Was ist Leben?
Erich Fried
Leben
das ist die Wärme
des Wassers in meinem Bad
Leben
das ist mein Mund
an deinem offenen Schoß
Leben
das ist der Zorn
auf das Unrecht in unseren Ländern
Die Wärme des Wassers
genügt nicht
Ich muss auch drin plätschern
Mein Mund an deinem Schoß
genügt nicht
Ich muss ihn auch küssen
Der Zorn auf das Unrecht
genügt nicht
Wir müssen es auch ergründen
und etwas
gegen es tun
Das ist Leben
Outlook India, June 14, 2010
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| Ahmadis In Pakistan | Ahmadis In India | |
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| Population: 4 million | Population: Estimated to be from 60,000 to 1 million | |
| Headquarters: Rabwah town, Punjab | Headquarters: Qadian in Gurdaspur district, Punjab, where the sect was established. The 2001 census counted roughly 20,000 Ahmadis in Qadian. | |
| Status: Since 1974, declared non-Muslim | Why low numbers: Partition saw the bulk of Ahmadis becoming citizens of Pakistan | |
| What they can’t do: Call themselves Muslim, offer prayers in mosques, quote Quranic verses in their newspaper, propagate their religion | Status: Several high court verdicts say they must be treated as Muslim | |
| Threats from fundamentalists: They say it is ‘permissible to kill’ them. Some 2,000 died in riots in 1953, suffered untold misery in 1974. The attacks on them claimed nearly 100 lives. | What they can’t do: They don’t sit on the Muslim Personal Law Board, but are governed by Muslims | |
Black Friday, the May 28th massacre of Ahmadi worshipers while at Friday prayers, has been a dark reminder of the terrible conditions that Pakistan’s non-Sunni and non-Muslim communities live in. At least part of the problem is the Pakistani state’s institutionalization of legalized discrimination against Ahmadis and various other groups. These horrible and inhuman laws must go.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. We call on the Pakistani government to repeal these terrible laws, bring perpetrators of violence to justice, and take steps to separate religion from government.
Please sign our petition calling on the government to take these steps! Signing the petition takes only a few seconds and none of your personal information is saved. Please do this now, and please spread the word widely and ask others to sign the petition as well.
by Paul Woodward, War in Context, June 16, 2010
“The man who ordered the attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza, set up the inquiry, chose its members and determined its mandate, has announced its outcome even before it has started,” wrote Chris Doyle, noting Benjamin Netanyahu’s visible satisfaction, confident that he has mounted an effective response to international pressure.
If the only audience the Israeli prime minister needed to satisfy was made up by the likes of Jeremy Ben-Ami and Barack Obama, Netanyahu could indeed take satisfaction as he proves how easy it is to win unprincipled support.
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According to a Los Angeles Times report, a senior U.S. official stated the Obama administration wants to detain and interrogate non-Afghan terrorism suspects captured in countries outside Afghanistan in a section of the Bagram prison, even after it turns the prison over to Afghan “control.” The proposal is reportedly in the early stages of development.
This is consistent with Obama’s record of continuing and expanding the national security state begun by the Bush regime. Bagram is one of the pre-eminent hellhole prisons currently run by the U.S. military. In many respects it is even worse than Gitmo, with torture and death being the result for many prisoners detained there.
To date, Obama administration lawyers have been successful in court in arguing that prisoners held at Bagram are not entitled to due process rights such as habeas corpus. As a result of the federal court victory, the U.S. can use Bagram to detain indefinitely, without any judicial oversight, “terrorism suspects” captured far from any battlefield who have not been charged with any crime.
The administration is currently involved in the charade of turning over the prison at Bagram to the Afghan puppet government, but if this latest idea goes ahead, part of the prison will still be under the direct control of the U.S. torturers instead of the puppets in Afghanistan.
As if the lack of basic legal and human rights is not bad enough, the Obama administration maintains that prisoners of the U.S. war of terror can be held indefinitely. Bagram appears to be one of the hellholes where such prisoners will be held, possibly until they die. Other newly captured prisoners of the U.S. war of terror would also be interrogated at Bagram as well. Some prisoners currently held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba may also eventually be transferred to Bagram although a Pentagon spokesperson denies that this is currently under consideration.
According to the Times, “The senior U.S. official…said Bagram remains the best option for holding future terrorist suspects captured elsewhere in the world, in places like Somalia or Yemen.” Bagram is also a place to hold prisoners without as much media attention as that accorded to Gitmo. Unlike Gitmo it is thousands of miles from the U.S. If it is under “Afghan jurisdiction” it will be even easier to cover up the crimes committed there.
According to Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, “The Guantánamo problem is not solved simply by recreating a Guantánamo somewhere else. Closing Guantánamo is essential but it is equally important that the Obama administration put an end to the illegal indefinite detention policy behind Guantánamo. The entire world is not a battlefield. We cannot just capture people far from any zone of armed conflict and lock up them up indefinitely without any access to the courts or due process. Such a policy not only flies in the face of our justice system, but opens up the possibility that mistakes will be made and the wrong people will be imprisoned – which is exactly what we have seen at Guantánamo.”
The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in September 2009 demanding information about Bagram, which has thus far been shrouded in much secrecy to protect the crimes of the national security state. In response to the lawsuit, the government has been forced to turn over some important information but continues to withhold key details about the prisoners detained at Bagram, as well as information about the implementation of its new detainee status review procedures (kangaroo proceedings) and about a separate “secret jail” on the base. The secret facility is reportedly run by either the Joint Special Operations Command or the Defense Intelligence Agency, and detainees maintain they have been tortured there. “The possibility of continuing to hold and interrogate detainees at Bagram is even more disturbing given the lack of transparency about the facility,” said Goodman. “Plans to continue holding prisoners in U.S. custody at Bagram must be accompanied by the disclosure of key information about what currently goes on there.” As part of the ongoing FOIA lawsuit, the ACLU on June 8th received several documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Justice. The disclosures include a number of detainee policy documents from the early years of the Bush administration, including a 2004 document describing “Global Screening Criteria for Detainees” used to determine who – no matter where they were captured – could be detained as an enemy combatant and which detainees could be transferred to Guantánamo. Also just turned over to the ACLU are Obama-era records including policy guidance from February 2010 regarding access to detainees and facilities by non-DOD government officials, foreign governments, members of the media and representatives of non-governmental organizations that confirms non-DOD agents can visit detainees at Bagram in order to interrogate them. This allows the CIA and other torturers regular access to the prisoners. The DOD also disclosed its policy regarding the waiver of autopsy requirements for detainee deaths. Thus when prisoners are tortured to death their murders are more easily covered up. (The documents received in the ACLU FOIA lawsuit are available online).
Bagram and Gitmo are just two of the prisons run by the U.S. and it allies in the war of terror. Tens of thousands of prisoners have been held and abused at these facilities. Secrecy continues to surround the crimes committed in these hellholes. But the crimes that we already know of are more than enough to warrant prosecutions of various top U.S. officials, including former president Bush and VP Cheney. But do not expect the Obama administration to begin prosecutions of these top criminals or even their underlings.
The Obama administration has instead repeatedly gone to court and taken other actions to protect and cover-up for them, as well as the national security state. Even worse many of the crimes of the Bush regime are now the crimes of the Obama administration. Gitmo and Bagram are under the command of Commander-in-Chief Obama. Obama has greatly expanded the U.S. war of terror. We can not hear the screams and cries for help of the prisoners held by the U.S. In places like Bagram they have often been silenced under court rulings that deny them basic legal and human rights. This makes it even more incumbent on those who know what is happening to speak out. Silence about the crimes of our government is complicity.
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| Al Jazeera, June 17, 2010 | ||
| By Mark LeVine | ||
The remarks were not made in anger or haste, as were the now infamous, flippant and ill-conceived comments that cost White House reporter Helen Thomas her job, if not her legacy. Instead, they were made quite deliberately, with an air of thoughtfulness, while leaning over a lectern, as if lecturing to a class. Thomas was forced into retirement for declaring that Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine,” but New York Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful politicians in the US, has avoided any criticism or even major press coverage for remarks he made only days later that supported the continued “economic strangulation” of Gaza; in part, because, he essentially argues, the inhabitants of the benighted Strip are not Jewish. |
By James Petras, Information Clearing House, June 17, 2010
Despite almost a decade of warfare, including an invasion and occupation, the US military and its allies and client state armed forces are losing the war in Afghanistan. Outside of the central districts of a few cities and the military fortresses, the Afghan national resistance forces, in all of their complex local, regional and national alliances, are in control, of territory, people and administration.
The prolonged unending war has become a major drain on the morale of the US armed forces and undermined civilian support in the US, limiting the capacity of the White House to launch new imperial wars. The annual multi-billion dollar military expenditures, are exacerbating the out-of-control budget deficit and forcing harsh unpopular cuts on social programs, at all levels of government. There is no end in sight, as the Obama regime keeps increasing the number of troops by the tens of thousands and military expenditures by the dozens of billions but the resistance advances, both military and politically.
Amnesty International launched an attack on Tuesday into Tel Aviv’s proposed inquiry into the massacre of solidarity activists aboard a Gaza aid flotilla just over two weeks ago.
Israel’s right-wing cabinet has approved a three-man Israeli commission, with two international observers, to examine the naval raid in international waters off the Gaza coast in which nine Turkish civilians were killed by Israeli commandos.
The human rights group noted that the investigation lacked transparency and was unlikely to ensure accountability.
Since Israel’s May 31 attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship, there has been growing criticism of Israel’s behavior across much of the world, including from traditional allies like Turkey.
Yet as this criticism has grown abroad, the pressure for Israel’s public to toe the official line on the story (whatever it may be at any given time) has also grown, and in the West there is an increasingly visible effort to lionize the Israeli attack and do demonize even perceived criticism of the Israeli government as “anti-semitism.”
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Peace and Justice Post 
Open letter to Obama on behalf of citizens of Bhopal
June 18, 2010‘Reverse The Out-Of-Court Bhopal Settlement’
Activists write to the US President: ‘Whose ‘ass’ should the citizens of Bhopal kick if governments selectively shield their corporations and officials from legal accountability?’
Mr Barack Obama
President,
United States of America
Dear Mr President Obama,
With a great deal of interest, we have been following your tough stand against BP for the oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico, particularly your demand to know whose ‘ass needs to be kicked’. We think your demand for corporate accountability for causing huge environmental damages is worthy of emulation by other governments around the World.
May we draw your attention to a bigger disaster that took place in the city of Bhopal in India in December 1984 that has officially killed over 15,000 people (about 25,000 people unofficially) and seriously injured nearly half a million people by now (the situation after twenty five years is attached for ready reference). This disaster was caused by another mega corporate entity called Union Carbide, headquartered in the United States of America, unlike BP whose parent company resides in Great Britain.
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