| Written by Michael Tennant |
| New American, October 10, 2010 |
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On October 9, 2009, the Nobel Committee awarded Obama the Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Goldman writes that Obama “was selected, prize committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland said, not for what he had accomplished but for the promise of what he would accomplish.” Former President Jimmy Carter, the 2002 Peace Prize recipient, said Obama was deserving of the prize for his “vision and commitment.” What, then, has Obama done to vindicate the committee’s faith in him? Goldman sees a few bright spots: “Obama has withdrawn tens of thousands of troops from Iraq. He rushed to the relief of Haiti after its devastating earthquake and redirected U.S. helicopters and aid to help the millions of Pakistanis whose homes were washed away by catastrophic floods.” On the flip side, Goldman notes, “fighting is escalating in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq continues to smolder and Obama [is struggling] to keep fledgling Middle East peace talks from collapsing. Drones are firing missiles in unprecedened [sic] numbers and confrontations with Iran and North Korea are hotter than ever.” “In addition,” he says, “wars rage in Somalia, Africa, Asia and South America, fueled by religion, tribal hatreds, poverty and piracy.” It is, of course, a good thing that Obama has mostly kept his nose out of these other wars. But he has done little to address the problems in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and, in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, has actually escalated, rather than lessened, hostilities. The President has committed an additional 47,000 troops to Afghanistan; and though he has stated that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011, he has made it clear that the withdrawal is dependent on conditions on the ground and that even if withdrawal does begin at that time, the United States is going to be involved in Afghanistan for years to come. The troop surge has hardly achieved peace: “Nearly 500 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan and nearly another 500 troops from other Western allies since October 2009,” writes Goldman. At the same time, the Pentagon is seeking a permanent presence in Afghanistan, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates averring that “we’re not ever leaving at all” and Obama meekly acquiescing to whatever the military wants — this according to Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars. |
One Year After Obama’s Peace Prize: Where’s the Peace?
October 12, 2010
In a famous TV commercial from the 1980s, an elderly woman, surveying the minuscule amount of hamburger in the middle of a bun, asks pointedly, “Where’s the beef?” One year after President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize despite having been in office only a short time, ABC News’ Russell Goldman Time for New Palestinian Political Strategy
October 12, 2010By Dr. Elias Akleh, intifada-palestine.com, Oct 11, 2010
Palestinians had long lost confidence in their Palestinian Authority as their representative, who was supposed to defend their rights and work to achieve their statehood. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, was imposed on the Palestinians in the 2005 election when the Israeli forces had arrested and restricted the movements of other Palestinian candidates and his campaign was given 94% of TV coverage. Although his presidency had expired in January of 2009 he is still, illegally and unconstitutionally, occupying his position. Polls had shown that his popularity is very low.
Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and his government were also imposed on Palestinians when Abbas appointed him to the position after the democratically elected Hamas government foiled an American coup d’état that eventually caused a division between the Palestinians.
The Palestinians were deceived by the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They were misled that the Accords would be merely the first step in a plan that would eventually lead to Israeli withdrawal back to the 1967 Armistice Lines and to the establishment of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 1995. Thus Yasser Arafat had dramatically altered the charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to reflect a new strategy of denouncing the legitimate armed resistance (labeled violence at the time), abandoning the liberation of all Palestine, accepting and recognizing the existence of the Israeli state on 78% of Palestine, and announcing peaceful negotiations as the only strategic choice for solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Obama’s enthusiasm for drone strikes takes heavy toll on Pakistan’s tribesmen
October 11, 2010Drone missile attacks near to Pakistan’s Afghan border have become an everyday occurrence since Obama took power
Declan Walsh in Islamabad, The Guardian, Oct 7, 2010
The Pashtun tribesmen have several nicknames for the drones that endlessly circle over their mud-walled mountain villages. Some call them “wasps” or “mosquitoes”, after the low buzz emitted by the pilotless aircraft’s small engines.
But the most telling name is “bangana” – the Pashto word for a thunderclap – after the terrifying impact of a laser-guided Hellfire missile as it slams into a building, often obliterating everyone inside.
Since the CIA launched its first drone strike in Pakistan in June 2004, killing a young Taliban leader, such missile attacks have become an everyday event in North and South Waziristan, along the troubled Afghan border.
Predator and larger Reaper drones have killed up to 1,800 people, according to media estimates gathered by the New American Foundation, including at least two dozen senior al-Qaida operatives and hundreds of more junior militants.
But the drones also kill many civilians – the exact toll is hotly contested – and debate rages, in Pakistan and abroad, about whether they ultimately quell militancy or encourage it.
Washington has few doubts. So far Barack Obama has signed off on over 125 strikes – twice the number authorised by George Bush during the last five years of his presidency. Manufacturers are scrambling to keep up with demand from the CIA.
The New York Times defends assassinations
October 11, 2010By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 11 October 2010
In its main editorial Sunday, the New York Times, the major voice of what passes for liberalism in America, openly defends the right of the US government to assassinate anyone it pleases. The only restriction the Times suggests is that the president should be required to have his selection of murder victims rubber-stamped by a secret court like the one that now approves 99.99 percent of all electronic eavesdropping requests.
The apologia for killing begins with a blatant lie about the US assassination program using missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft flying along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The Times claims, citing official US government sources: “The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, but fewer than 10 noncombatants.”
Actually, Pakistani government officials estimated the number of civilians killed by drone attacks in 2009 alone at more than 700, with an even higher figure this year, as the Obama administration has rained missiles and bombs on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.(See “US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009” .)
A report in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn concluded, “For each Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”
The Times editors cannot be unaware of these well-established figures, since their own journalists have reported a civilian death toll from US missile strikes in Pakistan of some 500 by April 2009, and 100 to 500 more through April 2010. They lie shamelessly and deliberately in order to conceal the significance of their endorsement of such widespread killing.
Nine Months After the Quake – a Million Haitians Slowly Dying
October 11, 2010by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t | Report, Oct 11, 2010
Haitians sit among the rubble in Port-au-Prince following an earthquake in January. (Photo: Zoriah)
“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.
We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to 5,000 people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.
Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.
America’s disastrous policy of assassination
October 11, 2010
 Cartoon by John Darkow
Jason Ditz, Daily Sun News, Oct 8, 2010 President Obama’s Justice Department recently feigned outrage when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the planned assassination of a U.S.-born Muslim cleric, insisting that the president, not the courts, should have the only say in the assassination of American citizens. A far cry indeed from Executive Order 12333, signed in December of 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, which read, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” This was the sort of plainspoken language President Reagan became famous for–leaving no wiggle room for interpretation–and it is exactly the policy America so desperately needs today. Just 29 years after this executive order America has become, simply put, assassination-happy. President Obama claims not only the right to assassinate foreigners abroad without charges, but American citizens as well. The legal basis for these claims is so murky that the Justice Department insists that even presenting this case would be a threat to national security that would force it to divulge secrets. Yet extralegal assassinations, whether by means of federally employed assassins or the aerial bombardment of nations with which the United States is not at war, remains a terrifying fact of life. The WikiLeaks documents revealed, among other things, that the U.S. Army had an active assassination team operating in southern Afghanistan, and that the team has killed a number of innocent civilians in its heedless operations. But the Army’s assassins are small potatoes compared to the CIA, which was revealed in Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars to have an active team of 3,000 trained assassins operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Combined with the CIA’s constant drone strikes, the number of civilians killed by these plans since President Obama took office is well into the thousands. How do things go so tragically wrong in just 29 years? How did America go from a nation which so bristled at the idea of overseas assassination that three consecutive presidents, Ford, Carter and Reagan, each saw the need to issue more harshly worded bans against the policy, to a nation which is so comfortable with the idea that its Justice Department can claim, with no fear of backlash, that it is outrageous to even seek judicial oversight over the process? From the wars of Clinton to the wars of Bush and now the wars of Obama, U.S. Presidents have been claiming ever increasing amounts of power over life and death. In just a few short years this has brought America far over the cliff from a nation of law and order to a nation in which presidents feel justified in solving any of their problems with murder. The Reagan standard, weakened by Bush, has been obliterated by Obama. Yet this does not appear to be the destination on the road of increasingly dictatorial presidents, but merely another stop-off. The situation is continuing to worsen and remains disastrously under the radar of most Americans. Candidate Obama was a critic of detainee abuse and detention without charge. President Obama has not only shrugged that off with alarming alacrity, but become the president of the assassination, ordering more extrajudicial killings than any who came before him. And he’s not even halfway through his first term. Organizations like the ACLU will no doubt continue the fight against extending the president’s killing power, but until the American public genuinely cares about what is happening and makes it clear they will not tolerate mass murder as official policy they will only be slowing the inexorable growth of the Obama Administration’s body count. America must return to sanity, and soon, before this sort of thuggery stops feeling like a novel, troubling new policy and starts becoming the new American way of life. – Jason Ditz is news editor at Antiwar.com, a non-profit organization dedicated to the cause of non-interventionism. |
In the crosshairs of US drones
October 11, 2010
Residents live under a constant fear of being hit as dozens of unmanned drones buzz the skies over North and South Waziristan. The drones frighten children and women who sometimes become the victims, especially if the intended targets are anywhere close to their homes.
According to local tribal sources, the Americans have planted several spies whose job is to insert microchips in vehicles which are then tracked and taken out by missiles fired from drones.
When the US drone attacks started several years ago, their priority was to get the al-Qaeda leadership, But a lot has changed since then, and it appears the Americans have expanded their targets to include foreign fighters, the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
According to one senior Pakistanii military official, the accuracy of the drone raids has increased but that it still causing civilian casualties because of the nature of the way local houses are built.
The large adobe-type mud structures are wall to wall and so, often adjoining structures collapse under the pressure of heavy explosions.
Tony Blair’s Colonial Blinders
October 11, 2010Middle East Online, Oct 11, 2010
Tony Blair’s story about ‘Islamic extremism’ reminds us precisely why the world rose up in the early and mid-20th Century against European colonialism and racism that denied much of the rest of the world both its political rights and its fundamental humanity, says Rami G. Khouri.
BOSTON — When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) get together, you know that something slightly frightening will happen — given that WINEP is a leading voice of pro-Israeli sentiment in Washington and Blair is the world’s leading example of neo-colonial Western political leadership that speaks nicely of making peace in the Middle East but in reality mostly makes war or ignores the real causes of the conflict at hand. We were not disappointed last week, when WINEP awarded Blair its 2010 Scholar-Statesman Award. His remarks clarified a main reason why Western-Arab-Asian tensions persist, and even worsen.
Blair’s basic point was that we need a revolution in our thinking to defeat Islamic extremism by “defeating the narrative that nurtures it… The practitioners of the extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking. And what is this narrative? It is that Islam is basically oppressed by the West, disrespected, and treated unfairly, that the military action we took post-9/11 was against countries because they are Muslim, and that in the Middle East we ignore the injustice done to Palestinians in our desire to support Israel because the Palestinians are Muslims and the Israelis predominantly Jews. It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs, and organizations. And of course, many of those that agree with this narrative abhor the terrorism. But as the support across the Middle East for the Muslim Brotherhood shows, far too many buy into far too much of the analysis of the extremists, if not their methodology…. So in my judgment, what we should be doing instead is confronting the narrative head-on, forming an alliance across the face and across the divides of culture and civilization to defeat it.”
Gaza flotilla attack: calls for international criminal court to step in
October 11, 2010Turkish victims ask international criminal court to pursue Israeli gunmen over raid on ship
Afua Hirsch, legal affairs correspondent, The Guardian, Oct 8, 2010
The international criminal court is being urged to prosecute members of the Israeli defence force for the raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship. Turkish victims have formally requested an investigation, the Guardian has learned.
Lawyers acting for Turkish citizens injured or killed when Israel intercepted the flotilla in May have written to Luis Moreno Ocampo, the court’s prosecutor, claiming there is an “overwhelming” case for prosecution.
The request is a significant step towards a criminal investigation by the court, which experts say has jurisdiction to prosecute those involved in the raid despite Israel not recognising its jurisdiction.
“The attack on the flotilla occurred in international waters, which directly violated many parts of international law as well as international public and criminal law,” said Ramazan Ariturk, a partner at Elmadag Law Office, the Turkish legal body that is representing the Turkish victims and the human rights group IHH. “The crimes committed by Israeli Defence Forces should be prosecuted and the International Criminal Court is the sole authority which is able to do that.”
There is mounting pressure on Israel after a UN report into the incident, in which nine Turkish activists were killed, accused Israel of violating international law.
Kuwait: For Abused Domestic Workers, Nowhere to Turn
October 10, 2010Scant Protection Against Mistreatment and Abuse
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Workers continue to spend long periods waiting at embassy shelters, including the Philippines safe house, shown here. Since 1992, the Kuwaiti government has relied on deportation as the primary method for dealing with domestic workers who face employment-related problems. Workers reported spending weeks or months in official custody, moving from embassy shelters to police stations, and from there to criminal investigation facilities, before they were sent to deportation detention.
© 2010 Moises Saman/Magnum Photos -
Employers hold all the cards in Kuwait. If abused or exploited workers try to escape or complain, the law makes it easy for employers to charge them with ‘absconding’ and get them deported. The government has left workers to depend on employers’ good will – or to suffer when good will is absent.
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director
(Kuwait City) – Domestic workers in Kuwait who try to escape abusive employers face criminal charges for “absconding” and are unable to change jobs without their employer’s permission, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Migrant domestic workers have minimal protection against employers who withhold salaries, force employees to work long hours with no days off, deprive them of adequate food, or abuse them physically or sexually.
The 97-page report, “Walls at Every Turn: Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers Through Kuwait’s Sponsorship System,” describes how workers become trapped in exploitative or abusive employment then face criminal penalties for leaving a job without the employer’s permission. Government authorities arrest workers reported as “absconding” and in most cases deport them from Kuwait – even if they have been abused and seek redress.
“Employers hold all the cards in Kuwait,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “If abused or exploited workers try to escape or complain, the law makes it easy for employers to charge them with ‘absconding’ and get them deported. The government has left workers to depend on employers’ good will – or to suffer when good will is absent.”
Kuwait, which has the highest ratio of domestic workers to citizens in the Middle East, announced on September 26, 2010, that it would abolish the sponsorship system (kafala) in February 2011, and replace the employer-based system with a government-administered recruitment authority. While this would be an important reform, the government gave no details on what legal protections would be added for migrant workers in the country, or whether the reforms would cover domestic workers.
The country’s more than 660,000 migrant domestic workers constitute nearly a third of the work force in this small Gulf country of only 1.3 million citizens. But domestic workers are excluded from the labor laws that protect other workers. Kuwaiti lawmakers reinforced this exclusion as recently as February 2010, when they passed a new labor law for the private sector that failed to cover domestic work.
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