Peace and Justice Post

Global Research, November 8, 2007
IBA

The International Bar Association (IBA) is calling upon its member bars and law societies across the globe to support lawyers and judges in Pakistan . Since President Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the Pakistan constitution on 3 November 2007, mass protests, led by judges and lawyers, have taken place. Recent reports suggest that thousands of lawyers have been arrested and subjected to torture and ill-treatment for protesting against President Musharraf’s action. Among those arrested is Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who is believed to be under house arrest.

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Information Clearing House

By Joel S. Hirschhorn

11/14/07 “ICH ” — – With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs.

Keith Olbermann was praised when he called the Bush presidency a criminal conspiracy. That missed the larger truth. The whole two-party political system is a criminal conspiracy hiding behind illusion induced delusion.

Virtually everything that Bush correctly gets condemnation for could have been prevented or negated by Democrats, if they had had courage, conviction and commitment to maintaining the rule of law and obedience to the Constitution. Bush grabbed power from the feeble and corrupt hands of Democrats. Democrats have failed the vast majority of Americans. So why would sensible people think that giving Democrats more power is a good idea? They certainly have done little to merit respect for their recent congressional actions, or inaction when it comes to impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

One of the core reasons the two-party stranglehold on our political system persists is that whenever one party uses its power to an extreme degree it sets the conditions for the other party – its partner in the conspiracy – to take over. Then the other takes its turn in wielding excessive power. Most Americans – at least those that vote – seem incapable of understanding that the Democrats and Republicans are two teams in the same league, serving the same cabal running the corporatist plutocracy. By keeping people focused on rooting for one team or the other, the behind-the-scenes rulers ensure their invisibility and power.

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truthdig | posted November 14, 2007 (web only)

Robert Scheer

“The war on terror” made me do it. That’s the excuse that works for George W. Bush to rationalize his assaults on the rule of law, from arbitrary arrest to torture. So why not try some war-on-terror obfuscation to bail out his president-dictator buddy over in Pakistan?

That’s the card Bush played at his Saturday press conference when he once again celebrated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a strong ally in the war on terrorism: “If you’re the chief operating officer of Al-Qaida, you haven’t had a good experience. There has been four or five Number 3s that have been brought to justice one way or the other, and many of those folks thought they had found safe haven in Pakistan. And that would not have happened without President Musharraf honoring his word.”

Of course Bush’s statement was utter nonsense. Al-Qaida has been having a very good experience with its CEO Osama bin Laden–whom Bush had promised to get “dead or alive”–being still very much alive and apparently moving with his minions quite easily across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So too his Taliban sponsors, who seem to get stronger each month; Afghanistan is no closer to stability than Iraq, that other war-on-terrorism battleground where Bush once claimed triumph.

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From The Times

November 15, 2007

Tom Baldwin in Washington

More American military veterans have been committing suicide than US soldiers have been dying in Iraq, it was claimed yesterday.

At least 6,256 US veterans took their lives in 2005, at an average of 17 a day, according to figures broadcast last night. Former servicemen are more than twice as likely than the rest of the population to commit suicide.

Such statistics compare to the total of 3,863 American military deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 – an average of 2.4 a day, according to the website ICasualties.org.

The rate of suicides among veterans prompted claims that the US was suffering from a “mental health epidemic” – often linked to post-traumatic stress.

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Benazir Bhutto is back at the head of a struggle against dictatorship, but Pakistan needs a more radical transformation

Seumas Milne
Thursday November 15, 2007
The Guardian, Comment

The return of Benazir Bhutto from the political dead has been wondrous to behold. Ten years ago, her name was mud around the world: she had been sacked as prime minister; her brother had been gunned down by her own police force; her husband was in prison on corruption charges; and her Swiss bank accounts had been frozen at the request of the Pakistani government. When the heroine of the struggle against the dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq visited Britain, government ministers failed to return her calls.

A decade on, she is the darling of the western media once more, leading the opposition to another US-backed military ruler and somehow, at the same time, the last hope of the US and British governments of keeping a grip on the upheaval now engulfing Pakistan. As she was told by a senior US official at her lowest point in the late 1990s: “We can whitewash you in 24 hours if we need to.”

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Framed, November 6, 2007
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, this famous line is spoken:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

There has long been a debate about how that line should be interpreted. Is it a half-serious jibe about how much better off the world would be without members of the bar? Those who think so argue that this line is

offered as the best feature imagined of yet for utopia. It’s hilarious. A very rough and simplistic modern translation would be, “When I’m the King, there’ll be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in every pot, AND NO LAWYERS.” It’s a clearly lawyer-bashing joke.

Others point out that the line is uttered by Dick the Butcher, a murderous thug who seeks to overthrow the lawfully constituted government and to establish tyranny:

For example, one legal firm states:

“The first thing we do,” said the character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, is “kill all the lawyers.” Contrary to popular belief, the proposal was not designed to restore sanity to commercial life. Rather, it was intended to eliminate those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution — thus underscoring the important role that lawyers can play in society.

(from Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky LLP Firm Profile)

Or

As the famous remark by the plotter of treachery in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI shows – “The first thing we must do is kill all the lawyers,” – the surest way to chaos and tyranny even then was to remove the guardians of independent thinking.

(from “Thinking Like a Lawyer”)

This dispute, however, is actually a false dichotomy. Shakespeare seldom wrote two-dimensional characters. The reason he is revered as the greatest playwright in the English language is precisely because so many of his lines are plausibly open to multiple interpretations. As my old friend Mike Manheim used to say, the nature of ambiguity is that it’s ambiguous.

Still . . . the validity of the pro-lawyer interpretation got an unexpected boost this week from Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf:

Baton-wielding police fought with lawyers outside courthouses in Islamabad and Lahore again Tuesday, arresting dozens more as they enforced Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s crackdown on judicial activism.

With one in four lawyers now jailed and many judges detained in their homes, surrounded by soldiers, Pakistan’s judicial system is in lockdown three days after Musharraf suspended the constitution and declared a state of emergency.

* * *

About 3,000 Pakistani lawyers, rounded up since Saturday, sit in jails across the country with no courts operating to which they can seek release. Pakistan has an estimated 12,000 lawyers.

Police earned cash bonuses for beating and arresting hundreds of lawyers Monday who had gathered outside of Lahore’s courthouse, police sources said.

Any lawyer who attempts to enter the Lahore or Islamabad courthouse Tuesday was immediately arrested, witnesses said. Some were grabbed by police as they walked toward the court, sources said.

Get rid of the people committed to the rule of law and tyranny is much more easily established.

And by the way, take note of the line in the CNN version of the story about a “crackdown on judicial activism.” Judicial activism . . . judicial activism . . . sounds familiar; where have I heard that phrase before? Oh yeah, I remember now–from the GOP as it condemns judges who actually protect people’s rights from government intrusion and prosecutorial overreach. They’re the people who read Dick the Butcher’s line as a prescription, not a caution.

Those Republicans have found their contemporary ideological mentor in the dictator of Pakistan. How envious they must be of his ability to solve “judicial activism” problem with a roundup of lawyers and judges. If only we could do that here.

See also: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/5/1192/07991

Counterpunch, November 13, 2007

Where are the Demonstrations? 

By RALPH NADER

One of the most noticed photographs in the newspapers last week was that of a well-dressed Pakistani lawyer on the streets hurling back a tear gas canister toward the soldiers who were suppressing a demonstration by lawyers protesting the martial law (called “emergency rule”) of Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Can anyone remember anywhere in all of modern history, large numbers of lawyers leading the resistance as they did on the streets of Pakistani cities way ahead of the workers, peasants and even the university students?

Pakistani police and troops rounded up the mass protests of lawyers and pushed hundreds of them into trucks on the way to the prison. Lawyers were willing to go to prison and endure beatings, while demanding the re-establishment of the rule of law and the independence of judges right up to the Supreme Court, a rare display of professional courage and duty.

What about lawyers in the United States standing up to the Bush regime’s regular violation of our Constitution, the imprisonment of thousands of people without charges and without attorneys, the assault on due process, probable cause, habeas corpus, the spying on Americans without court approval and the defiant, illegal use of torture?

Keep reading . . .

The News international, November 14

Am not dictator, want to restore democracy
LONDON: A Britain’s News TV Channel on Wednesday quoted General Pervez Musharraf as saying that he is not a dictator and that he wants to restore democracy.

President Pervez Musharraf had told it in an interview he had considered resigning.

In an interview, Musharraf said he had considered his position but now felt he was the man to lead Pakistan into democracy.

Musharraf said he felt let down by the West and betrayed by the media and remarked, “I am not a dictator.”

The military ruler declared a state of emergency on November 3 and has since detained thousands of opposition politicians, activists and lawyers.

His actions have been widely condemned by Western governments which are urging him to end military rule an…..more

The Daily Star, November 13, 2007

Editorial

Yasser Arafat has been dead for three years, harried to an early death by the Israeli siege of his battered presidential compound in Ramallah. Two camps – his own secular Fatah faction and the Islamist group Hamas – that claim to carry on his struggle for Palestinian rights have effectively been at war for months. In so doing, they have undermined their shared goal of justice for the Palestinian people and trampled a principle of ideological inclusiveness that was perhaps the most important hallmark of Arafat’s leadership. And now they have marred the anniversary of his death with bloodshed.

Leaders of both Fatah and Hamas need very much to take a step back and think about the position of their people – not their respective constituents, but the Palestinian people whom they both purport to represent  – and therefore about the consequences of their actions. Their people have been dispossessed for decades, and their Arab allies have never been of much help except (in a limited fashion) when it has suited their own purposes. Their would-be peace partner, the Israeli government, has made clear that it is in no rush to conclude an agreement, and the Jewish state’s cohorts in Washington can be relied upon to support this intransigence as best they can.

This is a period of profound vulnerability for the Palestinians, making it incumbent on their leaders to put up a united front so as to communicate their unanimous rejection of any peace treaty that unduly violates or even dilutes their legitimate national rights. This will not be accomplished by having Fatah and Hamas plan and prepare for the next round of a senseless civil war. That would play straight into the hands of those who want their people’s suffering to continue.

For all his weaknesses, Arafat understood very clearly that a movement divided against itself could never succeed. Which of his would-be heirs will be the first to figure this out?

AFP , November 14, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – FBI investigators have found that Blackwater guards shot 14 people with no justification in the controversial September 16 incident in Baghdad, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Seventeen people were killed in the incident, in which Blackwater private security guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad neighborhood as they protected a State Department convoy. Blackwater said the guards came under attack.

At least 14 of the shootings broke rules for private security guards in Iraq regarding the use of deadly force, the Times reported, citing unnamed civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents said the shootings were unjustified, the Times reported.

The FBI investigation into the incident has not concluded, but the findings are being reviewed by US Justice Department officials, the Times reports.