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Medea Benjamin to Receive 2014 Gandhi Peace Award (United States)
un article par Promoting Enduring Peace (abridged)
Medea Benjamin will receive the Gandhi Peace Award
from Promote Enduring Peace on April 16 in New
Haven, Ct. She is a co-founder of both CODEPINK
and the international human rights organization
Global Exchange. Benjamin is the author of eight
books. Her latest book is Drone Warfare: Killing
by Remote Control, and she has been campaigning to
stop the use of killer drones. Her direct
questioning of President Obama during his 2013
foreign policy address, as well as her recent
trips to Pakistan and Yemen, helped shine a light
on the innocent people killed by US drone strikes.
Medea Benjamin
click on photo to enlarge
Benjamin has been an advocate for social justice
for more than 30 years. . . Since the September
11, 2001 tragedy, Medea has been working to
promote a U.S. foreign policy that would respect
human rights and gain us allies instead of
contributing to violence and undermining our
international reputation. In 2000, she was a
Green Party candidate for the California Senate.
During the 1990s, Medea focused her efforts on
tackling the problem of unfair trade as promoted
by the World Trade Organization. Widely credited
as the woman who brought Nike to its knees and
helped place the issue of sweatshops on the
national agenda, Medea was a key player in the
campaign that won a $20 million settlement from 27
US clothing retailers for the use of sweatshop
labor in Saipan. She also pushed Starbucks and
other companies to start carrying fair trade
coffee.
From 2002 to 2009, Benjamin engaged in numerous
protests involving U.S. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld; U.S. President George W. Bush;
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, among
others. Benjamin engaged in similar protest
actions at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
and the 2004 Republican National Convention. . .
Her work for justice in Israel/Palestine includes
taking numerous delegations to Gaza after the 2008
Israeli invasion, organizing the Gaza Freedom
March in 2010, participating in the Freedom
Flotillas and opposing the policies of the Israel
lobby group AIPAC. In 2011 she was in Tahrir
Square during the Egyptian uprising and In 2012
she was part of a human rights delegation to
Bahrain in support of democracy activists; she was
tear-gassed, arrested and deported by the Bahraini
government.
Medea has also been on the forefront of the anti-
drone movement. In 2009 Benjamin began her efforts
to bring attention to the effects of drone
warfare, participating in demonstrations at United
States bases where drones are piloted and at
headquarters of drone manufacturers. On April 28,
2012 in Washington, D.C., she was responsible for
organizing the first ever International Drone
Summit with lawyers, scientists, academics, and
activists to kick off an international campaign to
rein in the use of drones in the U.S. and abroad.
She recently published Drone Warfare: Killing by
Remote Control. She also organized the first-ever
international drone summit and lead delegations to
Pakistan and Yemen to meet with drone strike
victims and family members of Guantanamo Bay
Prisoners.
Her articles appear regularly in outlets such as The
Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet and OpEd
News.
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DISCUSSION
Question(s) liée(s) à cet article:
Drones (unmanned bombers), Should they be outlawed?
* * * * *
Commentaire le plus récent:
Finally a Drone Report Done Right
By David Swanson
The U.N. and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently released a flurry of deeply flawed reports on drone murders. According to the U.N.'s special rapporteur, whose day job is as law partner of Tony Blair's wife, and according to two major human rights groups deeply embedded in U.S. exceptionalism, murdering people with drones is sometimes legal and sometimes not legal, but almost always it's too hard to tell which is which, unless the White House rewrites the law in enough detail and makes its new legal regime public.
When I read these reports I was ignorant of the existence of a human rights organization called Alkarama, and of the fact that it had just released a report titled License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law. While Human Rights Watch looked at six drone murders in Yemen and found two of them illegal and four of them indeterminate, Alkarama looked in more detail and with better context at the whole campaign of drone war on Yemen, detailing 10 cases. As you may have guessed from the report's title, this group finds the entire practice of murdering people with flying robots to be illegal.
Alkarama makes this finding, not out of ignorance of the endless intricacies deployed by the likes of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Rather, Alkarama adopts the same dialect and considers the same scenarios: Is it legal if it's a war, if it's not a war? Is it discriminate, necessary, proportionate? Et cetera. But the conclusion is that the practice is illegal no matter which way you slice it.
This agrees with Pakistan's courts, Yemen's National Dialogue, Yemen's Human Rights Ministry, statements by large numbers of well-known figures in Yemen, and the popular movement in Yemen protesting the slaughter. . ... continuation.
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