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Citizen Run Database Shows Over 1,000 People Killed by Cops in 2014

By Jay Syrmopoulos | The Free Thought Project | December 10, 2014

To date the most reliable data anyone has about law enforcement killings in the U.S. was the FBI’s statistics on homicides by law enforcement. But therein lies the problem.

Those numbers are voluntarily given to the FBI by police, and many jurisdictions simply don’t hand over this information, thus making an accurate accounting of exactly how many people police have actually killed each year extremely difficult to ascertain.

For instance, the killing of Eric Garner would not be included in the FBI’s 2014 statistics because New York doesn’t participate in the voluntary program.

Thankfully there is a new means of aggregating how many people are being killed by law enforcement. This new tool for accountability is the website www.killedbypolice.com.

It’s basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.

The information available on the site begins in May of 2013 and runs through now. The novel idea of monitoring the number of police killings through news reports has shown to be a much better accounting of deaths at the hands of cops than the voluntary FBI system.

The FBI’s stats show that in all of 2013 there were 461 people killed by cops, but when using the new site, which only shows from May 1 to Dec. 31, 2013, police actually killed 748 people. Keep in mind, 748 is drastically more than the feds claim police killed the entire year but only accounts for 8 months of 2013.

The site shows 2014’s total number killed by police to be at 1,029 with a few weeks left in the year.

Here is a link to their Facebook page. This is another wonderful tool to be utilized in holding law enforcement accountable for their actions, as they can no longer hide these numbers from the public.

This site has shown itself to be a dramatically better barometer for what is actually transpiring in police state USA, and accounting for how many citizens are actually being killed by police, than anything we previously had available.


Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, freethinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | 1 Comment

Hawaii under martial law was like ‘military dictatorship’ (1941-1944)

For three years Hawaiians lived under repressive Army rule and without any constitutional protections

Police State USA

HAWAII — Islanders suffered under nearly three years of martial law from 1941-1944; so oppressive that it was later described by a federal judge as a “military dictatorship.” All manner of civilian liberties were replaced by oppressive military orders enforced by American soldiers.

The dark period of Hawaiian history began on December 7, 1941, with the massive surprise attack of Japanese bombers on the U.S. Naval Base Pearl Harbor. The air raid successfully sunk or grounded 18 ships and killed 2,403 Americans.

As the smoke billowed from the harbor, Lieutenant General Walter Short met with Territorial Governor Joseph Poindexter to convince him to declare martial law. Being coerced through tactics discussed below, Gov. Poindexter reluctantly ceded power to the military — temporarily, or so he thought.

In declaring martial law, all forms of civilian law were suspended. An entire new system of justice and order was instituted and controlled at the absolute discretion of Lt. Gen. Short — the newly declared “Military Governor” of the islands.

The transfer of power meant that all civilian courts would be closed, and all government functions — federal, territorial, and municipal — would be placed under military control. The U.S. Constitution was suspended and civilians no longer guaranteed any individual rights or protections from the government. Civilians had no freedom of speech, self-defense, assembly, or protections from from unreasonable search and seizures, inter alia.

Lt. General Short, in his first proclamation as Military Governor on December 7th, 1941, stated that [7]:

I shall therefore shortly publish ordinances governing the conduct of the people of the Territory with respect to the showing of lights, circulation, meetings, censorship, possession of arms, ammunition, and explosives, the sale of intoxicating liquors and other subjects.

In order to assist in repelling the threatened invasion of our island home, good citizens will cheerfully obey this proclamation and the ordinances to be published; others will be required to do so. Offenders will be severely punished by military tribunals or will be held in custody until such time that the civil courts are able to function.

Poindexter relayed his decision to the mainland, which was affirmed with approval from the President of the United States [7]:

Communication between Hawaiian Civilian Governor Joseph Poindexter and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the declaration of martial law and suspension of the write of habeas corpus.  (Source: Anthony, Joseph Garner.  Hawaii Under Army Rule, p. 128)

The Military Governor’s subsequent orders were designed to “discourage concerted action of any kind.” Saloons were ordered to be closed, as well as schools, theaters — anywhere there might be a “concentration of people.” [6]

Civilians were given strict curfews. The streets were ordered to be cleared between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. under penalty of arrest. All persons of Japanese descent had to be in their homes by 8:00 p.m. [6]

Everyone over the age of six years was fingerprinted, registered, and ordered to carry around military-issued ID cards. [11] Using the extensive registration program, the military drew up intelligence reports on 450,000 Hawaiians. [8]

Stringent censorship of the media went into immediate effect. The Military Governor required that newspapers be made illegal unless they were granted a license to operate. All newspapers and radio stations were shut down for a time. Any publication not printed exclusively in English was denied a license and considered illegal. [6]

US Army M3 Stuart light tanks roll down Beretania Street in the Honolulu business district, Hawaii, 30 August 1942.

The local telephone company was taken over by the military. [6] All outgoing mail was read and censored by the military. All long-distance telephone calls to the mainland were required to be spoken in English and censored. The military government monitored the content and morale of the population this way. [11]

Travel between the islands was restricted. Use of civilian short-wave radio was restricted. Photo materials were restricted to limit photography. [6]

The newspapers that were allowed to reopen with licenses were forced to print military orders and military-controlled news. The Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin both published an order directed at every inhabitant of the island:

The Army demands the aid and assistance of every person in the Territory… If you are ordered by military personnel to obey a certain command, that order must be obeyed instantly and without question. [9]

Days after martial law had gone into effect, the United Press reported that “cases of non-cooperation” were “severely dealt with” according to military authorities [1].

Civilian ownership of firearms was prohibited except to those specially authorized [6]. Every male islander was ordered to construct a bomb shelter [9]. Approximately 300,000 acres of private land was confiscated by the military — land, farms, buildings [8]

U.S. soldiers surround the Hawaiian Iolani Palace with barbed wire during the rule of martial law in 1942. (Image: U.S. Army Museum)

Civilians were not permitted to switch jobs, and had their wages frozen. U.S. Dollars were confiscated and new money was issued — only valid in Hawaii. Citizens were not allowed to carry more than $200 on them for any reason. [11] The wages of Japanese nationals were capped at $200 per month, with the rest being forced into bank accounts, with weekly withdrawal limits of $50. [9]

Businesses were tightly controlled; they were ordered to shut down daily by 4:30 p.m. Goods on the shelves were inventoried by the military. [9]  Liquor sales were banned.  Gasoline was rationed. [6]

One of the more onerous measures was the nightly “blackout” of all civilian lights, ostensibly to mitigate the effectiveness of a potential enemy air raid. Every light bulb and every flame was ordered to be extinguished after dark. Even a lit cigarette, a kitchen stove burner, or an illuminated radio dial was grounds for an arrest. It was ordered that all residential doors and windows be covered. Car headlights were to be painted blue to dim the beams. [11]

“We couldn’t see each other nor anything on the table so we literally had to feel our way through the meal,” wrote Honolulu resident Richard Wrenshall wrote in a 1942 letter. “If you reached out for something you’d be liable to stick your finger in the butter or in somebody’s eye.” [11]

Military Governor Green reported that the Army Corps of Engineers had a roving band of armed individuals calling themselves the “vigilance committee” which frequently shot at lights wherever they could be seen and “terrorized” the public. [6]

Waikiki Beach behind barbed wire fence, during martial law.  Honolulu, Hawaii. (Image: National Archives, U.S. Navy)

Of great controversy and consequence was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus — the common-law court doctrine requiring a party holding a prisoner to demonstrate the legal and jurisdictional basis for continuing to hold the prisoner. With all civilian due process suspended, arrestees could be held without charges or trial; without legal representation, witnesses, a defense, or a jury. [2]

Breaking the blackout order brought about stiff fines or jail time. Numerous violators were thrown before a military judge, Lt. Col. Neal D. Franklin, who swiftly sentenced them to 100 days in jail or minimum fines of $100. A Japanese person might be given as much as 1,000 days imprisonment or up to $1,000 fines. It was reported that a Shinto priest was fined $500 for not extinguishing the “eternal flame” on his temple altar. [9]

The military courts were eager to impose fines for those who broke the military governor’s general orders. However, some individuals who couldn’t pay fines were instead given a “credit” following a forced donation of their blood. The practice was jokingly referred to as being “fined a bucket of blood.” [6]

People of Japanese descent — even American citizens — were looked at with suspicion and scorn by their government and their neighbors alike. Aside from the repressive military orders used to control their lives, thousands of Hawaiian Issei were arrested and shipped off to internment camps for the duration of the war. [13]

The oppression of civil rights was so thorough that it became a main theme in the 1942 platform of one of the major political parties on the islands [7]. The platform stated:

We deplore a system of government whereby the citizens of the Territory of Hawaii can be arrested and held for investigation, without bail, for offenses that have nothing to do with the operations of the military establishment.

We deplore the exercise of public authorities who are making unlawful searches and seizures in the homes of the people of the Territory of Hawaii without a search warrant…

We deplore the continued existence of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus…

It was evident that the continued suspension of civilian law was disconcerting to some on the mainland, including Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, who wrote on January 9th, 1943: “Civilian government has been successfully maintained and its responsibilities carried out by civilian authorities in other parts of the English-speaking world under conditions of much more severe strain than exist in Hawaii,” he wrote. “The idea that restoring the responsibility of civil government and the jurisdiction of the courts would hamper the defense of the territory by the  Army and Navy is repugnant of every concept of American democracy and reflects upon the capacity of the people of Hawaii for self-government and self-discipline.” [7]

“The Army went beyond the governor and set up that which was lawful only in conquered enemy territory… they threw the Constitution into the discard and set up a military dictatorship.”

Finally, in April 1944, Federal Judge Delbert E. Metzger overturned the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, citing that martial law “ceases and becomes unlawful as soon as the civilian government is capable and willing to resume its normal functions.” [3]

Despite the ruling, martial law was enforced for six more months. General Richardson defiantly stated after the ruling that regular blackouts would continue to be enforced as of 10 p.m. that same evening. “Violations of general orders will continue to be tried in provost courts,” he pronounced.  [3]

Richardson knew he would be free of consequence, since he had already been granted an executive pardon by President Roosevelt after Judge Metzger had held him in contempt of court on a previous case involving violations of the writ of habeas corpus. [3]

Judge Metzger argued that civilian law should be restored and was sufficient to protect the population. He said: “If present laws do not give the nation the fullest desirable protection against subversive or suspicious Japanese aliens, clearly it is the duty of the army and navy to ask a legislative curb and procedure instead of holding by force of arms an entire population under a form of helpless and unappealable subjugation called martial law.” [4]

Technically, martial law was terminated in Hawaii on October 24, 1944, in Roosevelt’s Presidential Proclamation 2627. While Roosevelt granted that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus” was restored, his declaration maintained that civilians were still thoroughly under the control of military commanders, and civilian freedoms were still heavily restricted. It was declared:

The military commander will have authority to establish blackouts and curfew periods, organize air raid precautions, regulate the conduct of enemy aliens, take anti-espionage precautions in the military area, control the possession and use of weapons, set up ports and harbors protections, regulate travel and regulate the publication of newspapers “published in a foreign language or in duel languages.” In addition he will have authority to regulate or prohibit the possession or use of radio transmission sets between the military area and points away from it. The authority conferred in the executive order will expire 30 days after the end of war with Japan. [5]

After the war, federal district court magistrate Judge J. Frank McLaughlin condemned the conduct of martial law, saying, “Gov. Poindexter declared lawfully martial law but the Army went beyond the governor and set up that which was lawful only in conquered enemy territory namely, military government which is not bound by the Constitution. And they… threw the Constitution into the discard and set up a military dictatorship.” [12]

Judge McLaughlin, said in a speech that “[Maj. Gen. Short] set up an unconstitutional provost court system to try, without constitutional safeguards, anybody for anything — and they did it, too.”

Evidence explained by Judge McLaughlin revealed that there were some dubious efforts on the part of the military to influence the “civilian” decision to declare martial law. The military’s treachery was described in Hawaii Under Army Rule [7]:

Judge McLaughlin outlined how it was done, pointing out that the proclamation of martial law was prepared by the Army months in advance of December 7, 1941, and noted that the proclamation “was in the hands of the publishers for printing that afternoon some substantial period of time before the governor’s proclamation was signed and received for publication.” Commenting on Secretary Patterson’s letter to Representative Andrews and a public statement by General Richardson on the same subject, Judge McLaughlin said:

“…They did not, of course, mention that the Army went back on its word to the Hawaiian legislature. They did not tell you that it had said one thing while preparing to do another thing. They did not tell you that they prepared Governor Poindexter’s proclamation for him and induced him to sign it, reluctantly. They did not tell you either that he finally agreed to do as they asked with the understanding that the effect of the proclamation would be for maybe 30 days…”

Judge McLaughlin concluded:

“Yes ‘they did it.’ They did it intentionally. They did it with design aforethought. They did it knowing disregard of the Constitution. They did it because Hawaii is not a State. They did it because they did not have faith that Americanism transcends race, class, and creed.”

This period of events marked the longest period that Americans had ever been subjected to military rule, and as many commentators have pointed out, the conditions were more repressive than many actual combat zones.

Japanese Americans, including community leaders and even Buddhist monks, were among those detained at the Honouliuli internment camp on Oahu, Hawaii.  Picture taken in 1945. (Image: R.H. Lodge / Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii)

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SOURCES

1. Tremaine, Frank. “Martial Law Proclaimed For Hawaii.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] 11 Dec. 1941: 2. Web. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=19411211&id=l5RRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=LWoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2442,5301386]

2. Anthony, Joseph Garner. “Martial Law in Hawaii.” California Law Review, Vol. 30. May 1942. Web. [http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol30/iss4/1]

3. Associated Press. “Judge Invalidates Martial Law in Hawaiian Islands.” The Evening Independent [St. Petersburg, Florida] 14 April 1944: 9. Web. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19440414&id=GmpIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CVUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4284,6259680]

4. Johnston, Richard W. “Army Defies Ban On Hawaii Martial Law.”  San Jose Evening News [San Jose, California] 14 April 1944: 7. Web. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1977&dat=19440413&id=JygiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=FKQFAAAAIBAJ&pg=986,1109323]

5. Associated Press.  “Martial Law Ends in Hawaii.  The Deseret News [Salt Lake City, Utah] 24 Oct. 1944: 1.  Web. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19441024&id=tU5SAAAAIBAJ&sjid=xnwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3153,5465917]

6. Green, Major General Thomas H. “Martial Law in Hawaii, December 7, 1941–April 4, 1943.” Unpublished manuscript. Library of Congress [Washington, D.C.]. Web. [http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/Martial-Law_Green.pdf]

7. Anthony, Joseph Garner. Hawaii Under Army Rule. Stanford University Press [Stanford, California] 1947. [books.google.com/books?id=V66lAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109]

8. Polmar, Norman. “World War II: The Enclyclopedia of the War Years, 1941-1945.” Random House [New York] 1996. [books.google.com/books?id=30gRAGjXrIIC&pg=PA372&lpg=PA372]

9. Dunford, Bruce. “Blackout, Martial Law After Japanese Attack.” The Observer-Reporter [Greene County, Pennsylvania] 9 Dec. 1996: A6. Web. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19961209&id=Al5eAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2GENAAAAIBAJ&pg=2763,1190314]

10. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.  “Personal Justice Denied.” 1997.  Web.  [http://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/justice-denied/]

11. Borreca, Richard. “Martial Law Held Sway in Isles for Three Years.” The Star Bulletin [Honolulu, Hawaii] 13 Sept. 1999. Web. [http://archives.starbulletin.com/1999/09/13/special/story5.html]

12. Borreca, Richard. “Christmas 1941 in Hawaii Was Not a Time to Rejoice.” The Star Bulletin [Honolulu, Hawaii] 13 Sept. 1999. Web. [http://archives.starbulletin.com/1999/09/13/special/]

13. Soga, Keiho. “The Untold Story: Internment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii.” University of Hawaii Press {Honolulu, Hawaii] 31 Oct. 2007. [Amazon.com]

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Justice for Eric Garner? From the Justice Department? Don’t Hold Your Breath

By Mark P. Fancher | Black Agenda Report | December 10, 2014

When news broke of the grand jury’s refusal to indict Eric Garner’s killer, Spike Lee told CNN interviewers that because the death was video recorded he remains hopeful that the U.S. Department of Justice investigation will produce the results thousands of protesters crave. Based on the Justice Department’s record, it is probably a vain hope.

The Garner killing is not the first one to be captured by cameras. The Justice Department had access to a video record of the police firing squad execution of Milton Hall in Saginaw, Michigan, but no charges were brought against the cops who shot 46 bullets at the 49-year-old homeless black man. The reason? In a statement, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said: “…this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to give rise to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”

Few who watch the police cruiser dashboard camera footage of the killing reach the same conclusion. That video is probably the best indication that if the Justice Department believes the evidence against Milton Hall’s killers is insufficient, then the bar is so high that there is no case that is likely to qualify for prosecution – including Eric Garner’s killing. While it is possible that public pressure might force Eric Holder to handle the Garner case differently, some legal analysts discount that possibility because they have bought into the Justice Department’s inaccurate and incomplete interpretation of the applicable federal law.

The law that authorizes federal criminal civil rights charges against police officers says that in a homicide case like Eric Garner’s or Milton Hall’s, a police officer can be guilty only if he not only violated the victim’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force, but the officer also “willfully” violated that right. In its explanation of why Milton Hall’s killers were not prosecuted, the Justice Department said: “Law enforcement actions based on fear, panic, misperception or even poor judgment do not constitute willful conduct prosecutable under the statute.” Implied in that statement is the belief that it would not be possible to get into the heads of the officers and extract private thoughts that might betray their intent to “willfully” violate a constitutional right.

To the great disappointment of those outraged by Milton Hall’s death, the Justice Department conveniently ignored what the courts have had to say about the “willfulness” requirement. Starting with the U.S. Supreme Court and ending with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (which has jurisdiction over Milton Hall’s hometown) the courts have made it clear that the Justice Department is not required to engage in mind reading in order to hold the police accountable.

The Supreme Court said: “[t]he fact that the defendants may not have been thinking in constitutional terms is not material” to whether they satisfy the willfulness requirement. The Sixth Circuit explained that a jury: “need not, in order to convict, determine that [the accused] actually knew that it was a Constitutional right that they were violating…”

Not only is it unnecessary to prove that an officer was thinking specifically of trying to violate a victim’s Fourth Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court took the additional step of providing a much easier way to charge and convict police who kill. The court said: “[to] act willfully in the sense in which we use the word [is to] act in open defiance or reckless disregard of a constitutional requirement…”

It is therefore hard to imagine why charges cannot be brought when police officers fire dozens of bullets at a homeless man armed only with a pen knife; or when police use a choke hold to put a submissive man on the ground because he was alleged to be engaged in unauthorized cigarette sales. By almost anyone’s reckoning, such conduct should be regarded as “open defiance” or “reckless disregard” for the constitutional rights of the victims.

Will the Justice Department’s investigation result in the criminal prosecution of Eric Garner’s killers? It’s possible, but don’t hold your breath. With each new incident of unpunished police violence, it becomes more likely that concerned observers will conclude that African people born or living in America have no rights that the Justice Department is bound to respect.

Mark P. Fancher is the staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Project, which pursues justice for Milton Hall. He is also a member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , | 1 Comment

New ISIS “scare video” reveals Ottawa’s unprecedented hubris

john-maguire-isis-video

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | December 9, 2014

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Canada’s puppet politicians have so little faith in the public’s ability to think critically or discern reality that they are now marketing the most ridiculous harebrained nonsense to further hoodwink an already woefully ignorant Canadian populace.

Despite the fact that Stephen Harper announced Canada’s participation in the fraudulent anti-ISIS (or “Islamic State”) coalition in Iraq many weeks in advance of any ISIS-inspired threat or attack in Canada, the professional script-readers in Ottawa are asserting that the existence of such threats is a de facto justification for this country’s involvement in the campaign.

Can Ottawa’s unprecedented hubris get any more depraved?

What’s more, the Canadian media is frenzied over the emergence of a new ISIS video featuring a Canadian citizen, John Maguire, who allegedly converted to Islam and traveled to Syria to join the ISIS insurgency in 2013. In the comical video, Maguire is seen sporting a foreboding Islamic beard and battle get-up as he calls for attacks on Canadian soil in retaliation for Ottawa’s participation in the US-led bombing offensive allegedly aimed at combatting the militant group.

“Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney says Canadian officials revoked the passport of John Maguire, an Ottawa-area man who joined ISIS in Syria and who is calling for Muslims to carry out lone-wolf attacks in Canada,” reported the CBC in a Dec. 8 article.

Was this video “threat” crafted in the propaganda caverns of the Harper regime? Or was it shot and filmed in a Mossad studio in Tel Aviv?

Skeptics are speculating that the new video is just another Hollywood deception designed to legitimize a morally bankrupt and irrational foreign policy. In a Dec. 10 article discussing the Maguire video, the Toronto Star mentions that it was procured by SITE Intelligence Group, a US-based intelligence-gathering organization. SITE’s founder and chief, Rita Katz, is an Israeli citizen whose father was executed in 1968 in Iraq as a spy for Israel during the Six Day War. Katz’s group has acted as little more than a propaganda outlet for Israel’s Mossad, routinely disseminating menacing videos depicting Arabs and Muslims as Captain Hook-style villains.

Even if the new video is genuine and the man in it is not some paid actor on the payroll of an intelligence service, it serves as nothing more than a painful reminder that Stephen Harper is a deadly miscreant whose every move is motivated by envious malice and an intent to eradicate anything good associated with the country he claims to represent.

Just as the US regime intermittently released al-Qaeda videos at opportune times after 9/11 to frighten their people into submission, the neocon-infested administration in Ottawa is mimicking the tactics of its ideological kinfolk in Washington. The mysterious shooting on Parliament Hill in October was Canada’s media-made 9/11-style spectacle, and the subsequent hyping of “jihadi” videos is undoubtedly part of a coordinated public relations campaign to “win over” the masses to Harper’s belligerent war agenda in the Middle East.

Irrespective of the verity that ISIS is a manufactured creation of the US-Israeli imperium and that its actions are wholly in sync with US-Israeli objectives in the region, it must be pointed out that even if an entity like ISIS was a grassroots organization acting on its own accord it is still much less of a menace to the world than its duplicitous shadow sponsors in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Whatever evil ISIS may represent, Israel and the US are substantially worse and markedly more dangerous and devastating in the reach and breadth of their crimes against millions of innocent people. Many awakened American college students attending Harvard University echoed this sentiment in a recent “Campus Reform” video posted to YouTube. It is American imperialism (and by extension Israeli imperialism) that is the culprit behind much of the unrest and turmoil in the Middle East, the students opined. It is America, not ISIS, which is the “bigger threat” to world peace, they said.

The Harvard students’ contention that the US government represents a greater peril than ISIS is confirmed by the facts. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, the CIA has directly and indirectly caused the deaths of more than six million people by way of proxy wars, coups, assassinations and terrorist attacks. “In the 1980s, I coined the phrase the ‘Third World War’ because in my research I realized that we [the US] were not attacking the Soviet Union [or other big powers], we were [consistently] attacking people in the Third World,” Stockwell explained in a lecture on the CIA’s “secret wars” across the globe. Critics of US imperialism such as William Blum and Noam Chomsky have documented US military occupations, both overt and covert, in more than 50 countries, resulting in tens of millions of deaths since the end of World War II. In his magnum opus on US imperialism entitled Rogue State, William Blum documents the sordid details of America’s imperial interventions on every continent on earth. Blum’s research proves that the US has engineered the overthrow of dozens of foreign governments (installing brutal dictatorships in their stead) and has sponsored terrorists and death squads to do its bidding against “unfriendly” regimes.

Israel’s killing and maiming of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese and other Arabs in the mid-east since its creation in 1948 has yet to be matched by the likes of ISIS and affiliated groups. In addition to its direct victims, Israel is also to blame for much of America’s bloodletting in the region, principally the war in Iraq whose “American” masterminds in both propaganda and policy-making were by and large Jewish-Zionist dual-citizens with passionate links to the regime in Tel Aviv.

One cannot argue with these humbling truths. No matter how you look at it, the gruesome atrocities of the “Islamic State” pales in comparison to the genocidal conduct of that group’s clandestine backers in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Copyright 2014 Brandon Martinez

December 10, 2014 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , | 2 Comments

An End to Solitary is Long Overdue

By Marie Levin | CounterPunch | December 9, 2014

Less than two weeks ago the United Nations Committee against Torture issued a report strongly criticizing the U.S. record on a number of issues, among them the extensive use of solitary confinement. While the U.S. uses long-term solitary more than any other country in the world, California uses it more than any other state. It’s one of the few places in the world where someone can be held indefinitely in solitary. This practice is designed to break the human spirit and is condemned as a form of torture under international law.

Despite these repeated condemnations by the U.N., the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is harshening rather than easing its policies, currently with three new sets of regulations. The administration’s iron-fisted strategy is emerging: project the appearance of a reforming system while extending its reach, and restrict the ability of prisoners and their loved ones to organize for their rights.

First, the CDCR has instituted a “Step Down Program” ostensibly to create a pathway out of indefinite solitary. However, the program actually widens the net of who can be considered a threat and therefore eligible for placement in solitary. Recently adopted regulations replace the old language of “gang” with “Security Threat Group” (STG) and the previous list of a dozen identified gangs is now replaced with a dizzying list of over 1500 STGs. Under these new regulations, even family members and others outside the prisons can be designated as part of an STG. Given the fact that indefinite solitary is used disproportionately against people of color – in Pelican Bay, 85% of those in isolation are Latino – the language used to justify placement in solitary eerily mirrors the rhetoric of the federal government and its permanent state of war against its declared enemies, all of whom are people of color.

The CDCR promulgated a second set of rule changes last summer with sweeping new “obscenity” regulations governing mail going both in and out of prisons. The original proposal was to explicitly ban any “publications that indicate an association with groups that are oppositional to authority and society,” yet after coming under heavy criticism, CDCR decided to mask its Orwellian motives by hiding behind the above mentioned language of STGs. This ominous language violates First Amendment rights, and reveals a broader agenda: to censor writings that educate the public about what is actually occurring inside the prisons, and to stifle the intellectual and political education and organizing of prisoners themselves.

A third element of CDCR’s strategy of containment is the implementation of highly intimidating visiting procedures designed to keep family members away from their loved ones. Draconian new visiting regulations authorize the use of dogs and electronic drug detectors to indiscriminately search visitors for contraband, even though both methods are notoriously unreliable. These procedures effectively criminalize family members and deter them from visiting, especially in a period of a growing family-led movement against solitary.

The three new policies are also intended to extend CDCR’s reach beyond the prison walls. As an organizer and family member of a prisoner, I’m censored when sending letters to my brother, Sitawa N. Jamaa, subjected to gratuitous and intimidating searches during visits, and susceptible to being labeled an STG associate. These are all ways that CDCR is trying to keep me from knowing how my brother and others are doing, and to repress my organizing.

Taken individually, these regulations may seem to address unrelated issues. But given they are all coming down simultaneously – just a year after the last of a series of historic hunger strikes by people in California prisons has given rise to the highest level of self-organization and empowerment among imprisoned people since the 1970s – these regulations are nothing less than a systematic attempt to silence and retaliate against prisoners’ growing resistance. Over 30,000 prisoners participated in 2013’s strike, some for 60 days, risking their health and lives for an end to indefinite solitary. Prisoners’ family members and loved ones also took up leadership roles in political organizing in unprecedented ways. The movement to abolish solitary continues to gain momentum around the country.

The hunger strikes were a significant part of an ongoing national sea change regarding the use of solitary, as states are waking up to its dangers. Illinois, Maine and Mississippi have closed or drastically downsized their solitary units without any loss of institutional safety. New York and Arizona were recently forced to reduce their use of isolation, with Colorado and New Jersey following suit.

Yet California steadfastly remains an outlier seemingly impervious to change, led by an administration that relies on tired rhetoric about “the worst of the worst” to justify torture. People locked up in California have a decades-long history of fighting for the rights and dignity of prisoners, affirming their humanity in the face of inhumane conditions and demanding change. The U.N. report calls on this government to “ban prison regimes of solitary confinement such as those in super-maximum security detention facilities.” It’s time for California to listen.

Marie Levin is the sister of Sitawa N. Jamaa, a prisoner in solitary confinement at Tehachapi. She is a member of California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) and Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition (PHSS).

Mohamed Shehk is the Media and Communications Director of Critical Resistance, and also contributed to this piece.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

The New Republic’s Ugly Reality

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 8, 2014

There has been much hand-wringing of late in Official Washington about an editorial shakeup at The New Republic and the possibility that the century-old political magazine’s legacy will somehow be tarnished by its new owner. But the truth about The New Republic is that it has more blood on its hands than almost any other publication around, which is saying something.

In my four decades in national journalism – that’s two-fifths of The New Republic’s life – what I have seen from the magazine is mostly its smug advocacy for U.S. interventionism abroad and snarky putdowns of antiwar skeptics at home. Indeed, you could view The New Republic as the most productive hothouse for cultivating neoconservative dogma — and at least partly responsible for the senseless slaughter associated with that ideology.

Though The New Republic still touts its reputation as “liberal,” that label has been essentially a cover for its real agenda: pushing a hawkish foreign policy agenda that included the Reagan administration’s slaughter of Central Americans in the 1980s, violent U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other Muslim countries for the past two decades, and Israel’s suppression of Palestinians forever.

Indeed, the magazine’s long-ago-outdated status as “liberal” has long served the cause of right-wingers. The Reagan administration loved to plant flattering stories about the Nicaraguan Contras in The New Republic because its “liberal” cachet would give the propaganda more credibility. A favorite refrain from President Ronald Reagan’s team was “even the liberal New Republic agrees …”

In other words, the magazine became the neocon wolf advancing the slaughter of Central Americans in the sheep’s clothing of intellectual liberalism. Similarly, over the past two decades, it has dressed up bloody U.S. interventionism in the Middle East in the pretty clothes of “humanitarianism” and “democracy.”

The magazine – which has given us the writings of neocons Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Steven Emerson, Robert Kagan and many more – has become a case study in the special evil that can come from intellectualism when it supplies high-minded rationalizations for low-brow brutality.

In the world of the mind, where The New Republic likes to think it lives, the magazine has published countless essays that have spun excuses for mass murder, rape, torture and other real-world crimes. Put differently, the magazine afforded the polite people of Official Washington an acceptable way to compartmentalize and justify the ungodly bloodshed.

Perhaps The New Republic had a different existence in the years before I arrived on the scene. I’ve heard some longtime New Republic lovers wax on about its era of thoughtful progressivism. But The New Republic that I encountered from the 1970s onward was the magazine of Martin Peretz, a nasty neocon who cared little about journalism or even thoughtful analyses, but rather pushed a dishonest and cruel agenda including crude insults against Muslims.

In his later years after moving part-time to Israel, Peretz began to expose more of his personal agenda. In one TNR blog post regarding the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan which prompted post-9/11 right-wing outrage, Peretz declared: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [the promoter of the Islamic center] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.

“So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” (Facing accusations of racism, Peretz later issued a half-hearted apology which reiterated that his reference to Muslim life being cheap was “a statement of fact, not opinion.”)

A New York Times magazine profile of Peretz in 2011 noted that Peretz’s hostility toward Muslims was nothing new. “As early as 1988, Peretz was courting danger in The New Republic with disturbing Arab stereotypes not terribly different from his 2010 remarks,” wrote Stephen Rodrick.

Steven Emerson, one of Peretz’s favored TNR writers, also became notorious for similar Islamophobia as well as shoddy and dishonest journalism. [See Consortiumnews.com’sUnmasking October Surprise Debunker.”]

Ignoring the History

Yet, very little of this real history of The New Republic can be found in the mainstream media’s coverage of the recent staff revolt against plans by new owner (and Facebook co-founder) Chris Hughes to modernize the publication. Hughes’s new chief executive – former Yahoo official Guy Vidra – vowed to rebuild the magazine as a “vertically integrated digital media company.”

At the Washington Post, the New York Times and pretty much the entire MSM, there has been much rending of garments over these plans and the ouster of some top editors but almost nothing about what some of those now ex-TNR editors actually did.

One was longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who was a prominent advocate for the Iraq War and a promoter of right-wing Zionism. Another was editor Franklin Foer, another hawkish intellectual. Their departures were followed by a walkout by a dozen or so members of the editorial staff, resignations from contributing columnists, an outraged letter from former TNR writers and furious columns by ex-TNR staffers.

“The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it,” wailed Post columnist Dana Milbank, another TNR alumnus.

On Monday, the 31-year-old Hughes took to the Post’s op-ed page to offer Official Washington something like a paper bag to control all the hyperventilating. He denied that he was behaving like some spoiled Silicon Valley rich kid imposing an Internet-style culture on an old-fashioned print publication, but rather was trying to save the institution.

“I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice — the things that make us singular — could survive,” Hughes wrote.

But the real question is: Does The New Republic deserve to survive? Wouldn’t it be appropriate that at least one neocon institution faced some accountability for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not to mention the other victims of reckless U.S. interventionism in the Middle East or the tens of thousands of murdered Central Americans during the Reagan years?

Though The New Republic’s apologists depict the magazine as an honorable place where “long-form journalism” thrived and “serious thinking” was nourished, the reality was actually much different. Indeed, much of the trivialization of U.S. journalism in the 1980s stemmed from the punchy opinions voiced by TNR columnists as they moonlighted as talking heads on the TV “shout shows,” like “The McLaughlin Group” and “Inside Washington.”

Many of the regulars on those media “food fights” came from The New Republic and lowered the intellectual level of Official Washington into a “thumbs up, thumps down” reductionism where political leaders were rated on scales of one to ten. Their well-compensated behavior was the opposite of true intellectualism or – for that matter – true journalism.

Phony Posture

The typical posture of these media-beloved neocons was to pretend that they were bravely standing up against some “liberal” orthodoxy, courageously daring to embrace the Nicaraguan Contras or other right-wing “freedom fighters” despite the danger of taking such principled stands.

The reality was that TNR’s writers were lining up behind the real power structure, standing with the Reagan administration and much of the major media while joining in the bullying of the relatively weak and vulnerable forces in Washington that went against this grain.

The phoniness of TNR’s pretend bravery was demonstrated by how the neocon commentators were rewarded with plum jobs, prominent op-ed slots, regular seats on the TV shows, lucrative speaking fees, book contracts, etc. The opposite was true for journalists who challenged the Reagan administration’s propaganda. They were the ones who faced real punishment.

Journalists who dared file critical stories about the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army or the CIA-trained Contra rebels found themselves reassigned or out on the street. The New York Times’ Raymond Bonner was the best known example after he was pulled out of Central America while under fierce right-wing attack for his accurate reporting on human rights atrocities in El Salvador.

In a similar case, the Reagan administration’s public diplomacy team browbeat National Public Radio for airing a story about a Contra massacre of farmworkers in northern Nicaragua. Sensitive to government strings on NPR’s funding, NPR executives appeased the administration by getting rid of foreign editor Paul Allen who had allowed the story to air.

Within a short time, Washington journalists understood that their route to professional success required them to swallow any propaganda from Reagan’s team, no matter how absurd.

That servility was on display when Reagan’s White House fumed over one human rights report citing 145 sworn affidavits signed by Nicaraguans who had witnessed Contra atrocities. Many of the witnesses described Contras slitting the throats of captives and mutilating their bodies.

In stepped The New Republic and one of its many pro-Contra writers, Fred Barnes, who countered the eyewitnesses by referencing the findings of a secret U.S. investigation which had absolved the Contras of many charges, he wrote. In a harsh article entitled “The Sandinista Lobby,” Barnes denounced the human rights community for hypocritically criticizing the innocent Contras and other pro-U.S. forces, while allegedly going soft on Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

But when I got hold of the investigative report in 1986, I found that it had been written by the CIA and was based on the word of the Contras themselves. One of the CIA’s key findings, supposedly debunking the slitting-throat allegations, was that the Contras said they could not have slit throats because they “are normally not equipped with either bayonets or combat knives.” The CIA failed to note that photographs of the Contras from that period showed them slouching off to battle carrying a variety of machetes and other sharp objects.

The absurdity of suggesting that the Contras could not have slit the throats of captives because they weren’t “normally” given knives should have been something a cub reporter would have laughed at. But clearly journalism was not what was going on at The New Republic where there was no interest in exposing the atrocities committed by the Contras. It was all about pushing a hawkish foreign policy and serving the Reagan agenda.

A Contra Exposé

That sort of behavior continued throughout the Reagan era with one notable exception in fall 1986  – when editor Jefferson Morley and investigative reporter Murray Waas asked me and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger to expand the work that we had done exposing Oliver North’s secret Contra support network into a New Republic cover story.

Our article appeared in November 1986 while Peretz was out of town visiting Israel. But he soon weighed in after receiving a furious letter from then-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, another arch-neocon. Abrams ostentatiously canceled his TNR subscription in protest of our article, and Peretz responded to Abrams’s complaint by excluding Waas from the magazine and putting Morley in the publisher’s doghouse.

The situation could have gotten worse for those who had a hand in bringing our story into the magazine, except that the Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open in November 1986, confirming that Barger and I had been right about North’s secret network. Abrams eventually pleaded guilty to misleading Congress (though he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and was brought into President George W. Bush’s National Security Council to oversee Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq).

The New Republic’s pattern of playing fast and loose with the facts would eventually cause the magazine some embarrassment in 1998 when it was caught publishing a number of fabrications by writer Stephen Glass. But TNR never was held accountable for its support for atrocities in Central America, its pushing for illegal wars in the Middle East or its smearing of honest journalists and human rights investigators.

Though Peretz finally lost control of the magazine’s content in 2010, The New Republic has remained an important vehicle for pushing the neocon agenda. Earlier this year, TNR published a long exaltation to American interventionism by neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading proponent for the Iraq War.

In the essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence,” wrote Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to re-assume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.”

President Barack Obama, who remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons, responded by inviting Kagan to lunch at the White House and shaping his foreign policy speech at West Point’s graduation in May to deflect Kagan’s criticism.

So, when you read the endless laments from the mainstream U.S. news media about the tragedy of having some Silicon Valley barbarians violating the sacred journalistic temple of The New Republic, you might reflect on all the suffering and death that the magazine has rationalized and intellectualized away.

~

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

5 not-so-peaceful Obama actions since nabbing Nobel Prize

barack-obama-goggles

RT | December 10, 2014

Five years on from President Barack Obama scooping a Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House has taken anything but a Zen approach to foreign policy under his watch. Here are the top 5 not-so-peaceful moves the laureate has made in the past half-decade.

1. Afghan Surge

Obama didn’t start the war gin Afghanistan, but he certainly took a page from his predecessors playbook in trying to finish it. He recognized his precarious position at prize time.

“But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he said after accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 2009.

While he said the war in Iraq was “winding down,” things in Afghanistan were just starting to heat up. A week before accepting the prize, Obama announced he was sending 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of his “surge policy,” intended to beat back the Taliban and train Afghan security forces to take the country into their own hands. The following years would become the deadliest for both US troops and Afghan civilians. Again, it wasn’t Obama’s war. But then came…

2. Military strikes in Libya

Following UN Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, which called for “an immediate ceasefire” in Libya and authorized the international community to set up a no-fly zone to protect civilians, Obama, along with his NATO allies, would soon launch military strikes to turn the tide of the 2011 Civil War in the North African state. NATO conducted 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision bombs. A Human Rights Watch report would go on to detail eight incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as a result of the aerial campaign.

But the real damage to overthrowing the Gaddafi regime came in the ensuing years, with the country descending into a civil war between Islamist forces and the weak post-revolutionary government. In August, Obama admitted his Libyan policy was a failure, but not because he chose to intervene militarily. Rather, he says the problem was that America and its European partners did not “come in full force” to take Gaddafi out. Although his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to rejoice in his death, wryly noting “We came, we saw, he died.”

3. Drone Wars in Yemen, Pakistan

Since the US first started targeting Yemeni militants in 2002, Obama has launched all but one of the 15 airstrikes and 101 drone strikes in the country. According to the web portal New America.net, which has meticulously complied data on the strikes, up to 1,073 people have been killed in the strikes. An estimated 81-87 of those killed were civilians, while the identity of another 31-50 remains unknown. But Yemen was just one prong in Obama’s so-called Drone War, though, as we shall see, it was the site of a game-changing incident.

Unlike in Yemen, drone strikes in Pakistan were in favor long before Obama came to power. A report conducted by Stanford and New York Universities’ Law schools found that between 2,562 and 3,325 people were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September 2012. Anywhere between 474 and 881 of those were civilians, and 176 were children. While Obama didn’t start the Pakistani drone war, he aggressively expanded it.

Between 2004 and 2007, only 10 drone strikes were launched in Pakistan. The following year saw 36 such strikes, and 54 were launched in 2009.

But 2010 would be the deadliest year by far, with 122 strikes launched and 849 people killed. He would go on to authorize 73 and 46 strikes in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

Following widespread opposition at home and abroad, in May 2013, Obama promised a new era of transparency to protect civilians, saying control of the program would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. But…

4. Obama has a secret kill list

In February 2013, the Obama administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens abroad came to light for the first time. According to the Justice Department document, the White House has the legal authority to kill Americans who are “senior operational leaders,” of Al-Qaeda or “an associated force” even if they are not actively engaged in any active plot to attack the US.

In September 2011, a US drone strike in Yemen killed two American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The following month, a drone strike killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Colorado.

The concept of the US president exercising the right to kill US citizens without the benefit of a trial has resonated throughout American culture.

In the comic-book-inspired film ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the issue of targeted killings and “kill lists” features prominently in the plot.

5. Redrawing red lines

President Barack Obama drew a red line around Syria’s use of chemical weapons, pushing the international community to punish Damascus with military strikes following the August 21 Ghouta Attack.

After the UK balked at airstrikes, Moscow and Washington took the diplomatic route, resulting in a historic deal that has seen Damascus abandon its chemical weapons stockpiles.

But US-led airstrikes on Syria were only postponed. On August 8, 2014, the United States started bombing so-called Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq to protect embattled Kurds. The following month, the US would launch airstrikes against IS militants in Syria as well. Of all the US military interventions in recent years, the battle against the IS has been met with widespread approval. Still, Syria was the seventh country Obama has bombed in six years.

Quite a feat for a Nobel Peace Prize-winner.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Israel resumes building museum on Muslim cemetery

Ma’an – 10/12/2014

JERUSALEM – Israeli authorities have resumed excavations in Mamilla graveyard in West Jerusalem as part of the “Museum of Tolerance” project, a local committee said Tuesday.

The head of the Islamic cemeteries preservation committee, Mustafa Abu Zahra, said large machinery was placed in the cemetery. It poured reinforced concrete in preparation for the building of the structure of the museum.

Abu Zahra added that the structure is scheduled to be built over the “remains of icons, martyrs, grandparents and parents,” and he said that the project is being implemented by a California-based center in cooperation with the Jerusalem municipality and other Israeli departments.

The project was started by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2001, and 12 dunams of the cemetery ground were seized including 70 percent which was transformed into “Independence Park,” he explained.

Abu Zahra said that the construction was a grave assault on Muslim heritage and history.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | 3 Comments

Journalist most recent victim of Israeli military violence at Kufr Qaddum

International Solidarity Movement | December 9, 2014

Kufr Qaddum, Occupied Palestine – Bashar, a journalist from Palestine TV, was shot in the left leg at Kufr Qaddum on Friday the 5th of December 2014.

The weekly demonstration aims to highlight the issue of the road that has been closed to Kafr Qaddum and demands for it to be reopened. The road is closed to Palestinians but connects several illegal Israeli settlements nearby. The road was once the Palestinians’ main route to the villages of Jit and Sarra, and to the city of Nablus. Residents of Kafr Qaddum and nearby villages must now use a 14 kilometer detour on badly paved roads through olive groves. This proves especially problematic in emergency situations when ambulances are trying to get patients to Nablus hospital. Kafr Qaddum villagers state that several people have died because of the longer ambulance trip.

Bashar has been going to the Kafr Qaddum demonstrations since they began four years ago. This particular one was a special demonstration in solidarity with Patrick, an Italian activist who was shot in the chest with a .22 caliber bullet the Friday before. The demonstration began peacefully with people holding Italian and Palestinian flags. A skunk water truck, a renowned demonstration repression technique, sprayed the people who were peacefully holding flags right at the beginning of the protest. Within ten minutes, Bashar had been shot in his left leg by an Israeli sniper.

The bullet used to shoot Bashar was an expanding bullet, often called a “dum-dum”. International law has declared their use illegal in war because they are so destructive. Bashar was shot by a sniper with a weapon that is only supposed to be used when soldiers are at mortal risk and skunk water, tear gas, rubber bullets, rubber coated steel bullets, and other nonlethal weapons have all proved ineffective. This is supposed to be the last weapon soldiers use before they shoot to kill with M16s. Witnesses say that Bashar was filming as he usually did when he was shot. He was no threat to the soldiers at all. Witnesses say that there were no people in front or behind him throwing stones.

Bashar was taken by ambulance to Nablus hospital. The X-ray showed that the dum-dum bullet did as it was designed to, breaking into many pieces when it entered his leg.

1 dumdum xray

Bashar had an operation on the 6th of December, the day after he was shot, to take out most of the bullet fragments.

Doctors have decided to leavein some pieces for the time being because they are very close to veins and would be dangerous to remove. Bashar will be bed bound for two weeks until the decision is made, but his condition remains stable.

Within one week at Kufr Qaddum, three people were shot with lethal, live ammunition—two with .22 caliber bullets and one with a dum-dum. One was a journalist, another an international peace activist. None of them were any threat to the soldiers. So why, then, were they shot at? To create fear for all the people who are in solidarity with the Palestinians and who want to tell the world the story of what is happening here? To physically stop peaceful resistance using the most extreme repression techniques?

It will not work. Patrick and many other international, Palestinian and Israeli activists will continue to nonviolently resist the confiscation of their lands in Kufr Qaddum each week. Bashar will continue to report their stories to the world. The unnecessary use of violent repression techniques will only continue to delegitimize the illegal occupation of the Palestinian people.

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

FBI director refuses to rule out agents posing as reporters

By Robert Bridge | RT | December 10, 2014

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation left the door open to the possibility that officers may falsely represent themselves as journalists in the course of an investigation, so long as it’s done with “significant supervision.”

Despite last month’s furor following revelations that an FBI agent had posed as an employee of the Associated Press as part of a sting operation, James Comey said he was not willing to swear off the use of such ploys in the future.

“I’m not willing to say ‘never’,” Comey told a press roundtable discussion on Tuesday, AP reported. “Just as I wouldn’t say that we would never pose as an educator or a doctor or, I don’t know, a rocket scientist.”

The response will certainly reverberate through AP, which was furious after Comey revealed in a letter to the New York Times that an FBI agent had posed as an AP journalist in 2007 during an investigation of a 15-year-old who was believed to be delivering bomb threats at a high school in Olympia, Washington.

Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, called the FBI’s covert activities “unacceptable.”

“This latest revelation of how the FBI misappropriated the trusted name of the Associated Press doubles our concern and outrage, expressed earlier to Attorney General Eric Holder, about how the agency’s unacceptable tactics undermine AP and the vital distinction between the government and the press,” Carroll said in a statement.

She said such activities serve to diminish public trust in AP’s “legacy of objectivity, truth, accuracy and integrity.”

Comey remained ambiguous about the future of such activities, saying they require “significant supervision, if it’s going to be done.”

This is not the first time the news collective has experienced problems with government agencies.

On May 13, 2013, the Associated Press said telephone records for 20 of their journalists during a two-month period in 2012 had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department. The agency never provided an explanation for its demand.

READ MORE:

FBI says agent impersonated AP journalist in 2007 sting op

FBI performed three federal background checks per second on Black Friday

December 10, 2014 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment