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November 7th, 2009

Six Questions for Desmond Travers on the Goldstone Report

Web Note: Here’s a link to the official Goldstone Report

imgBy Ken Silverstein – Harpers Magazine

Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report. Travers is a retired Colonel of the Army of the Irish Defence Forces. His last appointment was as Commandant of its Military College. He also served in command of troops with various UN and EU peace support missions. I recently spoke to Travers by phone about the report. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

November 7th, 2009

Israel: Stop East Jerusalem Home Demolitions

by Human Rights Watch

57 Palestinians Forced From Their Homes in One Week

imgThe Israeli government is destroying the homes of Palestinian families and causing unnecessary suffering so that it can expand illegal Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. Israel needs to respect the basic rights of Palestinian families to property and housing…

(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem should immediately stop demolishing Palestinian homes in violation of international law, Human Rights Watch said today.

November 7th, 2009

Former UK Ambassador: CIA Sent People To Be ‘Raped With Broken Bottles’

By Daniel Tencer – Raw Story

imgThe CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

November 6th, 2009

Eager to Tap Iraq’s Vast Oil Reserves, Industry Execs Suggested Invasion

by Jason Leopold – TruthOut

imgTwo years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain “a prisoner of its energy dilemma” as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

That April 2001 report, “Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,” was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the US Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves.

November 6th, 2009

Has US Clumsiness Finished Off Mahmoud Abbas?

by Dominic Waghorn – Sky News, UK

img‘Halas’, says Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. ‘Enough. It’s over’.

Last night he told his people he has ‘no desire’ to stand in the elections he has called for early next year.

He has made similar threats before, about resigning and not wanting to go on. Whether he means it this time remains an open question. If he does, Palestinian politics is entering extremely choppy waters, and with it the hopes for peace.

But how did we get here, and what happened to the now rapidly unravelling US push for peace?

November 5th, 2009

Why Does AIPAC Spy on Americans?

By Grant Smith – AntiWar.com

mmmmAccording to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Steven J. Rosen will be allowed to move ahead with his civil defamation lawsuit against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  Rosen and fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman were indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act in 2005 along with Department of Defense Employee Col. Lawrence Franklin for passing classified national defense informaiton.  Franklin pled guilty, but Rosen and Weissman’s case never went to trial — US attorneys gave up (PDF) after the presiding judge made a successful prosecution unlikely.

November 4th, 2009

A Court Decision That Reflects What Type of Country the US Is

By Glenn Greenwald – PuppetGov.com

TortureIt’s not often that an appellate court decision reflects so vividly what a country has become, but such is the case with yesterday’s ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Arar v. Ashcroft (.pdf).  

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  

November 3rd, 2009

Swine Flu — One of the Most Massive Cover-ups in American History

By Dr. Russell Blaylock

I have been following the evolving “pandemic” of H1N1 influenza beginning with the original discovery of the infection in Mexico in March of this year. In the course of this study I have tried to utilize as my sources high-quality, peer-reviewed journals, data from the CDC and accepted textbooks of virology.

As with all such studies one has to integrate and correlate previous experiences with epidemics and pandemics. As you will see, a great deal of my material comes from official sources, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Journal of Medicine. Thus my distracters cannot claim that I am using material that is not within the mainstream.

November 3rd, 2009

Was Osama bin Laden Responsible for the 9/11 Attacks?

by David Ray Griffin – Global Research

Fake The idea that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks has been an article of faith for public officials and the mainstream media. Calling it an “article of faith” points to two features of this idea. On the one hand, no one in these circles publicly challenges this idea.

On the other hand, as I pointed out at length in two of my books – 9/11 Contradictions[1] and The New Pearl Harbor Revisited,[2] no good evidence has ever been publicly presented to support it.

Colin Powell’s Withdrawn Promise

November 3rd, 2009

Ongoing U.S. Efforts to Protect and Coddle Israel

by Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Israel USAn Israeli columnist issues a scathing indictment of Israel and calls on the U.S. to apply pressure.

The latest Haaretz column by the outstanding and courageous Israeli columnist, Gideon Levy, is entitled “America, Stop Sucking Up to Israel,” and it highlights one of the most bizarre political facts:  criticism of Israeli actions is far more tolerated and permitted in Israeli political discourse than it is in America’s.  It’s simply inconceivable that any establishment journalist or national politician would ever echo Levy’s scathing indictments of Israel’s conduct and his calls for the U.S. to apply serious pressure and even threats to coerce changes in Israeli behavior.  After describing the increasingly conciliatory actions towards Israel by the Obama administration in exchange for nothing but obstinance, Levy writes:

November 3rd, 2009

Why Haven’t Any Wall Street Tycoons Been Sent to the Slammer?

by Kevin G. Hall – McClatchy Newspapers

More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

November 3rd, 2009

Hillary’s Ill Will Tour

By Justin Raimondo – AntiWar.com

Hillary left Pakistan even more destabilized – and hostile to the U.S. – than it was when she arrived, and her trip to Israel is similarly disastrous….

Hillary at AIPACIn what the Los Angeles Times described as “a fence-mending trip” to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to tear down more fence posts than she repaired. Abrasive, arrogant, and condescending, she fired a series of verbal RPG volleys that nearly demolished what remained of good relations between the U.S. and its principal ally in the region.

On the fight against al-Qaeda:

November 2nd, 2009

Barack Obama Continues Bush Administration Policy Regarding Posse Comitatus

by Joe Wolverton, II – The New American

Bush-ObamaIt has been just over one year since the U.S. Army announced that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was being placed under the direct control of the US Army Northern Command (NORTHCOM), and was being indefinitely reassigned as an “on-call federal response force” for emergencies of all sorts, natural and man-made, including terrorist attacks, within NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility — the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Although the assignation went mostly unheralded at the time, it marked the first time in the history of the United States that an active unit of the regular Army was placed under the immediate and exclusive command of NORTHCOM.

November 2nd, 2009

Goldman Takes On New Role: Taking Away People’s Homes

By Greg Gordon — McClatchy Newspapers

When she wrote to [Henry aka Hank] Paulson,  lawyers for Goldman denied that it owned the Beckers’ mortgages. So did Germany’s Deutsche Bank, a trustee that was holding thousands of subprime mortgages Goldman had converted to bonds….

Vistims of Goldman Sachs

Tony and his wife, Celia

When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

November 2nd, 2009

Obama’s Latest Use of “Secrecy” to Shield Presidential Lawbreaking

by Glenn Greenwald – Salon

What was once depicted as a grave act of lawlessness — Bush’s NSA program — is now deemed a vital state secret.

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the “state secrets” privilege — which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) — to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government’s domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday — just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead — as predicted — the DOJ continues to embrace the very same “state secrets” theories of the Bush administration — which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned — and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

November 2nd, 2009

The Truth About the Middle East is Buried Beneath the Headlines

by Robert Fisk – The Independent, UK

Can you imagine the uproar if Reuters referred to the “mass killing” of Jews by Germans with the words: “Jews say it was a genocide, a term right-wing Germans and neo-Nazis reject….

Amira Hass was spot on when she said last week that her lifetime women’s award was an award for failure. The West Bank correspondent of the Israeli paper Haaretz eloquently explained herself on al-Jazeera’s English channel. She received an award for failure, she said, because despite all the facts that she and her journalistic colleagues had explained about Israeli occupation in Palestine, the world still did not understand what occupation meant and still used words like “terror” and “war on terror”. Amira was absolutely correct. Most of our Western press and television are as gutless as ever when they have to participate in what Noam Chomsky described as “the manufacture of consent”.

November 2nd, 2009

How Goldman Secretly Bet on the U.S. Housing Crash

by Greg Gordon – McClatchy Newspapers

Despite updating its numerous disclosures to investors in 2007, Goldman never revealed its secret wagers….

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

November 1st, 2009

An Opportunity for the Oath Keepers: End the Occupation

by William Norman Grigg – LewRockwell.com

One Nation, under Occupation: Police departments nation-wide are acting as if this were a conquered country, and as if citizens were "enemy combatants."

A thin blanket of early evening darkness had draped itself across Alex Locklear’s home in Maxton, North Carolina when the armed intruders arrived.

Brandishing firearms, the invaders forced several people – including wheelchair-bound Nicholas Locklear and a pregnant woman – to the ground and then barged in through the rear door, threatening to “blow the brains” out of anyone who put up a struggle. One woman was so terrified that she fled, tripped over an unseen obstruction, and broke her arm.

October 29th, 2009

Daily Show Under Fire for Covering Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

By Daniel Tencer – Raw Story

Note: See video clips here and here….

Jon Stewart’s comedy news show The Daily Show is reportedly under fire from pro-Israeli groups for giving airtime to two pro-Palestinian figures on Wednesday night.

Stewart hosted Palestinian democracy activist Mustafa Barghouti and human rights activist Anna Baltzer, author of A Witness in Palestine, who explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of the Palestinian side.

According to a letter reportedly written by Baltzer and circulated by blogger Eric Johnson, the show “was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel.”

October 29th, 2009

Goldstone Tells Moyers: Israel Guilty of War Crimes

by Allen L Roland — Salon Blog

Bill Moyers interviews Judge Richard Goldstone

Highly respected Judge Richard Goldstone, who is both a Jew and a Zionist, rightfully condemns Israel’s policy of collective punishment of a people under effective occupation, destroying their means to live a dignified life as well as the trauma caused by the kind of military intervention the Israeli government called Operation Cast Lead.

The highly anticipated Goldstone human rights report has exposed Judge Goldstone to both universal acclaim as well as some strident and bitter criticism ~ mainly from the Israeli far right ~  however, late last week, the UN’s Human Rights Council officially endorsed his findings.

October 28th, 2009

Scott Horton Interviews Sibel Edmonds and John M. Cole

Scott Horton – AntiWar Radio

WebNote: Let me tell you right up front that the AntiWar Radio podcast with Scott Horton is the best talk radio on the entire planet. I never miss any of his shows – ever. I learn more from his program than I could spending days on the Net. This is information that you will never learn from cable TV – real news about our government and all the insiders. Here’s the problem. I’m getting smarter listening to Horton and his outstanding guests, but now I’m angrier that ever. I really want you to tune in and get fired up along with me. Then maybe we can actually get that 2nd R3volution going. Tune into AntiWar Radio via the website or ITunes.

October 27th, 2009

Chosen People: How to Atone for Being a WASP

by Scott McConnell – The American Conservative Magazine

Though this book is leavened by cheerleading for Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs and digressions into the theory of computers and the history of the Manhattan Project, the bulk consists of Gilder repeating the same argument: all opposition to Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism…

October 27th, 2009

Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

By Paul Craig Roberts – VDare.com

A narco-state is bad enough. The US surpasses this horror with its financo-state…

Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.

One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.

Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.

October 27th, 2009

Ron Paul: Anything Less Than Full Disclosure is Unacceptable

By Congressman Ron Paul – Texas Straight Talk

Last week a new bill was introduced in the Senate to audit the Federal Reserve. Some backers of my bill HR1207 and the existing Senate companion bill S.604 were a little miffed at this, but depending on how you think about it, this new legislation poses no great threat to our efforts.

October 26th, 2009

Administrative Detention in Israel: Palestinians Behind Bars with No Recourse to Justice

By Christoph Schult — Spiegel.de

Palestinian prisoners in Ketzion prison in southern Israel. A number of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel are not told what they have been accused of

Palestinian prisoners in Ketzion prison in southern Israel. A number of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel are not told what they have been accused of

The fact that the Israelis have nabbed a supporter of non-violent protests has enraged some Western diplomats. “Many Palestinians are interpreting this as a sign that Israel doesn’t even respect peaceful protests….

Hundreds of Palestinians are kept behind bars in Israel without charges having been filed and with no access to a fair trial. Not even their lawyers are allowed to look at the evidence. Some governments in the West have expressed their concern, but the Israelis haven’t budged.

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