Peace and Justice Post

by Abdul Moeed Hashmi, Pajhwok Afghan News,  May 28,  2011

JALALABAD (PAN): As many as 112 people were killed in an airstrike by NATO-led troops in the remote eastern province of Nuristan, a senior official said on Saturday.

Twenty-two policemen, 20, civilians and 70 Taliban fighters were among the dead, Governor Jamaluddin Badr told Pajhwok Afghan News, quoting a probe into the incidents.

Foreign soldiers conducted the air raid on Thursday to drive insurgents from Doab district, he said, adding Afghan forces recaptured the town late on Thursday night.

Up to 40 people, including district’s administrative head and police chief, were wounded, Badr added. Both officials were discharged from hospital after receiving treatment.

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By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine, MWC News, May 28, 2011

There is absolutely no doubt that a true, dignified peace with the Palestinians is nowhere on Benyamin Netanyahu’s agenda. The clear spirit of insolence characterizing his recent speech before Congress, often described as an Israeli-occupied territory, caricatures an extremist demagogue who understands peace to mean domination and enslavement by Zionist Jews of the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu doesn’t use terms such as “domination,” “enslavement” or even “subjugation. “However, the misleading  rationales, pretexts, and  red herrings he  keeps invoking  to justify Israeli recalcitrance and rejection of a just peace  illustrate a depraved mindset that covets more lebensraum or “breathing  space” at the Palestinians expense.

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Admitting failure in Iraq and Afghanistan is anathema to Official Washington, especially to the still-influential neocons whose status depends on maintaining the illusion of “victory” or at least limited success, even at the cost of more blood and treasure. But Daniel N. White says only a frank acknowledgement of failure can free America from even worse calamities ahead.

By Daniel N. White, Consortium News, May 28, 2011

There’s an important but little known story from World War II that comes to mind these days. It’s from the days before Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941.

It needs telling with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in their current state of failure – and with a war against Iran waiting in the wings.

The German Army, the Wehrmacht, was on a roll in late 1940. It had defeated and conquered Poland and France, and had thoroughly whipped the British Army in the process.

Adolf Hitler, a knowledgeable self-taught amateur historian and the most successful German politician ever in both domestic and foreign affairs, gave orders to the German General Staff to study and make plans for an invasion of Russia.

The staff officers, the bright young captains and majors, the older lieutenant colonels with gray hair and experience, went to work, and came up with plans for an invasion for the Wehrmacht General Staff to evaluate and present to Hitler.

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By Samer al-Atrush – CAIRO, Middle East Online, May 27, 2011

Partners in crime; now spilling the beans on each other

Egyptian ex-president Hosni Mubarak, charged with murder, “had complete knowledge of every bullet fired” at protesters, according to damning testimony by his former spy chief published in a state newspaper on Thursday.

The Al-Akhbar daily reported that prosecutors partly relied on testimony provided by Omar Suleiman, the former head of intelligence and briefly vice president, to charge Mubarak with premeditated murder.

“Mubarak had complete knowledge of every bullet fired at protesters, and the number of those killed or wounded,” Suleiman is reported to have told prosecutors.

Suleiman said he relayed to the president hourly updates on the police’s deadly response to the mass protests that began on January 25 to overthrow Mubarak, who ruled the country for three decades.

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The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”

This type of war requires a vast intelligence apparatus, which now constitutes almost a fourth arm of government that most Americans are almost completely unaware of.. According to The Washington Post, this murky world includes 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country, with a budget last year of at least $80.1 billion.

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Rashid Khalidi explains how President Obama is reinforcing every roadblock to peace Israel has created

Reuters/Jim Young

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, May 20, 2011.

The old Arabic proverb has it that the dogs bark but the caravan goes on. President Obama’s comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speeches last week at the State Department and then at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) produced a great deal of sound and fury in Washington. However, the sense I had being in Beirut and the Gulf when they were delivered was that they meant much less to Arabs than they did in Washington or in Israel. There is little sense in the Arab world or among Palestinians that the United States has a constructive role to play in resolving this conflict. Indeed, if anything, it has only succeeded in making itself even more of a roadblock to progress than it was before.

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Though Iraq’s government had mostly managed to keep the protesters off the streets over the past several weeks, a massive rally organized by supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr took place in the capital city of Baghdad today. There, tens of thousands of Shi’ites marched to Sadr City, condemning the US and demanding that the American troops leave by December 31.

The march featured thousands of people wearing red white and black Iraqi flag uniforms, and included warnings that the mass of followers of Sadr could reform the Mahdi Army and resist the US occupation if the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) deadline is not honored.

US officials have repeatedly pressed Prime Minister Maliki to accept an open-ended US presence, and have argued that keeping US troops in Iraq would be a great way to spite neighboring Iran.

But they are extremely uncomfortable to hear how unpopular the occupation has become, with US commander Major General Jeffrey Buchanan slamming the protest march, saying it was “an affront to Iraq’s democracy.”

by Stuart Littlewood, Dissident Voice, May 27th, 2011

Do you fume at the International Criminal Court (ICC) when you see all those obnoxious war criminals still walking free and still thumbing their noses at the civilised world while their gruesome crime sheet just gets longer?

There should be no hiding place. But international law never reaches into some corners because the levers that control the wheels of justice, we discover, are sometimes leaned on by the criminals themselves.

The International Criminal Court was supposed to change all that. It is governed by the Rome Statute and is the first permanent, treaty-based, international criminal court established “to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community”.

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When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed … murdered … I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.

 The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.

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