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Robert Fisk on Obama(nia)

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Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush's delusions
by Robert Fisk (source: The Independent)
Saturday, November 8, 2008

American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of "raw" reports from American spies and their "assets" around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia.

That this nonsense was disseminated around the world by those tasked to defend the United States in the "war on terror" shows the fantasy environment in which the Bush regime has existed these past eight years. If you can believe that bin Laden drops by a shopping mall on an American military base, then you can believe that everyone you arrest is a "terrorist", that Arabs are "terrorists", that they can be executed, that living "terrorists" must be tortured, that everything a tortured man says can be believed, that it is legitimate to invade sovereign states, to grab the telephone records of everyone in America. As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times a couple of years ago, the Bush administration wanted these records "which contain crucial documentation of calls for a Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Indiana, and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Alabama, to help in the search for Osama bin Laden". There was no stopping Bush when it came to trampling on the US Constitution. All that was new was that he was now applying the same disrespect for liberty in America that he had shown in the rest of the world.

But how is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself? John F Kennedy once said that "the United States, as the world knows, will never start a war". After Bush's fear-mongering and Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo and secret renditions, how does Obama pedal his country all the way back to Camelot? Our own dear Gordon Brown's enthusiasm to Hoover up the emails of the British people is another example of how Lord Blair's sick relationship with Bush still infects our own body politic. Only days before the wretched president finally departs from us, new US legislation will ensure that citizens of his lickspittle British ally will no longer be able to visit America without special security clearance. Does Bush have any more surprises for us before 20 January? Indeed, could anything surprise us any more?

Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He's got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what – internationally – he will have to do if the "change" he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America's borders. He will have to re-think – and deconstruct – the whole "war on terror". He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America's massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan – why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? – and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush's 2004 acceptance of Israel's claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials – and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan – and Syria.

Indeed, there's a growing concern among America's allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control – indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus' original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the "surge" than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission – and morals – had become so warped by Bush's policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was – if not a rogue operation – certainly not sanctioned by Washington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad.

But Obama's not going to be able to make the break. He wants to draw down in Iraq in order to concentrate more firepower in Afghanistan. He's not going to take on the lobby in Washington and he's not going to stop further Jewish colonisation of the occupied territories or talk to Israel's enemies. With AIPAC supporter Rahm Emanuel as his new chief of staff – "our man in the White House", as the Israeli daily Maariv called him this week – Obama will toe the line. And of course, there's the terrible thought that bin Laden – when he's not shopping at US military post offices – may be planning another atrocity to welcome the Obama presidency.

There is just one little problem, though, and that's the "missing" prisoners. Not the victims who have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.

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Winter Edition of the Neighbors Times is Out!

Neighbors For Peace circulates quarterly newsletters. Click on the following link to get to read our Winter Issue.
go to our Resources section or click on the following link:
http://www.neighborsforpeace.net/uploads/resources/1200368732.pdf

The Iraqi Student Project - The Latest Info

For seven thousand years or more, the people in the area now known as Iraq have been a learned people. The fertile crescent bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was home to the world's first known civilization, the Sumerians. Because its peoples produced the earliest writing and some of the first mathematics, science, laws, and philosophies of the Western world, this land has been called the “Cradle of Civilization.” During the Ottoman Empire, the people who lived in this region enjoyed a rich culture full of universities, libraries and museums. Even after the League of Nations created Iraq and during the punitive U.N. sanctions begun under the Clinton Administration, colleges and universities in Iraq continued to operate and struggled to maintain their famed excellence..

Now, however, after the U.S. invasion, occupation, and continuing violence, studies at the undergraduate and graduate level in Iraq have become nearly impossible. Of the millions of Iraqi refugees, the vast majority have little or no access to higher education.
The Iraqi Student Project (ISP), founded by Gabe Huck and Theresa Kubasak, is designed to address this tragedy. Gabe and Theresa are founding members of Neighbors for Peace who now live in Damascus. There they came to know many Iraqi refugees and last spring began to look for ways to help some of the young people eager for a college education. The result is the ISP.

Modeled after the successful Bosnian Student Project in the 1990s, the Iraqi Student Project is seeking tuition waivers from U.S. colleges and universities and establishing support groups in local communities to facilitate the students’ success while in our country. Currently, the Project has two hard-working staff: Tara Monthir Hasan works from Amman with potential Iraqi students, facilitating their college applications and the necessary language tests, and helping with Visa applications. Natalie Baker Merrill works with the institutions and support groups in the U.S.

Over twenty-six colleges have expressed interest. Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and Holy Cross College in Indiana have already officially signified their acceptance of Iraqi students for Fall, 2008, and several other institutions are in the negotiating stage.

Members of Neighbors for Peace hope that several Chicago colleges will take advantage of this opportunity to serve Iraq's future. Gabe and Theresa report that the Project is looking for more contacts at Chicago universities and also for funds to pay for language testing and student visa applications. Tax-exempt contributions can be sent to:

Iraqi Student Project
c/o Faith & Values Media
475 Riverside Dr. #530
New York, NY 10115

With Iraq's higher education system in ruins, with more than four million Iraqis displaced inside and outside Iraq, with occupation and sectarian strife continuing, and an estimated death toll of more than a million Iraqis, ISP offers a small but significant effort toward reconciliation and restitution. For more information, see www.iraqistudentproject.org, or write Gabe and Theresa at gabeandtheresa@gmail.com. If you have contacts for area colleges, email pallist3-n4ptimes@yahoo.com.

Neighbors Times Fall 2007 Edition is on the Web

Check out the Web version of our newsletter under Resources. In downloadable .pdf format
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Working for Peace In Israel and Palestine

From the Neighbors Times, Spring/Summer Edition...

By Mary Ann Weston

Palestinians and Israelis working for a just peace struggle against formidable odds. These workers, unknown to most Americans, were the focus of my November trip to the region with a delegation co-sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and Interfaith Peace-Builders.

Jimmy Carter called the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem apartheid. He was right.

Many Palestinians cannot go to work or school, visit family or health care facilities, or tend their fields and olive groves without running into some of the 522 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks or the formidable Wall, the “separation barrier.” The Wall–solid concrete and 25-feet high in places—is supposed to protect Israelis from suicide bombers. But instead of running along the “green line” drawn to separate Israel from the Palestinian territories in 1948, it snakes deep into the West Bank, annexing about 10 percent of it to Israel.

Also few Palestinians can drive on the main roads. These are reserved for Jewish settlers. Palestinian houses are often in danger of demolition by Israeli authorities.

But many Israelis and Palestinians refuse to accept occupation and resist creatively and nonviolently. Some examples I saw:

• The Nassar family, facing confiscation of their farm near Bethlehem by Israeli settlers, fights for their land in court while bringing international visitors and Palestinian children to the farm for planting, harvesting and summer camps.

• The Palestine Fair Trade Association, a cooperative that helps farmers market their olive oil overseas in return for just compensation.

• Fida Shafi, a refugee herself who runs the Quaker Palestine Youth Program in Ramallah, teaches non-violence to teens who see little but violence.

• Combatants for Peace, Israeli and Palestinian former fighters who now call one another “brother,” work together for peace.