Peace and Justice Post

Reuters, Oct. 6, 2011

(Reuters) – Hundreds of Afghans marched through Kabul on Thursday, the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, to condemn the United States as occupiers and demand the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops.

About 300 men and women gathered early in the morning with placards and banners accusing the United States of “massacring” civilians while denouncing President Hamid Karzai as a puppet subservient to Washington.

“Occupation – atrocities – brutality,” read one sign, held aloft by two women with scarves covering their head and face.

“No to occupation” said another placard, as a U.S. flag was set on fire. Another banner featured a caricature of Karzai as a glove puppet holding a pen and signing a document entitled “promises to the USA”.

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By Shamus Cooke, opednews.com, Oct. 4, 2011
Sometimes it explodes. But social explosions are rare events.   Are the Wall Street protests and their nationwide actions that have been inspired by them an explosion or just a flare up?

flickr image  By Chicago Man

Although many of the Wall Street protesters are following the tactics of the Arab Revolutions, they’ve begun on a higher plane politically. The Arab dictatorships made for an easy target and helped unify working people against the regimes; the Wall Street protesters, however, have already identified the money interests behind the bad government in the U.S. — a very similar money interest that rules post-Mubarack Egypt that Egyptians are still mobilizing to dethrone.

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AHRC, October 6, 2011

Statement : The increase in the government’s tolerance of the actions of the militants and fundamentalists and the subsequent insecurity this causes has put the citizens in a state of wilderness and chaos. The failure of the state to provide security to its citizens and other fundamental rights such as: the right to practice the religion of their choice, freedom of speech and association and, of course, the right to have employment and unbiased education, has provided a strong basis for the militant organisations to take the law into their own hands. The irony is that the custodians of the law, the legal fraternity, is also resorting to the use of physical force against the courts and even the laws which should prevent citizens from taking the law in their own hand.

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AHRC, Oct. 5, 2011

Hunger Alert Case : The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that on September 26, hundreds of people hired by a construction company attacked villagers protesting against the construction of a coastal road, allegedly to facilitate the POSCO project. Sticks, stones and hand-bombs were hurled upon the protesters, resulting in 12 injuries, two of them serious. The police allegedly received a prior notice of the attack and were nearby, but did not come to the spot for intervention. Instead, the Inspector in Charge of the Kujang police station humiliated two women who came to file a complaint at the police station, and tried to remove the names of the key perpetrators: the owner of the construction company and the leader of the hired attackers. This was one protest amongst many that have been occurring against the POSCO project in Orissa, which will gravely affect people’s livelihood, food security and the environment.

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Steve Shalom, New Politics, Oct. 5, 2011

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on Friday by a U.S. drone has elicited cheers from most mainstream politicians and pundits. Civil libertarians, however, have noted the terrible precedent this sets: here an American citizen has been targeted for assassination and executed solely on the say-so of the president, with no need to indict him, or present open evidence of his guilt. If the U.S. government had wanted to tap al-Awlaki’s phone, judicial review would have been required. But killing him was totally up to the president.

As the A.C.L.U.’s deputy legal director stated, “this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public, but from the courts.”

To be sure, this was not a case like the killing of Osama bin Laden, where soldiers were on the ground and could have captured him alive without needing to put a bullet through his head if they hadn’t been intent on executing him. Still, Obama’s justification for the drone strike on al-Awlaki — that he is an enemy combatant and we’re at war — is as expansive a claim of executive authority as any put forward by the Bush administration. If the “war on terror” lasts forever and the whole world is a combat zone, then Obama is asserting the unchecked right to serve as judge, jury, and executioner of every person on Earth.

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Twenty six more Bahraini protesters were sent to jail to serve sentences from 5 to 15 years for involvement in recent uprisings, offenses that are essentially exercises of freedom of speech and assembly.

This is only the latest incident where Shiite political activists have been imprisoned unjustly. Last week, 20 medical professionals were sentenced 10 to 15 years in prison for the crime of treating as patients protesters who had injured as a result of government repression. Three days prior to that, some 46 Shiite protesters were sentenced to lengthy prison terms after clashes amid a by-election boycott.

The authoritarian government of Bahrain dismissed claims that these activists had been arrested and imprisoned for protesting, instead claiming that they attempted to murder and kidnap police, and had engaged in so-called “terrorist” violence. Such unlikely assertions are typical among dictatorial regimes that rely on US support.

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by Pham Binh, Dissiden Voice,  October 5th, 2011

The entrapment and arrest of 700 peaceful Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists on the Brooklyn Bridge has created a huge wave of support for their movement. The number of daytime occupants in Liberty Plaza doubled or tripled from 100 the week prior to 200-300 this past Monday and Tuesday. These people are the core who maintain the occupation of the plaza, making it possible for several hundreds and sometimes thousands to hold rallies in the late afternoon and participate in the open mic speakouts and General Assembly meetings in the evening.

The mood of the crowd is defiant and determined. Quite a few people were still unsure of how exactly they had been trapped by the NYPD, but that did not matter.

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Dismantle and Hold Accountable Sunni Extremist Groups

(New York) – The Pakistani government should take all necessary steps to ensure the security of Shia Muslims in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should hold accountable those responsible for ordering and carrying out a campaign of targeted killings against the Shia.

On October 4, 2011, gunmen riding on motorbikes stopped a bus carrying mostly Hazara Shia Muslims who were headed to work at a vegetable market on the outskirts of Quetta, the provincial capital.

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by Sheldon Richman, fff.org, October 3, 2011

The Obama administration’s hypocritical vow to block full UN membership for Palestine shames America. Only a hypocrite could proclaim support for the Arab Spring while opposing this step toward realizing the Palestinian aspiration to be free from the 44-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank and subjugation of Gaza.

The Palestinians have been under brutal and degrading occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War, which they did not start. Their daily lives, when not punctuated by shootings, beatings, and bulldozing of homes and olive groves, are scarred by routine humiliation: military checkpoints, road blocks, arbitrary searches, unpredictable delays, and an inhumanely disruptive “security” wall. No one should have to live like that, yet two generations of Palestinians have been subjected to this cruelty. Some Palestinians, mostly in Gaza, have responded with attacks on Israeli civilians. However comprehensible, it is nonetheless vicious, criminal action.

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It was formed to assist in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in reality, envoy Tony Blair uses it for personal profit.

Quartet envoy Tony Blair has been the target of stinging criticism of late from officials close to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. There have even been murmurs that Abbas’ officials may formally request Blair’s removal.

While Blair’s Quartet role, which he took up the day he left office as UK prime minister in 2007, has undoubtedly been harmful to the Palestinian people and to any semblance of international law, it would not be enough to call for Blair to go.

It is the Quartet itself – an ad hoc committee of US, EU and Russian officials, and the UN Secretary General, that monopolises the so-called “peace process” – that has destroyed what little credibility the United Nations has left on the question of Palestine.

It functions as a front that launders Israeli and American demands as UN and “international” positions, sidelining international law and countless resolutions declaring myriad Israeli actions to be grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

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