Peace and Justice Post

ATHENS, Greece – 235 years after the American colonies declared independence from Britain, the passenegers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza call for a new American Declaration of Independence, this time from Israel.

The passengers issued their call from the decks of the U.S.-flagged boat, The Audacity of Hope, which is currently confined to a Greek military pier near Athens, while its captain sits in jail.

Like the Founders in Philadelphia, the passengers in Athens recognize that “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them to another, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separataion.”

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By Frank Schaeffer, opedenews.com, July 3, 2011

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a “chosen” people is the root of almost all our troubles.

The earth bursts with life. Far right exclusionary religion bursts with death. If there is a creator of life He/She/It must hate fundamentalist religion.

The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world’s greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.

If the rest of the human race could find a time machine to roll back the clock and make a world where these countries/city states had never existed we’d live in a better world.
Just take one example of religion’s baleful influence: President Woodrow Wilson’s messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War One. “My life would not be worth living” Wilson wrote, “if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple.” (Letter to Nancy Toy, 1915.)

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By Daily Mail Reporter, Daily Mail, July 2, 2011

A former CIA operative has revealed his methods for extracting information from detainees and the secret prison they were taken to.

Glenn Carle, who has written a tell-all memoir about his time with the agency, said some people would call him a ‘torturer.’

He maintains he carried out all his duties within the law and within the boundaries of what he believed was morally right.

In The Interrogator Carle recalls the time after 9/11 when he was assigned to get information out of a suspected senior member of Al Qaeda.

At first Carle tries to build a rapport with the man he refers to in the book as CAPTUS.

When this doesn’t work the agency send the pair to ‘Hotel California,’ a so-called ‘black site’ or secret prison in an undisclosed foreign country, according to the book.

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Shortly after news came that the US aid ship “The Audacity of Hope” had departed from port and was attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the vessel was attacked by heavily armed Greek commandos and forced to return to port.

US aid ship The Audacity of Hope with a Greek military vessel in the foreground

The activists on board the ship have been forced into a military dockyard surrounded with barbed wire, and report that after expelling the journalists who were on the ship, they have so far not let anyone else leave.

The move was quickly followed with an announcement from the Greek government that all ships hoping to deliver aid to Gaza have been banned from leaving port to “prevent breach of Israel’s naval blockade.” This has a number of aid vessels from myriad countries stuck in Greece for the foreseeable future. The Greek Hellenic Coast Guard is also said to be monitoring the sea to track other ships potentially trying to deliver goods to Gaza.

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Richard Falk, MWC News, July 2, 2011

The reports that two of the foreign flagged ships planning to be part of the ten vessel Freedom Flotilla II experienced similar forms of disabling sabotage creates strong circumstantial evidence of Israeli responsibility.

It stretches the imagination to suppose that a sophisticated cutting of the propeller shafts of both ships is a coincidence with no involvement by Israel’s Mossad, long infamous for its overseas criminal acts in support of contested Israeli national interests. Recalling the lethal encounter in international waters with Freedom Flotilla I that took place on May 31, 2010 and the frantic diplomatic campaign by Tel Aviv to prevent this second challenge to the Gaza blockade by peace activists and humanitarian aid workers, such conduct by a state against this latest civil society initiative, if further validated by incriminating evidence, should be formally condemned as a form of ‘state terrorism’ or even as an act of war by a state against global civil society.

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As he turns 93, Nelson Mandela can look back on an extraordinary life of accomplishment, as the world’s iconic leader on behalf of racial justice and individual liberty. A new book of quotations compiles some of what he has learned and what he has taught, Danny Schechter reports from Johannesburg, South Africa.

By Danny Schechter, Consortium News, July 1, 2011

Nelson Mandela, icon-hero of the world, turns 93 on July 18. He survives in the face of family tragedies, such as one in June that claimed a great-grandchild who was born premature and died after just four days,

The man, known by his clan name Madiba, still evokes wonder and admiration and almost god-like reverence, with airport stores selling “We Love Mandela” posters and T-shirts. He is the one South African that most of South Africans take pride in, including the older generation that first knew him as an apartheid-government-designated terrorist.

So feared was he that his picture could not be shown in the media and his words could not be quoted for 27 years.

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Maher al-Assad attends the funeral of late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad in Damascus on June 13, 2000. Maher is now leading his elite military units around the country to violently quell protests. (Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Described as the country’s “thug-in-chief,” Maher al-Assad has become the de facto power in Syria, leading his elite troops around the country to kill protesters threatening his family’s 41-year-old dictatorship even as his elder brother, the president, continues to pledge reforms.

“He’s the one doing the regime’s dirty work. He plays the Rifaat role from the 1980s: the nasty guy of the regime,” said Radwan Ziadeh, director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

In 1982, Rifaat al-Assad, former President Hafez al-Assad’s younger brother, led a military assault on Hama to crush an uprising by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people, one of the worst atrocities committed by an Arab regime against its own people.

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Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 308, July 1, 2011

Ollanta Humala was elected President of Peru on June 5, 2011. The one sure loser in this election was the United States, whose ambassador, Rose Likins, scarcely hid her open campaigning for Humala’s opponent in the second round, Keiko Fujimori. What was at stake in this crucial election in Latin America?

Peru is a key country in the geopolitics of South America for a number of reasons: its size, its heritage as the locus of the Inca empire, its locus as a fount of the Amazonia River, its ports on the Pacific, and its recent history as the site of a major struggle between nationalist forces and pro-American elites.

In 1924, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian intellectual and Marxist – a quite unorthodox Marxist – founded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), which was intended to be a pan-American anti-imperialist organization. APRA flourished in Peru, although it was severely repressed. What was original about APRA, unlike most left movements in the Americas, was its understanding that the majority of Peru’s peasantry were indigenous Quechua-speaking peoples who had been systematically excluded from political participation and cultural rights. After 1945, APRA began to lose some of its radical edge but still had a strong popular base. Only the death of Haya de la Torre prevented his election as President in 1980.

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  To be or Not To Be American

William A. Cooke, MWC News, June 30, 2011

This week the United States Senate unanimously adopted a resolution drafted by its masters, the State of Israel and AIPAC, to prevent the United Nations, of which the United States is a member, from exercising its constitutional rights to free speech to deliberate on the recognition of a Palestinian State. The resolution is an exercise in coercion since its intent is to withhold funding from the Palestinian Authority should the UN deliberate on such a resolution of recognition, making the UN responsible for depriving the Palestinian people of America’s support.

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There are many parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan. The recent American mayors’ resolution to “bring our war $$ home” and Obama’s announcement that troops are now being withdrawn are fresh reminders, but the story they tell is grim, writes Eric Walberg.

Middle East Online, July 2, 2011

In Baltimore, the nation’s mayors debated and passed a War Dollars Home Resolution at their annual meeting, the first time they have taken a stand on war since they passed a similar resolution in 1971, during the Vietnam war. The anti-war resolution even made the TV news, which has downplayed the fact that the majority of Americans have wanted an end to their illegal wars for years.

It is a moment flooded with nostalgia for those who cut their political teeth 40 years ago during the Vietnam war, though it is hard to even recognise the State of the Union 40 years on. The “War on Poverty” of LBJ has been replaced by a “war on terror”. Today’s America has a black president, yet is mired in recession, and promises only falling living standards, collapsing infrastructure, and more and more violations of civil rights.

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