Peace and Justice Post

AHRC, Sep 10, 2010

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information regarding the shameful act allegedly by the officials of notorious intelligence agencies and the Elite Force, a law enforcement agency of Punjab government. Mr. Umer Cheema, a senior journalist from the newspaper, daily The News International, was abducted, tortured severely and kept in incommunicado to threat and intimidate him from his professional duties. Several media reports suggest that persons from intelligence agencies carried out the act. The government has still not been able to arrest the persons responsible for the abduction and torture. In a routine way the orders to arrest the culprits and form an inquiry committee have been made by the government and the Ministry of Interior and the Lahore High Court has taken suo motto action. However, it appears that the government officials and the courts hesitate to take action against the intelligence agencies due to the culture of impunity.

CASE NARRATIVE:

According to Mr. Umer Cheema, a senior journalist at The News International, a daily newspaper based in Islamabad, he was kidnapped, tortured and humiliated for six hours on 4 September. He was picked up in cloak-and-dagger style in the wee hours by men in commando uniforms and driven to a “safe house”. Here unknown persons took over; he was beaten black and blue, humiliated beyond one’s comprehension, made to strip off his clothes, hung upside down and remained in the illegal custody for hours. Finally, he was thrown out on the roadside at Talagang, 120 kilometres from Islamabad with a shaved head and a threatening message for Ansar Abbasi, the head of the newspaper’s investigative section.

Umar Cheema was a 2008 Daniel Pearl Fellow. In 2004 during General Musharraf’s government, he was deliberately hit by a moving car while doing a story on international inspection of Pakistan’s nuclear power installations.

According to the stories published in Daily The News, the kidnappers hurled abuses at the Chief Justice and cursed the editor-in-chief of the Jang Group. The kidnappers also threatened that Ansar Abbasi’s son might be kidnapped if the stories against the government were not stopped.

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by Sampath Perera, wsws.org, Sep 10, 2010

Callously exploiting the humanitarian disaster caused by six weeks of flooding, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is spurning Pakistan’s pleas for the release of funds under a 2008 loan agreement until Islamabad implements wrenching policy changes—changes that will further squeeze the incomes of the country’s impoverished toilers.

Earlier this summer Pakistan was due to receive a $1.3 billion tranche from an IMF loan of $11.3 billion. But the IMF delayed release of the funds after Islamabad failed to meet various IMF performance targets.

Since then, more than 20 million people and 79 of Pakistan’s 124 administrative districts have been affected by the Indus Valley floods.

The current government death toll of around 1,700 is low in comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and last January’s Haitian earthquake. But millions of hungry, homeless people remain at risk from disease and in many other respects the catastrophe in Pakistan dwarfs these tragedies.

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Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important

By Juan Cole, TomDispatch.com, Sept  9, 2010

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness.

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown — by the media conglomerates of their choice — the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.

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Mayhill Fowler,  The Huffington Post, Sep 10, 2010

A combination of ignorance and righteousness is just as much a danger to American society as the corruption of power in business and government. But for the last half century it is only the latter that has garnered the attention of investigative journalism, in both legacy and new media. The inexorable consequences for this eschewing, this recoiling, this turning away from laying down the historical record of American spiritual life has been playing out over the summer and into the fall of 2010, in the uproar over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero and in the intention of the pastor of a nondenominational church to burn copies of the Quran on the ninth anniversary of 9/11. The book burning has been averted (hopefully) only now, long past the point when a tiny congregation, through the combustion of ignorance and righteousness, has roiled the world.

Media has inundated us with stories about the proposed book burning, but always within legal and political frameworks: the constitutional protections for both freedom of speech and freedom of religious practice; the uproar in the Muslim world; the fallout for our troops and other Americans abroad. The heart of the matter, however, is religious belief: what the pastor and many other Americans of all persuasions think about the Bible and the Quran. Significantly, it has taken a dialogue between religious leaders, the pastor and Imam Feisal of the proposed New York Islamic Center, to defuse the situation. Why did the media, with all its coverage, fail to do the same thing first? What happened to the powerful effect of shining the light of knowledge?

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By Jacob Hornberger, Sep 9, 2010

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. confirms two things: the U.S. government wields the omnipotent, unreviewable power to torture people and, two, that Barack Obama, despite his much ballyhooed pre-election campaign hype about “change,” is actually just serving George W. Bush’s third term in office.

The plaintiffs’ claims against Jeppesen arose out of the CIA’s infamous kidnapping and rendition program, in which the CIA kidnaps people and then transports them to brutal foreign regimes for the purpose of torture. According to the plaintiffs’ complaint, which the Court was required to accept as true for purposes of ruling on the defendant’s motion to dismiss, the victims were subjected to horrible medieval-like torture techniques, such as breaking of bones, cutting into sexual organs, and pouring of painful liquids into open wounds.

The U.S. government intervened in the case, claiming that the suit should be dismissed based on the “state-secrets doctrine,” a pernicious doctrine that is found nowhere in the Constitution but which, the Court held, trumps the due process provisions of the Bill of Rights.

The government claimed that to allow the suit to go forward would entail the disclosure of government secrets, which would supposedly threaten national security.

The government’s position, however, which the court unfortunately bought into, is sheer nonsense. The state-secrets doctrine does nothing more than protect government officials from having their wrongdoing disclosed to the American people. That’s its purpose. That’s its effect.

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By Eric Margolis, Lew Rockwell.com, Sep 7, 2010

On 2 Sept, 2001, in a newspaper rticle, I wrote: “America’s strategic and economic interests in the Mideast and Muslim world are being threatened by the agony in Palestine, which inevitably invites terrorist attacks against US citizens and property.”

The 9/11 attacks came nine days later.

President Barack Obama is absolutely right to seek an end to the endless suffering of Palestinians. It is an affront to humanity and gravely undermines America’s values, security and prestige.

In my most recent book, American Raj – America and the Muslim World, I tried to show how the poisonous conflict over Palestine has generated much of what we call “terrorism,” and how it is dragging the United States ever into a deeper but unnecessary conflict with the Muslim world.

For those yearning to see an end to the seven decade Jewish-Palestinian conflict, to see security and tranquility for Israel, and justice for Palestinians, last week’s so-called “peace talks” in Washington were a painful farce.

President Obama convoked Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to meet in Washington with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, Egypt’s strongman, Husni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Abdullah.

The result was the same kind of tired, stale Mideast political kabuki that has dragged on for the past decade: platitudes about peace, cheery handshakes, and talks about talks about talks.

All involved knew that this was political theater designed to beguile American voters into believing progress was being made in the eternal Mideast mess.

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