Peace and Justice Post

by Spencer Ackerman, CommonDreams.org, May 5, 2011

Source: Wired.com

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in warzones; no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry; and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

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By Immanuel Wallerstein, ZNet, May 1, 2011

I have to start my story by outlining what I consider to be the context of your discussion. You say you want to look at “avant-gardes from the decline of modernism to the rise of globalization, 1956-1986”. It is not clear to me whether these dates were chosen because of turning points in the artworld or turning points in the world political arena – perhaps both.

Your background text lays emphasis on the large number of authoritarian regimes that existed in various parts of the world at the beginning of that period and presumably fewer towards the end. You talk about the rise of globalization, presumably towards the end of that period. The shift you want to discuss is very real, but let me offer you a slightly different set of temporal cutting-points to illuminate this story – 1945, 1956, 1968, 1979-1980, 1989-1991, 2001-2003, 2008-2010.

1945: This was of course the end of the Second World War. More important, it was the end of an intense 30-year-long struggle between the United States and Germany in their efforts, begun in the 1870s, to succeed Great Britain as the hegemonic power of the world-system.

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By Saeed Shah,  McClatchy Newspapers, May  3, 2011

Obama and National Security team watching the killing of unarmed  Osama

(Photo:  BOINGBOING)

ABBOTABAD, Pakistan — Osama bin Laden’s young daughter has told Pakistani officials that she saw her father shot and killed by armed Americans when they raided a house here early Monday, an official with Pakistan’s spy agency said Tuesday.

The official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the daughter, whom he described as being 12 or 13 years old, was one of eight or nine children in the house when a team of U.S. Navy SEALs stormed the complex by helicopter.

“We have no independent confirmation of Osama bin Laden being there or dying there except what we got from the daughter,” said the official, a member of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

The official said that based on interviews with the daughter and others in the house Pakistani authorities now believe that bin Laden had been living in the Abbottabad compound for “some months.”

Ivan Eland, Consortium News,  May 3, 2011

Editor’s Note: Many Americans hope the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will permit the winding down of government excesses related to the “war on terror,” including a sensible process for adjudicating the scores of cases still pending against Guantanamo Bay detainees.

However, neoconservatives and other hardliners are pressing for even more draconian government powers aimed at accused “terrorists” and permitting the expansion of the global war against Islamic militants, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes in this guest essay:

The WikiLeaks documents released on Guantanamo prisoners indicate appalling military incompetence in haphazardly patching together sketchy and contradictory information that has allowed many high-risk terror suspects to go free, while low-risk or innocent detainees continue to be incarcerated.

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Yet some members of Congress would like to strengthen the military’s role in holding and trying such suspects and have the military completely take over the “war on terror.”

The documents indicate that in the case of many Guantanamo prisoners, the slapdash and fragmentary intelligence of their guilt was contradictory and would not have stood up in court or even under the lax evidentiary standards of kangaroo military tribunals. That’s why many of the prisoners are being detained indefinitely without any kind of trial.

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A number of the details surrounding the Obama Administration’s initial account of the Sunday slaying of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan have been revised by officials today. The most noteworthy of these is the claim that bin Laden was killed in an intense firefight, and that officials really hoped to take him alive.

Despite emphasizing this in their initial account, officials are now confirming that there was no firefight in the room in which bin Laden was killed, and that the al-Qaeda founder was entirely unarmed when he was shot in the head by Navy SEALs.

Officials had previously insisted the SEALs were instructed to attempt to take him alive if he “didn’t pose a threat.” Though officials claim he was resisting at the time of his killing, one wonders how much of a threat the aging, sickly terror leader could have posed to a team of soldiers when he was unarmed.

Other changes to the story include the “used his wife as a human shield” claim, which was first revised to a claim that he used some other, random woman as a human shield and eventually dropped in favor of the claim that the random, unarmed woman attacked the troops upon entering the room. It remains to be seen if other major changes will be forthcoming.

BANGLADESH: Army officer’s family gouges eyes and torture after kidnapping Human Rights Defender FMA Razzak, who is going to die without treatment due to pressures from armed forces and intelligence agencies

ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, April 30, 2011

Urgent Appeal Update: AHRC-UAU-023-2011

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[RE: AHRC-UAU-016-2011: BANGLADESH: State agents allow army officer’s relatives to rob off the house of a human rights defender; AHRC-UAU-013-2011: BANGLADESH: Army officer’s father threatens to destroy home and establishments of a human rights defender’s family]
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BANGLADESH: Army officer’s family gouges eyes and torture after kidnapping Human Rights Defender FMA Razzak, who is going to die without treatment due to pressures from armed forces and intelligence agencies

ISSUES: Abuse of military power; death threat; land grabbing; violence against women; robbery; equality before law; rights of human rights defender; inaction of authorities; impunity; rule of law
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Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has learned that human rights defender FMA Razzak is going to die without proper medical treatment due to tremendous pressures from the officials of the armed forces and intelligence agencies who have cordoned the whole area in plain cloth. Since 9:45AM today, 30 April 2011, Razzak is left on the floor of the Radiology Unit of the DMCH. The officers of the armed forces and the intelligence agencies have been trying to make sure that Razzak die without proper treatment.

On 29 April at around 10:30pm a group of armed men led by Mr. Kazal Sarder, younger brother Major Mustafizur Rahman Bokul, kidnapped Mr. Razzak from the Dhaka Bus Stand of Paikgachha along with Razzak’s younger brother and brother-in-law. The abductors put the three persons into a vehicle and took in a field adjacent of Major Mustafizur Rahman’s parent’s house. There Razzak and his brother Bodiuzzaman Bodiar were brutally tortured according to the instructions by the army officer, Major Bokul and the Officer-in-Charge (OC) Enamul Haque of the Paikgachha police. Both – army and police officers – asked the perpetrators to gouge the eyes of Razzak and torture him until death. Razzak, who was initially declared “dead” by Paikgachha hospital doctors, and his brother were denied adequate medical treatment in the hospitals in Khulna due to tremendous pressures from the military officers. Razzak and Bodiar are struggling for life in critical conditions.

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By Anthony  Shadid, The New York Times, May 2, 2011

“They’ve arrested people left and right, random arrests,” said Ayham al-Zoghbi, a resident in Dara’a, a southern border town that has been besieged by the Syrian military for more than a week. “Anyone between 18 and 45 they could put their hands on was arrested.”

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By Sherwood Ross, MWC, May 2, 2011

If President Obama believes ‘justice has been done’ by the killing of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden–allegedly responsible for the deaths of 3,000 civilians in the 2001 World Trade Center attack–why hasn’t he indicted former President George W. Bush, the architect of an illegal war that has killed some 5000 US troops and perhaps a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians?

How can President Obama talk about justice concerning bin Laden while steadfastly refusing to indict his own predecessor who deceived the American people into making a war against Iraq based on fabricated intelligence and outright lies? Why aren’t former Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush team players under arrest at this hour?

Why is there no prosecution of the officials who sucked $3 trillion in tax dollars from the pockets of American workers to wage a war against a country that posed no threat to them?

President Obama’s failure to prosecute Bush-Cheney clearly violates his obligation to enforce the U.S. Constitution—a document that incorporates the United Nations Charter which the Bush White House violated when it attacked Afghanistan and Iraq.

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By Immanuel Wallerstein, ZNet, May 3. 2011

The United States is currently engaged in three wars in the Middle East – in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. The United States has bases all around the world, in more than 150 countries. It has tense relations currently with North Korea and Iran, and has never ruled out military action.

The war in Afghanistan, when it began in 2002, had very strong support from U.S. public opinion, and indeed a great deal of support in other countries. The war in Iraq had almost as much support from U.S. public opinion when it began in 2003, but a lot less support in other countries. Now the United States is halfway into Libya. Less than half the U.S. public is supportive, and there is very much opposition in the rest of the world.

The most recent polls in the United States show opposition not only to the Libyan operation but now to remaining in Afghanistan as well. Pollsters are talking of “war-weariness,” as well they might, since it is hard to argue that the United States has been victorious in any of these conflicts. 

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