Peace and Justice Post

by Paul Craig Roberts, Foreign Policy Journal, March 14, 2011

If we were to be blessed with a 21st century George Orwell, he would coin a new “speak” to apply to “support the troops.”  Would he call this “Deceptive Speak”?  Or would he be more clever?

The words certainly deserve an Orwellian name.  The catch-phrase was rolled out the minute the war started, which makes one wonder about its public relations origin.  Who can oppose supporting the troops, at least before we learned from WikiLeaks and Abu Ghraib of the intentional killing of civilians and torturing of whoever happened to be rounded up in the various sweeps? All for the fun and games of it.

“Support the troops” originated in the public relations department of the military/security complex. What “support the troops” really means is to support the profits of the armaments industry and the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony.

“Support the troops” is a clever PR slogan that causes Americans to turn a blind eye to the brutal exploitation of our soldiers and military families for profit and for an evil ideology.

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There are three reasons why monitoring AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is a valuable use of time for anyone following events in the Middle East.

The first is that AIPAC faithfully reflects the positions of the Netanyahu government (actually it often telegraphs them before Netanyahu does).

The second is that AIPAC’s policies provide advance notice of the positions that will, not by coincidence, be taken by the United States Congress.

And third, AIPAC provides a reliable indicator of future policies of the Obama administration, which gets its “guidance” both from AIPAC itself and from Dennis Ross, former head of AIPAC’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and now the president’s top adviser on Middle East issues.

The next few months, as AIPAC prepares for its annual conference (May 22-24), will be especially fruitful for AIPAC watchers. The conference is a huge event, attended by most members of the House and Senate, the prime minister of Israel, and either by the president or vice president of the United States. It is also attended by thousands of delegates from around the country and by candidates for Congress who raise money for their campaigns at the event. This year, the leading Republican candidates for president will also be in attendance, all vying for support by promising undying loyalty to the AIPAC agenda.

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By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 12 March 2011

An otherwise desultory press conference Friday morning featured the first public questioning of President Obama about the abusive treatment of Bradley Manning, the Army private who faces 34 criminal charges, some bearing the death penalty, for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as State Department cables revealing US diplomatic intrigues.

Manning is jailed at the Quantico Marine Corps base near Washington DC, under conditions that have been denounced by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations as tantamount to torture. He has been held in solitary confinement there for more than seven months. In the last week he has been deprived of all clothing during sleeping hours, then compelled to stand naked for inspection every morning.

If another country were meting out similarly sadistic treatment to a captured American POW, the Pentagon and the American media would be howling about war crimes. But Manning’s treatment has been largely blacked out of the corporate-controlled mass media. Friday’s question was the first time the subject has been raised by the White House press corps.

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Bahrain has seen weeks of protests as demonstrators pressure the nation’s rulers to offer reforms [Reuters]

Hundreds of Saudi troops have entered Bahrain to help protect government facilities there, according to witnesses.

Bahrain television broadcast images of the troops entering the Gulf State, which lies between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, on Monday.

The images back up earlier claims by Saudi sources that a force had entered Bahrain whose Sunni rulers have faced weeks of protests and growing pressure from a majority Shia population to institute political reforms.

“About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain early on Monday morning through the causeway to Bahrain,” the Reuters news agency reported a Saudi source as saying, referring to the 26km causeway that connects the island kingdom to Saudi Arabia.

“They are part of the Gulf Co-operation Council [GCC] force that would guard the government installations.”

In Saudi Arabia, the SPA state news agency carried a government statement saying: “The council of ministers has confirmed that it has answered a request by Bahrain for support.”

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by Chris Hedges, Truthdigcom, .March 14, 2011

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.Damon Terrell speaks to demonstrators at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., during a series of protests against a then-pending bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers. Last Friday Gov. Scott Walker signed the legislation into law. (AP / Andy Manis)

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

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An anti-war  Tamil-English  song

By Villivaru

There’s no denying its historic decline, but the left does not lack for issues. It needs only organisation

Richard Wolff, The Guardian, March 13, 2011

An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday 26 February 2011 to protest Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill that would remove collective bargaining rights from public employees. Photograph: AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, John Hart

The Capitol Square in Madison at 2 p.m. today. Unionists rushed to the Capitol last night and returned today to protest the surprise passage of the governor’s anti-union bill. Photo: antrover.

Police dragged a hundred demonstrators from the Wisconsin statehouse Thursday to break a blockade trying to prevent state representatives from passing the governor’s anti-union bill.

Several thousand bellowed their disapproval outside, joined by more than 1,000 high school and middle school students who walked out of class again to march together to the Capitol.

None of the protesters were arrested, and state representatives spent the afternoon with police blocking Capitol entrances while they debated inside. Republicans have a clear majority in the Assembly and are expected to pass the bill.

Union leaders and a crowd that grew by thousands yesterday evening and throughout the day denounced Wisconsin’s Senate Republicans, who rewrote a month-old bill yesterday to focus just on attacking union rights and collective bargaining.

That allowed them to pass the bill without the participation of Senate Democrats, who reportedly are returning to the state today. Republicans didn’t need them because a quorum of 20 is required only for fiscal measures.

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AHRC, March 10, 2011

Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information regarding the murder of human rights activist Mr. Niyamat Ansari in Kope Gram Panchayat of Latehar District, Jharkhand state, on 2 March, as well as a similar attempt on the same day upon the life of his associate Mr. Bhukhan Singh. It is reported that the local private contractors engaged in the implementation of employment generation schemes under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) are behind the murder since Ansari and Singh were trying to expose the corruption behind the utilisation of funds under the MGNREGA. Only one person has been arrested so far despite nationwide public outcry for immediate arrest of the suspects.

CASE NARRATIVE:

As provided by the notes prepared after detailed enquiries conducted by Prof. Jean Drèze, Mr. James Herenj and Ms. Reetika Khera and also draws on the findings of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) fact finding team on 6 March, 2011. Some details may require further corroboration, but the main points are well established.

On 2 March, 2011 a group of armed men in uniforms abducted Niyamat from his residence in Jerua village (Kope Gram Panchayat). He was brutally beaten for nearly one hour. According to eyewitnesses, the same people who attacked Niyamat in October 2008 did this. It is strongly suspected that Mr. Shankar Dubey, a petty contractor in the locality and his associates instigated these men. After they deserted him, Niyamat’s brother and other family members carried his unconscious body on a charpoy from Jerua village to Manika Police Station, a distance of about 10km. Niyamat’s family reached Manika Police Station by foot, with Niyamat unconscious on a charpoy, before the administration managed to send an ambulance to them. After this, Niyamat was brought to Latehar Sadar Hospital. Soon after reaching there, he died.

The suspects were also seeking out Niyamat’s associate, Mr. Bhukhan Singh to be assaulted. But he was able to save his life by hiding. On the morning of 3 March he was brought to Latehar by the district authorities.

Niyamat is a resident of Kope Gram Panchayat in Manika Block, Latehar District. During the last few years, he was working with Gram Swaraj Abhiyan, a local campaign for village self-rule, also involved in issues such as the right to information, the right to food and the right to work.

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Anti-government protesters confront riot police assembled on a flyover near the Pearl Square in Manama, March 13.(Reuters)

Riot police in Bahrain fired tear gas and rubber bullets at anti-government demonstrators blocking the highway into the capital’s financial district Sunday and also surrounded the protesters’ main camp in the capital, eyewitnesses said.

Protesters blocked off a main thoroughfare to the Bahrain Financial Harbour, a key business district in the Gulf Arab banking centre.

Authorities failed to dislodge the thousands of protesters blocking King Faisal Highway in Manama, the capital.

About two miles (about three kilometers) away, police also moved on the Pearl Square protest camp in the largest effort to clear the area since the demonstrations, inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, started in mid-February. Another rally at a university Sunday also reportedly descended into clashes with police.

Thousands of youths ran across the King Faisal Highway as police backed away in the face of hundreds of protesters who had gathered near the Pearl roundabout, the focal point of weeks of demonstrations on the small Gulf island.

Traffic was stalled for miles (kilometers), and police fired tear gas and used heavy vehicles to try to move the protesters and dismantle the barriers they had set up.

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