Peace and Justice Post

By Conor Friedersdorf, The Antlantic, October 20,  2011

  Every American bears a share of the blame for the innocents killed and the imprudence of weakening historic restraints on the president

Every Western democracy has answered the question, “How should the power of the leader be checked?” In the United States, we separated the role of the sovereign into three co-equal branches, incorporated the Bill of Rights into our written Constitution, and scheduled regular elections when the people, having observed the actions of the executive and legislative branches, regularly decide whether to oust them from office or send them back to Washington, D.C.

When we undercut these safeguards, we accept some share of responsibility for the excesses that result. Bear that in mind as you read Jane Mayer’s description of the new way that America kills its foreign enemies, along with an unknowable number of innocents that add up to hundreds at minimum. “The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there. . .

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Amnesty International, 12 October 2011

The Ukrainian authorities must act immediately to deal with endemic police criminality, Amnesty International said today in a new report that reveals widespread torture, extortion, and arbitrary detention.

No evidence of a crime: Paying the price for police impunity in Ukraine, reveals how police are rarely punished for these crimes because of high levels of corruption, non-existent or flawed investigations, harassment and intimidation of complainants, and a low level of prosecutions for such crimes.

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Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, 24 October 2011

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton solemnly announced Sunday that Washington “strongly supports” an independent investigation into the barbaric murder of Libya’s deposed head of state Muammar Gaddafi.

What exactly is it that Ms. Clinton wants investigated that she doesn’t already know?

Gaddafi was captured Thursday while fleeing his hometown of Sirte. Over the previous month Sirte had been under continuous NATO bombardment and a brutal siege by the so-called “rebels” that destroyed the city and claimed untold numbers of civilian dead and wounded.

His convoy, detected by US spy planes, was attacked first by an American Predator drone aircraft, operated by remote control from an airbase in Nevada. An American AWAC surveillance aircraft then called in French fighter jets, which dropped two 500-pound bombs on the vehicles in which Colonel Gaddafi and his entourage were fleeing.

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ORAL PRESENTATION on 20 October 2011 of Report to the General Assembly by Special Rapporteur on “Situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967,” submitted in 13 September 2011

This is an edited and slightly modified version of my oral statement to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly on 21 October 2011. The main modification is to add a paragraph on the prisoner exchange. I found it disturbing that the single Israel soldier released received virtually all the attention in the Western press whereas the Palestinians released remained nameless except to call attention to the crimes that had led to their imprisonment. It is a rather vivid example of humanizing the suffering of the occupier while treating the far greater ordeal of the occupied population as a statistic. Furthermore, the soldier captured is treated as a hero of war, while the acts of Palestinian resistance are derided as crimes, or worse, as terrorism.

If you have read the complete report, the only new material here are the paragraphs devoted to recent developments.

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Exclusive: President Barack Obama may have thought appointing David Petraeus as CIA director was a political masterstroke, keeping the ambitious ex-general inside the tent. But Petraeus’s close ties to the neocons may now be undercutting Obama’s policy goals, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News, October  20, 2011

The Obama administration is having trouble overcoming skepticism about its allegations that Iran’s Quds spy agency devised a buffoonish plot to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Part of the trouble is the lingering credibility crisis from the bogus WMD charges about Iraq, but that is compounded by what appears to be a re-politicized CIA.

Whatever credibility the CIA has rebuilt in the nine years since it embraced the neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq hiding stockpiles of unconventional weapons is now jeopardized by the activism being shown by its new director, retired Gen. David Petraeus, known as a hard-liner on Iran and a strong ally of the neocons.

Last week, Petraeus found himself caught up in a controversy over whether his top aides were implementing a new analytical approach designed to skew intelligence reporting on the Afghan War to make it more favorable to the ex-general’s insistence that measurable progress is being made there.

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The news of capitalism’s demise is (to borrow from Mark Twain) somewhat exaggerated. Capitalism has an inbuilt wondrous capacity of resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability that leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion. Luxemburg, however, confined the set of organisms, lined up for the outstanding visits of the parasite, to “pre-capitalist economies” – whose number was limited and steadily shrinking under the impact of the ongoing imperialist expansion.

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By the Bradley Manning Support Network. October 19, 2011

Report on Bradley Manning to be Released Soon

NEW YORK — Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, confirmed yesterday that the Department of Defense has blocked his requests for an unmonitored meeting with PFC Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower. He told reporters gathered at a U.N. General Assembly committee on human rights that he would be issuing a report on Bradley Manning’s case “in the next few weeks.”

Mendez noted that the Obama administration had offered the possibility of a meeting, but only under “conditions in which they could not confirm the confidentiality of my conversations with him.”  He said that, according to the rules of his U.N. mandate, “that is a condition that we cannot accept.”  Mendez explained further that he nevertheless offered to meet with PFC Manning, but that “he also chose not to waive his right to have a private conversation with me.”

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Socialist Worker, October 24, 2011

Video footage posted on the Internet showed an injured Qaddafi (left) in the custody of rebels

LIBYA’S FORMER dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed last week as rebels, backed by NATO military forces, conquered the final city holding out against them. The U.S.-backed Transitional National Council (TNC) declared on Sunday that Libya was now “liberated”–but the manner of Qaddafi’s downfall raises questions about that claim.

Most Libyans celebrated the death of the man who ruled their country with an iron fist for more than four decades. Hatred of the Qaddafi regime spurred a popular rebellion last February. This mass mobilization against tyranny was another chapter in the Arab Spring that has spread from Northern Africa across the Middle East.

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By James Petras, Countercurrents.org,  23 October, 2011

The relation between imperialism and democracy has been debated and discussed over 2500 years, from fifth century Athens to Liberty Park in Manhattan. Contemporary critics of imperialism (and capitalism) claim to find a fundamental incompatibility, citing the growing police state measures accompanying colonial wars, from Clinton’s anti-terrorist laws, and Bush’s “Patriot Act” to Obama’s ordering the extrajudicial assassination of overseas US citizens.

In the past, however, many theorists of imperialism of varying political persuasion, ranging from Max Weber to Vladimir Lenin, argued that imperialism unified the country, reduced internal class polarization and created privileged workers who actively supported and voted for imperial parties. A historical, comparative survey of the conditions under which imperialism and democratic institutions converge or diverge can throw some light on the challenges and choices faced by the burgeoning democratic movements erupting across the globe.

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