Peace and Justice Post

MQ-9 Reaper in flight. Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/US Air Force photo

No matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together.

— By Tom Engelhardt, Mother Jones, March 17, 2011

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When men first made war in the air, the imagery that accompanied them was of knights jousting in the sky. Just check out movies like Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture in 1927 (or any Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal “dogfight”). As late as 1986, five years after two American F-14s shot down two Soviet jets flown by Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean’s Gulf of Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie Top Gun. In it, Tom Cruise played “Maverick,” a US Naval aviator triumphantly involved in a similar incident. (He shoots down three MiGs.)

Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the US had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that US patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.

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CommonDreams.org, March 19, 2011

Associated Press

More than 100 anti-war protesters, including the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, were arrested outside the White House on Saturday in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

A unidentified protester lifts his legs as he is arrested by U.S. Park Police near the White House while protesting against war on the 8th anniversary of the Iraq invasion in Washington, on Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo) The protesters, some shouting anti-war slogans and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” were arrested after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House. The demonstrators cheered loudly as Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War that was later published in major newspapers, was arrested and led away by police.

In New York City, about 80 protesters gathered near the U.S. military recruiting center in Times Square, chanting “No to war” and carrying banners that read, “I am not paying for war” and “Butter not guns.”

Similar protests marking the start of the Iraq war were also planned Saturday in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities.

The demonstration in Washington on Saturday merged varied causes, including protesters demanding a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as well as those supporting Bradley Manning, the jailed Army private suspected of giving classified documents to the website WikiLeaks.

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By Mumia Abu Jamal, ZNet, Friday, March 18, 2011

As pro and anti-government forces battle for supremacy in the cities and deserts of Libya, in North Africa, the tenor and tone of U.S./Western reporting puts the lie to the often heard claim of journalistic objectivity.

The cheer-leading seems more apt for ESPN than on the nation’s leading newscasts, spurred on, of course, by U.S. enmity against Col. Moammar Khaddafy, who has long been a thorn in the side of U.S. Imperial designs on the region.

Let us not pretend that American efforts are caused by solicitude for the suffering Libyan people, for easily 10 (or perhaps, 30!) times that number suffered under Egypt’s President-for-life (and trusty U.S. ally), Husni Mubarak, and the U.S. turned a deaf ear for decades to their cries.

Only when the people rose up, and took the stage, did the U.S. start mumbling phrases about ‘human rights’, and concerns about ‘violence’.

This, from a government that secretly sent (and may still be sending) men to Egyptian hellholes to be tortured via rendition –and killed by the dreaded secret police.

Indeed, anyone with a smattering of American history cannot even hear the media and political charges of a government attacking or bombing ‘its own people’ without cringing. For U.S. National Guard fired semi-automatic weapons at unarmed students in Kent State University, Ohio, killing 4 kids who were protesting the Vietnam war.

Shortly thereafter, 2 Black kids were shot and killed by cops at Jackson State University, Mississippi, during a similar protest.

Philadelphia, PA was the site of a government bombing a home, killing men, women and babies. This was the MOVE Bombing of May 13, 1985, where 11 people were bombed to death, and a whole city block reduced to smoldering rubble.

Were any of these bombers ‘brought to justice?’

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By Danny Schechter, Consortium News, March 17, 2011

Ediitor’s Note: The U.S. political/media Establishment has long treated Al Jazeera as an American enemy in the global “information war.” During George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. forces shot and jailed Al Jazeera correspondents as part of Bush’s brutal campaign to force “free-market democracy” on the Middle East.

But it appears Al Jazeera is emerging victorious from this conflict, with far greater credibility among well-informed people than U.S. propaganda outlets, including much of the timid U.S. news media. And, Al Jazeera is now on the front lines of spreading real democracy in the Middle East.

In this guest essay, Danny Schechter describes an Al Jazeera forum on these topics that he attended at the network’s base in Doha, Qatar:

When I arrived in the capital of Qatar, as one of the guest participants in the 6th annual Al Jazeera Forum focused on the Arab world in transition, it was clear the mood had changed.

In years past, the humiliation and oppression of the region was driving the discourse, but this year, events had taken a positive turn with popular youth revolutions catapulting the Al Jazeera TV networks into the global spotlight with governments falling and a new future emerging.

A revolt in Libya was topping the news, being described as civil war — whether it is or isn’t — with Western intervention in the form of a no-fly zone on the horizon to either protect that country’s people from a mad dictator, or in Col. Gaddafi’s view, use humanitarianism as a cover for an armed effort by foreign interests to seize the country’s oil wealth.

Just as the Forum began, we learned that an Al Jazeera Cameraman, Hassan Al Jaber, who I  met at an earlier Forum was killed in Libya, likely a targeted killing because the Al Jazeera people I met believe Gaddafi put money on their heads.

Soon, the story we came to discuss also lost its standing at the top of the media agenda. The disaster in the East had displaced the crisis in the Middle East.

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The latest US drone strike against North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan is amongst the deadliest in recent memory, with at least 41 people killed and other, unconfirmed sources speculating the toll may be upwards of 80.

Making matters worse, this strike isn’t coming with the usual pretense of everyone slain being a “suspected militant.” Rather, the attack struck a tribal jirga (official meeting) for the Madda Khel tribe, in the town of Datta Khel.

The casualties from the attack included six tribal elders who were overseeing the jirga, which was apparently to discuss the ownership of mineral rights, a number of children who were brought by their families to the gathering, and several members of a pro-government militia the tribe helped organize.

The US has been striking houses and vehicles in Datta Khel and elsewhere in North Waziristan for years, and such a large gathering must have seemed an appealing target. The fact that the gathering had nothing to do with militants, however, points again to just how little information they have about their targets before launching missiles at them.

by Gareth Porter and Shah Noori, CommonDreams.org, March 17, 2011

WASHINGTON/KABUL – The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.

The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed. (AFP/Shah Marai) The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for Taliban assassinations.

The Mar. 9 report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of 80 civilians were killed in “search and seizure operations” by “Pro-Government Forces” in 2010.

But AIHRC Commissioner Nader Nadery told IPS the figure represented only the number of civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents involving SOF units that the Commission had been able to investigate thoroughly.

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Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Ewen MacAskill in Washington

The Guardian, March 16, 2011

Jamaat-e-Islami party supporters hold a protest against the release of Raymond Davis, in Karachi. Photograph: Fareed Khan/AP

document id: ALRC-COS-16-21-2011

An Oral Statement to the 16th Session of the UN Human Rights Council from the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organization in general consultative status

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) would, at the outset, like to express its deepest sympathy and solidarity with the people of Japan.

The ALRC is gravely concerned by Sri Lanka’s perilous plunge into autocracy. Increasing religious violence against minorities, as witnessed in Indonesia concerning Ahmadiyyas, and Pakistan concerning Christians and those opposing the archaic and flawed blasphemy law, is also greatly disturbing. The assassination on March 2, of Mr. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Religious Minorities, exactly two months after that of former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, shows the extent to which such violence is tolerated, and promoted through impunity, in Pakistan.

The case of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaipaijit, who was forcibly disappeared seven years ago in Thailand, is emblematic of challenges in the region. On March 11, 2011, the Criminal Court acquitted the five alleged perpetrators in this case, exposing a system of impunity. The verdict ruled that Somchai’s wife, Anghkana, who addressed this Council just last week, and her children, cannot be joint-plaintiffs, preventing them from seeking justice. The defendants were all acquitted because of the lack of legislation specifically prohibiting enforced disappearance and because evidence of Somchai’s death was not possible. In cases of disappearance, the person’s death or injury can, by definition, not be ascertained.

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