Peace and Justice Post

A pair of US drone attacks against North Waziristan Agency today have killed at least 16 people and wounded a number of others. The slain were termed “suspected terrorists” by Pakistani security officials, though there was no indication of any high value targets slain.

One of the strikes destroyed a home in the village of Bushnarai, while another destroyed a car in Datta Khel. The two attacks mark the 10th and 11th US strikes in the agency in the past 11 days.

And while Pakistani officials have conceded that a number of civilians, including children, have been killed in the strike, they have yet to identify any of them as a known militant, terming the vast majority of them suspects.

Which has been the case with most of the massive drone campaign of the Obama Administration. Though a handful of named militants have been confirmed kills, the vast majority of the “suspects” are never identified, or turn out later to be innocent civilians whose guilt was assumed because of tribal affiliations.

Spiegel Online International, Sep 13, 2010

AP

The Szczytno-Szymany airport in northeastern Poland, close to the suspected black site prison (2005 photo).

Former CIA agents have confirmed rumors that the agency tortured terror suspects at a detention center in Poland. One agent allegedly held a drill to a prisoner’s head while he was naked and hooded.

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.

Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”

Albert is said to have repeatedly held the drill and a handgun to al-Nashiri’s head and threatened him with death. The agent was later reprimanded and left the CIA. An attempt to pursue legal proceedings against him was abandoned, however. Albert has since returned to work for the CIA as an intelligence contractor, the AP reported.

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By Eric S. Margolis, Sun2Surf, Sep 16, 2010

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is the world’s leading think tank for military affairs. It represents the top echelon of defence experts, retired officers and senior military men, spanning the globe from the United States and Britain to China, Russia and India.

I’ve been an IISS member for over 20 years. IISS’s reports are always authoritative but usually cautious and diplomatic, sometimes dull. However, two weeks ago the IISS issued an explosive report on Afghanistan that is shaking Washington and its Nato allies.

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II

So, when enterprising Indians  defeated British Colonialism, they took care to absorb all the  “developmental” lessons.  The one new thing was the need to remember periodically that the blood, sweat, and hunger of the labouring (in whom “sovereignty” resided, don’t you know) was rewarded every five years or so with a call to elect  a new set of rulers of the same old vintage.  They called it Democracy.

Never more to the fore in the year of the Lord, 2010, when the democratic state fires away at the little people from one end of the double barrel and prepares to showcase the realm to the world via the Commonwealth Games through the other.

Thus, in a throwback to Pico and Shakespeare, the Indian state displays its faculties of innovation and spending in the works it gets made at less than minimum wage, and, on the other side, plays the beast to man, woman, and child  who have, alas, not inherited the pedigree of Renaissance Humanism.  Recall the butcheries the Conquistadors were perpetrating as they sought to make of the white race  the  gold-plated inheritors of God’s selective intent; and recall that even as Jefferson was inking the Declaration  (all men are equal etc., with them unalienable rights) he, like  most of his distinguished peers—Madison, Washington, what-have-you—owned a hundred or more slaves  (of whom, Howard Zinn tells us in his People’s History of the United States of America, some 50 million died during the slave trade.  Some other estimates put the figure at 60 million.)

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Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.org, Sep 11, 2010

Apparently having learned no lessons from the Iraq WMD debacle, the New York Times is pushing for a heightened confrontation with Iran, slipping into the same kind of hysteria that it and other major U.S. news organizations displayed in 2002 and 2003.

In its latest neocon-styled editorial – commenting on a new critical report about Iran’s growing truculence toward nuclear inspectors – the Times concluded with this judgment:

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US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Glyn Davies again warned Arab nations against trying to push forward a non-binding resolution urging Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), insisting it might harm the Mideast peace talks.

“We need to send a positive impulse to that broader peace process, not a negative one,” Davies insisted. US officials had previously reacted with outrage when they learned that Israel’s arsenal was a topic for discussion at the IAEA meeting, insisting it was “untimely and uncalled for.”

But the issue of Israel’s status as the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East and the region’s only non-signatory to the NPT isn’t going away, and must continue to be an issue as the Nuclear Free Mideast push continues.

Israel has ruled out joining the NPT, claiming such calls are unfair, and President Obama has indicated that he is backing that position and that he believes Israel has an inherent right to the possession of nuclear weapons. President Obama also criticized his own vote in favor of the Nuclear Free Mideast resolution at the most recent NPT meeting, insisting it was a “mistake.”

Socialist Worker, September 2, 2010

For 43 years of my conscious life, I have remained a revolutionist; for 42 of them, I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again, I would, of course, try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent; indeed, it is firmer today than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

Leon Trotsky

WITH THOSE words, Leon Trotsky–a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, now living in exile in Coyoacán, Mexico–ended his “Testament,” to be published after his death.

Several months later, on August 20, the tragedy engulfing the international communist movement delivered its final assault on the living Trotsky.

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