Peace and Justice Post

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 12 March 2011

An otherwise desultory press conference Friday morning featured the first public questioning of President Obama about the abusive treatment of Bradley Manning, the Army private who faces 34 criminal charges, some bearing the death penalty, for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as State Department cables revealing US diplomatic intrigues.

Manning is jailed at the Quantico Marine Corps base near Washington DC, under conditions that have been denounced by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations as tantamount to torture. He has been held in solitary confinement there for more than seven months. In the last week he has been deprived of all clothing during sleeping hours, then compelled to stand naked for inspection every morning.

If another country were meting out similarly sadistic treatment to a captured American POW, the Pentagon and the American media would be howling about war crimes. But Manning’s treatment has been largely blacked out of the corporate-controlled mass media. Friday’s question was the first time the subject has been raised by the White House press corps.

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Bahrain has seen weeks of protests as demonstrators pressure the nation’s rulers to offer reforms [Reuters]

Hundreds of Saudi troops have entered Bahrain to help protect government facilities there, according to witnesses.

Bahrain television broadcast images of the troops entering the Gulf State, which lies between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, on Monday.

The images back up earlier claims by Saudi sources that a force had entered Bahrain whose Sunni rulers have faced weeks of protests and growing pressure from a majority Shia population to institute political reforms.

“About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain early on Monday morning through the causeway to Bahrain,” the Reuters news agency reported a Saudi source as saying, referring to the 26km causeway that connects the island kingdom to Saudi Arabia.

“They are part of the Gulf Co-operation Council [GCC] force that would guard the government installations.”

In Saudi Arabia, the SPA state news agency carried a government statement saying: “The council of ministers has confirmed that it has answered a request by Bahrain for support.”

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by Chris Hedges, Truthdigcom, .March 14, 2011

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.Damon Terrell speaks to demonstrators at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., during a series of protests against a then-pending bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers. Last Friday Gov. Scott Walker signed the legislation into law. (AP / Andy Manis)

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

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An anti-war  Tamil-English  song

By Villivaru

There’s no denying its historic decline, but the left does not lack for issues. It needs only organisation

Richard Wolff, The Guardian, March 13, 2011

An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday 26 February 2011 to protest Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill that would remove collective bargaining rights from public employees. Photograph: AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, John Hart

The Capitol Square in Madison at 2 p.m. today. Unionists rushed to the Capitol last night and returned today to protest the surprise passage of the governor’s anti-union bill. Photo: antrover.

Police dragged a hundred demonstrators from the Wisconsin statehouse Thursday to break a blockade trying to prevent state representatives from passing the governor’s anti-union bill.

Several thousand bellowed their disapproval outside, joined by more than 1,000 high school and middle school students who walked out of class again to march together to the Capitol.

None of the protesters were arrested, and state representatives spent the afternoon with police blocking Capitol entrances while they debated inside. Republicans have a clear majority in the Assembly and are expected to pass the bill.

Union leaders and a crowd that grew by thousands yesterday evening and throughout the day denounced Wisconsin’s Senate Republicans, who rewrote a month-old bill yesterday to focus just on attacking union rights and collective bargaining.

That allowed them to pass the bill without the participation of Senate Democrats, who reportedly are returning to the state today. Republicans didn’t need them because a quorum of 20 is required only for fiscal measures.

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AHRC, March 10, 2011

Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information regarding the murder of human rights activist Mr. Niyamat Ansari in Kope Gram Panchayat of Latehar District, Jharkhand state, on 2 March, as well as a similar attempt on the same day upon the life of his associate Mr. Bhukhan Singh. It is reported that the local private contractors engaged in the implementation of employment generation schemes under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) are behind the murder since Ansari and Singh were trying to expose the corruption behind the utilisation of funds under the MGNREGA. Only one person has been arrested so far despite nationwide public outcry for immediate arrest of the suspects.

CASE NARRATIVE:

As provided by the notes prepared after detailed enquiries conducted by Prof. Jean Drèze, Mr. James Herenj and Ms. Reetika Khera and also draws on the findings of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) fact finding team on 6 March, 2011. Some details may require further corroboration, but the main points are well established.

On 2 March, 2011 a group of armed men in uniforms abducted Niyamat from his residence in Jerua village (Kope Gram Panchayat). He was brutally beaten for nearly one hour. According to eyewitnesses, the same people who attacked Niyamat in October 2008 did this. It is strongly suspected that Mr. Shankar Dubey, a petty contractor in the locality and his associates instigated these men. After they deserted him, Niyamat’s brother and other family members carried his unconscious body on a charpoy from Jerua village to Manika Police Station, a distance of about 10km. Niyamat’s family reached Manika Police Station by foot, with Niyamat unconscious on a charpoy, before the administration managed to send an ambulance to them. After this, Niyamat was brought to Latehar Sadar Hospital. Soon after reaching there, he died.

The suspects were also seeking out Niyamat’s associate, Mr. Bhukhan Singh to be assaulted. But he was able to save his life by hiding. On the morning of 3 March he was brought to Latehar by the district authorities.

Niyamat is a resident of Kope Gram Panchayat in Manika Block, Latehar District. During the last few years, he was working with Gram Swaraj Abhiyan, a local campaign for village self-rule, also involved in issues such as the right to information, the right to food and the right to work.

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Anti-government protesters confront riot police assembled on a flyover near the Pearl Square in Manama, March 13.(Reuters)

Riot police in Bahrain fired tear gas and rubber bullets at anti-government demonstrators blocking the highway into the capital’s financial district Sunday and also surrounded the protesters’ main camp in the capital, eyewitnesses said.

Protesters blocked off a main thoroughfare to the Bahrain Financial Harbour, a key business district in the Gulf Arab banking centre.

Authorities failed to dislodge the thousands of protesters blocking King Faisal Highway in Manama, the capital.

About two miles (about three kilometers) away, police also moved on the Pearl Square protest camp in the largest effort to clear the area since the demonstrations, inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, started in mid-February. Another rally at a university Sunday also reportedly descended into clashes with police.

Thousands of youths ran across the King Faisal Highway as police backed away in the face of hundreds of protesters who had gathered near the Pearl roundabout, the focal point of weeks of demonstrations on the small Gulf island.

Traffic was stalled for miles (kilometers), and police fired tear gas and used heavy vehicles to try to move the protesters and dismantle the barriers they had set up.

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Uruknet.info

Source: UN News Centre

UN News Centre, 11 March 2011 – An independent United Nations expert has called on Israel to stop illegally demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank, including two apartment buildings in East Jerusalem where 150 people are about to be evicted, citing a recent surge in such actions.”This pattern of eviction, demolition, expansion of settlements, and settlers’ violent expropriation of Palestinian homes in the occupied East Jerusalem violates fundamental human rights, as well as provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing belligerent occupation,” UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Richard Falk said in a statement.  Since the beginning of 2011, Israel has demolished 96 Palestinian structures throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, consisting of 32 homes and other residential structures. As a result, 175 people, more than half of them children, have lost their homes, a sharp increase compared to the same period in 2010 when there were 56 demolitions and 129 people displaced. At the same time, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have continued to expand. Mr. Falk described the decision to demolish the two buildings in the Beit Hanina neighbourhood of East Jerusalem as “particularly disturbing,” noting the families were given only 10 days to vacate their homes last Sunday. He said Israeli authorities often seek to justify demolition of Palestinian homes on the grounds that the owners lack building permits, which are next to impossible for Palestinians to obtain. Continues >>

By ROD NORDLAND, The New York Times, March 12, 2011

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai on Saturday appeared to call for NATO and the United States to cease military operations in Afghanistan, but then issued a clarification saying that he was referring only to specific operations that had caused civilian casualties.

Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A mixed message from Hamid Karzai has raised tensions with American officials.

nar Province, the Afghan president told relatives and neighbors of civilian victims that he sympathized with their plight. “With great honor and with great respect, and humbly rather than with arrogance, I request that NATO and America should stop these operations on our soil,” he said. “This war is not on our soil. If this war is against terror, then this war is not here, terror is not here.”

Mr. Karzai’s remarks were made at a memorial service for the victims, in the presence of local officials as well as the second highest ranking American general in Afghanistan, David M. Rodriguez. “Our demand is that this war should be stopped,” Mr. Karzai said. “This is the voice of Afghanistan.”

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