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Pakistan Assassination
Junaid Ahmad is assistant professor of law at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. He said today: “The assassination of the ruling party’s governor of Pakistan’s largest province, the Punjab, adds one more to the list of high-profile political assassinations in the country. … The assassination and the chaos that has ensued happen at a time when the ruling PPP coalition government has dramatically lost its legitimacy, both from its coalition political parties and from the popular street. And once again, Pakistan descends into an incredible period of instability and uncertainty.”
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WikiLeaks Documents Expose Boeing Dealings
William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of the new book Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, said today: “The revelations of aggressive U.S. government advocacy for Boeing airliner deals underscore the extent to which U.S. foreign policy has become captive to commercial interests. …
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Wright and Kelly in Afghanistan
Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence; she is also available via Skype: kathy.vcnv. Wright, a former State Department diplomat and retired Army colonel, helped re-open the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2001. She resigned from the State Department in protest of the Iraq invasion in March of 2003. Wright said today: “The U.S. needs to be removing its troops from Afghanistan. This increase in military operations in Afghanistan with massive loss of life, multiple times more than previous years — plus the reach into Pakistan — is making things much more unstable, not stable.”
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Indefinite Detention and Assassination: “Clock Back to Pre-Magna Carta Times”
Bruce Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and is author of the new book American Empire: Before the Fall. He said today: “The American Empire has pushed the due process clock back to pre-Magna Carta times. The new national slogan is, ‘Anything and everything for professed safety, but nothing for liberty or freedom.'” Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and author of the new book The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse. She said today: “Indefinite detention violates the International Covenant on…
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Return of Ma Bell? FCC Net Neutrality Order a “Squandered Opportunity”
Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron said today: “The new rules are riddled with loopholes, evidence that the chairman sought approval from AT&T instead of listening to the millions of Americans who asked for real Net Neutrality. …”
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Cost of START Treaty
Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and is on the coordinating committee of Abolition 2000, a disarmament coalition. She said today: “The Obama administration will pay a heavy price to ratify the modest START treaty should it receive the required 67 Senate votes this week to enact it into law. The president originally promised the weapons labs $80 billion over ten years for building three new bomb factories in Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Kansas City to modernize our nuclear arsenals as well as an additional $100 billion for new delivery systems –…
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Slavery and the States’ Rights Myth
Loewen is author of the bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me and the new book The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (with Edward Sebesta). Loewen said today: “In 1860 and 1861, when the Southern states seceded, they said why, and it was all about slavery — its protection and extension. They said nothing about states’ rights. Why would they? The federal government was doing what they wanted, from recapturing fugitive slaves to low tariffs. On the contrary, South Carolina (and other states) inveighed AGAINST states’ rights, attacking states that refused to return slaves, for example.” See Loewen’s webpage
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D.C. Metro to Search Bags
The D.C. Bill of Rights Coalition and the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalitionith launched an online petition campaign today in opposition to the bag search program announced on Thursday, but not yet implemented, by D.C. Metro Transit Police. Elder and Udry are members of both civil liberties groups. The bag searching program was initially announced in 2008, but was put aside due to widespread community opposition. Udry, who is also director of the Defending Dissent Foundation, said today: “Metro officials are referencing a recent alleged bomb plot against Metro as justification for the random bag searches. They should remember that…
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Civil Resistance at White House Led by Veterans
Military veterans will lead a nonviolent act of civil resistance at the White House Thursday, Dec. 16, at 10:00 a.m. to protest the ongoing U.S. wars and occupations. Veterans For Peace organizers expect this to be the largest veteran-led resistance since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. Among the scheduled participants: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; Mike Ferner, Veterans For Peace national president; Leah Bolger, Veterans For Peace vice president and retired Navy commander; Ray McGovern, retired CIA official; Coleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower; and Chris Hedges, author and former New York Times war correspondent. See: stopthesewars.org
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Holbrooke
Zunes just wrote the piece “Richard Holbrooke Represented the Worst of the Foreign Policy Establishment.” Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn