A general view of rubble and buildings in Beirut's southern suburbs, Aug. 27, which were damaged during Israeli bombardments (Reuters Photo)

An Amnesty International report on Israeli Defence Forces’s (IDF) behavior during the recent war in Lebanon severely criticizes it and calls for an independent commission of inquiry.
According to Amnesty International, during the more than four weeks of war, Lebanon’s infrastructure suffered destruction “on a catastrophic scale.“ During that period, the Israeli Air Force conducted more than 7,000 air attacks while the Navy carried out 2,500 bombardments.
As a result of these attacks and those of Israeli ground forces, 1,183 persons were killed. One third of them were children. In addition, over 4,000 people were injured and almost one million people were displaced.
Civilians were harmed not only as a result of direct attacks but also as a consequence of the destruction of vital infrastructure. The Lebanese government estimates that 31 “vital points“ (airports, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities) have been totally or partially destroyed. Attacks were also carried out against fuel stations and commercial enterprises.
Hospitals, particularly in the south of the country, have sustained shelling damage, while their continued operation was affected by fuel shortages, road destruction and the continuing blockade. The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health stated that, as of August 12, almost 60 percent of the country’s hospitals had stopped functioning. Two government hospitals--in Bint Jbeil and in Meis al-JebelÑwere completely destroyed by IDF’s attacks.
In the southern village of Tebnine, just before the cease fire on August 14, Israeli forces fired cluster bombs all around the government hospital where hundreds of civilians had sought refuge, including many children, and elderly and disabled people. These attacks happened although hospitals are by nature “civilian objects“ and shouldn’t be attacked unless they are used for military purposes.
Amnesty International’s delegates also observed attacks on supermarkets and warehouses, apparently intended to hasten the departure of residents, a situation also denounced by the Catholic charity Caritas. To make matters worse, agricultural production has also been severely hit, since the produce cannot be transported by roads, which are almost completely destroyed.
According to Fadl Shalak, head of Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction, the damages provoked by the IDF amount to $3.5 billion: $2 billion for buildings and $1.5 billion for infrastructure such as bridges, roads and power plants. Overall, more than 120 bridges were destroyed, including the one connecting Mount Lebanon to the Bekaa Valley, far away from the south of Lebanon, the main theater of hostilities.
According to evidence, the extensive destruction of roads, power systems, civilian homes and industry was a deliberate component of the IDF’s strategy rather than just “collateral damage.“ On July 13, Israel’s Defence Force Chief of Staff Lt-Gen Dan Halutz stated, “Nothing is safe [in Lebanon]. It is as simple as that.“
Many of the actions described are war crimes, and those responsible are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the doctrine of universal jurisdiction.
Criticism of the IDF’s actions is not limited to Amnesty International. Gilad Atzmon, a former Israeli soldier who is now a writer and musician stated, “The IDF is a spoiled, confused and tired army that is specializing solely in terrorizing civilian populations while being engaged in constant tactical withdrawal. This Israeli Army is not trained to win wars anymore. Instead, its tank battalions are mainly engaged in daily shelling of schools and hospitals É The IDF is basically a heavy army specializing in merciless regional bullying.“
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

I began to feel a little itchy as I read reports of the 11 terrorist suspects appearing at Westminster magistrates court last week. The 17-year-old suspect allegedly ’had in his possession... a book on improvised explosive devices, some suicide notes and wills with the identities of persons prepared to commit acts of terrorism and a map of Afghanistan containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.
Well, I thought, I have two out of three of those in my house. Then came a sudden horror at the vision of Special Branch knocking down my door and conducting a search. I imagined the newspaper report as I disappeared into the inner cordon of Belmarsh jail.
’Nicoll’s eyrie in an old part of Edinburgh was cluttered with paramilitary equipment,’ the report would read. ’There was a wealth of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.’
Take the book that sits between Jamie Oliver and Elizabeth David on my kitchen shelf, The Poisoner’s Handbook. Opening it at random, I find that autumn crocuses are not only pretty, but they contain ’the very dangerous alkaloid, colchicine’. The book explains how to extract the colchicine using a coffee percolator and then kill someone with it.
Just looking around increases my unease. What is this I see on the desk before me? A stiletto I use as a letter opener, and the Bible, and there, propped against the window, is my old airgun with its broken spring. On the shelf is a book called David’s Tool Kit: A Citizen’s Guide to Taking Out Big Brother’s Heavy Weapons. The cover shows a man dropping a Molotov cocktail into a tank which has its barrel pointed towards a woman and two children. There’s also a volume called The Big Book of Secret Hiding Places, but I seem to have lost that.
There are rational explanations for all this. The books were research for a novel, the dagger is an heirloom. But I wouldn’t want these things listed in court and then revealed in a national newspaper. Hell, no.
My point is this, and this alone: you could go into any home and find items that, once translated into court reports, would leave the owner looking suspect. I may be a little extreme, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that we’re moving towards a society where even a map of Afghanistan can be read as a sign of guilt.
Ruaridh Nicoll
OBSERVER.CO.UK

Nothing. Rarely does a single word convey so much, and explain so little.
The word leaped from President Bush’s lips, dismissive and defiant, as though the questioner should have known better, and perhaps should not have asked. Bush at his Monday news conference made his customary recitation of all the new and supposedly improved reasons why he went to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, concluding that “the terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.“
Then the question came--bold and, frankly, beautiful. “What did Iraq have to do with that?“ The president replied: “What did Iraq have to do with what?“ Well, with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“Nothing,“ was Bush’s reply. Except that in his mind, the “lesson of Sept. 11“ is linked to resentment and hopelessness that roil the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East, nurturing suicide bombers.
And so because of this, Bush said, he invaded Iraq.
As the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, there is an aching emptiness in repeating the many untruths and odious insinuations that Bush and especially Vice President Dick Cheney made in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The totality of them was to convey to the American people the conclusion that Saddam somehow was behind the deadly attack, an assault that was plotted and executed from masterminds dwelling in Afghan camps.
The assertion has been disproved, disavowed, discredited--pick your word--time and again by the U.S. government, by foreign intelligence services, by the independent 9/11 commission, and by a growing list of authors who have accumulated a bulging portfolio of evidence showing that the Bush administration came into office in January 2001 already itching to invade Iraq.
And so, to borrow the president’s word, Sept.11 really did have “nothing“ to do with Iraq.
This is not an admission of error, but something more grave. It is an exposition of the tragic lack of logic that impairs the Bush administration and imperils the country. The leaps of imagination that Bush makesÑstill--between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein are not entirely political calculation, meant to confuse a bewildered nation about the terrorist threat. The president’s mind and his policies are directed by this intuition. And so is the nation.
As the anniversary approaches, we hear again some voices of reason and some voices of passion, from those who tried to penetrate the sophistry and bring some clarity to the public. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, describe in their new book “Without Precedent“ the freakish political reaction to the panel’s conclusion that there were no operational links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. After the president publicly contradicted their findings, and the vice president attacked the press for its account of them, Kean found himself at a news conference searching for the right words: The commission found “there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were in any way part of the attack on the United States,“ he said.
What separates Bush from other world leaders who have tried to contain the centrifugal forces of the Middle East is not a lack of historical information or sound advice or allies who seek the same goals.
It is his own distorted thinking, a trait that is personal and not political, and has put the United States on a path that runs through darkness.
Marie Cocco
DAILYCAMERA.COM

Congolese men and women walk in the streets of the capital Kinshasa, Aug. 25. (Reuters File Photo)

As soon as the election results were announced in Kinshasa last Sunday (Aug. 20) and it became clear that President Joseph Kabila had won less than half the votes in the first round, the shooting started. Army troops loyal to Kabila showed up outside the compound of the main challenger, Jean-Pierre Bemba, his guards opened fire (or returned it, depending on whom you believe)--and the United Nations had to send in 20 armored personnel carriers to extract the American, French, Chinese and other foreign diplomats who had been meeting with Bemba.
Not a happy omen for those who hope that this election can end the long nightmare of the Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo) by producing a president whom everybody would accept as legitimate. Most people assumed that it would be Joseph Kabila, who has ruled the country without benefit of elections since his father, former president Laurent-DŽsirŽ Kabila, was assassinated in 2001, but he only got 45 per cent of the votes in the first round of voting.
The runner-up, with 20 per cent, was Bemba, who will now face Kabila alone in the second round of voting (probably on Oct. 29).
The Congo, with 60 million people, is one of Africa’s biggest countries, and it has certainly been one of the worst-governed. It has only recently emerged from a civil war that also involved six other African armies and directly or indirectly caused the deaths of four million Congolese. This is its first free election in 41 years. If your dream is a future of peace and prosperity, you definitely wouldn’t want to start from here.
For almost half a century the Congo has been a symbol of how bad things could get in Africa: A huge, resource-rich country where nothing works any more, where even the roads have vanished, where most people live in misery, poverty and despair. But that’s not what most African countries are like, and it needn’t have been the Congo’s fate either.
The Congo got its independence in 1960, but its former Belgian rulers were determined to hang onto the rich mines of Katanga province even if they had to leave the rest of the country, so they sponsored a separatist movement there. When that didn’t work, they and the US government (which feared that the Congo was going communist) conspired to overthrow the new president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and subsequently had him murdered.
The man who ruled the Congo for the next 32 years, Joseph-DŽsirŽ Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), was a former sergeant in the colonial army, rapidly promoted to general by Lumumba and then chosen by the CIA to replace him. He stayed in power for a generation by taking over the state’s revenues for himself and his supporters, and nothing got spent on maintaining the Congo’s existing infrastructure, let alone improving it. So the country went back to the bush.
Lumumba’s surviving allies fought back, including DŽsirŽ Kabila, who spent 20 years leading a futile guerrilla struggle in eastern Congo. Kabila ended up in exile in Tanzania, and his son Joseph grew up there, so Joseph ended up speaking Swahili, the lingua franca of Tanzania and the eastern Congo, but not a word of Lingala, the language that serves the same purpose in the western Congo, including Kinshasa--and he speaks French, the Congo’s official language, with an English accent.
Mobutu’s time ran out when the cold war ended, because without the “Soviet threat“ the US lost interest in supporting him. DŽsirŽ Kabila led a revolt in the eastern Congo that drove Mobutu into exile in 1997, but the war turned into a free-for-all that wrecked what was left of the country, and when Kabila was assassinated in 2001 his son Joseph, aged 29, took over as unelected president. A truce in 2002 brought a kind of peace to the country, but at the expense of making the four biggest warlords vice-presidents.
The current election is an attempt to move past that corrupt but necessary bargain and provide the Congo with a properly elected parliament and president for the first time since 1961. It may not work, and even if it does, the Congo will be starting over again poorer, more divided and less developed than it was at independence 46 years ago.
But if the peace can be kept and the income from the mines can be invested in basic services and infrastructure, the Congo could be transformed in a decade. What is required is not a miracle, but the political stability that comes from democratic legitimacy. The effort is worth making, and it hasn’t failed yet.
JORDANTIMES.COM

Four years ago, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looked like just another domino in Latin and South America’s leftward tumble, an echo of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the continent’s largest country. Wall Street and Washington watched his inauguration with trepidation, the sea of red Workers’ Party flags in Brasilia echoing the likely returns on their investments and the spread of anti-Americanism.
How quickly power transforms a firebrand. The many degrees of separation between Lula and Chavez disprove the notion of a monolithic left. Brazil’s president has managed to walk the fine line between business interests and those of the working poor. That’s why the prospect of his resounding reelection just over a month away (in the most recent poll Lula had about a 25-point lead) is greeted by policy wonks and fund managers in this country with a collective shrug.
Lula may have disappointed his more radical followers when he embraced orthodox macroeconomic policies, but the results have been strong job growth, a stable currency and low inflation coupled with dramatic increases in the minimum wage and a sweeping poverty reduction program.
The program, Bolsa Familia, has been so successful that the World Bank has been trumpeting it as a model for the rest of the world. Although Lula has conducted his foreign policy quietly, he has become a voice for the world’s poor, helping lead the charge to reduce agricultural subsidies in the United States and the European Union in the Doha round of trade talks.
The paradox is that Lula was a longtime, bona fide leftist labor activist, persecuted by the military for his democratic activism as leader of one of Brazil’s biggest unions and founder of the Workers’ Party. The socialist president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, is another former activist turned pragmatic president who defies the stereotype of the Latin American left.
That’s not to say Lula has been perfect. His first term was mired by a corruption scandal that nearly doomed his presidency. Brazil is home to half of South America’s population and should have commensurate influence on the continent.
LATIMES.COM