Peace and Justice Post

Mary Shaw, Information Clearing House, Sep 28, 2010

It’s like McCarthyism all over again.

On September 24, FBI agents raided the homes of some anti-war activists in Chicago and Minneapolis on suspicion that they were providing material support to terrorism.

This follows only a few weeks after it was discovered that Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security had been spying on activist groups in the Keystone State.

The Chicago Tribune quotes one of the harassed activists in Minnesota as calling the searches “an outrageous fishing expedition.”

Indeed. But this is apparently how our tax dollars are being used.

Apparently the authorities still subscribe to the George W. Bush-style assumption that if you’re not in lockstep with the government’s policies, then you must be with the terrorists.

And the Bush administration’s knee-jerk, fear-based policies in response to 9/11 have arguably made it legal for agencies to conduct these witch hunts.

The Patriot Act broadened the definition of domestic terrorism to an extent that it “may have a chilling effect on the U.S. and international rights to free expression and association,” says Amnesty International USA.

Amnesty continues: “The law defines ‘domestic terrorism’ as acts committed in the United States ‘dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws,’ if the U.S. government determines that they ‘appear to be intended’ to ‘influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion,’ or ‘to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.’ Such ambiguous language allows for loose interpretation that might violate civil liberties and international human rights.”

As we’re seeing right now.

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By Marjorie Cohn , ZNet,  September 29, 2010

Marjorie Cohn’s ZSpace Page

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public.  [His] supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning’s release from military custody. Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U.S. troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. The video, available at www.collateralmurder.com, was published by WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010. Manning faces 52 years in prison. No charges have been filed against the soldiers in the video.

In October 1969, the most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, smuggled out of his office and made public a 7,000 page top secret study of decision making during the Vietnam War. It became known as the Pentagon Papers. Dan risked his future, knowing that he would likely spend life in prison for his expose.

The release of the Pentagon Papers ultimately helped end not only the Nixon presidency, but also the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 Americans and three million Indochinese were killed. Dan’s courageous act was essential to holding accountable our leaders who had betrayed American values by starting and perpetuating an illegal and deadly war.

Manning’s alleged crimes follow in this tradition. The 2007 video, called “Collateral Murder,” has been viewed by millions of people on the Internet. On it, U.S. military Apache helicopter soldiers from Bravo Company 2nd Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment can be seen killing 12 civilians and wounding two children in Iraq. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency.

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Though the attention tonight is squarely on the US military’s brief incursion into Pakistani territory and the 60 people killed in that attack, the CIA continues to escalate their policy of drone strikes against Pakistani territory to alarming levels.

In fact, a flurry of strikes over the weekend has brought the total number of strikes to at least 20 in the month of September alone. From a rarely used tactic during the waning days of the Bush Administration, hardly a day goes by when US missiles aren’t killing someone in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

President Obama has made the drone strikes the centerpiece of his foreign policy, and has killed well over a thousand people inside Pakistan since taking office. The vast majority of those killed have turned out to be innocent civilians, while large numbers of others remain unidentified but classified as “suspects.”

But despite the growing disquiet in Pakistan over the large number of civilians killed, the number of attacks is continuing to escalate beyond all reason, and the US continues to tout it as a “precise” tactic. Despite this, of the 20 attacks this month none has led to a confirmed kill of a high value target, and a number of civilians have been confirmed slain.

Future historians will marvel at how U.S. leaders failed to learn from their horrific crimes in Indochina, and are instead repeating many of them today.

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger addresses a keynote on the theme of power shifts and security at the opening day of the eighth Annual IISS Global Strategic Review conference in Geneva.

Photo Credit: AFP – Fabrice Coffrini

Nothing more symbolizes how the temptations of power can corrupt youthful values and idealism than Secretary Hillary Clinton’s invitation to Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke to keynote a major State Department conference on the history of the Indochina war. As an idealistic college student, Clinton protested Kissinger’s mass murder of civilians in Indochina. She knows full well that had the international laws protecting civilians in war been applied to Kissinger’s bombing of civilian targets in Indochina he would have been indicted for crimes of war.

But on Sept. 29 she will introduce Kissinger at the State Department Historian’s conference, giving him a platform to continue 40 years of Orwellian deception in which he has sought to blame Congress for the fall of Indochina rather than accepting responsibility for his massive miscalculations and indifference to human suffering.

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By Robert Parry , Consortiumnews.com, September 27, 2010

President Barack Obama trapped himself in the morass of Afghanistan by his post-election decision to show bipartisan continuity and to keep in place George W. Bush’s military command structure, particularly Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus.

After his solid victory in November 2008, Obama rebuffed recommendations from some national security experts that he clean house by installing a team more in line with his campaign pledge of “change you can believe in.” He accepted instead the counsel of Establishment Democrats who warned against any disruption to the war-fighting hierarchy and who were especially supportive of keeping Gates.

The results are now in. Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, makes clear that it was Bush’s old team that made sure Obama was given no option other than to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan. The Bush holdovers also lobbied for the troop increase behind Obama’s back.

According to Woodward’s book, Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, refused last year to even prepare an early-exit option that Obama had requested. Instead, they offered up only plans for their desired escalation of about 40,000 troops.

Woodward wrote: “For two exhausting months, [Obama] had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan.

“He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were ‘really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted.’”

Woodward identified Gates, Petraeus and Mullen as “unrelenting advocates for 40,000 more troops and an expanded mission that seemed to have no clear end.”

The effort to box Obama in reached a crisis point on Nov. 11, 2009, in the White House Situation Room when Obama confronted the three and complained, “You have given me one option [for the escalation]. We were going to meet here today to talk about three options. … You agreed to go back and work those up.”

Mullen protested. “I think what we’ve tried to do here is present a range of options.” But Obama shot back that two options were clearly unfeasible and the other two were variations of the 40,000-troop increase request.

The Bush holdovers even resisted passing along a “hybrid” plan that came from outside their group, from Vice President Joe Biden who had worked with JCS vice chairman, Gen. James Cartwright. The plan envisioned a 20,000 troop increase and a more limited mission of hunting Taliban insurgents and training Afghan government forces.

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By Shamus Cooke, ZNet, September 19, 2010

With the November elections quickly approaching, the majority of Americans will be thinking one thing: “Who cares?” This apathy isn’t due to ignorance, as some accuse. Rather, working people’s disinterest in the two party system implies intelligence: millions of people understand that both the Democrats and Republicans will not represent their interests in Congress.

This begs the question: Whom does the two party system work for? The answer was recently given by the mainstream The New York Times, who gave the nation an insiders peek on how corporations “lobby” (buy) congressmen. The article explains how giant corporations — from Wall-mart to weapons manufacturers — are planning on shifting their hiring practices for lobbyists, from Democratic to Republican ex-congressmen in preparation for the Republicans gaining seats in the upcoming November elections:

“Lobbyists, political consultants and recruiters all say that the going rate for Republicans — particularly current and former House staff members — has risen significantly in just the last few weeks, with salaries beginning at $300,000 and going as high as $1million for private sector [corporate lobbyist] positions.” (September 9, 2010)

Congressmen who have recently retired make the perfect lobbyists: they still have good friends in Congress, with many of these friends owing them political favors; they have connections to foreign Presidents and Kings; and they also have celebrity status that gives good PR to the corporations.

Often, these congressmen have done favors for the corporation that is now hiring them, meaning, that the corporations are rewarding the congressmen for services rendered while in office, offering them million dollar lobbyist jobs (or seats on the corporate board of directors) that requires little to no work.

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Mideast talks fall apart, as Israel lets West Bank settlements begin anew. Peter Beinart on how American Jewish groups tie Obama’s hands—and work against peace.

Peter Beinart, CommonDreams.org, Sep 27, 2010

This just in, for anyone in the United States who still cares: Israel has not renewed the partial settlement freeze it imposed ten months ago. Which means that the direct talks with the Palestinians born this month may die in the crib. Which raises an interesting question: What would it take to make American Jewish groups admit that an Israeli prime minister is not serious about peace?

You could hardly find a better test case than Benjamin Netanyahu. Until last year, Netanyahu had not just spent his entire political career opposing a Palestinian state; he had repeatedly compared such a state to Nazi Germany. He opposed the Oslo peace talks at their inception, and as prime minister in the late 1990s so consistently reneged on commitments made by his predecessors that U.S. envoy Dennis Ross later noted that “neither President Clinton nor Secretary Albright believed that Bibi had any real interest in pursuing peace.” In 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu resigned from his cabinet in protest. Netanyahu was still on record as opposing a Palestinian state in 2009, when he again ran for prime minister. He hewed to this position when forming his coalition government, even though doing so helped keep Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party from joining his cabinet, thus preventing Netanyahu from assembling the national unity government he claimed to want in order to confront Iran. Through all of this, the major American Jewish groups still refused to publicly entertain the idea that Netanyahu was anything but a champion of peace.

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By the Rev. Howard Bess, Consortiumnews.com, September 27, 2010

Editor’s Note: Some Christians and Jews are seeking harsher policies against Muslims to counter Islam’s purported desire for dominance over other religions, ironically even as right-wing Christians and Jews themselves demand greater dominance over Muslims and others who practice different religions or none at all.

And, just as Muslims cite the Koran as a holy book that they feel must guide human behavior, many Christians and Jews trace their political agendas back to the Bible and the supposed “word of God.”

For instance, in defending the resumption of Jewish settlement expansion on the Palestinian West Bank, hard-line Israelis claim the Bible justifies the land grab.

Reflecting this fundamentalist and fundamentally racist view, Gershon Mesika, a settlement leader, lectured President Barack Obama on Sunday by saying: “I say to Hussein Obama: This Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. The Jewish people have the strongest title deed in the world, and that is the Bible.”

In the United States, Christian nationalists have taken up their own political-religious banner in demanding that the Christian Bible and the Ten Commandants become the basis for the American government, superseding even the U.S. Constitution.

In that context, retired Baptist minister Howard Bess examines this internal debate within Christianity (and Judaism) over where the Bible should stand as a factor in civil governance and whether one religion should dominate others:

One of the great sins of Christianity over the centuries is that it has sought dominance over believers in other religions as well as non-believers.

Somehow most Christian leaders have decided that their particular brand of religion should be dominant in the world and that the world would attain its greatest ideal if everyone were Christian.

Though there is material in the Bible to support this supremacist view, there is also a great body of Bible literature that looks at life from a very different perspective. According to this alternate point-of-view, the calling of the people of God is to be a servant people.

I have long maintained that the Bible should be read and studied with a recognition that both sides of the arguments are found in the same collection of writings, that the Bible is not monolithic on this and other key questions. The task of the Bible student is to join in the argument and to bring the argument to the most modern of settings.

The dominance side of the argument is rooted in the Bible story of King David, tracing his life from a humble shepherd boy to supposedly the most powerful king in the Near East. According to the story, he claimed power as a bloody, conquering tyrant and established a great capital city in Jerusalem as home to Jehovah God.

This story (which many historians consider largely mythical) has become the model and symbol of all Christian dominionists.

The servant side of the Bible tradition is rooted not in Jerusalem but in Babylon. Four hundred years after the establishment of Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and its God, Babylonia, a powerful neighbor to the east, conquered the last vestige of the Israelite nation, capturing Jerusalem and leveling the Holy Temple.

Some Israelites were carried off to the City of Babylon to be slave labor for the new dominant nation in the Near East. In that setting, the people of God pondered their role in the world. With dominance no longer a possibility, they concluded that their new calling from God was to serve the world rather than to dominate the world.

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Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 27 September 2010

Eyes in Gaza is a detailed and harrowing account by the Norwegian doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse of their experiences in al-Shifa Hospital during Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. For a time, they were not just the only western doctors in Gaza, but the only western witnesses to what they repeatedly call Israel’s “massacre” of some 1,400 Palestinian men, women and children. Hence the book’s title, bearing witness to their status as witnesses.

At noon on New Year’s Eve 2008, four days after the start of Israel’s onslaught, Gilbert and Fosse entered Gaza from Egypt. On the morning of 10 January 2010, with Israel’s campaign still having a week to run, they returned to Egypt and were replaced by another Norwegian medical team. During the intervening period they assisted their Palestinian colleagues — whose “historic heroism” (112) they praise unstintingly — in performing an average of twenty operations daily on the civilian victims of Israel’s orgy of shooting and bombing. In the absence of western media they also acted as reporters (“white voices” — 121-122), giving ten to fifteen interviews daily.

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