Peace and Justice Post

Investigate Allegations of Torture of Labor Activists

Humqan Rights Watch, May 3, 2011

Bangladesh’s international reputation is at risk when prosecutors pursue such serious charges against labor activists without making the evidence public. With the charges against these men and the deregistering of their organization there is a strong appearance that the authorities are targeting the Center for Worker Solidarity.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch

(New York) – The Bangladesh government should end the legal harassment of Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity leaders and staff and instruct its NGO Affairs Bureau to re-register the organization, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed.

Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS) leaders Kalpona Akhter and Babul Akhter and staff member Aminul Islam are facing a wide range of criminal charges including attempted murder, criminal intimidation, violence against civil servants, mischief causing damage, and violation of the Explosive Substances Act of 1908 in ten cases arising from violence related to labor unrest in June and July 2010. Some of the charges could lead to the death penalty.

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AFP/File – UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, seen here in 2010, has called for “a full disclosure of the accurate …

OSLO (AFP) – UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on Thursday called for “a full disclosure of the accurate facts” to determine the legality of the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“I’m still for a full disclosure of the accurate facts,” Pillay told reporters in Oslo.

“I think it’s not just my office but anybody is entitled to know exactly what happened,” she added.

Pillay’s declarations come a day after US Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate hearing the raid during which bin Laden was killed “was lawful and consistent with our values.”

“The United Nations condemns terrorism but it also has basic rules of how counter-terrorism activity has to be carried out. It has to be in compliance with international law,” she said.

“For instance, you’re not allowed (…) to commit torture or extra-judicial killings,” she explained.

The White House’s changing story over the attack has raised doubts about US assurances that the US special operations forces sent to bin Laden’s lair in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad were prepared to take him alive.

“If he had surrendered, I think — attempted to surrender — I think we should, obviously, have accepted that,” Holder told the Senate committee.

Pillay said this week “the United States has clearly stated that their intention was to arrest bin Laden if they could, I fully understand that this was always likely to have been difficult.”

On Monday, the White House said bin Laden was armed when he was shot dead in his comfortable compound not far from Islamabad.

But a day later, White House spokesman Jay Carney corrected that account, saying the terror chief was unarmed when gunned down by an elite team of US Navy SEALs in what he called a “highly volatile firefight.”

 Asian Human Rights Commission, May 5, 2011

(Hong Kong, May 5, 2011) The inhabitants of Paikgachha have again held a rally demanding the arrest of Mustafizur Rahman Bokul, a major in the Bangladesh army, and his aides for gouging the eyes of human rights defender FMA Razzak and his brother Bodiuzzaman Bodiar. The rally was held at the zero point of Paikgachha town on Thursday, 5 May, afternoon.

People of Paikgachha demand arrest of army major Mustfizur and other attackers in a procession on Thursday – AHRC Photo

Freedom-fighter and vice president of the Bangladesh Awami League Godaipur union unit, Mr. Mohammad Shahjahan Sharder, presided over the rally. Among others the rally was addressed by the president of the Godaipur Jubo League (youth wing of Bangladesh Awami League, ruling political party) Mr. Zakir Hossain, journalist Alauddin Raza, businessman Ziauddin Nayeb, transport worker Jamil Biswas and a neighbour of Razzak, Azibor Gazi. Around five hundred people, including journalists, public representatives of the local government units, businessmen and people of all walks of life took part in the rally.

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Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations Steve R. Pieczenik says he is prepared to tell a federal grand jury the name of a top general who told him directly 9/11 was a false flag attack

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com, Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Top US government insider Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a man who held numerous different influential positions under three different Presidents and still works with the Defense Department, shockingly told The Alex Jones Show yesterday that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001 and that he was prepared to testify in front of a grand jury how a top general told him directly that 9/11 was a false flag inside job.

Pieczenik cannot be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist”. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. A former US Navy Captain, Pieczenik achieved two prestigious Harry C. Solomon Awards at the Harvard Medical School as he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT.

Recruited by Lawrence Eagleburger as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management, Pieczenik went on to develop, “the basic tenets for psychological warfare, counter terrorism, strategy and tactics for transcultural negotiations for the US State Department, military and intelligence communities and other agencies of the US Government,” while also developing foundational strategies for hostage rescue that were later employed around the world.

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Paul Joseph Watson

Infowars.com,  May 5, 2011

In addition to images of President Obama’s address to the American public on Sunday night, it has emerged that the dramatic photos of Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton and members of the White House security team watching the assassination of Bin Laden “live” were in fact completely staged, casting further doubt on the ever-changing official account of the operation.

On Tuesday, the White House released provocative images that purported to show, “US President Barack Obama watching live footage of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.”

In one particularly dramatic photo, Hillary Clinton is seen with her hand anxiously clasped over her mouth as if reacting to a crucial event. Other photos show Obama and his staff with stern faces as they discuss the operation while it unfolds.

The photos were described by many as having “historical significance,” forming a “captivating” record of Obama’s greatest success and being the “defining moment” of his Presidency.

We were also told by the media that, “The leader of the free world saw the terror chief shot in the left eye.”

“US president Barack Obama along with his high-level team, watched live coverage in the White House, as the commandos gunned down the world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden Via a video camera fixed to the helmet of a US Navy Seal,” it was also reported.

US chief counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan claimed that the head cameras that fed audio and video back to the White House, allowed Obama and his staff to track the operation “on an ongoing basis”.

But the claims have been proven to be completely fraudulent.

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Paul Craig Roberts, LewRockwell.com   May 5, 2011

The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said, “was not armed.”

The firefight story was instantly suspicious as not a single SEAL got a scratch, despite being up against al Qaeda, described by former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

Every original story detail has been changed. It wasn’t bin Laden’s wife who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but the wife of an aide. It wasn’t bin Laden’s son, Khalid, who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but son Hamza.

Carney blamed the changed story on “the fog of war.” But there was no firefight, so where did the “fog of war” come from?

The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video.

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The Obama administration has hardly said a peep about the need for democracy in Saudi Arabia or the other oil-rich states of the Gulf, even as those regimes are cracking down on the small but growing number of democracy activists in their midst.

By Hannah Gurman, OtherWords.org, May 2, 2011

The U.S. response to the democratic uprisings sweeping the Middle East and North Africa is as notable for its silence as for its uneven support for the Arab Spring.

It took weeks of incessant protest in Tunisia and Egypt before the Obama administration would say much or do anything to support the protesters in those countries. While Washington intervened in Libya to protect civilians from Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks, it’s responding to uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, and Iraq with a particular quiescence. The Obama administration has hardly said a peep about the need for democracy in Saudi Arabia or the other oil-rich states of the Gulf, even as those regimes are cracking down on the small but growing number of democracy activists in their midst.

In recent weeks, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has joined the list of Gulf states that, without eliciting much outrage from the United States, have silenced individuals demanding even modest steps toward democratic reform. The UAE, a federation of emirates including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, has no political parties and never holds free elections. In response to the revolutions in the region, public intellectuals, academics, and political activists in the country have advanced a democracy campaign of their own.

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by Malik Ayub Sumbal

No one knows about the reality and sad saga of these greenish veiled and shaved head individuals carried by their masters with a chain about their necks to get the sympathies of the masses for the sake of begging.

The worst form of slavery in the name of religious tradition has become a common practice in Pakistan as no law and authority is ready to save these enforced mentally retarded slaves from their cruel masters and the beggar’s mafia.

In Pakistan where such kind of examples of the worst inhuman attitude and behaviours is a routine matter no one dares to shed their tears on these issues. Slavery has been banned the world over but still in Pakistan human beings are made to be slaves for the shameful acts of the inhuman and brutal mafia in the country.

There is a worst form of slavery, having a stupid and so called spiritual myth to tell the people to get more commiseration and money in the name of these innocent people who have been paralyzed by this mafia through a brutal manner.

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by Spencer Ackerman, CommonDreams.org, May 5, 2011

Source: Wired.com

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in warzones; no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry; and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

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By Immanuel Wallerstein, ZNet, May 1, 2011

I have to start my story by outlining what I consider to be the context of your discussion. You say you want to look at “avant-gardes from the decline of modernism to the rise of globalization, 1956-1986”. It is not clear to me whether these dates were chosen because of turning points in the artworld or turning points in the world political arena – perhaps both.

Your background text lays emphasis on the large number of authoritarian regimes that existed in various parts of the world at the beginning of that period and presumably fewer towards the end. You talk about the rise of globalization, presumably towards the end of that period. The shift you want to discuss is very real, but let me offer you a slightly different set of temporal cutting-points to illuminate this story – 1945, 1956, 1968, 1979-1980, 1989-1991, 2001-2003, 2008-2010.

1945: This was of course the end of the Second World War. More important, it was the end of an intense 30-year-long struggle between the United States and Germany in their efforts, begun in the 1870s, to succeed Great Britain as the hegemonic power of the world-system.

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