Peace and Justice Post

Stephen Lendman, MWC News, July 12, 2011

America’s dirty war, in fact, targets Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, political activists, and Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, and at times prominence and charity, exploiting them as “war on terror” scapegoats.

On July 9, a Press TV US prison system racket interview highlighted the problem and urgency to address it.

America’s media ignore how unjustly it harms millions of disadvantaged people. Instead, they regurgitate spurious high-profile case accusations, always when Muslims are affected. Most often they’re men, occasionally women, bogusly charged with terrorism or conspiracy to commit it, when, in fact, they’re guilty only of being targets of choice and/or being in America at the wrong time.

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By Haji Mujtaba, uruknet.info, July 12, 2011

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (Reuters) – At least 45 suspected militants were killed by missiles launched by U.S. drone aircraft in Pakistan’s northwest, local intelligence officials said on Tuesday, one of the largest death tolls to date in the controversial air bombing campaign.

Coming a day after Washington announced an $800 million delay in military assistance amid worsening U.S.-Pakistan ties, the attacks could exacerbate tension between the two uneasy allies in the war against militants.

The attacks started on Monday night, when remotely piloted drones fired nine missiles into a militant compound and at a vehicle in North Waziristan, killing 25 suspected insurgents, local intelligence officials said.

Another strike hours later in South Waziristan killed five suspected militants.

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Bombing of the King David Hotel

This clip is from episode one of a British-made documentary from 2002 titled ‘The Age Of Terror’, and examines the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946 by Zionists, in which the south wing of the hotel, then occupied by British civil-military authorities, was bombed killing ninety-one people. Twenty-eight of the victims were British, forty-one Arabic, while seventeen were Jewish.

The Zionist who carried-out the attack were known as the Irgun, and were led by a future prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin. The King David Hotel bombing was an act of terrorism that is widely-considered to be the first real incidence of 20th century terrorism.

Information Clearing House, July 11, 2011

“The Reason You Guys Are Here is Because on 9/11 We Got Attacked”

By Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch, July 12, 2011

The United States could take unilateral military action against Shia militias armed by Iran if they continued to attack US troops, Leon Panetta, the new US Defense Secretary, said on a visit to Iraq yesterday. The threat marks an escalation in the long-running battle for influence in Iraq between Washington and Tehran that has gone on since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The US has long accused Iran of supplying weapons to Shia militia groups, which it holds responsible for attacks in which some 18 US soldiers have died since the beginning of June. Washington would also like to keep between 8,500 and 10,000 troops in Iraq after the end of the year, despite an agreement for all US soldiers to be out by that date.

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Chris McGreal in Washingto, The Guardian, July 12, 2011

George W Bush, whose administration is accused by Human Rights Watch of authorizing use of torture. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute George W Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the Obama administration fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that the US authorities are legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration’s legal team was part of the conspiracy in preparing opinions authorising abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.

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IceNews,  July 11, 2011.

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Exclusive: The Audacity of Hope, the U.S. boat among a small flotilla seeking to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza, was turned back by Greek authorities doing the bidding of Washington and Tel Aviv. However, for ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was among the passengers, the endeavor demonstrated the commitment of Americans from a variety of backgrounds to fight injustice.

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, July 8, 2011

We passengers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza represent a cross-section of America. Yet, if there is an emblematic trait that sets us apart from “mainstream” America, it is a common, radical determination to take risks to bring Justice for the oppressed — in this case, the 1.6 million people locked in an open-air prison on a narrow strip of land called Gaza.

While most of those calling us “radical” hurl the word as a barb, we welcome the label — but radical as derived from the underlying meaning of this word, “root.” Like radishes, we are rooted in soil, the soil of Justice.

“Extremist?” Yes, we confess to that too — as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. did in his Letter From the Birmingham City Jail.

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by Jack A. Smith, Foreign Policy Journal, July 11, 2011

During his speech on Afghanistan June 22, President Obama revealed that “Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war.” He knew this was a deceptive understatement, as did everyone who has kept close watch on the Bush-Obama wars all these years.

Few Americans, however, have closely followed Washington’s 21^st century wars of choice, so a trillion probably sounds right to them, but that amount in 10 years — when the annual cost of air conditioning alone for the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq amounts to $20.2 billion a year — is  way off base.

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  Jurist.org, July 8, 2011

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that all instances of torture must be investigated as violations of US and international law and a failure to do so will allow impunity for those who authorized these actions…

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James Petras, Information Clearing House, July 10, 2011

The US government (White House and Congress) spends $10 billion dollars a month, or $120 billion a year, to fight an estimated “50 -75 ‘Al Qaeda types’ in Afghanistan”, according to the CIA and quoted in the Financial Times of London (6/25 -26/11, p. 5). During the past 30 months of the Obama presidency, Washington has spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan, which adds up to $4 billion dollars for each alleged ‘Al Queda type’. If we multiply this by the two dozen or so sites and countries where the White House claims ‘Al Qaeda’ terrorists have been spotted, we begin to understand why the US budget deficit has grown astronomically to over $1.6 trillion for the current fiscal year.

During Obama’s Presidency, Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment has been frozen, resulting in a net decrease of over 8 percent, which is exactly the amount spent chasing just 5 dozen ‘Al Qaeda terrorists’ in the mountains bordering Pakistan.

It is absurd to believe that the Pentagon and White House would spend $10 billion a month just to hunt down a handful of terrorists ensconced in the mountains of Afghanistan. So what is the war in Afghanistan about? The answer one most frequently reads and hears is that the war is really against the Taliban, a mass-based Islamic nationalist guerilla movement with tens of thousands of activists. The Taliban, however, have never engaged in any terrorist act against the territorial United States or its overseas presence. The Taliban have always maintained their fight was for the expulsion of foreign forces occupying Afghanistan. Hence the Taliban is not part of any “international terrorist network”. If the US war in Afghanistan is not about defeating terrorism, then why the massive expenditure of funds and manpower for over a decade?

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