Jurist, November 16, 2007
JURIST Guest Columnist Sadaf Aziz of the Lahore University of Management Sciences Faculty of Law in Lahore, Pakistan, says that the government’s use of plainclothes thugs to brutally suppress dissent and protest in the present “emergency” makes it clear that Pakistan’s citizens have been divested of basic rights to the point where they have no obligation to abide “rules” decreed by power….
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| By Adam Pal in Lahore | |
| Friday, 16 November 2007 | |
  Manzoor Ahmad was arrested today in Gujranwala, a city 60 km north of Lahore. He was leading the Long March from Lahore to Islamabad which started on November 13 from Lahore to Kasur and Okara.In the second leg of the long march they reached Faislabad and then Sheikhupura. Yesterday they moved from Sheikhupura to Gujranwala.
Today they were gathering at the old railway station in Gujranwala to move on towards Gujrat leading thousands of people including PPP workers, youth and masses. However, the police and intelligence agencies followed Manzoor Ahmed closely but due to the roaring thunder of the workers against them Manzoor Ahmed could not be arrested. This time the police attacked heavily on the workers and used brutal measures to disperse the rally. The workers valiantly fought back against the police but the police was able to get hold of Manzoor Ahmed along with other local leaders in Gujranwala. Now he is is in police custody at the Model Town Police Station in Gujranwala along with hundreds of other workers and party activists. We appeal to all workers and labour organisations to send messages of protest to their local embassies. Telephone calls should be made to embassies and consulates in order to put the necessary urgent pressure on the regime to secure Manzoor Ahmed’s release. You can find information on the Pakistani embassies and consulates in your country here. Send messages of support and solidarity to info [at] ptudc.org. |
Asia Times, November 15, 2007
By Jonathan Schell
The journey to the state of emergency just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, General Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global George W Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either 100% with us, or 100% against us.”
The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Abdul Qade Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.
Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its “war on terror” turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. –Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution (emphasis added)
The mainstream Democrats — represented, say, by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd — have not levied war against the United States. Their treason lies instead in committing the second offense: They adhere to enemies of the country, giving them aid and comfort.
The enemies are President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. Like no other president and vice president in history, these men attacked their country.
It was not our geography George Bush and Richard Cheney invaded. Instead they abandoned and subverted the bedrock institution of our constitutional democracy: the rule of law. By word and deed, Mr. Bush repeatedly and arrogantly sets himself above the law, claiming obedience to be a matter of presidential choice. Mr. Cheney orchestrates, coaches, applauds and iterates.
The Nation, November 15, 2007
John Nichols
Since the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter has courted the sort of controversy that most ex-Presidents, and all would-be Presidents, avoid. Jonathan Demme’s exceptional new documentary, Jimmy Carter Man From Plains, highlights that controversy, providing an intimate portrait of a man on a mission. The Nation‘s John Nichols spoke with Carter about the book, the film and the 2008 presidential campaign.
Since its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (the OPT) in 1967, Israel imprisoned over 650,000 Palestinians according to the Palestinian peace and justice group MIFTA.
By Stephen Lendman
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
B’Tselem is the conservative Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories with a well-deserved reputation for accuracy. A group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists and Knesset members founded the organization in 1989 to “document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel” to convince government officials to respect human rights and comply with international law.
Its work covers a wide range of human rights issues that include detentions and torture. In May, 2007, it prepared a detailed 100 page report titled “Absolute Prohibition: The Torture and Ill-treatment of Palestinian Detainees” that’s now available in print for those who request it. This article summarizes its findings that represent a joint effort by B’Tselem and HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual that was founded in 1988 to support Palestinian rights during the first intifada in the late 1980s.
Since the early 1990s, B’Tselem published more than ten reports on Israelis’ use of torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees. This is the latest one in an effort to raise public awareness and help abolish these abhorrent practices. The findings are based on testimonies solicited from a small “unrepresentative” sample of 73 Palestinian West Bank residents who were arrested between July, 2005 and January, 2006, agreed to tell their stories, and who met predetermined criteria for the study.
Global Research, November 8, 2007
IBA
The International Bar Association (IBA) is calling upon its member bars and law societies across the globe to support lawyers and judges in Pakistan . Since President Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the Pakistan constitution on 3 November 2007, mass protests, led by judges and lawyers, have taken place. Recent reports suggest that thousands of lawyers have been arrested and subjected to torture and ill-treatment for protesting against President Musharraf’s action. Among those arrested is Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who is believed to be under house arrest.
Information Clearing House
By Joel S. Hirschhorn
11/14/07 “ICH ” — – With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs.
Keith Olbermann was praised when he called the Bush presidency a criminal conspiracy. That missed the larger truth. The whole two-party political system is a criminal conspiracy hiding behind illusion induced delusion.
Virtually everything that Bush correctly gets condemnation for could have been prevented or negated by Democrats, if they had had courage, conviction and commitment to maintaining the rule of law and obedience to the Constitution. Bush grabbed power from the feeble and corrupt hands of Democrats. Democrats have failed the vast majority of Americans. So why would sensible people think that giving Democrats more power is a good idea? They certainly have done little to merit respect for their recent congressional actions, or inaction when it comes to impeachment of Bush and Cheney.
One of the core reasons the two-party stranglehold on our political system persists is that whenever one party uses its power to an extreme degree it sets the conditions for the other party – its partner in the conspiracy – to take over. Then the other takes its turn in wielding excessive power. Most Americans – at least those that vote – seem incapable of understanding that the Democrats and Republicans are two teams in the same league, serving the same cabal running the corporatist plutocracy. By keeping people focused on rooting for one team or the other, the behind-the-scenes rulers ensure their invisibility and power.
truthdig | posted November 14, 2007 (web only)
“The war on terror” made me do it. That’s the excuse that works for George W. Bush to rationalize his assaults on the rule of law, from arbitrary arrest to torture. So why not try some war-on-terror obfuscation to bail out his president-dictator buddy over in Pakistan?
That’s the card Bush played at his Saturday press conference when he once again celebrated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a strong ally in the war on terrorism: “If you’re the chief operating officer of Al-Qaida, you haven’t had a good experience. There has been four or five Number 3s that have been brought to justice one way or the other, and many of those folks thought they had found safe haven in Pakistan. And that would not have happened without President Musharraf honoring his word.”
Of course Bush’s statement was utter nonsense. Al-Qaida has been having a very good experience with its CEO Osama bin Laden–whom Bush had promised to get “dead or alive”–being still very much alive and apparently moving with his minions quite easily across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So too his Taliban sponsors, who seem to get stronger each month; Afghanistan is no closer to stability than Iraq, that other war-on-terrorism battleground where Bush once claimed triumph.
From
November 15, 2007
More American military veterans have been committing suicide than US soldiers have been dying in Iraq, it was claimed yesterday.
At least 6,256 US veterans took their lives in 2005, at an average of 17 a day, according to figures broadcast last night. Former servicemen are more than twice as likely than the rest of the population to commit suicide.
Such statistics compare to the total of 3,863 American military deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 – an average of 2.4 a day, according to the website ICasualties.org.
The rate of suicides among veterans prompted claims that the US was suffering from a “mental health epidemic” – often linked to post-traumatic stress.
Peace and Justice Post 