Peace and Justice Post

Witnesses said the initial attack lasted about three hours and heavy gunfire echoed through the streets all day

By Anna McCaffrey in Damascus, The Independent, March 24, 2011

AP 

Protesters in the southern Syrian city of Daraa yesterday. Several Facebook and human rights groups are calling for more demonstrations in Damascus and other cities tomorrow

• enlarge

Chris Stanton, The National,  Mar 24, 2011

CAIRO // Egyptian military personnel tortured a group of female detainees with forced “virginity tests” and other forms of humiliation at a prison in the capital this month, Amnesty International said yesterday.

The international human rights group’s report of torture against 17 female protesters arrested on March 9 came after Monday’s calls for an investigation from a coalition of Egyptian human rights groups.

The new report follows a number of other allegations — some documented on YouTube videos with alleged victims displaying ugly bruises and lacerations — that military forces have beaten and abused protesters arrested in recent weeks.

“The Egyptian authorities must halt the shocking and degrading treatment of women protesters,” Amnesty International said yesterday. “Women fully participated in bringing change in Egypt and should not be punished for their activism.”

The report quotes a female detainee by name who said she was arrested by the military while participating in a sit-in in Tahrir Square, transferred to a prison, and forced to take off all her clothing and undergo a virginity test by a man in a white coat along with 16 other detainees. According to the report, which was reportedly corroborated by other unnamed victims who spoke to Amnesty International, the military personnel “tried to further humiliate the women by allowing men to watch and photograph what was happening”.

Continues >>

AP / Jerome Delay

Fallout: During a Tuesday trip organized by Libyan authorities, a supporter of Moammar Gadhafi salutes amid the wreckage of what was described as a maintenance warehouse hit by two missiles Monday evening. The site was at a naval base near Tripoli.

It’s the black gold that drives nations mad and inevitably raises the question of whether America and the former European colonial powers give a damn about human rights as the basis for military intervention. If Libya didn’t have more oil than any other nation in Africa, would the West be unleashing high-tech military mayhem to contain what is essentially a tribal-based civil war? Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S. routinely protects.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Moammar Gadhafi must now go not because his human rights record is egregious but rather because his erratic hold on power seems spent. After all, from the London School of Economics to Harvard, influential foreign policy experts were all too happy until quite recently to accept Libyan payoffs in exchange for a more benign view of Gadhafi’s prospects for change under the gentle guidance of what Harvard’s Joseph Nye celebrated as “soft power.”

Continues >>

Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox, March 21, 2011

Dear War Loving (Democratic or Republican) Fraud,

I know many of you don’t really care, but in exactly 15 days, it will be seven years since my oldest son (whom I never “abandoned” and raised with his father and three siblings until he went into the Army when he was 21), Casey was killed in this Empire’s insane War OF Terror. Was Casey the first, or the last? No–but he was my first and the shock knocked me out of my quiet complacency–which was just as wrong as the Empire’s unending wars.

When I began protesting, Bush was president and my protest and the energy that grew around it was used by you Democrats to regain political power in the federal government. Four years later and a change of Executive, this nation is still mired in Arab countries waging a war against Arabs of all, or no, faith. Now brought to us by the Blue Team.

Three days after the current evil Emperor was installed by the oligarchy, he ordered a drone bombing in Northern Pakistan (a country that we are supposedly not at war with) that killed 36 civilians and since then, he has been absolutely mad about drone bombings, increasing Bush’s total over 300 percent in far fewer years. Even though I never supported Obama who funded wars as a Senator and who is NOT a peace president, I said at the time: “Three days in and already a war criminal.” I was thoroughly attacked by Democrats who once affiliated as “peace” activists for not giving Obama “time.”

Continues >>

Authorities Should Halt Use of Excessive Force on Protesters

The Syrian government has shown no qualms about shooting dead its own citizens for speaking out. Syrians have shown incredible courage in daring to protest publicly against one of the most repressive governments in the region, and they shouldn’t have to pay with their lives.

(Cairo) – Syria should cease use of live fire and other excessive force against protesters, as it did on March 18 and 20, 2011, in the southern town of Daraa, leaving at least five people dead, Human Rights Watch said today.

Sunday, March 20 marked the third day of protests in Daraa, where government forces yet again fired on protesters and used teargas to break up a public gathering, killing one person and injuring dozens of others, according to media reports. Today’s fatality brings the total number of protesters killed in Daraa to at least five.

“The Syrian government has shown no qualms about shooting dead its own citizens for speaking out,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrians have shown incredible courage in daring to protest publicly against one of the most repressive governments in the region, and they shouldn’t have to pay with their lives.”

Continues >>

By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News, March 22, 2011

Editor’s Note: At a time when many on the American Christian Right espouse the supposed “originalist” thinking of the Founders, it’s ironic that many show little interest in the “originalist” thinking of Jesus as recounted in the gospels.

Rather than embrace the pacifist message of “the Prince of Peace,” many of these Christians have a quick-draw reaction to launching wars, a corruption of their religion that Gary G. Kohls traces back to Rome’s embrace of Christianity:

There is no question that the Christian church of the first three centuries regarded itself as a nonviolent community. It makes perfect sense. Jesus clearly taught and modeled the nonviolent love of friend and enemy, and his earliest followers tried to do so.

Share this article

ShareThisEmail Printer friendly

And by and large they succeeded, despite terrible persecutions from Rome, under whose brutal domination being a Christian was a capital crime for most of the first three centuries.

The first Christians tried to be faithful to Jesus’s commandments to “put away the sword,” ”do not repay evil for evil,” “do unto others that which you would have them do unto you,” “do good to those who persecute you,” “pray for those who despitefully use you,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies” and “love as I have loved you.”

Jesus’s earliest followers regarded the human body as the holy temple of God here on earth, and, knowing that violence to a holy place was considered an act of desecration (and therefore forbidden), they refused to kill or maim other children of God, and therefore they also refused, out of conscience, to become killing soldiers for Rome.

Martyrdom, in the first three centuries, was regarded as the ultimate act of social responsibility. And the church flourished!

Continues >>

By Matthias Gebauer and Hasnain Kazim, Spiegel Online, Mar. 21, 2011

 

Photo Gallery: 3 Photos

The images are repulsive. A group of rogue US Army soldiers in Afghanistan killed innocent civilians and then posed with their bodies. On Monday, SPIEGEL published some of the photos — and the US military responded promptly with an apology. Still, NATO fears that reactions in Afghanistan could be violent.

For reasons of data protection and privacy, your IP address will only be stored if you are a registered user of Facebook and you are currently logged in to the service. For more detailed information, please click on the “i” symbol.

The United States and NATO are concerned that reactions could be intense to the publication of images documenting killings committed by US soldiers in Afghanistan. The images appeared in the most recent edition of SPIEGEL, which hit the newsstands on Monday.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already telephoned with her Afghan counterpart to discuss the situation. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon has likewise made contact with officials in Kabul. The case threatens to strain already fragile US-Afghan relations at a time when the two countries are negotiating over the establishment of permanent US military bases in Afghanistan.

In a statement released by Colonel Thomas Collins, the US Army, which is currently preparing a court martial to try a total of 12 suspects in connection with the killings, apologized for the suffering the photos have caused. The actions depicted in the photos, the statement read, are “repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States.”

Continues >>

By Chris Hedges,truthdig.com, March 21, 2011

AP / Cpl. Daniel J. Redding

An ambulance loaded with injured troops. The less fortunate—those who die—end up in the care of fellow servicemen and -women who have to carry out gruesome work while struggling to hold on to their own sanity.

Jess Goodell enlisted in the Marines immediately after she graduated from high school in 2001. She volunteered three years later to serve in the Marine Corps’ first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit, at Camp Al Taqaddum in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to collect and catalog the bodies and personal effects of dead Marines. She put the remains of young Marines in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.” The work she did was called “processing.”

“We went through everything,” she said when I reached her by phone in Buffalo, N.Y., where she is about to become a student in a Ph.D. program in counseling at the University of Buffalo. “We would get everything that the body had on it when the Marine died. Everyone had a copy of The Rules of Engagement in their left breast pocket. You found notes that people had written to each other. You found lists. Lists were common, the things they wanted to do when they got home or food they wanted to eat. The most difficult was pictures. Everyone had a picture of their wife or their kids or their family. And then you had the younger kids who might be 18 years old and they had prom pictures or pictures next to what I imagine were their first cars. Everyone had a spoon in their flak jacket. There were pens and trash and wrappers and MRE food. All of it would get sent back [to the Marines’ homes].

Continues >>

Claim Is Highest Toll Yet for Civil War

Speaking to al-Jazeera on Sunday, Libyan rebel spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga reported that upward of 8,000 Libyans had been killed in the civil war between the burgeoning protest-rebel movement and the Gadhafi regime.

The claim is the highest toll yet reported for the conflict, but is entirely possible given that doctors estimated 2,000 killed in Benghazi alone during the initial violence. It is unclear, however, how reliable the current information the rebels have on the western tolls is, as those cities were lost in fighting over the past weeks.

The deaths from the internal fighting appear to have ground to a virtual halt since Saturday, when Western nations attacked Libya. In the day and a half since then, reports from the ground suggest that at least 64 people have been killed in the campaign, as large numbers of missiles have been fired into Libyan territory.

It is unclear at this point what percentage of the casualties in either toll represents civilians and how many are combatants. With the campaign transitioning into air strikes, the toll, particularly among civilians, seems bound to grow going forward.