Peace and Justice Post

Rashid Khalidi, Information Clearing House, Oct. 6, 2011

As the dust settles after last week’s “showdown” at the United Nations over the Palestinian application for membership, several initial conclusions can be drawn.

First, the United States now is thoroughly out of touch with most of the international community when it comes to Palestine and Israel. It has positioned itself to the right of the most right-wing, pro-settler government in Israeli history. This was reflected in the joyful reception of President Obama’s speech by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and his right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as in the Israel lobby’s satisfied response to Obama’s caving in to Israeli demands all along the line.

In an almost surreal display of pandering, Republican presidential candidates—notably Texas governor Rick Perry—disparaged the president for “appeasing” the Palestinians and thereby betraying Israel. This rhetoric came despite the fact that Obama single-handedly sabotaged the Palestinians’ UN bid while publicly lecturing them and the entire General Assembly on the suffering of Israelis without so much as a word acknowledging Israeli occupation, violence and settlements—not to mention the Palestinian suffering caused by these American-supported policies. Obama’s domestic electioneering in the face of a historic demand by the long-suffering Palestinians was not lost on the world. Taken in the context of the Arab Spring and its wave of popular demands for human and political rights, it means that the United States has lost all credibility as an honest broker in this conflict.

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 By John Pilger, ZSpace, Oct. 7, 2011

The High Court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as “crazy”. Sweden’s chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.

 However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a “grave danger” to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the “torturous” dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive “He broke the law”.

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Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, Oct. 7, 2011

The first remembrance field dedicated solely to British military personnel who have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country’s drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world’s greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

Everything about Afghanistan beggars belief. This week its leader, Hamid Karzai, brazenly signed a military agreement with India, knowing it would enrage his neighbour, Pakistan, and knowing it would increase the assault on his capital by the Haqqani network, reported clients of Islamabad’s ISI intelligence agency. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Pentagon is exulting over its new strategy of drone killing, claiming this aerial “counter-terrorism” can replace the “hearts and minds” counter-insurgency. Down in Helmand, visiting British journalists gather to recite the defence ministry’s tired catechism: “We are making real progress on the ground.”

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MWC News, Wednesday, 05 October 2011

By Richard Falk

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The exciting presence of protestors on Wall Street (and the spread of the Occupy Wall Street protest across the country) is a welcome respite from years of passivity in America, not only in relation to the scandalous legal and illegal abuses of comprador capitalists, but also to the prolongations of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rising Islamophobic tide at home, and a presidency that seems less willing to confront hedge fund managers than jobless masses. But will this encouraging presence be sustained in a manner that brings some hope of restored democracy and social wellbeing at home and responsible law-oriented leadership abroad?

There is little doubt that this move to the streets expresses a deep disillusionment with ordinary politics based on elections and governing institutions. Obama’s electoral victory in 2008 was the last hope of the young in America who poured unprecedented enthusiasm into his campaign that promised so much and delivered so little. Perhaps worse than Obama’s failure to deliver, was his refusal to fight, or even to bring into his entourage of advisors some voices of empathy and mildly progressive outlook. . .

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By a reporting team,

wsws.org,  6 October 2011

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to many of those who joined Wednesday’s mass demonstration against Wall Street.

Sean Charls, age 24, a bank employee, joined the demonstration after leaving work in lower Manhattan.

“It’s about time, America is long overdue for a revolution,” he said. “Historically since the American Revolution, there hasn’t been a movement that everyone has been so passionate about. A lot of people are really hurting right now, and nothing is being done about it. Instead they are being stabbed in the back by the people who are in charge. Isn’t democracy supposed to be “government by the people, for the people’?

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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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