Mission & Justice

12/5/08

The Pentagon’s top legal adviser in the Office of Military Commissions has been disqualified from participating in the prosecution of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A naval officer ruled late last week that the adviser exerted improper influence over a team of prosecutors and may have compromised the case’s fairness. Captain Keith Allred, who is presiding over hearings in preparation for the military’s trial of an alleged driver for Osama bin Laden, determined that air force Brigadier-General Thomas Hartmann was too closely tied to prosecutors. He is supposed to be a neutral adviser to the official directing the commissions.

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11/5/08

A woman and a child were among four killed during a US military operation targeting Al Qaida in northern Iraq, the military said on Sunday. The two civilians were killed along with two armed men. The military said it regretted the death of the civilians. The military said US forces fired on a car carrying suspected militants that refused to stop near the northern city of Mosul on Saturday.

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11/5/08

A power plant in Gaza City has shut down, affecting 500,000 local inhabitants and forcing local hospitals to run on reserve fuel. Large parts of the Gaza Strip, particularly Gaza City, were in darkness after the main power station shut down its generators on Saturday. The Hamas government’s energy department said that about 55 per cent of Gaza City and 35 per cent of the territory’s other areas had power outages as a result of the shutdown. With hospital generators running out of fuel, it is feared that medical equipment will stop functioning soon.

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Malcolm Fraser; 10/5/08

US President George Bush claims that it is possible for Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state before the end of this year. That ignores the realities of the current situation, which Bush has done a good deal to exacerbate. It is a fact that Israel has persistently established more and more settlements on the West Bank and that it has ignored the US and the UN Security Council, which have continuously branded these settlements, together with settlements in East Jerusalem, as illegal. However, the US has not exerted real pressure to stop them and the process continues. Through most of my life I have believed that Israel was a beacon of hope. But somewhere Israel’s leadership lost its way.

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Nadav Shragai; 10/5/08

Some 100 settlers on late Thursday infiltrated the ruins of the evacuated West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur, in a stated attempt to rebuild it. Protesters were evacuated by security forces shortly after they entered. This was the first time that settlers have staged such a move at Sa-Nur since Israel’s 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank, in which the settlement was evacuated. The Israel Defense Forces was preparing to evacuate the group, who belonged to an organization called “Homesh - the beginning.” Over the past year, Homesh - the beginning activists have mounted repeated bids to resettle Homesh, another settlement also evacuated in the 2005 pullout, which was titled the “Disengagement.”

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Michael Shaik & Antony Loewenstein  8/5/08 - 

Michael is the public advocate for Australians for Palestine; Antony is a journalist and co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices.

If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.To realise the dream, he insisted, the Jews must be willing to seize the reigns of history by renouncing the classical Jewish tradition of pacifism and collaborating with European anti-Semites who supported the Zionist movement as a means of ridding Europe of its “Jewish problem”.

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8/5/08

Iraqis employed at the British embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone claim to have been sexually abused, the Times has reported. The British Foreign Office has received complaints from an Iraqi cleaner and two cooks that a culture of sexual harassment, abuse and bullying exists at the embassy, the report said Thursday. Accusations have been made against British employees of the US service company KBR which was responsible for catering at several embassies in Baghdad.

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9/5/08

The first UN aid plane arrived in cyclone-ravaged Burma last night, but US and other international efforts were on hold after the country’s military generals rescinded their approval for American planes to enter Burma. The generals had bowed to international pressure, agreeing to allow the US military to fly critical aid to survivors of last Saturday’s cyclone, which has left up to 100,000 feared dead and one million missing. Thailand’s Supreme Commander Boonsrang Niumpradit said yesterday Bangkok had convinced Burma’s secretive junta to accept US assistance using planes that have been in Thai-US military exercises. A US embassy official confirmed the decision, but US ambassador to Thailand Eric John said later the flight was not going ahead.

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Alistair Lyon; 8/5/08

While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakbeh (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a “right of return”. Alia Shabati was 12 when she fled Jewish attacks on her village of Kabri, occupied a few days after Israel’s creation. Now a matron of 72, wearing a flowery blue dress and white headscarf, her memories of Kabri in today’s northern Israel are vividly intact, unlike the village, which was wiped off the map. “We had houses and land,” Shabati said in the living room of her modest dwelling in the alleys of Beirut’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. “We had olives, grapes, prickly pears and dates. We had orchards and fields. Now what do we have? Nothing.”

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Omar; 8/5/08

In two weeks, my wife will bring our child into the world. The unborn baby is happy now, nestled within its mother’s womb and somewhat protected from the violence and suffering that exists in Gaza. I am naturally worried for mother and child. When she delivered our last child, my wife developed several medical complications. Due to the blockade on Gaza, such complications can no longer be treated in local hospitals and medical facilities.If my wife were to have an acute problem during natural birth there would be no medication or treatment available, putting her and the unborn at considerable risk. In light of this, we decided a while back that she would have a Caesarean-section rather than natural child birth. C-sections, at least, are available in Gaza.

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