An Israeli military force invaded the offices and homes of three Palestinian members of Parliament and confiscated their computers and cell phones in the early hours of Thursday morning, Palestinian media sources reported.
According to the source, Israeli troops broke into the house and office of Ibrahim Dahbour, Khaled Suleiman and Khaled Yahia in the West Bank city of Jenin and were interrogated by an Israeli intelligence officer.
The invading troops took the cell phones, computers and some private documents form the MP’s homes without showing any search warrant.
Khaled Suleiman said the soldiers told him that they are closing the office until further notice, but gave him no written official order proving their claim.
What does the European Union have to say about the plight of Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan? Not one word.
I have just entered Adnan’s name into the search facility on the website for the EU’s diplomatic service. The result: zero hits. A moment later, I searched under the words “Gilad Shalit” and received 230 hits.
Catherine Ashton, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, publicly sympathised with the family of Shalit at every conceivable opportunity, never acknowledging that the Israeli soldier belonged to an army of occupation and was taking part in acts of aggression against the Palestinian people when he was captured. Does she regard his life as more important than that of Adnan, a man in detention without being charged or convicted of an offence?
Is she more worried about the oppressor, than the oppressed? It would appear so.
Almost 12 hours ago, I contacted Ashton’s office, requesting an urgent explanation for her silence on Adnan’s hunger strike. I have still not received a response.
Too busy?
Perhaps her advisors too busy with matters they consider more pressing than the imminent death of a prisoner. Yet on Monday, her team was able to drop whatever other work it was doing and hastily respond to the attacks on Israeli embassies in India and Georgia. That same day, she (or her aides) found time to express concern about how Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi have now been under house arrest for an entire year. Her statement noted (properly) that these men – and Moussavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard – have been detained “without any legal process.”
Khader Adnan is in jail without any legal process. Why has Ashton not protested at his treatment?
Dignity and freedom
Marking Human Rights Day in December 2011, Ashton recalled that “human rights are universal and that people everywhere aspire to live in dignity and freedom.”
Khader Adnan is undertaking a courageous and awe-inspiring protest to defend the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and freedom.
And what does Catherine Ashton have to say? Not one miserable word.
NATO will spend US$3.9 billion on five US-built drones over 20 years in an effort to fill the gap exposed in the Libyan air war, an official said on Wednesday.
Allies will pay at least $1 billion to acquire the Global Hawk drones from Northrop Grumman, a price that includes ground support stations, image analysis technology, and training for operators.
Operating the drones, which will be based at the NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily, will cost the alliance another $2.5 billion over the next two decades, the official told AFP on the condition of anonymity.
“Libya showed the importance of having such a capability,” the official said.
While European air forces carried out the bulk of bombing missions in Libya last year, they relied heavily on drones provided by the United States to identify and hit targets during the campaign.
NATO defense ministers finally agreed on the Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) after two decades of wrangling over its funding.
The drones are being purchased by 13 NATO nations: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States.
The aircraft will then be available to all 28 allies who will contribute to the cost of operating them. France and Britain will mostly contribute by providing their own surveillance aircraft to the program.
US drones have consistently been criticized by international rights groups, who have said their use violates international law.
The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has tracked the increased use of drones by the Obama administration in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries.
The legality of using drones has never been tested in a US court.
BETHLEHEM – Reporters Without Borders on Wednesday condemned violence used by Israel against photojournalists covering demonstrations against Israel’s West Bank barrier.
Reporters Without Borders “deplores the total impunity enjoyed by the soldiers responsible for these abuses,” the Paris-based press freedom watchdog said in a statement.
The statement referred to incidents in January and February in which soldiers injured photojournalists in Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, and in Kufr Qaddoum, near Qalqiliya, and others sites in the occupied West Bank.
“Reporters Without Borders has on many occasions asked the Israeli army to undertake independent and impartial investigations into such incidents in order to identify and punish those responsible,” RSF said.
“Even when the army does carry out an investigation, it seldom reaches any real conclusions.”
Lt.-Col. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, responded to the complaints by saying that one of the incidents occurred while forces were acting against a “violent and illegal demonstration.”
She stressed that at least one of the complaints was not appropriate because of the dangers present in the West Bank, adding, “Sometimes the media are caught in the eye of the storm.”
The group called the response “a stonewalling exercise.”
“Reporters Without Borders is outraged at this insulting and totally inadequate response from the Israeli Defense Forces, which continually protect the army at the expense of freedom of information.”
Syrian President Bashar Assad set Wednesday February 26 as the date for a referendum on the draft Constitution.
The proposed constitution does away with Article 8 of the old charter which declared the Baath Party, in power since 1963, as the “leader of the state and society.”
Earlier on Sunday, a committee tasked with drafting the new constitution, handed a copy of the draft to the Syrian president.
“The Committee’s members stressed their determination… to prepare an integrated formula of a constitution that guarantees the dignity of the Syrian citizen and secures his basic rights”, the agency added.
“When the new constitution is approved, Syria will have passed the most important stage of laying down the constitutional and legal structure through the reforms and laws that have already been issued to take the country to a new era in cooperation with the full spectrum of the Syrian people to achieve what we all aspire for in terms of developing our country to draw a brilliant future for next generations”, the agency quoted Assad as saying during a meeting with committee members.
In January, Assad said a new constitution was being drawn up by a committee set up in October to replace the current one. At the time, he said it could be put to a popular vote as early as March.
For its part, Russia welcomed the move, saying the new constitution is seen as a step forward.
“We certainly believe a new constitution to end one-party rule in Syria is a step forward. It is a welcome idea and we hope the constitution will be adopted,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in The Hague.
Lavrov was speaking after talks with his Dutch counterpart Uri Rosenthal during a two-day visit to the Netherlands.
US government agencies are looking for digital tools that can extract information from social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings.
According to requests posted online, US federal law enforcement agencies are looking for potential contractors to build software that can monitor the entire universe of social media.
The Department of Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Federal Bureau of Investigation are among US agencies that are looking for ways to automate the process of identifying emerging threats and upheavals from social websites.
“Social media has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis, trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists,” the FBI wrote in its request.
“Social media is rivaling 911 services in crisis response and reporting,” the request added.
The proposals have raised privacy concerns among advocates who worry that such monitoring efforts could breach user’s privacy.
The FBI says their proposed system is only meant to monitor publicly available information and words that relate to criminal activities.
The software sought by the Defense Department would track information posted by the social media to identify threats that could affect US soldiers in the battlefield.
Germany has delayed its approval of the ACTA treaty after the Justice Ministry voiced its concerns about the legislation. It is the third EU country after Poland and the Czech Republic to challenge the controversial treaty.
The Justice Ministry said that the European Parliament should vote on ACTA before it is considered by the state’s parliament.
Three of Germany’s parties, the Pirate Party, the Left Party and the Greens, have also spoken out against ACTA.
German protesters are expected to stage demonstrations in over 60 towns across the country on Saturday.
Earlier Poland and the Czech Republic had refused to approve the agreement. Both countries saw major protests in the streets. Critics of ACTA accuse its authors of hammering out the agreement in secret and say the deal will limit online freedom of speech.
On January 26, the controversial ACTA treaty was signed by the 22 of 27 European Union member states, and the EU itself. It now has to be ratified by the European Parliament and is scheduled to be debated in June.
ACTA is an international agreement aimed at protecting intellectual property. It shares similarities with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US, which was shelved by lawmakers after a partial blackout by Wikipedia and Google in protest.
The ACTA treaty was negotiated by industrialized countries struggling for ways to fight intellectual property theft. The US, most of the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan and several other countries have signed the treaty.
Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan has entered his 55th day of hunger strike. He has long passed the critical stage and is in danger of organ failure any moment now. In other words, Khader Adnan is dying.
The silence from international media is deafening. Much of the publicity highlighting Adnan’s case came from social media via Twitter and blogs.
Does a young father of two arrested in the dead of night from his home, held under illegal administrative detention i.e. no charges have been brought against him, beaten and tortured during his interrogation, hunger striking since December 18th—a day after his arrest—not warrant headlines?
Yesterday a group of Palestinians called up Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem Bureau, demanding to know the reason for the bureau’s nonexistent coverage regarding Khader Adnan. Why Al Jazeera English? Why not the myopic BBC—who’ve recently proclaimed their censorship of the word “Palestine” from their music programmes—or The Guardian or CNN? (The last one was a joke.)
As an Arab news source based in Jerusalem, Al Jazeera English holds the responsibility to report what is happening to Palestinians. Not only are they not covering the bombings in Gaza, but they are ignoring the ethnic cleansing happening under their noses in Jerusalem. They have also completely ignored the weekly, daily popular protests in Palestine, while at the same time attempting to present themselves as the voice of the people who are revolting against oppression in the Middle East.
Furthermore, while all political prisoners are a shame to the countries imprisoning them, what was the criteria that Al Jazeera used to determine that a self professed Egyptian Zionist, Maikel Nabil, was more worthy of coverage than a Palestinian anti-Zionist?
Al Jazeera simply cannot state that Khader Adnan’s hunger strike is not news worthy as internationalhuman rightsorganizations have expressed alarm and condemnation over his detention and concern for his deteriorating health.
The following conversation took place between one caller and a woman from Al Jazeera English Jerusalem office, in response to that caller’s question about why Khader Adnan has been receiving so little exposure from Al Jazeera English.
“But there are other important stories we’re covering.”
“But Khader Adnan has been on hunger strike for 54 days in administrative detention and he’s dying.”
“But there are people dying everywhere.”
The caller was then directed to the editor, who said:
“With all due respect, it’s not up to you to tell us what to cover. I’m only accountable to my superiors in Doha.”
The editor continued to say that there will be a story on the website today so perhaps “you should wait before passing judgments.”
Did that mean that the caller should wait until Khader Adnan dies before he can get decent coverage?
The disrespect and arrogance that Al Jazeera English has shown to Palestinians with the lack of coverage has been nothing short of shocking. If Al Jazeera cannot commit itself to doing actual reporting about the cruelty of the Israeli occupation on a daily basis against Palestinians then it would be best for them to move their office to Tel Aviv or head back home to Qatar.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected demands presented by representatives of the European Union (EU) to release a number of Palestinian political prisoners under a confidence-building measure that would also increase popular support to president Mahmoud Abbas.
The Palestine News Network reported that a number of EU counties also called for creating a “Blacklist” that would include the names of extremist Israeli settlers, in order to prevent them from traveling to EU countries. The settlers will likely be those who did not only attack Palestinians but also attacked Israeli soldiers and policemen.
The Israeli daily, Maariv, reported that Abbas and the Quartet Committee for Middle East peace (the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia), called on Israel to approve a request made by Abbas demanding the release of Palestinian detainees who have been imprisoned by Israel since before the Oslo Peace Agreement that was signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993.
According to Maariv, the envoys asked Netanyahu to release 123 detainees, members of the Fateh movement of Mahmoud Abbas, and other factions that are part of the PLO; this excludes, among other factions, detainees who are members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
It is worth mentioning that the same proposal was presented by EU Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, during her visit to the region last month.
Netanyahu refused the proposal and told Quartet envoys that now is not the time to release political prisoners to boost Palestinian support to president Abbas.
He added that the release of prisoners should not be a “demand, or one of preconditions” for the resumption of talks, but hinted that he might grant the Palestinian Security Forces more privileges in the in Area B in the West Bank. Area B is under full Israeli Security control.
Congress is poised to give final passage to legislation that would give a big boost to domestic unmanned aerial surveillance — aka “drones.”
As we explained in our recent report, drone technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and there is a lot of pent-up demand for them within the law enforcement community. But, domestic deployment of unmanned aircraft for surveillance purposes has largely been blocked so far by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is rightly concerned about the safety effects of filling our skies with flying robots (which crash significantly more often than manned aircraft).
As we also explained in our report, the FAA is under pressure to loosen the reins and permit broader deployment of drones by government agencies.
One result of that pressure is this legislation (H.R. 658 — see conference report for more details), which authorizes appropriations for the FAA through fiscal 2014. Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.
Congress — and to the extent possible, the FAA — need to impose some rules (such as those we proposed in our report) to protect Americans’ privacy from the inevitable invasions that this technology will otherwise lead to. We don’t want to wonder, every time we step out our front door, whether some eye in the sky is watching our every move.
On Friday, the House gave final passage to the legislation. House approval came on a quite partisan vote, with most Republicans in favor and most Democrats opposing. The Senate is scheduled to take up the bill later today.
Here are details on what the bill would do in terms of drones:
Require the FAA to simplify and speed up the process by which it issues permission to government agencies to operate drones. It must do this within 90 days. The FAA has already been working on a set of proposed regulations to loosen the rules around drones, reportedly set for release in the spring of 2012.
Require the FAA to allow “a government public safety agency” to operate any drone weighing 4.4 pounds or less as long as certain conditions are met (within line of sight, during the day, below 400 feet in altitude, and only in safe categories of airspace).
Require the FAA to establish a pilot project within six months to create six test zones for integrating drones “into the national airspace system.”
Require the FAA to create a comprehensive plan “to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.” “Civil” drones means those operated by the private sector; currently it is all but impossible for any non-government entity, except for hobbyists, to get permission to fly drones (for-profit use of drones is banned). Industry groups and their congressional supporters see this as a potential area for growth. Congress specifies that the plan must provide for the integration of drones into the national airspace system “as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.” The FAA has nine months to create the plan. The FAA is also required to create a “5-year roadmap for the introduction” of civil drones into the national airspace.
Require the FAA to publish a final rule within 18 months after the comprehensive plan is submitted, “that will allow” civil operation of small (under 55 pounds) drones in the national airspace, and a proposed rule for carrying out the comprehensive plan.
The bottom line is: domestic drones are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power — like all government power — needs to be subject to checks and balances. We hope that Congress will carefully consider the privacy implications that this technology can lead to.
The Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) has released a paper on its efforts to hold the Israel Security Agency (ISA) – or Shabak – to account for its practices of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees. In Accountability Still Denied, PCATI reveals how Israel has evaded criminal investigations into all 701 complaints of torture and ill-treatment.
In October 1991, Israel ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Israel should therefore prevent acts of torture. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification of torture, according to the Convention. According to article 4, Israel must ensure that all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture and acts of complicity or participation in torture are made punishable “by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.” However, PCATI found that Israel has hitherto ignored its international obligations to halt torture.
Torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees
Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations have consistently reported about violations of the rights of Palestinian political prisoners. In its paper, PCATI presents a summary of two complaints on torture. In the case of Jihad Mughrabi the Shabak used physical force, beating the detainee’s head and chest with their fists and guns and kicking his legs. The violence produced bleeding wounds and the detainee lost consciousness while being tortured. He was taken to hospital. Shabak agents also exerted psychological pressure by showing Mughrabi detained family members. Mughrabi’s testimony is recorded on video.
Ala’a Salem also filed a complaint of torture suffered during Shabak interrogations. Ala’a was interviewed by Social Television to spread his story. The video is in Arabic with subtitles in Hebrew:
Habib Ph. Jaudy has translated what Ala’a said into English:
“They put me in jail for two days. Then they brought me back to the isolation cell and chained me.
Starting from there my treatment was beyond description. Naturally during this whole time I was forbidden to meet the lawyer.
I was placed on concrete, with my hands and feet in steel chains.
For the first period, after every eight hours of chaining they’d give me two and a half minutes of rest to eat and go to the toilet. But if you dare to ask to go to the toilet when you are chained [i.e. at a time other than your permitted two-and-a-half minute rest period], the eight hours would be extended to ten or even twelve hours of chaining as punishment.
At one time on the second day in the ‘hotel’ [this must be the interrogation place] there was a crazy Jewish person in the cell next to me shouting for 24 hours. So even if I was dying to sleep in my condition I couldn’t close my eyes. So I asked to go to the toilet, but in vain, I shouted but still in vain. (Video cut at that point.)
The reaction was that five soldiers came in and started hitting me. My nose was bleeding and blood came out of my mouth and I couldn’t do anything as I was chained. At that time I had tears running down my face … firstly because of the harsh pain and secondly because of the feeling that you can’t do anything about it.”
No proper procedure to investigate complaints
The majority of detainees who reported torture or ill-treatment to PCATI’s lawyers refused to submit complaints to the Israeli authorities. According to PCATI, the Palestinian detainees lack trust in Israel’s mechanism of investigation or fear reprisals.
Nevertheless, the Inspector of Interrogee Complaints (IIC) – who is an agent of the Shabak – received 701 complaints of torture and ill-treatment between 2001 and 2010. In 2009 and 2010 the IIC received 52 and 51 complaints respectively. PCATI informed me that the trend in the number of complaints continued in 2011.
Complaints of torture and ill-treatment have to be submitted to the Attorney General, who delegates a senior official within the State Attorney’s office to decide upon the complaints. Instead of opening a criminal investigation, the senior official refers the complaints for a preliminary inquiry to the Shabak Inspector of Interrogee Complaints. PCATI criticizes the inquiry:
Complainants’ testimonies are taken by the IIC during very brief and unannounced visits, It has been common practice for the IIC to falsely introduce himself as a representative of the Ministry of Justice, and complainants’ testimonies have been taken under conditions that replicate the interrogation itself: in the very same room where ISA interrogations take place, and, in some instances, while the complainants have remained shackled for the duration of the meeting.
No complaint of torture criminally investigated
Based on an analysis of its correspondence with the State Attorney’s Office, PCATI concludes that the majority of the complaints of torture and ill-treatment were closed because the authorities denied the facts. Fifteen percent of the complaints were closed because they were categorized under the “defense of necessity” doctrine. In 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Shabak is not allowed to use physical means of interrogation that are aimed at tiring out or breaking the detainee. The Court did “not negate the possibility that the ‘necessity’ defense be available” to Shabak investigators and empowered the Attorney General to devise guidelines for such “ticking bomb” cases. PCATI writes that these guidelines – issued in 1999 – have served “as the basis for de facto approval of methods of interrogation amounting to torture and ill-treatment in such cases, thereby granting ISA interrogators blanket exemption from prosecution.”
However, the Convention against Torture does not recognize such a “defense of necessity doctrine”. The Convention is unequivocal in its absolute prohibition of torture.
In addition, the Human Rights Committee concluded in July 2010 that Israel “should ensure that all alleged cases of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and disproportionate use of force by law enforcement officials, including police, personnel of the security service and the armed forces, are thoroughly and promptly investigated by an authority independent of any of these organs, that those found guilty are punished with sentences that are commensurate with the gravity of the offense, and that compensation is provided to the victims or their families.”
PCATI writes that following the publication of its first report on the topic – Accountability Denied – in 2009, there have been no substantive changes in Israel’s practices of torture and ill treatment. The closure of all 701 complaints of torture and ill-treatment by Palestinian detainees proves that the Israeli authorities protect the perpetrators. Meanwhile, Israel’s violations of Palestinian political prisoners’ rights continues. That is why the BDS Movement must keep Israel under pressure, and human rights organizations, social movements, activists and concerned citizens must call on their politicians, governments and embassies to intervene
The US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) is asking supporters to sign a pledge to defend civil and human rights as it was revealed last week that the lead government prosecutor of the Holy Land Five has been assigned to the ongoing secret investigation against anti-war and international solidarity activists across the US.
USPCN is a Palestinian formation aimed at unifying Palestinians in the Shatat (exile) in support of self-determination and the right of return and ending the Zionist occupation and colonization of Palestine.
The FBI and other federal agencies, in a coordinated raid in September 2010, burst into the homes of prominent organizers in the Midwest and harassed activists across the country. In the following months, subpoenas were delivered to a total of 23 activists; all of us have refused to testify, saying that we are being targeted because of our political work which is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Veteran Chicano liberation, anti-war and immigrant rights activist Carlos Montes was also raided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department last May. Montes is named in one of the search warrants served in Minneapolis in September 2010, and when he was in custody the FBI questioned him about his political associations.
He was charged with trumped-up technical firearms code violations related to his participation in protests decades ago. (For more information about Montes and this attack on him, see this good backgrounder by Chris Hedges: “Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale.”)
In solidarity with the 23, we will defend our constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly. We will stand up to any escalation of the attacks on human rights activists.
We will join in the National Day of Protest when any of the 23 human rights activists are ordered to appear in front of the Chicago Grand Jury or indicted.
Lead prosecutor of Holy Land Five now part of secret investigation
It was revealed last week that not only is the the investigation into the anti-war and solidarity activists ongoing, but Barry Jonas, the lead prosecutor of five men associated with the Holy Land Foundation, is now working on the investigation under US District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago.
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), once the largest Islamic charity in the US, was shut down by the Bush administration in December 2001 and indictments came down a few years later. After a first trial resulted in a hung jury that favored toward acquittal, a second trial resulted in the conviction of the five men, who were given sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years in prison.
The HLF was not accused of directly financing terrorist violence, but of supplying funds to Hamas-controlled charitable societies and committees. The US government has argued that providing humanitarian aid to victims of war or natural disasters is a crime if provided to or coordinated with a group labeled as a foreign terrorist organization.
The charitable groups, known as Zakat Committees, identified in the indictment have been funded by the US and the defense denied that the committees are controled by Hamas. The Hamas party won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and the Gaza Strip has been subjected to a devastating siege of collective punishment following the Hamas government’s takeover of the territory’s internal affairs.
All of the major Palestinian political parties, except for Fatah, is on the State Department’s terrorist organization list, essentially criminalizing an entire people. Of course I don’t have to point out the hypocrisy of criminalizing Palestinian political groups while the US funds the Israeli occupation to the tune of $3 billion a year and provides Israel with diplomatic cover at the United Nations.
Charity treated as “local face of terrorism”
Holy Land Foundation co-founder Ghassan Elashi is currently serving a 65-year sentence in a Communications Management Unit — self-contained detention centers where communication is severely restricted and monitored, and which are disproportionately populated by Arabs and Muslims. He provides a revealing testimony in Patriot Acts, describing how the HLF and his family company, InfoCom, which was raided days before the 11 September 2001 attacks, became the “local faces of terrorism.” It was at one point even speculated whether the 11 September attacks were in reprisal for the raid on the company.
Elashi also describes how the government agencies who raided the HLF’s offices in December 2001 had neither a search warrant or a court order to seize its contents.
The injustices against the HLF continued during the trials. During the first trial, Elashi recounts, “the prosecutors focused on the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Palestinian elements, and specifically Hamas, as opposed to the actions of the HLF or the defendants themselves.”
Elashi adds:
One government witness testified in detail about suicide bombings claimed by Hamas, and prosecutors were also allowed to present to the jury numerous images and statements made by individuals other than us. For example, they showed pictures of the aftermath of suicide bombs, and videos of Palestinian school ceremonies in which children played the roles of suicide bombers, complete with suicide belts. None of the videos came from the HLF’s files. The videos depicted events that happened years after the HLF closed, and there is no evidence that the defendants attended these ceremonies.
Yet all attempts by our attorney to show the jury fundraising videos demonstrating the HLF’s charity work were met with objections from prosecutors and the judge. The judge even deemed the evidence irrelevant.
Like in the Chicago trial of US Palestinians Muhammad Salah and Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar a few years back, the prosecution’s star witness in the HLF trial was an “anonymous expert who worked with the Israeli secret intelligence.” His real name was not revealed to the court and the defense attorneys were severely limited in what they were allowed to ask during cross-examination. “This is the first time in history the US court had allowed an expert witness to testify with an anonymous name,” Elashi recounts in Patriot Acts.
Elashi also recalls that after the first trial, none of the defendants were found guilty of any of the 197 counts against them. However, the prosecution had more tricks up its sleeve, as Elashi recalls:
Prosecutors then asked the judge to poll the jurors. The judge agreed, and one of the jurors changed their mind. Suddenly there was confusion in the court. Some of the marshals told us that they had never seen such a thing in their lives. The judge then ordered the jurors to go back to the deliberation room and come out with a final verdict … This time one of the jurors changed their minds … the final verdict was a hung jury on all counts for all defendants, except [Mohammad] Elmezain, who was acquitted on all counts, with a hung jury on one count. The judge then announced a mistrial. A mistrial meant of course that prosecutors decided to retry the case.
A second trial resulted in guilty verdicts on all counts and lengthy prison sentences for the five men.
Palestine solidarity construed as material support for terrorism
The injustice of the trial, convictions and sentencing of the Holy Land Foundation five gives an idea of what anti-war and international solidarity activists are in for should they be put on trial.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts’ Privacy Matters blog published a spot-on analysis last week on “International solidarity and the First Amendment in the crosshairs,” saying thatgovernment prosecutor Barry Jonas’ involvement“suggests that criminalizing support for Palestine could be at the top of the grand jury’s agenda.”
The post also states:
Since the Holy Land Foundation case was decided, prosecutors have obtained a new weapon to use against international solidarity activists like those at the receiving end of grand jury subpoenas. The Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 in the case of Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project was the culmination of 12 years of litigation over the interpretation of the “material support to terrorism” provision of the 1996 Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act to include the categories of giving “expert advice or assistance,” training, service and personnel.
The case revolved around groups that were helping the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) develop non violent ways of getting its message across and an organization that maintained that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) should be the recipient of aid for northern Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the deadly tsunami.
In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court in June 2010 carved out a frightening new exception to the First Amendment. Basically it says that if a person or organization has carried out some kind of activity that was somehow “coordinated” with a group that has been listed by the Secretary of State as a terrorist organization, then that person or organization can be prosecuted for giving “material support” to terrorists. That activity can be wholly peaceful, have peacemaking or humanitarian relief as its goal, and involve nothing more than words.
The Supreme Court’s constitutionally vague decision gives the government a powerful tool to prosecute international solidarity activists. As the ACLU-Mass blog notes:
If the African National Congress were still on the State Department’s list — it was taken off by an Act of Congress as a 90th birthday present to Nelson Mandela in 2008 — then, theoretically at any rate, anyone from this country who worked with Mandela, or enabled Mandela’s voice to be heard could have faced criminal charges.
While in its June 2010 decision the Supreme Court declared that it was not criminalizing independent advocacy of ideas or opinions, ACLU-Mass notes that this was “overlooked in Boston where, in December 2011, a federal jury found Tarek Mehanna guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists without any kind of demonstrated link being made to a terrorist organization.”
Ideological war
The (mis)application of anti-terror legislation is something that I have been scrutinizing on my blog, focusing on the case of three young North Carolina Muslim men who were indicted, convicted of and received decades-long sentences for conspiracy to provide material support for foreign terrorist organizations and, in two of their cases, for conspiracy to kill, kidnap, harm or maim persons in a foreign country.
However, the government did not identify which specific groups the men were plotting to provide material support for. The indictment instead uses the word jihad over and over again, as though that was a specific crime codified in US law, and refers to generic mujahideen (repeatedly mis-transliterated from Arabic as mujihadeen in the indictment, revealing US attorneys’ complete ignorance with the subject matter). Mujahideen roughly translates to “holy warrior” but does not refer to any specific group of people.
During the sentencing hearings for the three young North Carolina men, which I covered for The Electronic Intifada, statements made by government prosecutors suggested that it was ideology on trial. One of the defendants’ sympathies with Iraqis resisting US occupation forces in Fallujah was treated as evidence of him being sympathetic with terrorism. In one of the other men’s hearing, a US attorney referred to the US military as the “arm by which we have fought radical Islam all over the world.”
The North Carolina defendants were conflated with parties fighting the US military overseas, suggesting that the US government views the prosecution of US Muslims as the “domestic” front of the war on terror, and that ideological opposition to US foreign policy is “evidence” of “terrorist” leanings.
Never-ending “war on terror”
The dangers posed to civil liberties by the indefinite, ideological “war on terrorism,” which has no geographic boundaries, have been particularly felt by Arab and Muslim communities in the US. Environmental and animal liberation activists have also been treated as domestic terrorists, and now Palestine solidarity activists are under threat of being prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation. (Of course, Palestine activism in the US has been criminalized for decades — see this story I co-authored with my colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman for a bit of that history.)
The US State Department has said more than once that organizers with the US Boat to Gaza may be investigated for violations of material support to foreign terrorist organizations. US Congress late last year introduced a bill seeking to investigate the US Boat to Gaza.
Meanwhile the flow of money and arms to Israel goes unabated, and groups raising money to fund Israeli settlements enjoy tax-exempt status, just to identify but some of the double standards of what constitutes material support for “terror.”
The situation on the ground grows ever worse in Palestine, and Arab and Muslim communities face increased injustice in the US. It’s our job to raise our voices both in support for boycott, divestment and sanctions measures on Israel — including cutting off US aid — and in support of the civil liberties of those being repressed in the US.
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan has entered his 55th day of hunger strike. He has long passed the critical stage and is in danger of organ failure any moment now. In other words, Khader Adnan is dying.
Aletho News
