Peace and Justice Post

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by Pepe Escobar

No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum – piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism – Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script”. It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn’t be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered “a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives”.

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United States officials in the Obama administration and Justice Department have explicitly claimed that Iran’s supreme leader and the Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of the so-called terror plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. But evidence of that is lacking and many officials have admitted there are gaps in their understanding of the plot.

The Obama administration has combatively blamed the highest echelons of the Iranian government and promised impending consequences, despite the fact that there is no solid information about “exactly how high it goes,” as one official put it.

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The situation of Balochistan is no different to that of the former East Pakistan (Bangladesh) when the military carried out operations and killed more than 300,000 people in the guise of protecting ideological boundaries.

The government does not consider extrajudicial killings anything out of the ordinary and one of the reasons for this is that they have lost all control over the military, Para-Military forces and state intelligence agencies that control the province. These military forces brook no interference into their affairs and use ‘national security’ and the protection of ideological boundaries to justify the killings and disappearances of innocent persons, particularly students.

Not a single day goes by without an extrajudicial killing. In the recent years a new phenomenon has been introduced in the cases of disappearances where the victims are extrajudicially killed in order to destroy any evidence of wrong doing.

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It appears unlikely that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would approve such a brazen plot. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

It has the ring of a far-fetched Hollywood thriller and even the senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation admitted to journalists that the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US did not fit with what was known about the methods and practices of the supposed perpetrators, the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards. But $100,000 was clearly transferred by someone as a downpayment on the assassination. Washington is taking the case seriously enough to make unprecedented allegations against Tehran and threaten further isolation. The affair leaves several questions unanswered:

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U.N. says Afghanistan routinely tortures war suspects | McClatchy.

By Peter Symonds, wsws.org, 11 October 2011

At a press conference last Thursday, President Obama made his clearest warning yet that Pakistan had to do more to crack down on Islamist insurgents. While ruling out any immediate aid cut-off, he declared: “There is no doubt that we’re not going to feel comfortable with a long-term strategic relationship with Pakistan if we don’t think they’re mindful of our interests as well.”

Obama’s remarks follow weeks of mounting US pressure on Pakistan, including accusations by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen in late September that the Haqqani network inside Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan acted as “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s spy agency—the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Mullen alleged that the Haqqani network was responsible for high-profile attacks against targets in Kabul.

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By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, Inter Press Service

Activists on hunger strike in support of prisoners. Credit:Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

HAIFA, Northern Israel, Oct 10, 2011 (IPS) – Sitting in the shade of a small lemon tree in the German Colony area of Haifa, eight Palestinian activists are on hunger strike since Saturday in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners who have been striking for nearly two weeks in protest against poor prison conditions and a lack of basic rights.

“I decided to participate in the hunger strike in order to support the political prisoners, the freedom fighters, imprisoned in the Israeli dungeons. As a Palestinian, I know for sure that those fighters, those men and women, have fought in order to defend my rights,” Muhannad Abu Ghosh, a Haifa resident and one of the hunger strikers, told IPS.

“This hunger strike declared in Haifa is breaking through the borders which were put by the Israeli occupation throughout the years,” Abu Ghosh added.

More than 100 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails began an open-ended hunger strike on Sep. 27. Their demands include stopping Israel’s use of solitary confinement, including that of Ahmad Sa’adat, general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), rectifying the arbitrary nature of denying family visits, and ending the routine humiliation of detainees during prison transfer.

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Listen to Rep. Ron Paul deliver this address.

According to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Americans are never to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Constitution is not some aspirational statement of values, allowing exceptions when convenient; rather, it is the law of the land. It is the basis of our Republic and our principal bulwark against tyranny.

Last week’s assassination of two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, is an outrage and a criminal act carried out by the president and his administration. If the law protecting us against government-sanctioned assassination can be voided when there is a “really bad American,” is there any meaning left to the rule of law in the United States? If, as we learned last week, a secret government committee, not subject to congressional oversight or judicial review, can now target certain Americans for assassination, under what moral authority do we presume to lecture the rest of the world about protecting human rights? Didn’t we just bomb Libya into oblivion under the auspices of protecting the civilians from being targeted by their government?

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Dan Sharber looks at the deep connections between Marxist thought and environmentalism.

Socialist Worker, October 6, 2011

Karl Marx

ALTHOUGH NOT as popular a charge as it once was, Marxists are sometimes accused of being concerned with economics to the exclusion of environmental concerns. According to some environmentalists and leftists, Marxists praise the domination of nature by man, while leaving environmental problems to be sorted out by some future technological innovation.

Reading Marx, however, tells a different story. In his 1844 political manuscripts, Marx wrote about the link between humans and the natural world:

Physically, man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body–both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body–nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature–means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

While this may seem esoteric, it is pretty straightforward. Marx simply reasserts what many had known before him, dating back to the writings of Greek philosophers who Marx was familiar with and wrote his doctoral dissertation about: mainly, that we are nature as much as a tree is nature, and that destruction of nature is suicide since it is self-destruction.

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By Samuel Dowell, opednews.com, Oct 11, 2011

“I tend to believe things that a son says to his father in private. To this end, we should go back to 2009, to the words revealed by the father, Benzion Netanyahu, regarding the conduct of his son, Benjamin. With the consent of his son, the prime minister, the father gave an interview to Amit Segal on Channel 2 News, and this is what he said about the Bar-Ilan speech advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state: “He [the prime minister] doesn’t support it. He supports it under conditions that they [the Arabs] will never accept. That’s what I heard from him, not from myself. He proposed the conditions. They will never accept those conditions, not one of them,” said Netanyahu Sr.” [One of those conditions was acceptance of a “Jewish” State.] [1]

The Palestine Liberation Organization recognized the State of Israel as part of the Oslo Accords in 1993.  Recognition of a Jewish State is a new demand that did not come up during years of negotiations in the 1990s or in peace treaties reached with Egypt and Jordan.

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