Peace and Justice Post

By Paul Criag Roberts, opednews.com, Sept. 8, 2011

Earlier this week, I talked to James Corbett of Global Research TV (GRTV) about the significance of the 9/11 attack and  its effect on this nation as we are nearing the 10th anniversary of those events. As Corbett said, we discussed “…the many points at which the official explanation of 9/11 do not mesh with the available evidence, the many experts who have raised their voices in dissent (and been silenced), and what our response to 9/11 teaches us about where we are heading as a society.”

I feel that, at this time in our history, this discussion is critical. Watch the interview below.

Ivan Eland,Antiwar.com,  Sep. 7, 2011

Documents found in the files of Muammar Gadhafi’s intelligence services in Libya, which indicated that the now overthrown dictator cooperated closely with U.S. rendition of terrorist suspects to his torture chambers, should prompt questions about how much President Barack Obama has improved civil liberties from the bad old days of George W. Bush. Answer: not much.

Obama’s first promise in office was to close the infamous and torture-tainted U.S. military prison at Guantanamo within a year, which he abysmally failed to do. Granted, the Republican Congress has blocked the transfer of prisoners from the offshore facility to mainland civilian courts, but Obama, despite his prominent pledge, has failed to make the issue a top priority. The main reason he hasn’t is because politicians of all political stripes read public opinion polls indicating that the American people would rather be safe than free. The politicians should not be surprised by this outcome, because it is they who have scared Americans into preferring “security” at the expense of civil liberties.

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Anticipating a return to power after Republicans win in 2012, the neocons are now in a delaying game to stop any serious cuts in the U.S. military budget, including in the global network of bases, even in countries like Japan where – as Robert Higgs notes – the national security rationale has long since disappeared.

By Robert Higgs, Consortium News, Sep. 7, 2011

After the Japanese government surrendered to the Americans and their allies in 1945, the U.S. military occupied the Japanese home islands and ruled the nation for several years. In due course, however, Japan’s situation was normalized, and, moreover, in 1946 the Japanese adopted a new constitution that renounced war as an instrument of national policy.

The constitution read: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

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Palestinian refugee Mudalala Akel, 86, still holds the keys to her family’s home in what is now Israel. [MaanImages/Wissam Nasser, File]

I have dreamed of participating in the first and the second intifada, in the peaceful protests against the apartheid wall, and in the daily struggle against the occupation in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza as much as I have dreamed of being raised in my homeland and as much as I’ve continuously been hoping for a chance to visit Palestine.

I have also wished that President Abbas would visit some of the camps to see the drastic situation refugees are living in Lebanon instead of only looking to raise the Palestinian flag on the embassy of the state newly recognized by Lebanon. A major question is being raised amongst the refugees’ population in Lebanon: What will be our future?

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by Glenn Greenwald, Commondreams.org, Sep. 7, 2011

Source: Salon

The ACLU decided to use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack to comprehensively survey the severe erosion of civil liberties justified in the name of that event, an erosion that — as it documents — continues unabated, indeed often in accelerated form, under the Obama administration.  The group today is issuing a report entitled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11; that title is intended to underscore the irony that political leaders who prance around as courageous warriors against Terrorism in fact rely on one primary weapon — fear-mongering: the absence of courage — to vest the government with ever-more power and the citizenry with ever-fewer rights.  Domestically, the “War on Terror” has been, and continues to be, a war on basic political liberties more than it is anything else.  The particulars identified in this new ACLU report will not be even remotely new to any readers here, but given the organization’s status among progressives as the preeminent rights-defending group in the country, and given the bird’s-eye-view the report takes of these issues, it is well worth highlighting some of its key findings.

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The CIA is now “one hell of a killing machine,” said one CIA insider, as lethal drones hunt down “bad guys” selected for death by a ramped-up force of CIA target analysts. This shift in emphasis has transformed the spy agency that new director, retired Gen. David Petraeus, inherits, writes Gareth Porter.

 By Gareth Porter, Consortium News, Sep. 6, 2011

When David Petraeus settles into his new office at the Central Intelligence Agency, he will be taking over an organization whose chief mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analyzing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as in Yemen and Somalia.

But the transformation of the CIA did not simply follow the expansion of the drone war in Pakistan to its present level. CIA Director Michael Hayden lobbied hard for that expansion at a time when drone strikes seemed like a failed experiment.

The reason Hayden pushed for a much bigger drone war, it now appears, is that it had already created a whole bureaucracy in the anticipation of such a war.

During 2010, the CIA “drone war” in Pakistan killed as many as 1,000 people a year, compared with the roughly 2,000 a year officially estimated to have been killed by the Special Forces “night raids” in Afghanistan, according to a report in the Sept. 1 Washington Post.

A CIA official was quoted by the Post as saying that the CIA had become “one hell of a killing machine,” before quickly revising the phrase to “one hell of an operational tool”.

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Angus Stickler, uruknet.info, Sep. 6, 2011

Source: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

A BBC News report that a Nato-led mission in Afghanistan is considering suspending the transfer of detainees to Afghan jails following allegations of widespread torture is surprising. Not because of the revelations over the brutal treatment of prisoners, but that they are considering taking action at all. Troop contributing countries have been handing over detainees to the Afghan authorities in the full knowledge they are at risk of torture for years. And it has continued unabated. Only last year the US State Department Country Report, referenced torture and abuse methods, including but not limited to: ‘beating by stick, scorching bar, or iron bar; flogging by cable; battering by rod; electric shock; deprivation of sleep, water, and food; abusive language; sexual humiliation; and rape’. Continues >>

Editorial,

Socialist Worker, September 7, 2011

AFTER THE attacks of September 11 in New York City and Washington, D.C., Socialist Worker produced a special edition of our newspaper with the front-page headline, “Don’t turn tragedy into war.”

But of course, the Bush administration did just that–first with the invasion of Afghanistan, and then Iraq. One decade later, those wars have spawned countless tragedies of their own, throughout the Bush years and continuing into the presidency of Barack Obama.

The scale of the state-sponsored terrorism that took place after September 11 will never be known in its entirety–precisely because its scope is so vast.

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by Paul Craig Roberts, Foreign Policy Journal, August 25, 2011

In a few days, it will be the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.  How well has the US government’s official account of the event held up over the decade?

Not very well.  The chairman, vice chairman, and senior legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission wrote books partially disassociating themselves from the commission’s report.  They said that the Bush administration put obstacles in their path, that information was withheld from them, that President Bush agreed to testify only if he was chaperoned by Vice President Cheney and neither were put under oath, that Pentagon and FAA officials lied to the commission, and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for investigation for obstruction of justice.

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by Frank Legge , (B.Sc., Ph.D., Chemistry) and David Chandler, (B.S. Physics, M.S., Mathematics)

Foreign Policy Journal, September 6, 2011

Download the full paper (PDF)

Introduction

The legal and political implications of 9/11 have turned scientific research in this area into a high stakes competition for the minds of the public. Pertinent information has been kept secret, the corporate media has systematically kept “damaging” information (such as video images of the World Trade Center Building 7) out of public view, 9/11 research has been marginalized, and the official investigations have failed to answer, or in many cases even address, the most troubling questions. One development that appears to be a tactic in the ongoing cover-up is the high profile promotion of transparently false theories, “straw men,” the only purpose of which appears to be to allow the 9/11 Truth Movement to be ridiculed.

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