Peace and Justice Post

By Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post, Oct 15, 2010

In the publicity sheet that St. Martin’s Press has been sending out to spur interest in General Hugh Shelton’s new memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, the last highlight is a doozy: “A high-ranking cabinet member suggests intentionally flying an American airplane on a low pass over Baghdad so as to guarantee it will be shot down, thus creating a natural excuse to reltaliate and go to war.”

Turns out the incident took place during the Clinton administration, and Shelton’s response to the suggestion…well, let’s just say it more than lives up to the title of the memoir.

Over at Salon’s War Room, Justin Elliott has the specifics.

Shelton sets the scene at a “small, weekly White House breakfast” that served as regular “informal” meetings that “encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues.”

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By Rory O’Connor, Consortiumnews.com, Oct 15, 2010

Editor’s Note: From the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration refused to provide figures on the number of Iraqis killed, yet disputed estimates of war-related deaths that ranged up to one million.

Now, in a surprise development, the Pentagon has posted, without any fanfare, its totals for most of the war, numbers well below other tallies, eas Rory O’Connor notes in this guest essay:

In July, the United States military issued its largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war. The Pentagon tallied almost 77,000 Iraqis – both civilians and security forces – as having died in the carnage between January 2004 and August 2008.

As the Associated Press reported, the information went unnoticed for months after being “quietly posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command without explanation.”

It was only recently discovered by the AP “during a routine check…for civilian and military casualty numbers,” which the news agency had first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act.

As AP noted, “The military has repeatedly resisted sharing its numbers, which it uses to determine security trends.”

(One exception: U.S. military officials in Baghdad released their July 2010 Iraqi casualty tally in order to refute the Iraqi government’s much higher monthly figures, a decision made just weeks before U.S. forces withdrew all but 50,000 troops from Iraq.)

According to the AP, “a spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., could not answer basic questions about the information.”

Iraqi Health Ministry officials were equally reticent and refused to discuss the American figures, which fall thousands of deaths short of those the Iraqis have compiled using actual death certificates.

The American data claimed 76,939 Iraqi security service members and civilians killed and 121,649 wounded between January 2004 and August 2008. (The count shows that 3,952 American and other international troops were killed over the same period.)

The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry reported last October that 85,694 people were killed from the beginning of 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008, and 147,195 wounded. (Notably, these tallies do not include the period of the U.S. invasion and conquest of Iraq in March and April 2003.)

Certainly estimating casualties in Iraq has been an inexact process, and various figures have long been disputed as attempts to manipulate the political debate either by minimizing or exaggerating the numbers to sway public opinion.

The mysteriously-derived U.S. military figures rank as the lowest. One tally by a private, British-based group that has tracked civilian casualties since the war began estimates that between 98,252 and 107,235 Iraqi civilians were killed from March 2003 to Sept. 19, 2010. Other estimates of war-related deaths have been much higher, up to and even over one million.

Curious as ever about the meaning of events at the nexus of media and politics, let me ask a few questions:

1. Why was the U.S. military’s most extensive death tally ever of the Iraq war released without comment or explanation and buried on a Web site for months?

2. Why can no one in the U.S. military answer “basic questions” about the tally months after it was made, such as how it was compiled, why it was released, and whether the new numbers included suspected insurgents?

3. Why has the U.S. military repeatedly resisted requests to share its comprehensive figures on Iraqi civilian casualties?

4. Why was the U.S. death figure well below that of the Iraqi government?

5. Finally, whatever else you may think about the so-called “lamestream media,” would we ever have even known about the Pentagon’s largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war without the Associated Press requesting casualty numbers through the Freedom of Information Act – and then “routinely” checking for them?

Rory O’Connor is a journalist and filmmaker, and co-founder of the media firm Globalvision. He is author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech

A psychologist whose research was used in constructing the US’s program to torture terrorism suspects has been granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide “resilience training” to US soldiers.

Mark Benjamin at Salon.com reports that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman’s research “formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration’s torture program.”

The Army awarded the “sole source” contract in February to the University of Pennsylvania for resilience training, or teaching soldiers to better cope with the psychological strain of multiple combat tours. The university’s Positive Psychology Center, directed by famed psychologist Martin Seligman, is conducting the resilience training.

Army contracting documents show that nobody else was allowed to bid on the resilience-training contract because “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” And yet, Salon was able to identify resilience training experts at other institutions around the country, including the University of Maryland and the Mayo Clinic. In fact, in 2008 the Marine Corps launched a project with UCLA to conduct resilience training for Marines and their families at nine military bases across the United States and in Okinawa, Japan.

In a 2009 article, the New York Times described Seligman’s small but crucial role in the establishment of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on terrorism suspects before the techniques were suspended in 2008.

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A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission, Oct 15, 2010

It is diluting the UN ICCPR and CAT by having reservations against many of their provisions.

The ratification of the of UN International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights (ICCPR) and the UN convention against Torture (CAT) this June had come after a valiant struggle by the human rights movement and had raised new hopes among the civil society and made them convinced of Pakistan’s commitment for restoring the rule of law. They were mistaken. All the happiness proved to be a premature celebration of a victory that was not worth the paper, which it was written on. The belief, that the ratification was a proof that Pakistan is taking slow but steady steps for consolidating the gains made by the democratic movement, turned out to be just that; a belief.

The hopes were short-lived. The President of Pakistan has ratified the convention but with ‘reservations’. Even a cursory look at the reservations makes it absolutely clear that ratifying the convention was only a window dressing exercise with little meaning.

Through the reservations on UN Convention against Torture, the government of Pakistan has explicitly declared that it will not specify torture as the criminal offence in the domestic law.

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By John Pilger, ZNet, Oct 15, 2010

John Pilger’s ZSpace Page

The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a façade.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile’s gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile’s privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed – but not for long. On 30 July last, a labour department report warned again of “serious safety deficiencies ”, but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.

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By Tom Lasseter,  McClatchy Newspapers, Oct 13, 2010

The New-Herald, October 13, 2010

By By Georgie Anne GeyerUniversal Press Syndicate

WASHINGTON — Every day now, at least if you peruse one of the big Eastern American newspapers, you read about our wars: Fighting in Afghanistan, in its 10th year! Collapse in Pakistan! American troops still in Iraq! American troops and/or drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen and various countries of Africa, plus threats to China over oil in the South China Sea!

If you plumb just a little bit below that warfare on the surface, you will find that current Pentagon outlays are roughly $700 billion annually, the U.S. spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined. That we have approximately 300,000 troops stationed abroad, occupying some 76l bases, or euphemistically called “sites,” in 39 foreign countries — an “empire of bases.” And that the Pentagon, being neat and precise in its habits, has divided up the planet into eight “unified commands” in order to, well, order the world.

Ahhh, but all this military expansionism is merely temporary, the loyal American citizen will say. It is a result of America’s having to fight the Cold War with the Soviets — and now, on top of that, having to face down Islamic radicalism. It is not, in short, who we are, a peaceable people forced into wars against our better selves. But instead of patting ourselves on the back, perhaps we ought to study a quote of the great philosopher Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote of the military created by imperialist states: “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”

Indeed, there is a growing school of military men and political thinkers coming to the fore who believe that the United States is now creating wars it either thinks it requires or that it simply desires to fight, to illustrate its predominance and grandeur before the world. This is not a line of thought that is easily going to fade away.

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Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari believes that the United States has been secretly behind a number of Taliban suicide attacks across the nation, according to a detailed account from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars.

According to the book, Zardari expressed this concern to then-US envoy Zalmay Khalizad during a dinner, telling him that they were being arranged by either the US or India and that he “didn’t think India could be that clever.”

Met with shock by Khalizad, Zardari explained that it was part of a US plot to “destabilize Pakistan so that the US could invade and seize its nuclear weapons.” Zardari also apparently claimed that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had told him the US was responsible for the attacks.

The claims continued to get more elaborate, as Zardari claimed the CIA was overtly supporting Baitullah Mehsud and that the US had “revealed its support of the TTP.” Mehsud, the former leader of the TTP, was assassinated in August 2009, and has since been replaced by Hakimullah Mehsud.