Peace and Justice Post

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Saudi Arabia is about to buy another $60bn worth of military hardware from the US, and even The Guardian is dutiful in parroting, without question, the accepted western narrative :

The sale, under negotiation since 2007, is aimed mainly at bolstering Saudi defences against Iran, which the US suspects will achieve a nuclear weapons capability within the next few years. The transfer of advanced technology, mainly planes, is to provide Saudi Arabia with air superiority over Iran.

Ignoring the fact that miltary aircraft (which form the bulk of the deal as we know it) are prettty much useless against a nuclear missile, especially one that does not exist, $60bn buys a mind boggling amount of firepower, so that must mean that Saudi Arabia’s military capacity right now is woefully insufficent compared to Iran’s, right?

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Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 289, Sept. 15, 2010

Democracy is a very popular word these days. There is virtually no country in the world today whose government does not claim to be the government of a democracy. But at the same time, there is virtually no country in the world today about which others – both inside the country and in other countries – do not denounce the government as being undemocratic.

There seems to be very little agreement about what we mean when we say a country is democratic. The problem is clear in the very etymology of the word. Democracy comes from two Greek roots – demos, or people, and kratia, or rule, the authority to decide. But what do we mean by rule? And what do we mean by the people?

Lucien Febvre told us it is always important to look at the history of a word. The word, democracy, was not always so universally popular. The word first came into common modern political usage in the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily in western Europe. At that time, it had the tonality of terrorism today.

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(A response to Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka)

by Avinash Pandey Samar, Asian Human Rights Commission, Sep 15, 2010

Nations do die, in fact they get murdered despite all the claims on the contrary. Only problem is that one needs to have a little understanding of both the social sciences and the society in its everyday life to see that happening. This is no mean task though, especially, for the academicians living in their ivory towers. It helps, also, if the ivory towers have been provided to them by the powers that may. No wonder then that such academicians keep coming up with justification for unjustifiable atrocities committed on people and institutions alike.

If not for this selective amnesia, all of the twentieth century has been an evidence for the birth and death of nations. After all, what is a nation if not an ‘imagined community’ in the words of Benedict Anderson. He calls it imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their community.” And yet, he asserts that this imagined community is no less real, and no less legitimate.

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One  Palestinian has been killed as Israeli aircraft bombed wthat they said tunnels under the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt on Wednesday, witnesses said.

The violence coincided with a visit to Jerusalem by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was taking part in negotiations between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Witnesses in the Palestinian town of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, said the Israeli air strikes killed a tunnel worker and wounded two other people.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said a rocket and eight mortar bombs fired from the Gaza Strip, landed in southern Israel. No one was hurt.

1.5 million Gazans live under heavy Israel siege, leaving Gazans desperate to digging tunnels underground and risking their lives since 2007.

Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.

Human rights groups slam Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”

A pair of US drone attacks against North Waziristan Agency today have killed at least 16 people and wounded a number of others. The slain were termed “suspected terrorists” by Pakistani security officials, though there was no indication of any high value targets slain.

One of the strikes destroyed a home in the village of Bushnarai, while another destroyed a car in Datta Khel. The two attacks mark the 10th and 11th US strikes in the agency in the past 11 days.

And while Pakistani officials have conceded that a number of civilians, including children, have been killed in the strike, they have yet to identify any of them as a known militant, terming the vast majority of them suspects.

Which has been the case with most of the massive drone campaign of the Obama Administration. Though a handful of named militants have been confirmed kills, the vast majority of the “suspects” are never identified, or turn out later to be innocent civilians whose guilt was assumed because of tribal affiliations.

Spiegel Online International, Sep 13, 2010

AP

The Szczytno-Szymany airport in northeastern Poland, close to the suspected black site prison (2005 photo).

Former CIA agents have confirmed rumors that the agency tortured terror suspects at a detention center in Poland. One agent allegedly held a drill to a prisoner’s head while he was naked and hooded.

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.

Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”

Albert is said to have repeatedly held the drill and a handgun to al-Nashiri’s head and threatened him with death. The agent was later reprimanded and left the CIA. An attempt to pursue legal proceedings against him was abandoned, however. Albert has since returned to work for the CIA as an intelligence contractor, the AP reported.

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By Eric S. Margolis, Sun2Surf, Sep 16, 2010

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is the world’s leading think tank for military affairs. It represents the top echelon of defence experts, retired officers and senior military men, spanning the globe from the United States and Britain to China, Russia and India.

I’ve been an IISS member for over 20 years. IISS’s reports are always authoritative but usually cautious and diplomatic, sometimes dull. However, two weeks ago the IISS issued an explosive report on Afghanistan that is shaking Washington and its Nato allies.

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II

So, when enterprising Indians  defeated British Colonialism, they took care to absorb all the  “developmental” lessons.  The one new thing was the need to remember periodically that the blood, sweat, and hunger of the labouring (in whom “sovereignty” resided, don’t you know) was rewarded every five years or so with a call to elect  a new set of rulers of the same old vintage.  They called it Democracy.

Never more to the fore in the year of the Lord, 2010, when the democratic state fires away at the little people from one end of the double barrel and prepares to showcase the realm to the world via the Commonwealth Games through the other.

Thus, in a throwback to Pico and Shakespeare, the Indian state displays its faculties of innovation and spending in the works it gets made at less than minimum wage, and, on the other side, plays the beast to man, woman, and child  who have, alas, not inherited the pedigree of Renaissance Humanism.  Recall the butcheries the Conquistadors were perpetrating as they sought to make of the white race  the  gold-plated inheritors of God’s selective intent; and recall that even as Jefferson was inking the Declaration  (all men are equal etc., with them unalienable rights) he, like  most of his distinguished peers—Madison, Washington, what-have-you—owned a hundred or more slaves  (of whom, Howard Zinn tells us in his People’s History of the United States of America, some 50 million died during the slave trade.  Some other estimates put the figure at 60 million.)

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