Peace and Justice Post

by Ira Chernus, CommonDreams.org, March 10, 2011

Sometimes it’s the good guys who do the most harm, because they know not what they do.

Take, for example, the New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen. He has become the U.S. mass media’s most progressive voice on the Israel-Palestine conflict, consistently telling the right-wing Israeli government to make genuine efforts and meaningful compromises for peace. With a name like Cohen, there’s no doubt he’s got the weight of his Jewish identity as well as the prestige of his newspaper behind him. So his call for a just peace carries as much influence as anyone’s in the mainstream political debate, and a lot more than most.

But the most recent U.S. decision on Mideast policy shows how limited is the influence of Roger Cohen and everyone else criticizing the Obama administration for its pro-Israel tilt. As Cohen noted in his latest column, Obama decided to veto a UN Security Council resolution “condemning Israeli settlement building in the West Bank” — even though the president himself has said clearly that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy” of the Israeli construction and has demanded that it stop.

Why take such an embarrassing step, when every other Security Council member supported the resolution? “It’s Obama who’s facing an election next year where censure of Israel would cost him,” Cohen explained, stating the obvious.

Continues >>

The latest UN report puts the death toll for Afghan civilians across the nation in 2010 to 2,777, the largest since the war began in 2001 and a 15% increase over the toll from 2009. The vast majority of those killed were random victims of the fighting between NATO and the Taliban.

But deliberate targetings of civilians seen as supporters of NATO is also dramatically on the rise, as is the tactic of kidnapping civilians to be held for random. The UN said it has contacted the Taliban to advise them on ways to get the toll down.

Perhaps the most surprising number, however, was just how much NATO’s civilians killings were down in 2010, a 26 percent decline by the UN’s count. This reflects the lack of the high kill count air strikes seen in 2009, and suggests that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to bring the civilian toll down were working even better than anyone knew.

But of course Gen. McChrystal is gone now, and his replacement, Gen. David Petraeus, has put a renewed emphasis on air strikes, even in heavily populated areas. This has resulted in a growing number of high profile civilian killings by NATO, particularly in air strikes, and growing public anger. If the trend continues as it has through the past two months, it seems assured that the 2011 NATO toll will dwarf its 2010 toll, and may well top the 2009 toll as well.

Oh God protect us, Henry Kissinger is back!

By Dr Lawrence Davidson, Opinion Maker, March 9, 201

Henry Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. He also held the latter [/caption]position under President Gerald Ford. While it would be unfair to characterize him as someone who never gave a piece of good advice (he did encourage Nixon to engage in Detente with the Soviet Union), his record weighs heavily on the side of unwise counsel. As we will see he is back in exactly that role, plying bad advice that, in this case, could further erode America’s already messed up intelligence agencies.

Kissinger was originally an academic. His doctoral dissertation was on the diplomacy of two early 19^th century statesmen, Britain’s Viscount Robert Castlereagh and Austria’s Prince Klemens von Metternich. These men were major players at the great Congress of Vienna that took place after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. At that meeting Metternich argued for returning Europe to its pre French Revolution political status. Pursuing that impossible end, he backed repressive policies and regimes. One gets the impression that the history of Kissinger’s public service was, at least in part, an effort to achieve the stature of a Metternich. Toward this end Kissinger would pursue “realpolitik” which, more often than not in its American manifestation, entailed the backing of repressive policies and regimes.

Continues >>

Hillary Clinton AFP/File image

Eric Blair, Activist Post, March 8, 2011

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been exhaustively in front of cameras promoting the right for people to protest in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, and Libya.  She’s been touting the freedom to use social networking sites as a way for Arab people to organize against their oppressive regimes.  Now, the Administration is even considering arming the opposition in Libya.

Clinton’s perpetual propaganda efforts exposed her blatant hypocrisy when a silent peaceful protester was violently removed from one of her recent speeches on the very subject. However, the hypocrisy now seems to go much deeper in her deafening silence over the prospect for protests in Saudi Arabia.

After Human Rights Watch revealed that a nationwide “Day of Rage” protest had been planned in Saudi Arabia for this week, March 11th, Bloomberg reported that the Saudi government claims that demonstrations and marches are “strictly” prohibited by law.  A Saudi Interior Ministry official said protests “contradict Islamic values” and “They harm public interest, infringe on the rights of others, spread chaos and lead to bloodshed.”

This prohibition of popular dissent proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Saudi Arabia is indeed the most tyrannical authoritarian regime in the Arab world.  Yet, U.S. Administration officials have been strangely silent about supporting the people’s uprising there.

Continues >>

The struggle of man (or woman) against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. — Milan Kundera

It was not simply the number of lives lost, though the number — perhaps 2,500 — is not insignificant. It was the cold-blooded manner in which they were taken. It was not simply that 19 of Gujarat’s 25 districts burned while Neros watched, fiddled and smirked but the sinister similarity in the way they were set alight. Militias were armed with deadly training, weapons, technology and equipment; with a lethal brew of deadly intent, inspired by constructed tales of hate, using the February 28, 2002 edition of a leading Gujarati daily that urged revenge; all combined with a deadly white chemical powder that seared to burn and destroy already killed bodies. And, of course, truckloads of gas cylinders, in short supply for cooking, were used instead to blast mosques and homes. Mobile phones and motorcycles made communications easy and movement swift.

Continues >>

By Asghar Ali Engineer, countercurrents.org,  05 March, 2011
Csss-isla.com

More than 100 innocent persons were arrested after burning of S-6 in Godhra on 27th February 2002 which in turn followed demolition of Babri Masjid on 6th December 1992. The man mainly responsible for the former was Mr. L.K.Advani who, to fulfill his ambition for power raised the slogan ‘mandir wahin banayenge’ and played with the religious sentiments of common Hindus and our secular state looked the other way. The man responsible for the later was Narendra Modi, who exploited burning of S-6 in Godhra to retain his power which otherwise he was sure to loose. And both these worthies of BJP brought utter shame to our secular tradition and secular philosophy.

As a result of this conspiracy by these two men thousands died, lakhs uprooted from their hearths and homes and many more lost everything they had and yet both are not only unpunished but are enjoying power (Advani, though could not become Prime Minister which was his ambition but became Home Minister and deputy Prime Minister under Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji and is now a prominent opposition leader which also is a sort of power).

Continues >>

by Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, March 7, 2011

Dr. Niels Harrit is a retired associate professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen and one among an international team of scientists who published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal on the discovery of nano-thermite in the dust from the World Trade Center collapses on September 11, 2001. He has recently finished a lecture tour of Canadian universities, where he spoke on the subject.

In this interview on the cable program Face to Face with Jack Etkin, Dr. Harrit discusses this finding and its implications. Dr. Harrit notes that World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7), a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper that was not hit by one of the planes on 9/11, collapsed symmetrically into its own footprint, and that the official explanation for this is that it was due to fire. However, the finding of nano-thermite in the dust, along with other available evidence, leads inescapably to another conclusion. “There is no doubt that this building was taken down in a controlled demolition,” says Dr. Harrit. “I consider this to be [a] mainstream scientific conclusion. There’s no way around this conclusion. There are so many observations that are only compatible with a controlled demolition.”

Continues >>

AKuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported Sunday that it obtained the documents from the Egyptian interior ministry.

uruknet.info, March 7, 2011

Source: Haaretz

Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, the two sons of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, received hundreds of millions of dollars in “commissions” from the sale of Egyptian natural gas to Israel, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported yesterday.

Gamal initially demanded a 10% commission but eventually agreed to half of that, while his elder brother and businessman Hussein Salem settled for 2.5% each from the $2.5-billion deal signed in May 2005. Salem, considered to be very close to the Mubarak family, is the the largest shareholder in Eastern Mediterranean Gas, the Egyptian firm that supplied the gas to Israel. Mubarak’s sons allegedly backed the controversial gas exports to Israel in return for the payments.

Continues >>

by Barry Gray, wsws.org, March 8, 2011

President Barack Obama on Monday announced the lifting of a 25-month stay on new military trials at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison camp, effectively repudiating his post-inauguration pledge to close the infamous facility.

In a White House announcement, Obama said he had ordered the Defense Department to lift the order, issued on the first full day of his administration over two years ago, suspending the filing of new charges in the military commissions at the camp. Obama at the time presented the order as the first step in shutting the facility within a year.

Administration officials said new charges against some of the 172 detainees remaining at the prison would be filed within days or weeks.

Obama also signed an executive order establishing a process to hold some Guantanamo detainees indefinitely without charge or trial, a further assault on the principle of habeas corpus and step in the direction of a police state. The US government considers that some of those being held—having been seized in various places around the world and imprisoned for nearly a decade without any legal recourse—cannot be tried even by the drumhead military commissions because they have been tortured or held on the basis of “evidence” elicited through the torture of others.

Continues >>