Peace and Justice Post

By Joseph Kishore, wsws.org, 28 December 2010

As part of an escalating US campaign in Pakistan, missiles from suspected CIA drones killed up to 25 people on Monday.

The latest slaughter took place in the North Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan and has been targeted by the majority of US missiles fired from unmanned aircraft over the past year. The region is said to be a stronghold of the so-called Haqqani network, which operates in Afghanistan and opposes the US occupation.

The Los Angeles Times, citing “Pakistani intelligence officials,” reported that 25 were killed after three trucks were incinerated in two separate attacks in Mir Ali, a city that lies close to the border with Afghanistan.

One of the attacks destroyed two trucks in the village of Sher Tala, while the other destroyed a truck traveling in the village of Machikhel.

As always, those killed were described by Pakistani officials and the US media as “suspected militants” or “terrorists,” even though no concrete information was provided about those killed. The US did not make any comment on the killings.

The attacks in North Waziristan followed by 10 days the killing of 54 in the Kyber tribal region, located further to the north along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. (See “US drones slaughter 54 in Pakistan”)

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The drums of war are heard again in Israel and they are sounded because once more Israel’s invincibility  is in question. Despite the triumphant rhetoric in the various media commemorative reports, two years after ‘Cast Lead’, the sense is that that campaign was as much of a failure as was the second Lebanon war of 2006. Unfortunately, leaders, generals and the public at large in the Jewish State know only one way of dealing with military debacles and fiascos. They can be redeemed only by another successful operation or war but one which has to be carried out with more force and be more ruthless than the previous one with the hope for better results in the next round.

Force and might, so explained leading commentators in the local media (parroting what they hear from the generals in the army), is needed in order to ‘deter’, to ‘teach a lesson’ and to ‘weaken’ the enemy. There is no new plan for Gaza – there is no real desire to occupy it and put in under direct Israeli rule. What is suggested is to pound the Strip and its people once more, but with more brutality and for a shorter time. One might ask, why would this bear different fruits than the ‘Cast Lead Operation’? But this is the wrong question. The right question is what else can the present political and military elite of Israel (which includes the government and the main opposition parties) do?

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In a country with countless ethnicities and religious minorities, the 1980s law against insulting Islam is used to settle scores, critics say. The case of a Christian woman sentenced to death has led to renewed calls for its repeal.

Daughters of Asia Bibi hold an image of their mother at their home in Sheikhupura, in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Human rights advocates have urged the president to pardon her and to repeal the blasphemy law under which she was convicted. (Adrees Latif, Reuters / December 27, 2010)

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2010

Reporting from Nankana Sahib, Pakistan —

Muslim cleric Muhammad Salim isn’t worried that a court or Pakistan’s president might spare a Christian woman from this village who has been sentenced to death on blasphemy charges.

After all, if Asia Bibi, a mother of two, escapes the hangman’s noose, he’s confident someone else will kill her.

“Any Muslim, if given the chance, would kill such a person,” Salim said calmly, seated cross-legged on a straw mat at a mosque here. “You would be rewarded in heaven for it.”

Salim isn’t the only one calling for vigilante justice. A cleric in Peshawar has offered 500,000 rupees, or $6,000, to anyone who kills Asia Bibi, if her execution doesn’t take place. Other hard-line clerics have warned they would mobilize nationwide protests against the government if President Asif Ali Zardari pardoned her.

Asia Bibi’s case has exposed deep rifts in Pakistan over the blasphemy law, seen by some as an appropriate measure to defend the tenets of Islam, but viewed by others as a dangerous tool easily abused in a society that is a volatile patchwork of ethnicities, religions and sects.

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According to the Obama administration, nothing can happen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan that doesn’t mean good news.

Apparently nothing can happen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan that doesn’t mean good news. If violence rises, it’s because “we’re taking the fight to the enemy.”  The Pentagon must be taking a lot of fighting to whoever they’re calling the enemy – this year alone the war has killed over 2500 Afghan civilians, and almost 500 U.S. troops and more than 200 other NATO forces have died too.  Of course in those isolated areas where violence may have dropped, it’s because “our strategy is winning.”

President Obama’s most recent Afghanistan review process resulted – surprise! – in the announcement that the U.S./NATO occupation will continue at least until 2014.  Another four years of war, death, and devastation for the people of Afghanistan, as well as for the young U.S. soldiers drafted by poverty and lack of opportunity and sent to kill and die there in escalating numbers.

That earlier promise of July 2011 as the pull-out date?  That one was always at least partially a sham – designed to pacify Obama’s powerfully anti-war base.  The language even when first announced was a carefully ambiguous version that sounded like “July 2011 will start a process to determine whether conditions might allow preparation for beginning consideration of when the partial transfer of some control to Afghan forces might allow for a partial withdrawal of a few U.S. troops…”

As is recognized by the 60% of people in the U.S. who understand that the war in Afghanistan is “not worth fighting,” this is a war we cannot win and cannot afford. There is no military solution – we’ve heard that for years now, from the very leaders orchestrating the war, in the Pentagon, in Congress, in the White House.  And yet, the military battle goes on, despite its inevitable failure.

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By the Rev. Howard Bess, Consortium News, December 24, 2010

(Originally published December 5, 2009)

Editor’s Note: In a modern era when ancient religious myths continue to set nations at war against one another at the cost of untold human suffering, it is no longer possible to look benignly even at some of the innocent myths like those that surround the birth of Jesus.

Anything that suggests the superiority of one religion over another carries with it the risk of justifying yet more killing. Indeed, one of the bitter ironies of this season’s joyful praise for the “prince of peace” is that his gentle teachings have been twisted into possibly the most violent and warlike religion in history.

If Christians don’t like to hear that – if they wish to think of, say, Islam as a particularly violent religion and Christianity as one of peace and human kindness – they should recall the endless bloodletting done in Jesus’s name, from the days since Christianity was adopted as Rome’s official religion through the Middle Ages to today.

For instance, think of:

–The “heretics” tortured and burned alive for transgressions such as disagreeing over interpretations of the transubstantiation of Christ in the communion or for deviating from Christian doctrine that clashed with scientific discoveries;

–The Crusaders who slaughtered the Muslim and Jewish populations of Jerusalem in 1099, hailed in Europe as a great victory;

–The interminable religious wars that ravaged Europe for centuries and the suffering that kings inflicted on their subjects after claiming a divine right under Christianity.

–The Christian-led genocides against and enslavements of indigenous “heathens” of the Western Hemisphere, Africa and Australia as well as brutal imperial incursions into Asia;

–The European pogroms against the Jews based on an anti-Semitism rationalized by labeling Jews collectively as “Christ killers,” laying the groundwork for the Nazi Holocaust as the Vatican and many Protestant religious leaders stood by silently.

–The religious justification for even more torture and butchery against “godless” leftists during the Cold War, again aided and abetted by the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians;

–Today’s “war on terror” or “clash of civilizations” directed against Muslims with the strong support of many deeply religious Christians (and Jews) who decry Islam as a violent religion bent on conquest.

So, given that grim history – and in the hope that Christians might pause in their celebrations to reflect on how far Christianity has strayed from the peaceful teachings of Jesus – we are republishing the Rev. Howard Bess’s article from 2009 about some of the cherished myths about Jesus’s birth:

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Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that’s usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America’s supermax prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for five months, following two months of detention in Kuwait.

The circumstances of Manning’s detention gained prominence last week after Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing exposé of what he called “conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.” As AlterNet’s Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine whether Manning’s solitary confinement constitutes torture under international law.

The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that Manning is “a maximum custody detainee” who can “receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive … [including] daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.” But David House, one of the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning told him he’d only been allowed outdoors sporadically, and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room where he can only walk around in circles.

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SAYS CONFIDENTIALITY NOT UNCONDITIONAL

New Delhi, Dec 23: Barely few days after a WikiLeaks cable revealed that India was “condoning torture” in Kashmir, the International Committee of the Red Cross has defended passing sensitive information about the torturing of prisoners to US, saying it was “frustrated due to the lack of dialogue” with New Delhi.
AlertNet, a Thomson Reuters initiative,  Thursday quoted Alexis Heeb, the ICRC’s spokesman in New Delhi, as saying: “We confirm that a meeting took place between the ICRC and the US embassy in 2005 at a time in which the ICRC was very frustrated due to the lack of dialogue with the Indian authorities,”
Heeb said: “The ICRC works always in a confidential way with the authorities. However, in specific instances, when the dialogue is blocked for different reasons, we may change our strategy.”
According to a 2005 cable, released by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian newspaper, the ICRC told American diplomats in New Delhi that it had found “systematic prisoner abuse by armed forces during detention centre visits in Kashmir from 2002 and 2004.”
The cable said the ICRC had told US diplomats that “police and paramilitary, who are fighting in Kashmir, beat suspects, subjected them to electric currents and tortured them with water in widespread human rights abuses.”
Among 1,500 detainees that the ICRC staff met, more than half reported “ill-treatment”, the cable reported. Of the 852 cases recorded, 171 detainees said they had been beaten, while the rest said they had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture.
The cable revealed the ICRC had raised the issue of prisoner abuse with the Indian government for more than a decade, but because the practice continued, “it is forced to conclude that the government of India condones torture”.

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PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN – As drone-fired missiles drop with furious frequency in the tribal area of North Waziristan, so do the bodies.

As often as seven times a week, tribesmen there say, corpses appear in fields and on roadsides with dark warnings pinned to their tunics: All American spies will meet the same fate.

Espionage has long been viewed as an egregious offense in the lawless borderland, but residents say the current pace of assassinations is unprecedented. The escalation parallels a massive surge in CIA drone attacks on North Waziristan, home to a nest of insurgents that includes al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, an Afghan militia considered the most lethal foe of U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

CIA drones have fired 112 missiles on Pakistan’s tribal areas this year, 88 percent of which hit North Waziristan, in a campaign whose effectiveness is hotly debated. But tribesmen say the U.S. campaign has had far-reaching consequences for the way of life in North Waziristan and provoked cycles of violence that, once in motion, are difficult to predict and impossible to control.

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