Peace and Justice Post

By K.Gajendra Singh

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Need of an independent International Commission for 9/11

Richard Clarke says that there must have been a conspiracy within the CIA regarding 11/9 and that though he does not believe that it was intended to make 11/9 happen, it actually allowed 11/9 to happen.( Clarke was counter-terrorism Chief with Bill Clinton and George Bush).

“It is not unthinkable for former US President George W. Bush to lie about who was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks on the American soil. — for some Americans, the deaths of nearly 3,000 people were not the scariest thing about 9/11. It was realizing who carried out the attack: yes, the American Government,” Mahathir Mohamad, former Malaysian Prime minister.

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by Felicity Arbuthnot, Dissident Voice,  September 15th, 2011

Since 1990 upper estimates are of three million Iraqi deaths between sanctions, bombings and invasion, under four US Administrations. One thousand 9/11s.

— Malcom Lagauche, ”The Mother of all Battles: The Endless US-Iraq War“

I once worked for a man whose inconsistencies and delusions stretched the mind to a realm beyond confusion. Having laid down specific edicts as to aims and how they should be achieved, the following day he would yell at staff for following them – and deny all knowledge of his instructions.

One day an exasperated colleague hung a placard on the wall above his desk before he arrived. It read: “You are never alone with schizophrenia.”

Combing through Tony Blair’s statements over the years, this week of the tenth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, I had a feeling of deja vu.

The former Prime Minister is, however, totally consistent in one thing — his inconsistency.

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Michael Parenti, Information Clearing House, Sept. 14, 2011

For more than a week–and extending into September 12 and probably continuing a while longer– the media have saturated the airwaves with 9/11 stories including sad tragic tales of friends of people who knew relatives who were lost or affected in some way by the terrible attacks of ten years ago. We kept hearing how we as a people and a nation “were never the same after 9/11.” (So might as well go bomb Afghanistan for ten years and destroy Iraq and now Libya.)

Again and again we heard “What were you doing when you first heard the news?” “How did it make you feel to confront such a loss? “Do you still grieve for him or have you achieved closure?” “And what of that generation that was too young to remember 9/11? What are they thinking now?” and on and on, all day, all week.

The whole world is repeatedly expected to give sympathy and admiration to America the Great, the nation that sustained this tremendous 9/11 loss yet gathered itself together and met the enemy (whoever that might be). Overlooked in all this is the fact that other nations continue to experience equally horrible attacks, if not even more bloody and costly in lives than America’s endlessly observed and mourned 9/11. And the US military is often the perpetrator.

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Erik Wendt & Therese Rytter, Rehabilitation & Research Centre for Torture Victims, Denmark

It is well documented that torture, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial executions are carried out throughout Asia by agents of the state, notably police, military, and special investigation units, who expose ordinary citizens to such heinous crimes in complete disregard of national legislation.

Torture is rampant, but even today it remains a taboo in many countries — and for good reasons. Human rights defenders and civil society organizations strive to break this taboo. They meticulously document torture and other human rights violations and disseminate information about these abusive practices to the governments and the general public in their countries. A human rights movement is growing, demanding an immediate stop to the use of torture. But more needs to be done to bring more people into this movement, notably parliamentarians, medical professionals, media people, and other progressive forces.

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by Richard Falk and Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy Journal, September 14, 2011

The latest United Nations report on last year’s lethal flotilla incident – in which nine people were killed and many injured by Israeli commandos on board a humanitarian ship bound for Gaza – was released at the beginning of September, and generated much controversy. On the one hand, the report makes clear that Israel’s use of force on board the Mavi Marmara and in the treatment of those detained on the ship was excessive and unreasonable. It acknowledges that forensic evidence indicates at least seven were shot in the head or chest, five of them at close range, and recognizes that Israel still refused to provide any accounting of how the nine people were killed. It calls on Tel Aviv to compensate the families of those killed, eight Turks and one American, and also those who were seriously injured during and after the incident, passengers roughed up while in Israeli custody and whose cameras, cell phones and other belongings were confiscated.

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By William deB. Mills, MWC News, Sept. 12, 2011

Does a little anti-Israeli PR from Cairo when the Egyptian government obviously needs to calm down its population really matter?

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry website reports:

On receiving the United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Michael Williams, Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr affirmed the importance of exerting all possible efforts to maintain stability in Lebanon and protecting it from all regional developments which might be negatively reflected on the country and the importance of excluding any political actor from the Lebanese equation

Spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Counselor Amr Roushdi stated that the Minister stressed that the main guarantee for Lebanese and regional stability is the immediate halting of the daily Israeli violations of the Lebanese airspace and respecting the Lebanese sovereignty over its space and soil.

In the context of a world nearly united in favor of the recognition of a Palestinian state, the popular Egyptian calls for an end to the Egyptian-Israeli alliance, the collapse of Israeli-Turkish ties, and the utter loss of U.S. credibility as a peace broker, yes, it matters.

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(Reuters) – Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip violates international law, a panel of human rights experts reporting to a U.N. body said on Tuesday, disputing a conclusion reached by a separate U.N. probe into Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.

The so-called Palmer Report on the Israeli raid of May 2010 that killed nine Turkish activists said earlier this month that Israel had used unreasonable force in last year’s raid, but its naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled strip was legal.

A panel of five independent U.N. rights experts reporting to the U.N. Human Rights Council rejected that conclusion, saying the blockade had subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

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By Ron Forthofer, Countercurrents.org, 14 September, 2011

The issue of a Palestinian state is back on the radar due to Palestinians taking their cause to the UN next week. Israel and the U.S. strongly oppose the Palestinian effort. In fact, on September 8 th , the U.S. confirmed it would veto the Palestinian effort in the UN Security Council. Israel claims that the Palestinians can achieve statehood only through negotiations, not through the UN. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. dutifully supports Israel.

Perhaps Palestinians finally concluded that they could not achieve a just settlement with the Israelis through a U.S. brokered peace process, hence the move to the UN. Support for this belief about the futility of negotiations is found in the Palestinian papers that were released this January by al-Jazeera and the British Guardian newspaper. . .

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Victims’ complaint to the international criminal court accuses Pope Benedict and three others of failing to prevent abusers

Karen MeVeigh, The Guardian, Sept. 13, 2011

Pope Benedict XVI, who has been cited in a complaint to the international criminal court. Photograph: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have accused the pope, the Vatican secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials of crimes against humanity, in a formal complaint to the international criminal court (ICC).

The submission, lodged at The Hague on Tuesday, accuses the four men not only of failing to prevent or punish perpetrators of rape and sexual violence but also of engaging in the “systematic and widespread” practice of concealing sexual crimes around the world.

It includes individual cases of abuse where letters and documents between Vatican officials and others show a refusal to co-operate with law enforcement agencies seeking to pursue suspects, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US-based organisation that represents the claimants.

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