Peace and Justice Post

Drone missile attacks near to Pakistan’s Afghan border have become an everyday occurrence since Obama took power

Declan Walsh in Islamabad, The Guardian, Oct 7, 2010

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 11 October 2010

In its main editorial Sunday, the New York Times, the major voice of what passes for liberalism in America, openly defends the right of the US government to assassinate anyone it pleases. The only restriction the Times suggests is that the president should be required to have his selection of murder victims rubber-stamped by a secret court like the one that now approves 99.99 percent of all electronic eavesdropping requests.

The apologia for killing begins with a blatant lie about the US assassination program using missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft flying along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The Times claims, citing official US government sources: “The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, but fewer than 10 noncombatants.”

Actually, Pakistani government officials estimated the number of civilians killed by drone attacks in 2009 alone at more than 700, with an even higher figure this year, as the Obama administration has rained missiles and bombs on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.(See “US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009” .)

A report in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn concluded, “For each Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”

The Times editors cannot be unaware of these well-established figures, since their own journalists have reported a civilian death toll from US missile strikes in Pakistan of some 500 by April 2009, and 100 to 500 more through April 2010. They lie shamelessly and deliberately in order to conceal the significance of their endorsement of such widespread killing.

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by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t | Report, Oct 11, 2010

Haitians sit among the rubble in Port-au-Prince following an earthquake in January. (Photo: Zoriah)

“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to 5,000 people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

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Photo by AFP

Residents live under a constant fear of being hit as dozens of unmanned drones buzz the skies over North and South Waziristan. The drones frighten children and women who sometimes become the victims, especially if the intended targets are anywhere close to their homes.

According to local tribal sources, the Americans have planted several spies whose job is to insert microchips in vehicles which are then tracked and taken out by missiles fired from drones.

When the US drone attacks started several years ago, their priority was to get the al-Qaeda leadership, But a lot has changed since then, and it appears the Americans have expanded their targets to include foreign fighters, the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

According to one senior Pakistanii military official, the accuracy of the drone raids has increased but that it still causing civilian casualties because of the nature of the way local houses are built.

The large adobe-type mud structures are wall to wall and so, often adjoining structures collapse under the pressure of heavy explosions.

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Middle East Online, Oct 11, 2010

Tony Blair’s story about ‘Islamic extremism’ reminds us precisely why the world rose up in the early and mid-20th Century against European colonialism and racism that denied much of the rest of the world both its political rights and its fundamental humanity, says Rami G. Khouri.

BOSTON — When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) get together, you know that something slightly frightening will happen — given that WINEP is a leading voice of pro-Israeli sentiment in Washington and Blair is the world’s leading example of neo-colonial Western political leadership that speaks nicely of making peace in the Middle East but in reality mostly makes war or ignores the real causes of the conflict at hand. We were not disappointed last week, when WINEP awarded Blair its 2010 Scholar-Statesman Award. His remarks clarified a main reason why Western-Arab-Asian tensions persist, and even worsen.

Blair’s basic point was that we need a revolution in our thinking to defeat Islamic extremism by “defeating the narrative that nurtures it… The practitioners of the extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking. And what is this narrative? It is that Islam is basically oppressed by the West, disrespected, and treated unfairly, that the military action we took post-9/11 was against countries because they are Muslim, and that in the Middle East we ignore the injustice done to Palestinians in our desire to support Israel because the Palestinians are Muslims and the Israelis predominantly Jews. It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs, and organizations. And of course, many of those that agree with this narrative abhor the terrorism. But as the support across the Middle East for the Muslim Brotherhood shows, far too many buy into far too much of the analysis of the extremists, if not their methodology…. So in my judgment, what we should be doing instead is confronting the narrative head-on, forming an alliance across the face and across the divides of culture and civilization to defeat it.”

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Afua Hirsch, legal affairs correspondent, The Guardian, Oct 8, 2010

Scant Protection Against Mistreatment and Abuse

(Kuwait City) – Domestic workers in Kuwait who try to escape abusive employers face criminal charges for “absconding” and are unable to change jobs without their employer’s permission, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Migrant domestic workers have minimal protection against employers who withhold salaries, force employees to work long hours with no days off, deprive them of adequate food, or abuse them physically or sexually.

The 97-page report, “Walls at Every Turn: Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers Through Kuwait’s Sponsorship System,” describes how workers become trapped in exploitative or abusive employment then face criminal penalties for leaving a job without the employer’s permission. Government authorities arrest workers reported as “absconding” and in most cases deport them from Kuwait – even if they have been abused and seek redress.

“Employers hold all the cards in Kuwait,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “If abused or exploited workers try to escape or complain, the law makes it easy for employers to charge them with ‘absconding’ and get them deported. The government has left workers to depend on employers’ good will – or to suffer when good will is absent.”

Kuwait, which has the highest ratio of domestic workers to citizens in the Middle East, announced on September 26, 2010, that it would abolish the sponsorship system (kafala) in February 2011, and replace the employer-based system with a government-administered recruitment authority. While this would be an important reform, the government gave no details on what legal protections would be added for migrant workers in the country, or whether the reforms would cover domestic workers.

The country’s more than 660,000 migrant domestic workers constitute nearly a third of the work force in this small Gulf country of only 1.3 million citizens. But domestic workers are excluded from the labor laws that protect other workers. Kuwaiti lawmakers reinforced this exclusion as recently as February 2010, when they passed a new labor law for the private sector that failed to cover domestic work.

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By Devinder Sharma, ZNet, October 9, 2010

If Shylock was alive today, I am sure he would have floated a public stock offering and would have been amongst the richest in the world. Forbes magazine would have certainly included his name in the list of the top 50 billionaires, and The Economist would have included his name among the 15 most powerful people in the world.

Probably Shylock was born in wrong times. Profit was not as respected a word as it is today. Also, Shakespeare was no Adam Smith. He wrote to reach people, and in a way entertain them. What he wrote reflected the times that he was living in. Adam Smith was no creative writer, and so it is not fair to compare him with Shakespeare’s greatness. But Adam Smith certainly sowed the seeds of greed with a lot of caveat (which unfortunately is never talked about by the modern day Shylocks), and future generations not only realized the power of markets that he so vociferously advocated but went a step ahead by virtually making a killing out of it.

In a world where you are known by how much money you make, and it doesn’t matter whether you made it by hook or by crook, the race to join the new emerging class of the bold and beautiful — these are the new brahmins of the evolving global caste system — has crossed all barriers. It doesn’t matter which race you belong to or which religion you practice or which country you come from, the only qualification you need is the tag that says you are rich enough.

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