Mission & Justice

Linda Heard; 22/7/08

Opening the newspaper last week turned out to be a surreal experience. One day “the Great Satan” and the poster country for the “Axis of Evil” were daggers drawn as per usual and the next day US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had turned into a female version of Nelson Mandela (apologies to Mandela): All forgiveness and reconciliation. Not only was the State Department publicly mulling over whether to open a special interests section or even a US mission in Tehran for the first time since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, an almost cuddly official William Burns was dispatched to Geneva for face-to-face talks with his Iranian counterparts. Curious, to say the least! Just in case we haven’t slipped into some kind of parallel universe while we were sleeping what on earth is going on? The chronically naïve might be tempted to believe that Washington has packed away its sabers and shrouded its deadly toys with dust covers…at least for now.

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21/7/08; http://news.theage.com.au/world/guantanamo-accused-pleads-not-guilty-20080721-3ijg.html

The first war crimes trial at Guantanamo has begun with a not guilty plea from a former driver for Osama bin Laden. Salim Hamdan entered the plea through his lawyer under tight security at the US Navy base in Cuba. He is the first prisoner to face a US war crimes trial since World War II. Hamdan is charged with conspiracy and aiding terrorism. He could get up to life in prison if convicted.
The trial is expected to take three to four weeks with testimony from nearly two dozen Pentagon witnesses.

21/7/08

Israel plans to build a new city for Arab citizens in the Galilee region, the first housing project of its kind since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. The proposal for the city, whose location has still to be determined, was made by Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit and approved by the cabinet yesterday, local media reported. “There is a need to broaden the range of opportunities available to the non-Jewish population,” Sheetrit was quoted as saying. “My aspiration is for a new Arab city in the Galilee, where young couples can buy a house, just like in any other city in the world.” Israel’s population of more than seven million people includes about 1.2 million Arabs, most of whom live in the north, in older Arab towns and villages that tend to lack modern infrastructure and adequate building space.

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21/7/08

The Israeli defence minister has condemned an incident, captured on video, in which an Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian detainee. Ehud Barak vowed on Monday that the incident would be investigated, but Sarit Michaela, from rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera that such incidents are usually ignored by the military. “Generally, there is very little accountability when it comes to Israeli security forces following up on cases we report - cases like the use of weapons, harassment charges, beating up civilians or killing children,” she said.

See: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2008/07/ 200872154636332207.html

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20/7/08

Three women are to be ordained as priests Sunday here in one of American’s most Catholic cities, but they will face automatic excommunication by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. The trio is to be ordained in a ceremony performed by a woman at a Protestant church affiliated to the US Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ, in Boston’s first female ordination. The move has angered the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, which has sent out an email to local priests reminding them of Vatican law that women are allowed to have key roles within the church, but cannot become priests.

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Sandy Tolan; 20/8/07

Firdaws Taji Khairi will always remember the voices of Israeli soldiers shouting through loudspeakers outside her home in al-Ramla, as the Nakba unfolded right before her.”Yallah Abdullah!” they cried as they pounded on people’s doors with the butts of their rifles. “Go to King Abdullah! Go to Ramallah!” It was a scorching day on the coastal plain of Palestine in mid-July 1948. A couple of days earlier, the town had surrendered to Israeli forces after they stormed the nearby city of Lydda.

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20/7/08

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has arrived in the Middle East for two days of talks to promote “an economic road map for peace”. “Israeli settlements are a hindrance to peace and must be frozen,” he said on Sunday at a news conference held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, also spoke at the conference that marked Brown’s first visit to the Middle East since becoming prime minister in June 2007. “Israel is not concerned with the principles of the Annapolis conference, namely freezing settlement expansion,” Abbas said.

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David Armitage; 19/7/08

My handy digital Bush countdown clock tells me there are 185 days left until George Bush leaves the White House. We will all have our memories of his eight years in office, but one that sticks in the mind is the moment in May 2003 when he stood on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and announced the end of large-scale combat operations in Iraq. The notorious banner behind him read “Mission Accomplished”. “Mission: Impossible” might have been more like it. There is a better reason than Bush’s hubris to remember that moment. It marked the end of the last war fought between two sovereign states. In this case, the enemies were the United States and Saddam Hussein’s Republic of Iraq. Not long after, the new Iraqi Government regained its sovereignty and began to carry on military operations in alliance with coalition forces. Bush’s announcement was clearly not the end of the war in Iraq. But it did end formal interstate warfare, at least for the present.

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Peter Gregory; 19/7/08

Years after they were held on Nauru, or forced to leave the country, two Iraqi refugees and an American peace activist are a step closer to learning why they were considered a danger to Australia. Scott Parkin, a US campaigner now working on climate change issues in his home country, has the highest profile of the three men trying to see the details of their adverse security assessments by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. But Iraqis Mohammed Yussef Sagar and Muhammad Faisal can probably claim to have suffered the most. According to a judgement delivered yesterday by a full bench of the Federal Court, the pair was held in detention at Nauru between 2002 and 2005 before the Immigration Department determined they were entitled to be recognised as refugees. Their visa applications were then refused after ASIO provided their assessments.

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Joseph A. Kechichian; 17/7/08

It took 45 years for a leading journalist like Harold Meyerson to ask why 58,193 Americans [as well as an estimated 2 million Vietnamese] died during the Vietnam War. How many years will it take for folks to wonder why 4,121 [as of July 15] Americans and more than a million Iraqis perished in Mesopotamia? This comparative question is not raised often, but in light of recent pronouncements by the presumed Democratic and Republican candidates for the presidency of the US, it may be useful to ask it even if foreign policy issues are almost always less important than domestic concerns - dominated in 2008 by high energy prices and falling real estate values. In an opinion piece published by The New York Times [and reproduced yesterday in Gulf News], Senator Barack Obama articulated his plan for Iraq, calling for a “phased redeployment of combat troops”. He promised to end the war if he becomes president. Obama emphasised that “it was a grave mistake … to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaida and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks”.

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