Peace and Justice Post

PFLP, March 12, 2011

PJ Crowley says Pentagon is being ‘ridiculous and stupid’ by subjecting WikiLeaks suspect to punitive conditions in jail

Ed Pilkington in New York, The Guardian, March 11, 2011

Bradley Manning is facing multiple charges relating to his alleged releasing of state secrets. Photograph: EPA

By Kevin Zeese, Consortium News, March 9, 2011

Editor’s Note: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top U.S. officials lecture world leaders on the need to respect the free flow of information as vital to democracy.

In other countries, brave whistleblowers are heroes, but in the United States, when Pvt. Bradley Manning allegedly exposed crimes and misconduct on a global scale, he was subjected to humiliation and punishment that would make many police states blush, as Kevin Zeese discusses in this guest essay:

Reports that Bradley Manning is being held nude every night at the Quantico Brig, then forced to stand naked in the hallway while he waits for his clothes, shows the inconsistency of the treatment of Manning with basic American values of due process, fair trial and human dignity.

Here is how his lawyer David Coombs describes his treatment:

“The Brig has stripped PFC Manning of all of his clothing for the past three nights, and they intend to continue this practice indefinitely. Each night, Brig guards force PFC Manning to relinquish all of his clothing.

“He then lies in a cold jail cell naked until the following morning, when he is required to endure the humiliation of standing naked at attention for the morning roll call.

“According to Marine spokesperson, First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, the decision to strip him naked every night is for PFC Manning’s own protection. Villiard stated that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to explain what prompted these actions ‘because to discuss the details would be a violation of PFC Manning’s privacy.’”

Manning, who has not been convicted of anything, has been held in virtual solitary confinement for ten months. David House who has visited him since September described him as “emotionally exhausted” and “catatonic.”

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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The United States, governed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, tortures political prisoners. That truth is on display for all the world to see, in the treatment of Wikileaks defendant Private Bradley Manning, who is stripped naked every night in an effort to crush his psyche. “The enemy is anyone, anywhere who dares to consider revealing the truth about how this country actually conducts itself around the world.”

Freedom Rider: Peace Prize Torture

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Manning is denied the use of sheets and now is forced to sleep naked and stand naked outside of his cell when it is inspected.”

If members of the Norwegian Nobel committee do not feel embarrassment for making Barack Obama a peace prize laureate, then they are as shameless as the man they foolishly chose to honor. Barack Obama is every bit the authoritarian as his predecessor George W. Bush. He too believes in his right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and restrict their rights to due process. He too has cracked down on whistle blowers and is determined to ferret them out and punish them.

The continued psychological torture of Pfc. Bradley Manning is the latest case in point. Manning is accused of leaking information to Julian Assange of Wikileaks, telling the world about the indiscriminate killings of Iraqis and other horrors brought about by the continuing American occupation.

Manning, who has yet to be tried or convicted of any crime, has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day ever since his arrest ten months ago. Last week the army added 22 additional charges, including “aiding the enemy.”

“Manning has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day ever since his arrest ten months ago.”

Manning’s one hour outside of his cell allows him only to walk in circles in another room. He is denied the use of sheets and now is forced to sleep naked and stand naked outside of his cell when it is inspected.

The government’s objective is a simple one. They want to break Manning so that he will talk about any communications he has had with Julian Assange. In other words, they are trying to drive him crazy in order to prosecute someone else. Manning has been denied visits from friends, journalists and even government officials such as Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

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by Ira Chernus, CommonDreams.org, March 10, 2011

Sometimes it’s the good guys who do the most harm, because they know not what they do.

Take, for example, the New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen. He has become the U.S. mass media’s most progressive voice on the Israel-Palestine conflict, consistently telling the right-wing Israeli government to make genuine efforts and meaningful compromises for peace. With a name like Cohen, there’s no doubt he’s got the weight of his Jewish identity as well as the prestige of his newspaper behind him. So his call for a just peace carries as much influence as anyone’s in the mainstream political debate, and a lot more than most.

But the most recent U.S. decision on Mideast policy shows how limited is the influence of Roger Cohen and everyone else criticizing the Obama administration for its pro-Israel tilt. As Cohen noted in his latest column, Obama decided to veto a UN Security Council resolution “condemning Israeli settlement building in the West Bank” — even though the president himself has said clearly that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy” of the Israeli construction and has demanded that it stop.

Why take such an embarrassing step, when every other Security Council member supported the resolution? “It’s Obama who’s facing an election next year where censure of Israel would cost him,” Cohen explained, stating the obvious.

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The latest UN report puts the death toll for Afghan civilians across the nation in 2010 to 2,777, the largest since the war began in 2001 and a 15% increase over the toll from 2009. The vast majority of those killed were random victims of the fighting between NATO and the Taliban.

But deliberate targetings of civilians seen as supporters of NATO is also dramatically on the rise, as is the tactic of kidnapping civilians to be held for random. The UN said it has contacted the Taliban to advise them on ways to get the toll down.

Perhaps the most surprising number, however, was just how much NATO’s civilians killings were down in 2010, a 26 percent decline by the UN’s count. This reflects the lack of the high kill count air strikes seen in 2009, and suggests that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to bring the civilian toll down were working even better than anyone knew.

But of course Gen. McChrystal is gone now, and his replacement, Gen. David Petraeus, has put a renewed emphasis on air strikes, even in heavily populated areas. This has resulted in a growing number of high profile civilian killings by NATO, particularly in air strikes, and growing public anger. If the trend continues as it has through the past two months, it seems assured that the 2011 NATO toll will dwarf its 2010 toll, and may well top the 2009 toll as well.

Oh God protect us, Henry Kissinger is back!

By Dr Lawrence Davidson, Opinion Maker, March 9, 201

Henry Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. He also held the latter [/caption]position under President Gerald Ford. While it would be unfair to characterize him as someone who never gave a piece of good advice (he did encourage Nixon to engage in Detente with the Soviet Union), his record weighs heavily on the side of unwise counsel. As we will see he is back in exactly that role, plying bad advice that, in this case, could further erode America’s already messed up intelligence agencies.

Kissinger was originally an academic. His doctoral dissertation was on the diplomacy of two early 19^th century statesmen, Britain’s Viscount Robert Castlereagh and Austria’s Prince Klemens von Metternich. These men were major players at the great Congress of Vienna that took place after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. At that meeting Metternich argued for returning Europe to its pre French Revolution political status. Pursuing that impossible end, he backed repressive policies and regimes. One gets the impression that the history of Kissinger’s public service was, at least in part, an effort to achieve the stature of a Metternich. Toward this end Kissinger would pursue “realpolitik” which, more often than not in its American manifestation, entailed the backing of repressive policies and regimes.

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Hillary Clinton AFP/File image

Eric Blair, Activist Post, March 8, 2011

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been exhaustively in front of cameras promoting the right for people to protest in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, and Libya.  She’s been touting the freedom to use social networking sites as a way for Arab people to organize against their oppressive regimes.  Now, the Administration is even considering arming the opposition in Libya.

Clinton’s perpetual propaganda efforts exposed her blatant hypocrisy when a silent peaceful protester was violently removed from one of her recent speeches on the very subject. However, the hypocrisy now seems to go much deeper in her deafening silence over the prospect for protests in Saudi Arabia.

After Human Rights Watch revealed that a nationwide “Day of Rage” protest had been planned in Saudi Arabia for this week, March 11th, Bloomberg reported that the Saudi government claims that demonstrations and marches are “strictly” prohibited by law.  A Saudi Interior Ministry official said protests “contradict Islamic values” and “They harm public interest, infringe on the rights of others, spread chaos and lead to bloodshed.”

This prohibition of popular dissent proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Saudi Arabia is indeed the most tyrannical authoritarian regime in the Arab world.  Yet, U.S. Administration officials have been strangely silent about supporting the people’s uprising there.

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The struggle of man (or woman) against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. — Milan Kundera

It was not simply the number of lives lost, though the number — perhaps 2,500 — is not insignificant. It was the cold-blooded manner in which they were taken. It was not simply that 19 of Gujarat’s 25 districts burned while Neros watched, fiddled and smirked but the sinister similarity in the way they were set alight. Militias were armed with deadly training, weapons, technology and equipment; with a lethal brew of deadly intent, inspired by constructed tales of hate, using the February 28, 2002 edition of a leading Gujarati daily that urged revenge; all combined with a deadly white chemical powder that seared to burn and destroy already killed bodies. And, of course, truckloads of gas cylinders, in short supply for cooking, were used instead to blast mosques and homes. Mobile phones and motorcycles made communications easy and movement swift.

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