترم كلية, ووجب عليها تحميها, وخاصة اماكن العبادة التي تتعرض لطمس الهوية او الهدم.
4.د. الهيئة العامة لحقوق الانسان تهيب الحكومات " بان يضمنوا حق العبادة لكل شخص يريد الاجتماع بسبب معتقد او دين , واقامة وصيانة اماكن العبادة او التجمع لذلك الغرض"
الهيئة العامة لحقوق الانسان تعليق 22
فقرة 4. "فكرة العبادة تضمن اقامة اماكن العبادة"
ولهذا نهيب بجميع المنظمات الحقوقية بان تقف وقفة صامدة ضد التعسفات والاعتداءات الاسرائيلية على هوية الحرم القدسي. ونطالب الحكومة الاسرائيلية بان تتوقف عن تدخلها في شئون المسجد الاقصى.
ونطالب بمحاكمة دولية عادلة للذين اعتدوا على المصلين وتسببوا في ترويعهم من الجيش والشرطة واليهود المتشددين.

الادارة

اعلانات سابقة بشان محاكمة المسؤولين عن انتهاكات حقوق الانسان
Previous published declarations

ArayaHuman Rights Organizationمنظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان
arayahro@yahoo.ie
19th Jan 2009
“THE ISRAELIS PRACTICE THE SAME TACTICS as the Holocaust practiced on them
GRANDCHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS FROM WORLD WAR II ARE DOING TO THE PALESTINIANS EXACTLY WHAT WAS ALLGEDLY DONE TO THEM BY NAZI GERMANY…” said an enthusiastic heart speaking man in the demonstrations against Israel bombing of Gaza.
Appalled by the situation concerning the children of Gaza and the suffering they went through and the kind of bombs that had been detonated in the region containing white phosphorous. Some would have been enriched with depleted uranium and the siege that added to the hunger and the suffering of the people. All this can be called the holocaust of the 21st created by the Israeli state.
We as a human rights organization hold the united nation and the Security Council together with the Israeli state as responsible for the aforementioned holocaust. USA and Europe should withdraw their endless support to the Israeli state from the Middle East and we demand that Olmert , Barack and Tzipi Livni should be tried in the international court of Justice. The atrocity that has been seen in the Middle East should never arise again in any part of the world.

Seeking Help in Palestine1. See the children of the world seeking help in Palestineseeking help in Palestine
2. We are the children of the world crying for help in Palestine crying for help in Palestine
3. Our land is taken forcibly our houses demolished day and night
4. See what the future is going to be see were we going to shelter for the night
5. We are the future of the world killed by the Zionist in Palestine
6. Shooting randomly showering bombs to kill the hope in the mind
7. Building a wall of hatred against the wishes of mankind
8.We are the future we are the hope we are the light of Palestine Ah we are the light of Palestine
9. Fifty years of refuges of fighting never seen a resting time never seen a resting time
10. Stop aggression stop occupation stop the genocide of the people of Palestine
11. Give us the chance to live in peace to have our land to turn it into paradise
12. Give us the chance to live in peace to have our land to turn it into paradise
13. Give us the chance to live in peace to have our land to turn it into paradise
14. See the children of the world seeking help in Palestineseeking help in Palestine
Lyric by Dr. Bashir Lasceabai
Music by Eric
Children singing : Safa, Marwa, Mariam Aburraouf, and Hajer Anniami

Ctrl Click to listen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7eaHGaDsDM



ArayaHuman Rights Organizationمنظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان
arayahro@yahoo.ie
26th Jan 2009
WANTED

مطلوبون للعدالة
All Children Killers
كل قاتل للاطفال
To be tried by the International Human Rights Court

Tzipi Livni Ehud BARAK and rice Ehud Olmert and Bush

لمحاكمتهم في المحكمة العالمية لحقوق الانسان




Administration

President Barack Obama, speaks at the Human Rights Campaign

President Barack Obama, speaks at the Human Rights Campaign national dinner, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009, in Washington.

October 23, 2009

"Does Obama Believe in Human Rights?" asks Bret Stephens in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. According to Stephens, the answer is a resounding "no." Citing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement on a visit to China earlier this year that human rights should not interfere with other pressing issues, Stephens writes indignantly, "It takes a remarkable degree of cynicism — or perhaps cowardice — to treat human rights as something that 'interferes' with America's purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them."
It takes a remarkable degree of cynicism — and chutzpah — for Bret Stephens to have written that sentence. This is the same Bret Stephens who, two years ago, in this tendentious column, defended the Bush administration against "inflated, imprecise and tendentious allegations of torture." Waterboarding, Stephens allowed, was unpleasant business, but did not "properly" qualify as torture.
Stephens is nauseated that the Obama administration is engaging regimes such as Burma. He does not bother to mention that the great Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi supports the administration's policy of engaging the junta running her country, or that human rights activists have long been divided over whether sanctions against Burma help or hinder the expansion of freedom. There is no inherent conflict between engagement and the promotion of human rights, just as isolating a country (see Cuba) doesn't necessarily hamper an authoritarian ruler's ability to stay in power and suppress political freedom.
Does this mean Obama's record on human rights has been perfect? Of course not. He has spoken forcefully — but acted otherwise — on indefinite detention and the treatment of detainees. He apparently refused to meet with the Dalai Lama in order not to rankle China's leaders. In this as on other matters, he has made it clear that he is a cautious realist, not a crusading idealist.
But those who pine for a more crusading figure should think back to the Bush era. They should also pause to consider whether any US President has ever made human rights the thing that defines America's purpose in the world, and whether - if Obama opted for such a course - it would be appropriate. As Stephen Walt usefully points out at the Politico, which invited various analysts to assess whether Obama is "punting" on human rights: "Of course he is. No U.S. President — not even Jimmy Carter — was ever willing to spend a lot of blood or treasure solely to advance human rights, and Obama isn't going to be the first. And given that the U.S. record on this issue looks has been tarnished by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, forced rendition, "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture), extra-judicial killings (aka "targeted assassinations"), our reaction to the Goldstone Report, and the thousands dead as a result of the invasion of Iraq, I'd say a bit of humility on this front was probably in order."

UN rights council endorses damning Gaza report

By Hui Min Neo

GENEVA — The UN Human Rights Council endorsed a report on Friday that accused Israel and the Palestinian hardliners Hamas of war crimes in the Gaza conflict, dealing a fresh diplomatic blow to the Jewish state.
While Israel had said such a move would be tantamount to "rewarding terror", the Palestinians welcomed the resolution which it said should be the trigger for follow-up action from the UN Security Council.
Some 25 of the council's 47 members, led by the Arab and African states, voted for the resolution. Six, including the United States, voted against while 16 others either abstained or did not vote.
The resolution calls for the endorsement of "the recommendations contained in the report" produced by a fact-finding mission led by international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone to probe the 22-day conflict.
It also "calls upon all concerned parties including United Nations bodies, to ensure their implementation."
Israel slams 'unjust' report
Goldstone concluded that both Israel and Hamas, Gaza's rulers, committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict launched by Israel in response to rocket fire from the enclave in late December 2008.
The report also recommends referring its conclusions to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague, if Israel and Hamas fail to conduct credible investigations within six months.
The vote came just two days after Israel and the Palestinians came under international pressure during a UN Security Council debate on the Middle East to produce "credible" domestic probes of war crimes allegedly committed during the Gaza conflict.
Welcoming the outcome, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said the international action should not end there.
"We hope this will be followed up in the UN Security Council to ensure such Israeli crimes are not repeated," Erakat told AFP.
While there was no immediate response from Israel, its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier urged the council to reject the resolution.
"Responsible nations have to vote against this decision that supports terror and harms peace," Netanyahu told reporters after a meeting with visiting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero late Thursday.
Explaining Washington's reasons for opposing the resolution, US ambassador Douglas Griffiths said: "We had worked for a resolution that recognized the right of a state to take legitimate action to protect its citizens in the face of threats to their security while also condemning violations of international law regardless of the actor.
"Regrettably, this is not the resolution that is before us today."
The Islamist movement Hamas is regarded by Israel and the West as a terrorist organisation after carrying out dozens of suicide attacks.
The conflict in Gaza, that erupted on 27 December 2008, left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.
Meanwhile, Goldstone himself, who was in Bern for a conference Thursday, also criticised the UN Council resolution for targetting only Israel and failing to include Hamas.
The UN resolution is peppered with references to "recent Israeli violations of human rights in occupied east Jerusalem" but failed to make any direct mention to Hamas.
"This draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Isreal. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope that the council can modify the text," said Goldstone in remarks published in Swiss newspaper Le Temps ahead of the vote.
On the Net:
UN Human Rights Council: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/

Announcing the release of a new book by Prof. Abdulaziz Sachedina on:

Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights "Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights is a reverent, insightful, and truly critical work by Abdulaziz Sachedina, who is the leading Islamic theorist writing in English today. This book is must reading for Muslims who want to be full participants in western moral and political discourse, for Jews and Christians who want voices from the third great monotheistic religion of revelation to become part of their dialogical interaction, and even for secular people who want to engage religious voices in moral and political discourse that is truly inclusive."
David Novak, J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Toronto "A searching investigation questioning the dilemmas facing Muslim thinkers with respect to human rights and a critique of the Western configuration of human rights as universal. Sachedina explores the possibility of an inclusive doctrine of human rights and he does so with passion and sensitivity. This book deepens our appreciation of human rights and also opens new frontiers of inquiry."
Ebrahim Moosa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke UniversityIn this book, Abdulaziz Sachedina argues for the essential compatibility of Islam and human rights. His work is grounded in a rigorous comparative approach; he not only measures Islam against the yardstick of human rights, but also measures human rights against the theological principles of Islam. He offers a balanced and incisive critique of Western experts who have ignored or underplayed the importance of religion to the development of human rights, arguing that any theory of universal rights necessarily emerges out of particular cultural contexts. At the same time, he re-examines the juridical and theological traditions that form the basis of conservative Muslim objections to human rights, arguing that Islam, like any culture, is open to development and change. Finally, and most importantly, Sachedina articulates a fresh position that argues for a correspondence between Islam and secular notions of human rights. Grounding his work in Islamic history and thought, he reminds us that while both traditions are rigorous and rich with meaning, neither can lay claim to a comprehensive vision of human rights. He never loses sight of the crucial practical consequences of his theory: what's needed is not a comprehensive system of doctrine, but a set of moral principles that are capable -whether sacred or secular - of protecting human beings from abuse and mistreatmentThe book is AVAILABLE now at amazon.com

The Lisbon Treaty Means More Militarisation

The Lisbon Treaty Means More Militarisation and Senseless WarsThe Irish Anti War Movement is calling on all our supporters to VOTE NO to theLisbon Treaty and to canvass your friends, work colleagues, neighbours, familyon this important issue. There is still time to swing the vote in favour of theNo side.Please print out the of our leaflet and hang it up in your workplace orcollege or distribute it to friends, family etc.If you can help with canvassing, stalls, leafleting etc. in these last criticalfew days please contact Michael Youlton on 086 8159487.The Irish Anti War Movement is calling on all our supporters to VOTE NO to theLisbon Treaty and to canvass your friends, work colleagues, neighbours, familyon this important issue. There is still time to swing the vote in favour of theNo side.Please print out this leaflet(http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/irish-anti-war-leaflet1.pdf [1]) and hang itup in your workplace or college or distribute it to friends, family etc.A number of articles have been included in this news letter if you are unsureabout what way you will vote please read them.If you can help with canvassing, stalls, leafleting etc. in these last criticalfew days please contact Michael Youlton on 086 8159487.________________________________________________________________________------------------------------------------------------------The Lisbon Treaty Means More Wasteful Militarisation & Senseless Wars [2]------------------------------------------------------------The Lisbon Treaty:* Imposes more military spending by all EU member states* Allows former colonial powers to dominate EU defence policy* Reinforces EU-NATO links hence U.S. influence over EU foreign policy* Creates a new EU common defence policy that further undermines Irish neutrality.* Obliges Ireland to aid and assist other EU countries in military conflicts* Will lead to more horrific wars such as those inflicted on Iraq,* Afghanistan and GazaRead more(http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/594 [3])________________________________________________________________________------------------------------------------------------------Treaty hides ticking time bomb of EU defence body [4]------------------------------------------------------------Lisbon Treaty seeks to incorporate an aggressive European Defence Agency intoEU, writes VINCENT BROWNETHE LISBON Treaty proposes to incorporate the European Defence Agency (EDA)within the institutional structure of the European Union.Among the tasks of the EDA will be to co-ordinate the military equipment of EUmember states to ensure there is greater efficiency and synchronisation of themilitary capacities of member states in the conduct of humanitarian andpeacekeeping projects. It also sponsors research on measures to improve theprotection of military personnel engaged in such missions.The EU has already participated in peacekeeping operations in the Balkans andin Africa, most recently in Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Theseinitiatives have won widespread approval and support and the intervention inCongo, in particular, may have saved thousands of lives.If this was all the EDA was up to, how could any of us complain? We are all infavour of peace, in favour of rescuing populations from starvation, war andnatural disasters, and doing everything we can to protect our soldiers engagedin such laudable undertakings. But, regrettably, this is not all the EDA is upto and this is not all the Lisbon Treaty would facilitate, if endorsed by theIrish people.Read more(http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/595 [5])________________________________________________________________________------------------------------------------------------------Militarism and the Lisbon Treaty [6]------------------------------------------------------------Download Entire Pamphlet [7] (www.caeuc.org/files/CAEUCpamphlet4Feb08.pdf [8])The Lisbon Treaty widens the range of reasons to justify EU militaryinterventions abroad. It would integrate Irish forces into EU militarystructures and planning, which are dominated by states with colonial historiesand use military force for political-economic ends. All member states must paytowards the costs of militarisation.Neutrality in the gutterIrish neutrality - meaning we don’t participate in militaryalliances or allow our territory to be used by belligerents involved in war- has been thrown into the gutter. Our political elite have allowed overone million US troops use Shannon going to and from the US colony in Iraq. Thiscontravenes international law on neutrality (Hague Convention, 1907). Likewisethey refuse to search US planes en route to illegal secret prisons, for examplein Poland, Romania and Egypt -carrying prisoners to these torture centres.Irish troops are to take part in a French-dominated EU intervention into theconflict in Chad, ostensibly to provide security for refugees. For us the wellbeing of ordinary people is paramount. While this is a UN-authorised mission,France - as the former colonial power - has been giving military supportto the dictatorial regime in Chad that has rigged elections and used childsoldiers. Beneath humanitarian concerns lies a French desire to maintainwestern influence over the oil and uranium of the region. In the eyes of localpeople, Irish troops are likely to be indistinguishable from French forces,hated in much of Africa for their brutal colonial history.Read more(http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/593 [9])________________________________________________________________________[1] http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/irish-anti-war-leaflet1.pdf[2] http://www.irishantiwar.org/..../../../../../node/594[3] http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/594[4] http://www.irishantiwar.org/..../../../../../node/595[5] http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/595[6] http://www.irishantiwar.org/..../../../../../node/593[7] http://www.caeuc.org/files/CAEUCpamphlet4Feb08.pdf[8] http://www.caeuc.org/files/CAEUCpamphlet4Feb08.pdf[9] http://www.irishantiwar.org/node/593======================================================================To set-up a standing order with the Irish-Anti War Movement please go to the following link http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/standing-order-form.doc fill in the form and post to the Irish Anti-War Movement P.O. Box 9260 Dublin 1.To unsubscribe from this mailing list send a message to info@irishantiwar.org with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.If you have subscribed using the button on the web site you can unsubscirbe this way as well.To contact the webmaster send an email to webmaster@irishantiwar.org or ring +353 0 878289243Irish Anti-War MovementTel (fixed) 353 (0) 1 8727912, Tel (mobile) 353 (0) 87 6329511 Postal Address Irish Anti-War MovementPO Box 9260Dublin 1======================================================================

Can you help out with the Lisbon Treaty Campaign

The Irish Anti-War Movement needs help with the Lisbon Treaty Campaign. If you can do any of the following please contact us:1. Provide Accommodation for European Guests who are travelling to Ireland for the referendum. CONTACT Michael Youlton 01-8727912 / 086 8159487.2. Put up posters. CONTACT Jim Roche 087 64727373. Leaflet the your area. CONTACT Jim Roche 087 64727374. Organise an anti-war stall. CONTACT Jim Roche 087 64727375. Leaflet the NAMA march on 19th September in Dublin. CONTACT Jim Roche 087 64727376. Help out on an Anti-War Stall. CONTACTJim Roche 087 6472737For more info on the treaty go to www.sayno.ie

To Prime Minister Gordon Brown

allibyah@yahoo.com
Prime Minister Gordon Brown
10 Downing StreetLondon SW1A 2AA
United Kingdom
4 September 2009
Dear Prime minister,

The Libyan League for Human Rights, a Libyan NGO in exile, member of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and of the Euro-Mediterranean human rights network (EMHRN), is writing to you, on an urgent basis, to draw your attention to the unclear health conditions of Mr. Abdelbasit Al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people and to the legal responsibilities of the UK government in his safety and the protection and preservation of his health. We understand that Mr. Al Megrahy, who was allowed recently to return to Libya after spending 8 of his 27 years sentence in Scottish prison, has become an unwanted prisoner and his mere existence has perhaps become cumbersome, but we believe that this cannot be used as an excuse to precipitate his death through medical negligence or to eliminate him through loose and slack security protection. Mr. Al Megrahi remains the only witness of the suffering of millions of people in the UK , the US , in Libya (effects of the embargo) and elsewhere. His health and safety are all the more important that he made it clear that he is resolute to make public all the facts about Lockerbie crime and that those facts will, in his words, leave not even the slightest doubt about his innocence.

Mr. Prime Minister,

It is good that the international community hears what Mr. Megrahi has to say and for this there is an urgent need that his life is protected and that his safety is enhanced. Libya’s medical infrastructures are far from being satisfactory as may be indicated by the number of Libyans who seek medical care abroad, in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan in particular, and as attested by the mysterious death in custody in May 2009 of Mr. Fathi El-Jahmi, a prominent Libyan Human right Defender. It is therefore urgent that a British medical team be sent to Tripoli to support the work of the Libyan medical team in charge of Mr. Al-Megrahi’s medical file. it is also important that Physicians from independent medical NGOs are invited to participate in the same endeavour to avoid to Mr. Megrahi what Mr. El-Jahmi experienced months in the same medical facility; the Tripoli Medical Centre, that led to his unexplained death.

I thank you for your attention to this important and urgent matter.

Yours sincerely,

Sliman Bouchuiguir (Ph-D)
Secretary General

5th September International Peace Conference

in ShannonInternational Peace Conference War, NATO and the Lisbon TreatySaturday 5th of September 2009 Park Inn, Shannon Airport, Co. Clare, IrelandSpeakers: * Joe Higgins (MEP) Socialist Party * Mary Lou McDonald Sinn Fein * Patricia McKenna The People's Movement * Cllr. Richard Boyd Barrett Irish Anti-War Movement * Ed Horgan Peace & Neutrality Alliance * Reiner Braun The Anti-NATO Network * Christophe Ventura Parti De Gauche * Jeremy Corbyn British Labour Party * Harry Bommel Dutch Socialist Party * John Feffer Foreign Policy in Focus USA * Tobias Pfluger Die Linke * George Karabelias Greek historian and Rixi journalTime Table:Registration 9.15 - 10.00First Session 9.45 - 11.15War and Shannon . Two main speakers of 10 mins each: Ed Horgan andJan O'Sullivan - local Limerick based TD. The first to focus on theairport, the troops and implications the second on the responses ofthe political establishment including her own party....Chair: Carol Fox (PANA)Coffee Break 11.15 - 11.30Second Session 11.30 - 13.15Lisbon Speakers: Sinn Fein (Mary Lou McDonald or Theresa Ferris),Socialist Party (Joe Higgins), Peoples Movement (Patricia McKenna) andRichard Boyd Barrett (SWP and People Before Profit) - ten minutes each.Chair Michael Youlton (IAWM).Lunch Break 13.15 - 14.00 - Sandwiches, coffee/ tea etc from hotel.Third Session 14.00 - 16.00The militarisation of Europe and NATO: Speakers Kate Hudson or Jeremy Corbyn(UK CND), Tobias Pfluger (Die - Linke /European Parliament) andChristophe Ventura from the Parti de Gauche - Fifteen minutes each. Chair: Roger Cole (PANA).Fourth Session 16.15 - 18.30.The new International post- Obama Environment: Speakers John Feiffer(co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus), Harry Bommel from theDutch Socialist Party, Reiner Braun of the Network who organised theStrasbourg anti-NATO mobilisation and George Karabelias - from Rixi -Greece.Chair: Ailbhe Smyth (People Before Profit)Lunch is available in the hotel restaurant. Accommodation is also available.Contact the Park Hotel, Shannon Airport for accommodation: €80 B&B perroom per person sharing, €85 B&B for single.Tel: +353 61 471 122The Conference is being organised jointly by the Peace & Neutrality Allianceand the Irish Anti-War Movement. For more details contact PANA at: +3531 2351512Roger Cole, Chair, Peace & Neutrality Alliance, Ireland www.pana.ie A bus will be leaving at 6.00 from Heuston Station returning in the evening -to book a place contact Michael Youlton 086 815 9487 or myouilton@yahoo.comif interested.www.irishantiwar.org======================================================================To set-up a standing order with the Irish-Anti War Movement please go to the following link http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/standing-order-form.doc fill in the form and post to the Irish Anti-War Movement P.O. Box 9260 Dublin 1.To unsubscribe from this mailing list send a message to info@irishantiwar.org with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.If you have subscribed using the button on the web site you can unsubscirbe this way as well.To contact the webmaster send an email to webmaster@irishantiwar.org or ring +353 0 878289243Irish Anti-War MovementTel (fixed) 353 (0) 1 8727912, Tel (mobile) 353 (0) 87 6329511 Postal Address Irish Anti-War MovementPO Box 9260Dublin 1

Witness Association for Human Rights

Report


Who is the responsible about the deterioration of health conditions in the Palestinian Red Crescent Hospitals in Lebanon, Especially at Haifa Hospital in Burj Al Barajenih Camp.

Most of the Red Crescent hospitals in Lebanon suffer greatly from many difficulties and complicated problems hat affect its performance and duties especially those exist inside the Palestinian camps .These problems caused a deep gap between the management of these hospitals and their worker on one hand and the Palestinian faction and the inhabitants from the other side. These crises put the Palestinian refugees in front of many obsessions that really threaten their health and life. These crises raise many logical questions: Who is the responsible about this deterioration, and how to deal and resolve this internal Crisis? Witness Association has received many complaints about these issues which basically concentrate inside Burj Al Barajenih camp. During a field round inside the camp that included Haifa hospital, the popular committee and many other people, it was obvious that there are many real problems facing the refugees inside the camp which represented the absence of the political reference that is capable of the daily challenges and the current condition of Haifa Hospital that witness dramatical declining for many reasons, particularly on the health level.

The opinion of Haifa Hospital management

The Director of Haifa Hospital , Dr. Awni Saad talks about the crisis and says : "Haifa Hospital witnessing a real crisis which caused by the interruption of the public electricity in the camp for many days which reflected negatively on the electricity of the hospital .As a result of this situations ,many people who live around the hospital as well as some powerful forces and political faction who violated against the hospital’s generators and its private electricity by isolating the wires behind the air conditions , the elevator and other devices and suspended their electric lines across the ceilings , they stole large quantities that exceeded the capacity of the generators . The director said that he found a line of 8 mm in diameter that able to enlighten a whole neighborhood.
Dr. Saad adds: “All these violated acts led the increasing loads on the generators and damaged them one after the other, and remained only one medium size generator that feeds only the operating and emergency rooms. In spite of that ,gloomy situation, the same forces threatened the employees and the guards ,and they took off the locks and stole from the remaining lines .At that time there were two dead bodies inside the refrigerators of the hospitals . These bodies related to a Palestinian citizen whose name is Omar Ahmad Annan from Shatila Camp and the other from Al Burj Camp ,whom died on august -14-2009 and to be buried when their relatives arrive from traveling .These bodies has rotted and decomposed ,so their relatives could not able to bath them, but they had been obliged to buried them directly .Dr. awni adds that he had addressed all the Palestinian factions and the popular and security committees , but unfortunately their response was very limited . He invited them for a meeting that would be held on august 14,2009 and put them in front of their responsibilities and inform them about the difficulties and obstacles that facing the hospitals , they promised him that they should take their role and remove all the wires and stop all the violation acts against the hospital next Monday .But unfortunately nothing had actually done , and the last generator also had damaged , so the hospital was forced to protest and announced about a strike and closed the hospital and did not receive except the emergency cases only ,since the hospital was still working on a small movable generator . After these protesting procedure, all the Palestinian factions and committees were embarrassed and they have removed all the violations and return the situation to its normal case after the hospital had paid large sum of money to repair the generators.
Regarding to the trust crisis with Haifa hospital, Dr. Awni says:” All the doctors, nurses and the workers practicing their obligations, but so scared, since there is a wrong scattered culture that did not respect the sanctity of the doctors and other medical staff. These conditions lead to frustration among the medical staff and adversely affect their performance. Moreover there is another wrong culture spread among the refugees that any patient enter the red crescent hospital may be exposed to many fatal medical errors .It is true that some errors may occur ,but this is due to the lack of advanced equipments as scanner , magnetic or audio images that help the doctors to diagnose and discover the disease like the private hospitals in Lebanon , in addition to the presence of some cases that had been treated in private hospitals ,and there is no hope to be healed , so their kin bring them to Haifa hospital to spend their remaining days in the hospital and die inside it ,so many predominant rumors that a medical mistake lead to his death ".
Dr. Saad complains of the lack of respect for the medical staff from the resident of the camp in spite that the management exerts great efforts to improve the situation by all possible means.

The Opinion of the Popular Committee in Burj Al Barajenih Camp:-
Upon our inquiry from the members of the popular committee about the problems facing the hospital and the lack of serious interactions to solve the problem of electricity inside the hospital. Said abuo Walid El Einain , the head of the popular committee inside Burj al Barajneh camp that the cause of this problem is the complicity of some hospital staff with some influential persons and provided them with electricity through the hidden joint behind the air condition in a secrete way . This phenomenon has encouraged the neighbors and other, to dare and violated against the hospital’s electricity, that damaged the generators one after the other. Mr. Abuo El Einain added that they are the most people who interest greatly on the hospital and it performance, but this also required from the management of the hospital to be at the same level of awareness. The corruptions inside the hospital is the result of many fatal medical errors as the case of a young man from Ayuoub family who had submitted to un successful surgical operation that decrease his weight from 45 kg to 18 kg, So the popular committee obliged to intervene and securing treatment for him in Rafik Al Hariri hospital and save his life.
Mr. Abuo El Einain added that the palestinian liberation organization is the responsible for the deteriorating condition in the palestine red crescent hospitals , through its failure to support or improve or control its performance . in addition that the major responsibility lies on the UNRWA agency , which has neglected the health situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon , and has contracted with the Red Crescent hospital that lack for necessary medical equipment , more over to inability to receive all the treatment cases . Many of the patients have been refused to be treated in spite of their normal cases, and they are easily treated in other private hospitals such as the case of children swallowing small coins.
The popular committee in Burj Al Barajenih camp condemns all the violation acts that harms this humanitarian institution and will n,t hesticate to support and provide it . The committee on the other hand hopes from the management of the hospital to deal with people fairly without discrimination, because of political affiliation and to take in consideration the social and economic condition of most people
.
Another point of view:
Through our survey the insiders view on the reality of the health situation inside the hospital. Mr. Rajab Taha ,the director of Al Reaaya pharmacy in the camp said :" the hospital has been suffering from neglect for along period of time .It lacks a lot of necessary equipments ,as photography , heart and brain planning and kidneys dialysis . Moreover the spread of domination and violation culture on the property of the hospital from those influential powers and members, so much so that one of them convert the water pipe of the hospital to his home. Mr. Rajab Taha inquires that if the Red Crescent is on of the vital institutions of the Palestinian liberation organization, why this dangerous neglect of it?

The View of Witness Human Rights:
We, in the Witness Association for Human Rights call all the parties to take their responsibilities particularly the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the UNRWA agency to work seriously in order to find serious solutions of the health problems that are facing all the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon , and the association recommends the following :-
First : The absence of the general political references make the Palestinian societies in all specificity including the health situation more expose to erosion and risks and expose the Palestinian interests to the real danger .
Second: It should be work to provide the Palestinian Red Crescent hospitals with advanced equipments in addition to improve the efficiency of the doctors and nurses that enable them to perform their roles without errors.
Third: It is necessary to secure all the rights of the workers in the hospitals of the Palestinian Red Crescent and to activate the management control.
Fourth: It is necessary to secure adequate protection of these hospitals and their staff to enable them to perform their humanitarian role with efficiency and respect.



Beirut: 2009/1/1

International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)

Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR)The "King of the African Kings" celebrates Libya's independence in the company of Robert Mugabe and Omar Al Bachir after African Summit in Tripoli
Paris- September 2, 2009: FIDH and its member organization in exile, the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR), deplore the support provided by the African Union Summit to President Khadafi's authoritarian regime, reflected by statements made by the AU Commission's president hailing the occasion last Tuesday as a double celebration "the 40th of the Libyan revolution and the 10th of the process that led to our current organization"(1). The Libyan official news agency also quotes the Commission's president proclaiming that remarkable progress has been made by Libya "in political, economic, social and cultural spheres", ignoring thereby the extreme repression against human rights defenders and opponents of the regime. The alarming nature of Libya's policies against human rights defenders was recently witnessed by the unclear conditions surrounding the death of Fathi El-Jahmi, Libya’s most prominent advocate of democracy and respect of human rights.(2)FIDH and LLHR recall that the Libyan regime has been violating and still violates most of the principles enshrined in Article 4 of the AU Constitutive Act, namely the respect of democratic principles, human rights, the rule of law and good governance. In Libya no elections have been organized during the last 40 years. No elected legislative power exist in Libya and no political parties or free trade unions or independent civil societies are allowed in the country. In power since a coup in 1969, President Khadafi has imposed a regime that explicitly prohibits the free expression of any critics to the government and the principles of the 1969 Revolution with sentences up to the death penalty (Law 71 of 1972, and Article 206 of the Penal Code). Libyan citizens are therefore not entitled to peacefully change their government, and are constantly denied their right to freedom of expression and association. Heavy punishments are inflicted to those who hold dissent views and dare to express their peaceful critics on the way public affairs are conducted.The Libyan authorities reportedly hold political prisoners in lengthy incommunicado detention. There is no independent judiciary in Libya, and several reports show that torture, theoretically prohibited in the country, is a common practice in the detention facilities, and confessions obtained under torture are being used against defendants in courts proceedings. The Libyan authorities have made no effort to investigate and prosecute those responsible for these acts.Furthermore, FIDH and LLHR recall that in recent years, Libya has been arbitrarily detained and migrants without distinction between refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants and collective deportations have been taking place on a wide scale, regardless of the risks these vulnerable people are facing back in their country of origin. According to official statistics, 2 million undocumented people from different African nationalities are believed to reside in Libya, waiting for an opportunity to cross the Mediterranean sea.

Appeal

My brother in Islam who may Allah guard and protect. I praise Allah for there is no god but Him. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Muhammad, who was sent as a mercy to all of humanity, upon his family, companions and on all those who hold fast to the Shariah until the Day of Judgement. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you when you travel with a proper intention and a noble purpose, and when you return with a sound endeavor and to a dedicated cause. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you as you serve Islam with the finest fruits of science and the best of knowledge,My name is ibrahim abdul bello from the northern part of Nigeria.We need the help of our brothers and sisters around the world over 4,000 of our men have been killed,our homes burnt,our cattles killed,our farmland, everything destroyed through military force by the Governmaent. Our wives and children are homeless and dying of hunger for no just cause.Below is link to more details:

http://www.newstimeafrica.com/search/northern+crises


Please we need Aid

ibrahim abdul bello

Supporting Democracy & Human Rights in Egypt

Supporting Democracy & Human Rights in Egypt - Peaceful Demonstration in Front of the White HouseTuesday, Aug. 18, 200911 am to 4 pm
On the occasion of Egyptian President Mubarak's visit to the White House, please come out Tuesday and express your support for freedom, human rights, and democracy in Egypt.
Supporting Democracy & Human Rights for All in Egypt Demonstration in Front of The White House (Between Madison Avenue and 15th Street) Tuesday, Aug 18, 11 AM - 4 PM Come Join 6 Egyptian Organizations: The Alliance of Egyptian Americans, Voices for a Democratic Egypt, Houkouk Alnas, International Quranic Center, Coptic Assembly of America, and Ibn Khaldun Center For Development Studies For more information, visit: www.unitedforegypt.com Or call: (202)276-4940 To RSVP, please click here.

Irish interviewing Guantanamo men

The Irish government is talking to the US authorities about resettling two Guantanamo Bay Uzbek detainees.
There have been reports that officials will travel to the detention centre this week to interview the men.
The government had said it was willing to take some detainees, who cannot return home.
Amnesty International in Ireland has been running a campaign for Uzbek national Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov to be allowed to come to Ireland.
He has been cleared for release, but cannot return to Uzbekistan for fear of torture and persecution.
It is understood that one of the men to be interviewed this week is Mr Jabbarov.
His lawyer, Michael Mone, told a US congressional committee hearing last year that Mr Jabbarov was living with his elderly mother and pregnant wife as refugees in northern Afghanistan when he was captured in 2001 and later transferred to the detention centre on Cuba.
The Uzbek had not been involved in fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and was most likely handed over for a bounty, he said.
In June, Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin said they had told US authorities Ireland would accept two detainees to help close the detention facility, and two Uzbek nationals had been identified by the US.
"There is ongoing contact between the Irish authorities and the US authorities in relation to detainees from Guantanamo," a spokesman for the Department of Justice said.
Commissions
If admitted the men will probably be given leave to remain status.
Amnesty International said that Mr Jabbarov's wife and child were in a refugee camp in Pakistan and that he would be able to apply for them to join him.
US President Barak Obama has said Guantanamo Bay prison will close by 22 January 2010.
However, there are still a number of problems - what to do with the remaining detainees being the biggest.
Fewer than 20 out of about 245 inmates have been transferred from the detention centre in the six months since Mr Obama signed an order to close it within a year, the Associated Press news agency has reported.
More than 50 inmates have been cleared for transfer overseas. Mr Obama has said others will be tried by modified military commissions or in US courts.
But some cannot be returned to their home countries because of concern they will be tortured - and finding countries prepared to take them has proved difficult.
There is also the question of those who cannot be prosecuted under existing legal structures, yet who are deemed too dangerous for release.
The Guantanamo Bay detention centre was set up in January 2002 to hold suspects deemed to be "enemy combatants".

condemned the killing in Chechnya

Rights groups on Thursday condemned the killing in Chechnya of prominent human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who has long documented abuses by government-backed militias there.
The killing has drawn attention to a worrying trend in which critics of Kremlin-installed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov have been harassed or murdered. Human rights groups have blamed Mr. Kadyrov and his followers for abusing innocent civilians in their counterinsurgency campaign against Islamic militants. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed "outrage" and called for an inquiry, reports the BBC.
Ms. Estemirova was abducted Wednesday as she left her home in Grozny, Chechyna's capital, the BBC report adds. Her body was later found with gunshot wounds in neighboring Ingushetia. (Click here for a map of the region.)
Ms Estemirova ... had been gathering evidence - for the Russian human rights organization, Memorial - of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militiamen.
She was known to be a fierce political opponent of Chechnya's government.
Reuters reported that suspicion for the killing has quickly fallen on the Chechen president. Kadyrov was put in place by Vladimir Putin and has ruled restive Chechnya with an iron grip.
Memorial's chairman Oleg Orlov pointed the blame at ... Kadyrov, a former rebel turned Kremlin loyalist.
"I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia.... Ramzan already threatened Natalia, insulted her, considered her a personal enemy."
The Guardian's Tom Parfit wrote a personal recollection of Estemirova, noting she was the latest of several critics of Kremlin policies in Chechnya who have been brutally silenced.
Kadyrov, a ... former rebel who came over to Russia's side and took power in 2007, is notorious for controlling thousands of armed devotees known as the "kadyrovtsy", who are now supposedly absorbed into official force structures. He brooks no dissent in his republic, and the kadyrovtsy have repeatedly been accused of torture, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings.
One person who wrote about their excesses was the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was assassinated in 2006). Another who investigated abuses was the human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov (shot twice in the back of the head in central Moscow in January).
A third detractor, who told reporters that Kadyrov personally tortured him, was a former member of the president's bodyguard, Umar Israilov (shot dead in Vienna in January). A fourth, and Kadyrov's most vocal critic inside Chechnya, was Estemirova.
Human Rights Watch said that the murders of government opponents in Chechnya is a troubling trend, according to Reuters
"It seems to be open season on anyone trying to highlight the appalling human rights abuses in Chechnya... Ensuring her murder does not go unpunished would help to break the vicious cycle of abuse and impunity in Chechnya," said HRW's director Kenneth Roth.
In a report released last month, Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of house-burnings carried out by Chechen law enforcement against the families of alleged terrorists
"Russia has said its 'counterterrorism operation' in Chechnya is over, but human rights violations there certainly aren't," said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Russia office. "Burning down peoples' homes for the alleged sins of their families is a criminal tactic, and there is no reason why the government can't put a stop to it and hold the perpetrators accountable."

Uighurs rioting

ArayaHuman Rights Organization

منظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان

Arayahro@yahoo.ie

Uighurs rioting
Will China stop the nonsense and rhetoric saying: the crowds were stirred up by U.S.-exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer and her overseas followers.
Will they pay attention to human rights in china and give the Uighurs their rights without delay.
It is shameful of the Chinese administration when such hate crimes happen. Will they make sure the victims receive proper help and protection?
Chinese officials should never have stopped people praying like they did on Friday. This is similar to the policy of the old communist China which can only escalate ethnic tension.
Araya human rights organization urges China:
To give the Uighurs their rights
To protect the Uighurs .
To compensate all the victims of this outrage.

Administration

Hate Murder in German court

ArayaHuman Rights Organization

منظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان

Arayahro@yahoo.ie

Hate Murder in German court
A German man stabbed an Egyptian woman in a German court. When her husband attempted to rescue her, the security guard shot him in the leg. The woman was stabbed 18 times.
This tragedy happened in front of court personnel. Although racist attacks usually happen in the dark, away from police and courts, but in this incident the event happened in broad daylight in front of the legal team.
Our concern as a human rights organization: How come a person enters the courts with a weapon such as a knife? Don’t the courts have scanning machines? And if so was it working or not? And did the security officer allowed the knife to go through? Will justice take place? Will the government of Germany introduce a system by which it will phase out hate crimes between native and ethnic minorities in Germany, be it Muslims or others?
We request the government of Germany to furnish all facts, and to have a fair public trial, and proper compensation for the victim's family, and to make sure that such hate attacks do not happen again.
Dr Marwa Al-Sherbini, the victim, had the right to the same security as any person living on German soil. It is important that the legal rights of ethnic minorities and vulnerable groups are well respected in Germany.
Administration

PUBLIC DEBATE OBAMA’S AFGHAN WAR

PUBLIC DEBATE OBAMA’S AFGHAN WAR: Should foreign troops withdraw?Date: Wed 15 July 2009 7pmVenue: Davenport Hotel, Merrion Square, DublinSpeakers: * Robert Faucher (Chargé d'Affaires, US Embassy), * Jonathan Neale (US Author), * Sahar Saba (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan).Chairman: Deaglán de Bréadún.Background Information * Why has Obama declared Afghanistan "the good war?" * Why are so many Western troops, including Irish military, involved in this war? * Why is the anti-war movement calling for all troops to be withdrawn?Afghanistan is descending into a hell-hole of chaos, corruption, crime and death. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by the 2001 invasion vary from 6,300 to 23,600. In May this year, U.S. planes dropped 2,000-pound bombs on three mud-brick villages in Western Afghanistan, killing up to 140 people. Over 1100 coalition soldiers have also been killed.The effects of the occupation have swelled support for the Taliban. The war is escalating and has spilled over into neighbouring Pakistan where attacks by US drone planes and the US backed Pakistani army assault on villages in the Swat Valley has left hundreds dead. and, Trócaire says that up to two million people have been displaced.Western forces are rowing ever further in behind the invasion. U.S. troop reinforcements, some 30,000 soldiers are beginning to arrive in southern Afghanistan. added to the 32,000 already there. The White House also wants to give Pakistan nearly $1.5 billion a year development aid and $400 million in fresh military assistance.Europe is deeply involved. ISAF troops (International Security Assistance Force) working under an expanded NATO command number 61,000 from 42 different countries, including at least ten officers from Ireland. Since October 2006 This is truly a war waged by western powers against a small poor country that has the misfortune to have a prized strategic position.Yet the west’s war is not popular with Afghanis. Opinion polls show Afghan confidence in the U.S. and the Afghan government plummeting, with now only 32% - down from 68% in 2005 - supporting the US performance. Yet this is the war that Obama wants to make his own. The stakes are very high but what is the war all about? Representatives from both the US Embassy (confirmed) and the Irish Dept. of Foreign Affairs have been invited to debate American and Afghani anti war activists. Come along and find out about this horrific situation.======================================================================To set-up a standing order with the Irish-Anti War Movement please go to the following link http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/standing-order-form.doc fill in the form and post to the Irish Anti-War Movement P.O. Box 9260 Dublin 1.To unsubscribe from this mailing list send a message to http://ie.mc271.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=info@irishantiwar.org with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.If you have subscribed using the button on the web site you can unsubscirbe this way as well.To contact the webmaster send an email to http://ie.mc271.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=webmaster@irishantiwar.org or ring +353 0 878289243Irish Anti-War MovementTel (fixed) 353 (0) 1 8727912, Tel (mobile) 353 (0) 87 6329511 Postal Address Irish Anti-War MovementPO Box 9260Dublin 1

Real criminals do scape justice

McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, July 6, served as Kennedy’s , then as Johnson’s defense secretary. He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.
Just as George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War, helped bolt together the ramshackle scaffolding of bogus claims that provided the rationalization for Harry Truman’s great “arms scare” in 1948, launching the postwar arms race, McNamara tugged his forelock and said “Aye, aye, Sir” when Kennedy, campaigning against Nxon in the late 1950s attacked the Eisenhower/Nixon administration for having allowed a “missile gap” to develop that had now delivered America naked and helpless into the grip of the Soviet Union.
This was the biggest lie in the history of threat inflation and remains so to this day. At the moment when Kennedy, McNamara at his elbow, was flaying the Eisenhower administration for the infamous “gap”, the U.S. government from its spy planes that the Soviet Union had precisely one missile silo with an untested missile in it. The Russians knew that the US knew this, because they were fully primed about about the U-2 spy-plane overflights, most dramatically when U-2 pilot Gary Powers crashed near Sverdlovsk and told all to his captors
So when President Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, took power in 1961, became privy to all intelligence from the spy flights, and announced that the U.S. was going to build 1000 ICBMs the Russians concluded that the US planned to wipe out the Soviet Union and immediately began a missile-building program of their own. So McNamara played a crucial, enabling role in the arms race in nuclear missiles. Before the “missile gap” it has been a “bomber race”.
It was entirely appropriate and logical that he began his services to the military working in Japan as a civilian analyst for Curt LeMay, the psychopathic Air Force general who ordered the raid that produced the Tokyo firestorm and who went on to become head of the Strategic Air Command and who boasted to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis that his missiles and B-52s were ready, willing and able to reduce the Soviet Union to a “smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours”, a deed he was eager to accomplish.
LeMay was expert in guiding bright young systems analysts like McNamara into giving him the ex post facto intellectual rationales for enterprises on which he had long since set his mind. McNamara was an early member of the “defense intellectuals”, including Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn, who developed the whole argot of “controlled escalation”, “nuclear exchanges” and “mutual assured destruction” that kept the nuclear weapons plants, aerospace factories and nuclear labs at Los Alamos and Livermore and Oak Ridge humming along, decade after decade. McNamara liked to claim later, as he did to Errol Morris, that it was he who advised LeMay to send in his planes at lower altitude, the better to incinerate Japanese cities, but the historical record does not give him this dignity. He was a small player in LeMay’s murderous game.
He faded comfortably away. The last time we saw him vividly was in 2004 as the star of Morris's wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped to kill.
Time and again, McNamara got away with it in that film, cowering in the shadow of baroque monsters like LeMay or LBJ, choking up about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the memory of Johnson giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever- useful camouflage of the "fog of war."
Now, the "fog of war" is a tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz, though the great German philosopher and theorist of war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in Military Review that the idea of fog--unreliable information--wasn't a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog", Kiesling wrote, "gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military command to their rightful centrality in 'On War'. It allows us to replace the simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war."
As presented by McNamara, through Morris, "the fog of war" usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by fog. Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which deployed the idea of distracting "noise" as the phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the information that the Japanese were about to launch a surprise attack. Wohlstetterian "noise" thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probably not its scale and destructiveness.
When McNamara looked back down memory lane there were no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: "I don't fault Truman for dropping the bomb"; "I never saw Kennedy more shocked" (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); "never would I have authorized an illegal action" (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); "I'm very proud of my accomplishments and I'm very sorry I made errors" (his life). Slabs of instructive history, like “the missile gap”, were entirely missing from Morris's film. In his later years he offered homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon, just like Kennan. It was cost-free for both men to say to say such things, grazing peacefully on the tranquil mountain pastures of their senior years. Why did they not encourage weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign? Or say that the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s were right to try to level nuclear terror to some sort of balance? Why did they not extol the Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.
It’s true that when he was head of the Ford Division of the Ford Motor Company in the mid- 1950s, McNamara did push for safety options--seat belts and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the '56 models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes, to GM's disadvantage. But as Ralph Nader describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford's vice president for sales and said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for years.
McNamara had very dirty hands, however hard he and admirers like Morris scrubbed them. Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule all expert review and procurement recommendations and insist that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after the disaster of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly- up, taking the mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional investigators about this for years afterward.
To interviewers McNamara paid great stress on JFK's "shock", just a few weeks before he himself was killed, at the assassination of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. He also promoted the view that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam. He oversaw the fakery of the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" that prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate the war in Vietnam. He was a career "front man" for the Kennedys, called even to Chappaquiddick to help Ted Kennedy figure out what to say about it.
The Six Day War? Just before this '67 war the Israelis were ready to attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a clear go- ahead from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary The 50 Years War narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to Washington. The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's long-planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present disasters. It was McNamara, after Israel's deliberate attack on the US ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174 wounded), who supervised the cover- up.
McNamara had a 13-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara liked to brandish his Bank years as his moral redemption and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual, ghastly record. In fact the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The one was prolegomenon to the other, the McNamara-sponsored horrors in Vietnam perhaps on a narrower and more vivid scale, but ultimately lesser in dimension and consequence. No worthwhile portrayal of McNamara could possibly avoid McNamara's performance at the World Bank because there, within the overall constraints of the capitalist system he served, he was his own man. There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing orders. And as his own man, McNamara amplified the ghastly blunders, corruptions and lethal cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam to a planetary scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's excellent history of the Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published in 1994.
When McNamara took over the Bank, "development" loans (which were already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million and when he left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted to slightly more than a 6- fold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops in Vietnam, he ballooned the Bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The Bank's shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World. Forests, in the Amazon, in Cameroon, in Malaysia, in Thailand, fell under the axe of "modernization". Peasants were forced from their lands. Dictators like Pinochet and Ceausescu were nourished with loans.
From Vietnam to the planet: The language of American idealism and high purpose was just the same. McNamara blared his mission of high purpose in 1973 in Nairobi, initiating the World Bank's crusade on poverty. "The powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor and the weak." The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam with obsessive secrecy, empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts to extinguish internal dissent. And as with Vietnam, McNamara's obsession with statistics, produced a situation, (according to S. Shaheed Husain, then the Bank's vice president in charge of Operations) where, "without knowing it, McNamara manufactured data. If there was a gap in the numbers, he would ask staff to fill it, and others made it up for him."
At McNamara's direction the Bank would prepare five year "master country lending plans", set forth in "country programming papers. "In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's cabinet could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poor countries, were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate."
These same "decrees" were drawn up by technocrats (in Vietnam they were the "advisers") often on the basis of a few short weeks in the target country. Corruption seethed. Most aid vanished into the hands of local elites who very often used the money to steal the resources--pasture, forest, water, of the very poor whom the Bank was professedly seeking to help. In Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm.
Across the third world, the Bank underwrote "Green Revolution" technologies that the poorest peasants couldn't afford and that drenched land in pesticides and fertilizer. Vast infrastructural projects such as dams and kindred irrigation projects once again drove the poor from their lands, from in Brazil to India. It was the malign parable of "modernization" written across the face of the third world, with one catatrophe after another catastrophes prompted by the destruction of traditional subsistence rural economies.
The appropriation of smaller farms and common areas, Rich aptly comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of open lands in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution--only this time on a global scale, intensified by Green Revolution agricultural technology." As an agent of methodical planetary destruction, McNamara should be ranked in the top tier of earth-wreckers of all time.
"Management", McNamara declared in 1967 "is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society." The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the '65 coup in Indonesia.
And to the Romania of Ceausescu. McNamara poured money--$2.36 billion between 1974 and 1982--into the tyrant's hands. In 1980 Romania was the Bank's eighth biggest borrower. As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith in the financial morality of socialist countries" Ceausescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farm land into open- pit mines, polluted the air with coal and lignite, turned Rumania into one vast prison, applauded by the Bank in an amazing 1979 economic study as being a fine advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic Control". Another section of that same 1979 report, titled "Development of Human Resources", featured these chilling words: "To improve the standards of living of the population as a beneficiary of the development process, the government has pursued policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production... An essential feature of the overall manpower policy has been ... to stimulate an increase in birth rates." Ceausescu forbade abortions, and cut off disrtribution of contraceptives. Result: ten of thousand of abandoned children, dumped in orphanages, another sacrificial hecatomb in McNamara's lethal hubris.
In his later years, McNamara never offered any reflection on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well- spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe- bombing of Japan showed, he could go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself, while still shirking bigger, more terrifying and certainly more useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
Like Speer, he got away with it, never having to hang his head or drop through a trap door with a rope around his neck, as he richly deserved.

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counter Punch

Scrap all nuclear weaponsby

Khor Eng Lee(July 5, 2009):

In 1986 US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev claimed they had come very close to an agreement on total nuclear disarmament. And nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War. President Barack Obama has initiated another bold attempt to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” As these weapons of mass destruction pose the greatest threat to human survival, all nations must pitch in to globalise Obama’s campaign and to put it through – to make this world nuclear-free.
IT WAS US president Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45), who had made the fateful political decision and given his “OK” on Jan 19, 1942 to the nuclear scientists and engineers to go ahead with research and development to build the first atomic bombs.And his successor, Harry Truman (1945-1953), authorised the use of the two A-bombs to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan on August 1945 – the first and hitherto the only time that such weapons of mass destruction were ever used in a war between nations.When Obama renewed the long drawn out campaign for nuclear abolition which he announced before a huge crowd outside the Prague Castle gates in the Czech capital on April 5, he stressed that the US has a moral responsibility to take the lead as the only nation to have used a nuclear weapon. There is every chance Obama might bring up the matter of renewing the START treaty, which calls for cuts in nuclear weapons, when he meets Russian president Dmitry Medvedev today.Four years after WWII, the Soviet explosion of a fission bomb (Joe One) in September 1949 was to trigger a nuclear arms race between the US under Truman and the Soviet Union under Stalin (general secretary 1922-53).Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61), the US military expanded its nuclear arsenal 20-fold (a stockpile of more then 24,000 nuclear weapons by the end of 1961). When he campaigned for Nixon in late October 1960, he told Americans that the US military had become “the most powerful on Earth ...”Eisenhower once said that every gun made is a theft from those who hunger. (The US will spend US$741 billion [RM2.6 trillion] on its military this year, nominally twice the American GNP of US$350 billion in 1960, accounting for nearly half of the global military expenditure, while as many as one billion people go hungry every day.)On nuclear disarmament, he said: “The alternative is so terrible that any risks there might be in advancing disarmament are as nothing.” But the words of this old and wise warrior went unheeded. Partly because, as they say, he didn’t walk the talk.By the time of the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, the US had such a tremendous military nuclear superiority that Nikita Khrushchev (general secretary 1953-64) had vainly tried to erode American dominance by planting his SS-4 and SS-5 rockets on Cuban soil about 150km away from the shores of Florida. Each SS-4 carried a 3-megaton warhead. Only 30 years later did the US come to know that the Soviets had 162 warheads in Cuba.When President John F. Kennedy announced the crisis on Oct 22, 1962, he warned of full nuclear retaliation, called upon Chairman Khrushchev to remove all offensive weapons in Cuba, and urged a peaceful solution to the confrontation.Nuclear historian Richard Rhodes has noted that the US Strategic Air Command had put on board bombers nearly three thousand strategic nuclear weapons packing a gross 7,000 megatons (more than two tons a head for the world population of 3 billion in 1962). The SAC had also tried to provoke a Soviet alert by flying bombers towards Soviet targets, which would justify a devastating US first-strike.As Rhodes has put it, the first and only direct nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers was also very nearly the last. The two nuclear Goliaths had come close to the Apocalypse.Compelled to remove his missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev’s humiliation led to an unprecedented Soviet nuclear buildup which multiplied the number of its nuclear weapons by ten times within the next couple of decades. The Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the US by 1978 and shortly afterwards the USSR overtook and outnuked the US numerically.When Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time at Geneva in 1985 at the height of the Cold War, both leaders accused each other for “the mad arms race which had led the world to the brink of catastrophe” (to quote Gorbachev’s own words to describe a view fully shared by Reagan). In their joint communique, they declared that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Both also pledged not to seek military superiority (in word, but not in deed).Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs: “We prepared a policy statement containing a step-by-step programme for moving towards a nuclear-free world ...”Reagan wrote: “No one could ‘win’ a nuclear war (what the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr had told Roosevelt and Churchill in 1944). Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end?“My dream, then became a world free of nuclear weapons ...”On their second meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev said they had come very close to an agreement on dismantling and destroying their vast nuclear arsenals. They had discussed a 10-year plan (1986-96) to free the world from the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. But their dispute over Reagan’s pet project for a defence system against nuclear missiles (referred to as the SDI, Strategic Defence Initiative) torpedoed their plan for total nuclear disarmament.Donald Regan, chief of staff, sat next to Reagan in the limousine taking them back to the US Embassy. Regan has written in his memoir that Reagan said to him: “Don, we came so close. It’s just a shame.”“He placed his thumb and forefinger less than a half inch apart and added, ‘We were that close to an agreement.’ ”Gorbachev wrote: “Success was a mere step away, but SDI proved an insurmountable stumbling block ...”The SDI proved to be insurmountable to both leaders because while one of them was obsessed with it, the other was possessed by a fear of it.Moreover, they didn’t have their top priority right. SDI or nuclear disarmament?Both Reagan and Gorbachev were “just one step away” from going down in history as mankind’s greatest peacemakers.As with the original decision to go nuclear (made by Roosevelt and Stalin in the 1940s), the momentous decision to dismantle and destroy all nuclear weapons must be made by the supreme political masters of the day.The first US president to campaign publicly for complete nuclear disarmament, Obama has given a highly resonant “yes” to the elimination of all the nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. And now it’s time for Medvedev to give a matching “aye” as well. And then, all the other nations – their leaders and their people must also give their full support to this campaign for global survival and well-being to make this world nuclear free.
The second of a four-part series on total nuclear disarmament by retired journalist Khor Eng Lee will appear tomorrow.

UN rights mission hears of Gaza children's suffering

2009-06-29 19:15
GAZA CITY (AFP) - A UN human rights mission on Monday listened to testimony about the suffering of children in the Gaza Strip as it continued its probe into alleged Israeli war crimes in the enclave.
Around 20 percent of children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome brought on by witnessing violent acts, child psychologist Dr Iyad Sarraj told the panel.
"The amount of killing and blood that they have seen or that their relatives have suffered from... it's a huge amount, and this leads to negative psychological feelings, to radicalism and a cycle of violence," he said.
More than half of Gaza's population of 1.5 million is under 18 years of age.
The public hearings are part of the UN Human Rights Council's investigation of the 22-day Israeli offensive launched in late December that killed about 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
The Red Cross meanwhile said in a new report that six months after the devastating offensive that Palestinians in the impoverished coastal territory are "unable to rebuild their lives and are sliding ever deeper into despair."
Israeli and Egyptian sanctions imposed on Gaza after Hamas seized power in June 2007 have crippled reconstruction efforts and caused widespread misery, according to the study by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
"The poorest residents in particular have exhausted their coping mechanisms and often have to sell off their belongings to be able to buy enough to eat," said Antoine Grand, head of the ICRC sub-delegation in Gaza.
"Worst affected are the children, who make up more than half of Gaza's population," he added.
The UN mission in Gaza is headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who previously served as chief prosecutor for international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
On Sunday, the mission heard a wheelchair-bound man describe how an Israeli shell slammed into his home, killing 11 of his relatives and cutting off his legs. Another man described a strike on a mosque that killed 17 people.
The group was expected to look into several allegations of human rights violations that emerged in the aftermath of the assault, which Israel said was aimed at stemming Palestinian rocket fire from the Hamas-ruled enclave.
Israeli authorities have so far refused to allow the investigators into the country and have accused the mission of bias against the Jewish state.
"The mandate is so one-sided, no fair, thinking person could see it as objective," government spokesman Mark Regev said on Sunday.
"The UN Human Rights Council has over the last months and years totally discredited itself as a serious vehicle for advancing human rights."
The 47-member council voted by a large majority in January to probe accusations of "grave" human rights violations by Israel, but the team was later given a broader mandate to deal with "all violations" during the war.
Israel has insisted it made every effort to spare civilians, including dropping thousands of fliers warning residents to flee ahead of strikes.
It has also said that Palestinian fighters and rocket launchers operated in crowded residential areas, a charge also lodged by rights groups against the Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza.
The group plans to hold similar hearings in Geneva in which they will interview witnesses and experts on alleged violations in Israel and the occupied West Bank, and to issue a final report by September 12.
The international community has pledged billions of dollars in aid to rebuild the territory, but reconstruction efforts remain paralysed by the closures, which prevent the import of virtually all building materials.

(By SAKHER ABU EL OUN)

Israel's settlements are on shaky ground

International law mandates that they must be removed and that the Palestinians should be compensated for their losses.
By Sarah Leah Whitson June 28, 2009
The debate over Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is often framed in terms of whether they should be "frozen" or allowed to grow "naturally." But that is akin to asking whether a thief should be allowed merely to keep his ill-gotten gains or steal some more. It misses the most fundamental point: Under international law, all settlements on occupied territory are unlawful. And there is only one remedy: Israel should dismantle them, relocate the settlers within its recognized 1967 borders and compensate Palestinians for the losses the settlements have caused.Removing the settlements is mandated by the laws of the Geneva Convention, which state that military occupations are to be a temporary state of affairs and prohibit occupying powers from moving their populations into conquered territory. The intent is to foreclose an occupying power from later citing its population as "facts on the ground" to claim the territory, something Israel has done in East Jerusalem and appears to want to do with much of the West Bank.


The legal principles were reaffirmed in 2004 by the International Court of Justice, which cited a U.N. Security Council statement that the settlements were "a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention." The International Committee of the Red Cross and an overwhelming number of institutions concerned with the enforcement of international humanitarian law have concurred in that view.

The economic and social cost of Israeli settlements to the Palestinian population, stemming in part from Israel's need to protect them, are enormous. The 634 (at last count) roadblocks, barriers and checkpoints erected to control the movement of lawful residents of the territory make travel an ordeal. Sometimes even getting to work, school or the home of a relative is impossible for Palestinians. Every day, they must wait in line for hours to show their IDs, and some days they are randomly rerouted, told to go home or, worse, detained for questioning.Similarly, the fact that Israel is building 87% of its projected 450-mile "security barrier" on Palestinian territory has less to do with protecting Israel from suicide bombers -- which could have been accomplished by erecting a wall on the Green Line -- than it does with putting 10% of West Bank territory, including most settlers, on the Israeli side. And while Israeli troops protect the settlers from armed Palestinian groups, there is little protection for Palestinians from the settlers' marauding militias and gangs, which have terrorized the local population, destroying their crops, uprooting their trees and throwing stones at their houses and schools.

Too little attention is given to the pervasive system of government-sponsored discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has constructed roads exclusively for settlers and established vastly unequal access to water, fuel, education, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure and virtually every other social service. Israeli authorities readily grant settlers building permits that they deny to Palestinians, whose "illegal" homes they often demolish at short notice. The glaring discrepancy in Israel's treatment of two populations living on the same land has taken a significant moral toll on Israel, as well as a political one, with wide coverage of humiliation and abuse at the hands of its security forces.

The common refrain of Israeli and even American politicians who recognize that the settlements must go is that it would be politically difficult to dismantle them, in part because it would stir the ire of the settlers and their supporters, an important voting bloc in Israel. Instead, politicians argue that settlements must be a part of future negotiations and a possible land swap.But this only serves as further incentive to expand settlements and makes a political resolution even more difficult. It also condones in the interim Israel's continuing human rights abuses in the name of settler security, leaving respect for Palestinians' rights a second-tier consideration that must await the conclusion of peace talks that have already gone on for decades.Israel has a duty to protect its citizens, but not in a way that violates the rights of Palestinians. The lawful, rights-respecting way to protect the security of settlers is to move them back to Israel. That should be the starting point of any discussion on settlements.

Sarah Leah Whitson is Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.