Brussels: New court to try Israel for war crimes

A new civil court founded in Belgium by human rights organizations will convene for the first time Friday evening and discuss war crimes Israel had allegedly committee during the Second Lebanon War and war crimes the groups claim it is currently committing in the Gaza Strip.

Over the past year, human rights groups, in cooperation with Arab and European intellectuals, have been working on establishing the new court, which will be tasked with addressing different issues related to human rights violations and war crimes.

The first matter on the court's agenda will be Israel's operations in the Gaza Strip. Human rights organizations, as well as the victims of these alleged crimes, will appear before the court. The court has also invited Israeli representatives to attend the hearing and respond to the accusations...

~ Read on... ~

 

Papers reveal how alleged war criminal escaped UK arrest

Scotland Yard allowed a suspected war criminal to escape from Britain partly because they feared an attempt to stop him would lead to a gun battle at Heathrow airport, police documents seen by the Guardian reveal. The former senior Israeli officer was supposed to be detained as he arrived in London for a speaking engagement, after a British court had ordered his arrest. But detectives looked on as he landed, then hid on the plane for two hours, before flying off to avoid arrest.

A British court had issued a secret arrest warrant for Major General Doron Almog for the alleged war crime under the Geneva convention of ordering the demolition of 59 civilian Palestinian homes.

Israeli diplomats were tipped off after Almog's plane left Israel on September 11 2005. Once it landed in London a military attache from the Israeli embassy boarded the jet and warned Almog to stay on board. He refused to leave the plane until it took off again for Israel, two hours later...

~ Read on... ~

Love, American Style

" ... Americans love to think that we're a peaceful people, and that we fight wars only when we must.

Unfortunately, you can count in nanoseconds how long those assertions hold up when exposed to such insidious commie dirty tricks as the application of logic or the examination of empirical history.

Sure, any war can be spun as some necessity against some Very Bad Person, preferably of brown skin, slanted eyes and/or differing deity. Not only can any war be so spun, probably every war there ever was has been, at least since the days when governments had to start offering some justification or another for their little foreign adventures.

But pick your barometer - any one will work - and you'll quickly see who are the militant folks on the planet. For America, it turns out - gulp - to be that bloated, frightened meth-addict staring back at us in the mirror, not some overseas evil emperor du jour. ... "

~ Read on... ~

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency...

~ Read on... ~

Pakistan: A big 'NO' to mullahs and military

" ... I must confess I was taken aback by the results, since I had expected Musharraf's henchmen to rig the results. Human Rights Watch kept a close tab on the elections and posted an audio recording of Pakistan's attorney general himself advising a political aspirant that there would be heavy rigging in favor of Musharraf's party. I guess there's a limit to the shenanigans you can engage in if the people are so overwhelmingly against you. The other parties are even questioning the 40-odd seats that Musharraf's party has gotten.

Whither Musharraf? And, more importantly from a U.S. perspective, where will the United States go from here?

Musharraf and his chief backer have been badly burned by the results. Both major parties despise the ex-general. Bhutto's widower, Asif Zardari, is not ruling out impeaching him. Musharraf has three options: to retire gently into the good night, to cooperate with parliament in the hope that he will not be impeached, or defy parliament's writ. Seeing Musharraf's past stubbornness, I would rule out option number one. Of the remaining two, which course he takes depends on how deeply chastened he is. Unfortunately, self-reflection is not a quality that comes easily to this former commando, and so I foresee unending confrontation in Pakistan between the legislature and the executive.

As for the United States, it is left without a paddle. The Bush Administration has invested possibly as much as $20 billion in a man who it made the linchpin of U.S. policy in the country. Now, the Bush folks should be grateful if the democratic parties want to even talk with the United States, let alone enter into a partnership with it. ... "

~ Read more... ~