In Western circles of influential opinion, the outcome of the NATO intervention in Libya has already been pronounced ‘a victory’ from several points of view: as a military success that achieved its main goals set at acceptable costs, as a moral success in averting a humanitarian catastrophe, and as a political success that created an opportunity for freedom and constitutionalism on behalf of a long oppressed people. This is one of those rare results in an international conflict situation that seems to please both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives because it was a show of force that reaffirmed Western primacy based on military power. Liberals because force was used with UN backing in accordance with international law and in furtherance of human rights and liberal values.
Acting Beyond the UN Mandate
September 9, 2011Baha Mousa was kicked and punched to death by British soldiers
September 9, 2011After an eight-year campaign for justice led by this paper, a public inquiry into the killing of Iraqi civilian Baha Mousa while in British Army custody delivers its damning verdict
By Nina Lakhani, The Independent, Sep. 9, 2011
PA: Baha Mousa, 26, a widower and father of two young children, died after enduring 93 separate injuries”Serious and gratuitous” violence by British soldiers caused the death of an Iraqi hotel worker and injuries to nine other innocent civilians, a landmark public inquiry ruled yesterday.
Click HERE to view graphic (76k jpg)
Baha Mousa, 26, a widower and father of two young children, died after enduring 93 separate injuries as a result of being kicked, punched and restrained by soldiers in Basra in September 2003.
He was one of 10 innocent men rounded up as suspected insurgents after weapons were found in the hotel at which seven of them worked. In addition to the assaults and humiliation, which began almost immediately upon arrest, soldiers from the 1st Battalion Queen’s Lancashire Regiment subjected the men to painful and inhumane interrogation techniques that had been banned for more than 30 years.
September may bring the death of the two-state solution – and the Jewish state
September 9, 2011What happens when the Palestinians realize come September that UN recognition doesn’t change their lives, that the settlements continue to expand, and the occupation continues?
By Carlo Strenger, Haaretz, Sep. 8, 2011
The diplomatic tsunami of September is building up. So far, neither the U.S. nor the EU has been able to dissuade the Palestinian Authority from its bid for UN recognition.
It seems that the Palestinians no longer have a way out. Given that they do not see the Netanyahu government as a bona fide partner on the route toward a viable state, they are bereft of an alternative strategy.
The Netanyahu government has known but one tactic vis-à-vis the Palestinian bid for UN recognition: working against it.
It is bracing for the head-on collision with the UN recognition of Palestine, and hopes to score a ‘moral victory’ if major EU countries like Germany, France and the U.K. either abstain or vote against this recognition.
How history is made
September 9, 2011Far from being “mechanical,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ view of society stresses how people make history, though not in conditions of their choosing.
Paul D’Amato, Socialist Worker, August 28, 2009 | Issue 704
IT IS often argued that the Marxist view of history allows no room for conscious human intervention–that to Marxists, everything which happens in the realm of political conflicts and class struggle is merely a passive reflection of what goes on at the economic “base,” and history charts a predetermined course according to historical laws, irrespective of the actions of individuals or groups.
In short, Marxism is often accused of being mechanical, fatalist and “reductionist” (that is, reducing everything to economic changes).
Many of these critiques trace the roots of this “mechanical” Marxism back to Marx’s close collaborator Frederick Engels, who, it is claimed, diverged from Marx’s ideas and laid the groundwork for the mechanical materialism of Stalinism, which viewed history as merely a succession of modes of production, each automatically sprouting from the previous.
P C Roberts: The 10th Anniversary of 9/11
September 9, 2011By Paul Criag Roberts, opednews.com, Sept. 8, 2011
Earlier this week, I talked to James Corbett of Global Research TV (GRTV) about the significance of the 9/11 attack and its effect on this nation as we are nearing the 10th anniversary of those events. As Corbett said, we discussed “…the many points at which the official explanation of 9/11 do not mesh with the available evidence, the many experts who have raised their voices in dissent (and been silenced), and what our response to 9/11 teaches us about where we are heading as a society.”
I feel that, at this time in our history, this discussion is critical. Watch the interview below.
Comparing Obama and Bush on Civil Liberties and War
September 8, 2011Ivan Eland,Antiwar.com, Sep. 7, 2011
Documents found in the files of Muammar Gadhafi’s intelligence services in Libya, which indicated that the now overthrown dictator cooperated closely with U.S. rendition of terrorist suspects to his torture chambers, should prompt questions about how much President Barack Obama has improved civil liberties from the bad old days of George W. Bush. Answer: not much.
Obama’s first promise in office was to close the infamous and torture-tainted U.S. military prison at Guantanamo within a year, which he abysmally failed to do. Granted, the Republican Congress has blocked the transfer of prisoners from the offshore facility to mainland civilian courts, but Obama, despite his prominent pledge, has failed to make the issue a top priority. The main reason he hasn’t is because politicians of all political stripes read public opinion polls indicating that the American people would rather be safe than free. The politicians should not be surprised by this outcome, because it is they who have scared Americans into preferring “security” at the expense of civil liberties.
The Absurd US Bases in Japan
September 8, 2011Anticipating a return to power after Republicans win in 2012, the neocons are now in a delaying game to stop any serious cuts in the U.S. military budget, including in the global network of bases, even in countries like Japan where – as Robert Higgs notes – the national security rationale has long since disappeared.
By Robert Higgs, Consortium News, Sep. 7, 2011
After the Japanese government surrendered to the Americans and their allies in 1945, the U.S. military occupied the Japanese home islands and ruled the nation for several years. In due course, however, Japan’s situation was normalized, and, moreover, in 1946 the Japanese adopted a new constitution that renounced war as an instrument of national policy.
The constitution read: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
Analysis: The UN bid through the eyes of a Palestinian refugee
September 8, 2011
I have dreamed of participating in the first and the second intifada, in the peaceful protests against the apartheid wall, and in the daily struggle against the occupation in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza as much as I have dreamed of being raised in my homeland and as much as I’ve continuously been hoping for a chance to visit Palestine.
I have also wished that President Abbas would visit some of the camps to see the drastic situation refugees are living in Lebanon instead of only looking to raise the Palestinian flag on the embassy of the state newly recognized by Lebanon. A major question is being raised amongst the refugees’ population in Lebanon: What will be our future?
The ACLU on Obama and Core Liberties
September 8, 2011by Glenn Greenwald, Commondreams.org, Sep. 7, 2011
Source: Salon
The ACLU decided to use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack to comprehensively survey the severe erosion of civil liberties justified in the name of that event, an erosion that — as it documents — continues unabated, indeed often in accelerated form, under the Obama administration. The group today is issuing a report entitled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11; that title is intended to underscore the irony that political leaders who prance around as courageous warriors against Terrorism in fact rely on one primary weapon — fear-mongering: the absence of courage — to vest the government with ever-more power and the citizenry with ever-fewer rights. Domestically, the “War on Terror” has been, and continues to be, a war on basic political liberties more than it is anything else. The particulars identified in this new ACLU report will not be even remotely new to any readers here, but given the organization’s status among progressives as the preeminent rights-defending group in the country, and given the bird’s-eye-view the report takes of these issues, it is well worth highlighting some of its key findings.
Petraeus’s New ‘Killing Machine’
September 7, 2011The CIA is now “one hell of a killing machine,” said one CIA insider, as lethal drones hunt down “bad guys” selected for death by a ramped-up force of CIA target analysts. This shift in emphasis has transformed the spy agency that new director, retired Gen. David Petraeus, inherits, writes Gareth Porter.
By Gareth Porter, Consortium News, Sep. 6, 2011
When David Petraeus settles into his new office at the Central Intelligence Agency, he will be taking over an organization whose chief mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analyzing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as in Yemen and Somalia.
But the transformation of the CIA did not simply follow the expansion of the drone war in Pakistan to its present level. CIA Director Michael Hayden lobbied hard for that expansion at a time when drone strikes seemed like a failed experiment.
The reason Hayden pushed for a much bigger drone war, it now appears, is that it had already created a whole bureaucracy in the anticipation of such a war.
During 2010, the CIA “drone war” in Pakistan killed as many as 1,000 people a year, compared with the roughly 2,000 a year officially estimated to have been killed by the Special Forces “night raids” in Afghanistan, according to a report in the Sept. 1 Washington Post.
A CIA official was quoted by the Post as saying that the CIA had become “one hell of a killing machine,” before quickly revising the phrase to “one hell of an operational tool”.
Peace and Justice Post 