Peace and Justice Post

  Danny Schechter, opednews.com, May 13, 2012

This article cross-posted from Consortium News

A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division patrolling an Afghan village at dawn on May 4, 2012, as U.S. press interest in the war declines. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod)

Foreign correspondents have always been revered within journalism. That’s why covering Iraq or other wars are assignments so many reporters cultivate. Many see them as a ticket up the media pecking order.

Being “under fire” promises excitement, danger and — let’s face it, on TV  — precious “face time.” Going overseas is often a route to more visibility and better jobs at home on the strength of your “bravery.” War reporting can be the macho oxygen of ambition.

Just as covering a turbulent world is attractive in the ranks, up in the suites of media power “foreign news” is, according to Michael Wolff, a “nostalgist’s beat” said to turn off American audiences and tune them out. That’s why decision-makers shutter bureaus and redefine news of the world as news of American power in the world.  (They also realize financial savings by doing so, of course.)

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Noam Chomsky explains why the drug war is a war on Latin America. (photo: Daniel Simpson)

By Noam Chomsky, Nation of Change

hough sidelined by the Secret Service scandal, last month’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, was an event of considerable significance. There are three major reasons: Cuba, the drug war, and the isolation of the United States.

A headline in the Jamaica Observer read, “Summit shows how much Yanqui influence had waned.” The story reports that “the big items on the agenda were the lucrative and destructive drug trade and how the countries of the entire region could meet while excluding one country – Cuba.”

The meetings ended with no agreement because of U.S. opposition on those items – a drug-decriminalization policy and the Cuba ban. Continued U.S. obstructionism may well lead to the displacement of the Organization of American States by the newly-formed Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, from which the United States and Canada are excluded.

Cuba had agreed not to attend the summit because otherwise Washington would have boycotted it. But the meetings made clear that U.S. intransigence would not be long tolerated. The U.S. and Canada were alone in barring Cuban participation, on grounds of Cuba’s violations of democratic principles and human rights.

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By: Zafar Iqbal, Eurasia Review,  May 11, 2012

Noam Chomsky and other 12 major personalities of academia, politics, activism and journalism have called on the Government of Pakistan to drop the charge it has manufactured against a leftist political worker Baba Jan and his four fellow activists. The petition urges the Pakistani regime ‘to treat them as political prisoners-not as terrorists.’ Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian, Simon Crithcley R C Young, Farooq Tariq and others issued the appeal in order to highlight the miseries of Pakistani campaigners who have allegedly suffered from state torture in the jail and access of their lawyers has been restricted.

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Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military’s Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.

In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.

Carlson is one of only three American servicemen who have won benefits from the U.S. government over exposure to the toxic defoliant on Okinawa — and the first of them to step forward and reveal that massive amounts of it were kept on the island.

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Wednesday, 09 May 2012 By Hugh Gusterson, Truthout

A member of the 214th Reconnaissance Group flies a Predator aircraft drone in support of ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan at Davis-Monthan Air Base in Tucson, March 10, 2009. (Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times)I kept finding myself thinking about the lunchbox.

I was at the all-day Drone Summit in Washington DC organized by Codepink, the antiwar group whose mostly female members are famous for putting on theatrical protests while wearing bold pink. I spent the day listening to human rights activists talking about civilians killed by US drone strikes, lawyers who complained that the strikes violated international law, and scientists worried that the United States is on the brink of automating the use of lethal force by drones and killer robots.

And I kept thinking about the lunchbox.

The lunchbox belonged to a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Her body was never found, but the rice and peas in her lunchbox were carbonized by the atomic bomb. . .

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By Gareth Porter, OpEdNews.com, May 3, 2012

Cross-posted from Consortium News

President Barack Obama arriving in Afghanistan on his May 1 trip to sign a new strategic accord with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. (White House photo by Pete Souza)

The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasize transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan — well hidden in the agreements — has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

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by Edward C. Corrigan, Dissident Voice,  May 1,  2012

One of the favourite tactics of supporters of Israel and Zionism is to accuse their opponents of ‘anti-Semitism’. This argument is advanced in an attempt to prevent criticism of Israel from being presented, or to attack the individual or group, that is defending Palestinian human rights.

Implicit in this criticism is the idea that all Jews, except a handful of ‘self haters’ support the Israeli state. Such an argument is inherently anti-Semitic, based as it is on the notion of a collective ethnic adherence to a particular political position. It also ascribes guilt for Israel’s crimes upon Jewish people collectively.

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Obama Aide: Constitution Makes Strikes Lawful Anywhere on Planet

Fresh off of an interview yesterday in which he shrugged off civilian killings in the US drone war, top White House adviser John O. Brennan was ordered to provide more “openness” on the program at a speech today in Washington.

This time, Brennan centered on the legality of the strikes, insisting that not only does the Constitution allow the president to assassinate people anywhere on the planet, but that the drone program was “legal, ethical and wise.”

Brennan went on to insist that there was “nothing in international law” that prohibits launching attacks on “enemies” outside of actual battlegrounds. Several organizations took issue with this and his other claims.

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