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Time to Look Past Obama’s Words and Face-up to His Actions, U.S. Foreign Policy Continues Rapidly in the Wrong Direction The Peace Movement Needs to Escalate Anti-War Actions
By Kevin Zeese
There is long-time saying about politicians: you cannot trust their words, but must judge them by their actions.
President Obama is very good with words, perhaps the best communicator we have seen in the White House in a generation. But now he has been in office long enough that he should be judged on his actions.
The direction of U.S. foreign policy is moving rapidly in the wrong direction on many fronts. It is time for the peace movement to step up its activities throughout the country and demand a change in course.
The U.S. passed the 5,000th death of a U.S. service member in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This death seemed to be barely noticed by a peace movement that during the Bush years highlighted every major milestone. This sad body count is the tip of the iceberg of the dire effects of these wars – mass deaths and maiming of civilians, millions forced to flee their homes described as “an exodus that is beyond biblical.”
A Bush In Sheep's Clothing
By ALI ABUNIMAH
Obama's speech shows little real change. In most regards his analysis maintains flawed American policies
Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama's intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.
Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can", there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and Islam" – the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.
Forget 'Negotiations', Obama, The Situation Cries Out For Law and Justice
Stuart Littlewood
Whenever western leaders lecture us about a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, they rely on those comfortable, woolly words "negotiation" and “peace process”… it’s a convenient crutch.
Kick away the crutch and they’d finally have to grasp the nettle of justice, something they have always avoided.
Justice is underpinned by law, but the operation of law in the Holy Land is conspicuously absent. The Arabs, I believe, want plain, simple justice. Why is this such a problem to a western alliance that claims to itself sweeping moral authority?
President Obama, speaking the other day in a BBC interview, said he believed the US was "going to be able to get serious negotiations back on track" between Israel and the Palestinians. Asked about Israel's defiance of his call for a halt to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Obama urged patience, saying it was early in the conversation. "Diplomacy is always a matter of a long hard slog. It's never a matter of quick results."
Do Americans Have a Moral Conscience?
Paul Craig Roberts
Succumbing to the dark side
Torture is a violation of US and international law. Yet, president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate US and international law.
The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold the rule of law by prosecuting those who abused their offices and broke the law.
Cheney claims, absurdly, that torture was necessary in order to save American cities from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Many Americans have bought the argument that torture is morally justified in order to make terrorists reveal where ticking nuclear bombs are before they explode.
However, there were no hidden ticking nuclear bombs. Hypothetical scenarios were used to justify torture for other purposes.
We now know that the reason the Bush regime tortured its captives was to coerce false testimony that linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. Without this "evidence," the US invasion of Iraq remains a war crime under the Nuremberg standard. -Torture, then, was a second Bush regime crime used to produce an alibi for the illegal and unprovoked US invasion of Iraq.
Credit crunch: time to treat employees like trash
Roland Michel Tremblay
Credit crunch time, once again the old management rules are back. Not only employers and employment agencies are ready to exploit you to death, but don’t expect respect and niceties, we’re all trash for the next few years if not decades. Let’s just hope that one day we can still be recycled into something that looks remotely like human beings, preferably before we end up doing something insane.
You don’t like it here? Here is the door. A thousand desperate unemployed people would kill for your job. Experience? Knowledge? Aptitudes? Attitude? What do they matter in a period of recession? You can now expect a minimum salary and to be treated like a dog would not even be treated like. There is no such thing as having a life outside work anymore, I’m not sure there ever was.
Muslims want actions, not words, from Obama
By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem
I sincerely believe that the vast majority of Muslims, including this writer, profoundly appreciate President Obama’s decision to address the Muslim world from Cairo. The American leader will speak from Cairo University, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the Arab world.
The symbolism surrounding Obama’s long-heralded speech is important. Words of good will, especially if they are sincere, can have an instantaneous positive effect on people’s sentiments. And I am completely certain that Muslims will meet good-will with good-will.
TORTURE MUST BE PROSECUTED / OBAMA NON-ACTION UNACCEPTABLE
Allen L. Roland
Part Three of Bill Moyer's award winning documentary TORTURING DEMOCRACY deals with the glaring moral and humanitarian injustice of Guantanamo which still festers as an open wound in our national conscience ~ a wound that Obama can no longer ignore: Allen L Roland
There can no longer be any doubt that the Cheney / Bush administration not only lied to the American people about WMD's and Torture but lied to and obstructed the 9/11 commission during its investigation of 9/11.
Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the two chairmen of the 9/11 commission, wrote a NY Times editorial on January 2, 2008 that said the CIA or the White House obstructed their investigation ~ and it doesn't get more obvious than this.
"More than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” ~ and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes ~ and did not tell us about them ~ obstructed our investigation." Stonewalled by the C.I.A.
Obama's Great Illusion
Yvonne Ridley
I wonder how many of you have woken up to the fact that America's latest leader is really a political Houdini ... an illusionist on a presidential scale.
Infront of our very eyes he has morphed from a gentle intellectual, and strong defender of human rights into a war-mongering bully who sponsors targetted assassinations and orders pre-emptive strikes with casual ease.
It took George W. Bush years before he dared to unveil his true intentions and invade Iraq, displacing three million people in a war which cost the lives of thousands of US soldiers and the slaughter of countless civilians.
Whereas the smooth-talking Obama has achieved the same in just a few months since he arrived in The White House by launching an illegal war on Pakistan ... but he's using someone else's army instead of his own.
West Bank rights violations on the rise
Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - "I heard voices, I turned around to look, and saw a group of Israeli settlers assaulting my brother Hammad," says Abdallah Wahadin, 82, a Palestinian farmer from Beit Ummar near the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
"Three of them surrounded me, while a fourth threw a rock at the back of my head. Lots of blood ran down onto my clothes. Other settlers then joined them," Wahadin told the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
Wahadin and his brother Hammad, 72, had been farming their land, which produces olives, almonds and grapes, near the illegal Israeli settlement of Bat Ayin, when they were attacked on their way home. Their land in Beit Ummar is near Hebron, about 30 kilometers south of Jerusalem. Hammad Abdallah was taken to a local hospital where he received 10 stitches for a head wound and treatment for chest injuries.
How the Catholic Church survives social progress
Mary Shaw
I was just starting out as a student at a small-town Catholic elementary school in the mid-1960s when the Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II) brought the Catholic Church into the 20th century. The Council's most notable changes for me at the time were that the use of vernacular language was now permitted in the Mass and that the laity became more involved in the Church's ministry. At around the same time, the nuns who taught in my school were given new, more modern habits to wear, which exposed their ankles and their hairlines -- much more progressive than the burka-like garb that they had to wear previously.
All of this was very exciting and appealing to us young folks. But, unfortunately, that is where the progress stopped.
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