Peace and Justice Post

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Source: UN News Centre

UN News Centre, 11 March 2011 – An independent United Nations expert has called on Israel to stop illegally demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank, including two apartment buildings in East Jerusalem where 150 people are about to be evicted, citing a recent surge in such actions.”This pattern of eviction, demolition, expansion of settlements, and settlers’ violent expropriation of Palestinian homes in the occupied East Jerusalem violates fundamental human rights, as well as provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing belligerent occupation,” UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Richard Falk said in a statement.  Since the beginning of 2011, Israel has demolished 96 Palestinian structures throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, consisting of 32 homes and other residential structures. As a result, 175 people, more than half of them children, have lost their homes, a sharp increase compared to the same period in 2010 when there were 56 demolitions and 129 people displaced. At the same time, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have continued to expand. Mr. Falk described the decision to demolish the two buildings in the Beit Hanina neighbourhood of East Jerusalem as “particularly disturbing,” noting the families were given only 10 days to vacate their homes last Sunday. He said Israeli authorities often seek to justify demolition of Palestinian homes on the grounds that the owners lack building permits, which are next to impossible for Palestinians to obtain. Continues >>

By ROD NORDLAND, The New York Times, March 12, 2011

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai on Saturday appeared to call for NATO and the United States to cease military operations in Afghanistan, but then issued a clarification saying that he was referring only to specific operations that had caused civilian casualties.

Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A mixed message from Hamid Karzai has raised tensions with American officials.

nar Province, the Afghan president told relatives and neighbors of civilian victims that he sympathized with their plight. “With great honor and with great respect, and humbly rather than with arrogance, I request that NATO and America should stop these operations on our soil,” he said. “This war is not on our soil. If this war is against terror, then this war is not here, terror is not here.”

Mr. Karzai’s remarks were made at a memorial service for the victims, in the presence of local officials as well as the second highest ranking American general in Afghanistan, David M. Rodriguez. “Our demand is that this war should be stopped,” Mr. Karzai said. “This is the voice of Afghanistan.”

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PFLP, March 12, 2011

PJ Crowley says Pentagon is being ‘ridiculous and stupid’ by subjecting WikiLeaks suspect to punitive conditions in jail

Ed Pilkington in New York, The Guardian, March 11, 2011

Bradley Manning is facing multiple charges relating to his alleged releasing of state secrets. Photograph: EPA

By Kevin Zeese, Consortium News, March 9, 2011

Editor’s Note: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top U.S. officials lecture world leaders on the need to respect the free flow of information as vital to democracy.

In other countries, brave whistleblowers are heroes, but in the United States, when Pvt. Bradley Manning allegedly exposed crimes and misconduct on a global scale, he was subjected to humiliation and punishment that would make many police states blush, as Kevin Zeese discusses in this guest essay:

Reports that Bradley Manning is being held nude every night at the Quantico Brig, then forced to stand naked in the hallway while he waits for his clothes, shows the inconsistency of the treatment of Manning with basic American values of due process, fair trial and human dignity.

Here is how his lawyer David Coombs describes his treatment:

“The Brig has stripped PFC Manning of all of his clothing for the past three nights, and they intend to continue this practice indefinitely. Each night, Brig guards force PFC Manning to relinquish all of his clothing.

“He then lies in a cold jail cell naked until the following morning, when he is required to endure the humiliation of standing naked at attention for the morning roll call.

“According to Marine spokesperson, First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, the decision to strip him naked every night is for PFC Manning’s own protection. Villiard stated that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to explain what prompted these actions ‘because to discuss the details would be a violation of PFC Manning’s privacy.’”

Manning, who has not been convicted of anything, has been held in virtual solitary confinement for ten months. David House who has visited him since September described him as “emotionally exhausted” and “catatonic.”

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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The United States, governed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, tortures political prisoners. That truth is on display for all the world to see, in the treatment of Wikileaks defendant Private Bradley Manning, who is stripped naked every night in an effort to crush his psyche. “The enemy is anyone, anywhere who dares to consider revealing the truth about how this country actually conducts itself around the world.”

Freedom Rider: Peace Prize Torture

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Manning is denied the use of sheets and now is forced to sleep naked and stand naked outside of his cell when it is inspected.”

If members of the Norwegian Nobel committee do not feel embarrassment for making Barack Obama a peace prize laureate, then they are as shameless as the man they foolishly chose to honor. Barack Obama is every bit the authoritarian as his predecessor George W. Bush. He too believes in his right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and restrict their rights to due process. He too has cracked down on whistle blowers and is determined to ferret them out and punish them.

The continued psychological torture of Pfc. Bradley Manning is the latest case in point. Manning is accused of leaking information to Julian Assange of Wikileaks, telling the world about the indiscriminate killings of Iraqis and other horrors brought about by the continuing American occupation.

Manning, who has yet to be tried or convicted of any crime, has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day ever since his arrest ten months ago. Last week the army added 22 additional charges, including “aiding the enemy.”

“Manning has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day ever since his arrest ten months ago.”

Manning’s one hour outside of his cell allows him only to walk in circles in another room. He is denied the use of sheets and now is forced to sleep naked and stand naked outside of his cell when it is inspected.

The government’s objective is a simple one. They want to break Manning so that he will talk about any communications he has had with Julian Assange. In other words, they are trying to drive him crazy in order to prosecute someone else. Manning has been denied visits from friends, journalists and even government officials such as Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

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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.

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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.

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