Israeli Troops Invade Hospital Near Bethlehem
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – December 19, 2010
The Bethlehem Arab Rehabilitation Hospital reported Sunday that a group of Israeli soldiers surrounded the hospital with armored vehicles and jeeps, then invaded the Emergency Room, pointing guns at patients.
The soldiers then roughly demanded of the ER staff that they produce admissions records for the past 48 hours, according to the Director of the Hospital, Edmund Shehadeh. They threatened to confiscate a computer containing medical records, but ended up leaving the hospital empty handed.
Invasions of hospitals are routine in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite the fact that hospitals are accorded special protection under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and are not supposed to be invaded by military force.
Israeli military forces routinely violate their obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention, particularly in the areas concerning protection of civilian populations, and attacks on schools and hospitals.
Some patients in Palestinian hospitals are civilian victims of Israeli military attacks, and the invasions of hospitals are especially traumatic to these patients, according to psychologists who work with Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.
How Wikileaks Is Effecting American-Israeli Relations
By Hannah McKale | Desert Peace | December 18, 2010
The first and most important question to ask when approaching events on the geopolitical spectrum is to first ask the question, who is to benefit? In the case of the most recent Wikileaks dump that occurred at the end of November, the most obvious party with something to gain from the files and cables exposed is Israel. American and Israel relations have been quite close ever since the end of the second world war.
When the news first broke that Wikileaks would be making another massive dump of information, people could not help but wonder what it may be. Now, it has been revealed to the public, and while it is not nearly quite as scathing as a video of soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians, there is still a definite agenda behind the release of these embassy cables. The cables were between American embassies and embassies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A majority of the cables pertain to Iran and potential military actions against the country. Who has been calling for a precision military strike against Iran for months now, if not years? You guessed it. Israel, and at least a portion of the United States Government wishes to bring the surrounding region against Iran. While the overall image of the American government is tarnished a great deal by these leaks, Israels is not affected whatsoever.
While the US is forced to deal with scathing leaked information such as its meddling in Argentinian affairs, Israel’s own agenda is only gaining ground. Some have even postulated a potential Mossad or CIA connection to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
According to the former Pakistani Chief of Intelligence, Hamid Gul, Wikileaks is designed to act as a controlled release of information, and disinformation designed to manipulate public opinion of Washington, and Iran.
Israel has cause for a strike against Iran in order to curtail its nuclear capabilities. The government of both America and Israel claim that Iran’s agenda for nuclear power will inevitably lead to a nuclear confrontation given that Iran acquires nuclear weaponry. This past August, the Iranian Busherh reactor was reportedly attacked by a virus which was said to be deployed against the installation by a government organization. Israel was fingered as the main culprit in this instance.
Israel and America have always maintained a close relationship in leadership. Both are proponents of the War on Terror, and both are also keenly interested in the Middle Eastern occupation. With Iran remaining one of the few independent states in the Middle Eastern area, Israel is looking to turn the rest of the Islamic world against Iran by using an indirect approach through information warfare. The most horrifying negative aspect of this most recent Wikileaks dump is the opportunity it gives the government to claim security measures are required for cyberspace. It was not entirely surprising how hostile some of the talking heads of the mainstream media appeared to be against Wikileaks, when it is exposing government corruption these imbeciles demand punishment for Assange, the shutdown of Wikileaks, and better control of information on the web.
It appears that the leadership schools of both the United States and Israel both have their agendas in full throttle in this Wikileaks situation. While Israel’s agenda of dominating the Middle East’s future is coaxed closer to the surface for those who have their eyes open, it also appears that segments of power within the United States government are attempting to mar the reputation of the nation in eyes of those around the world. Assange and Wikileaks will be demonized by the establishment, and methods of information control will be proposed by the government, all in the name of national defense.
Hanna McKale is a political scientist hailing from New York, NY. When she is not researching, she advocates for Online Education, and travels all over the world.
Provocateurs, shills and disinfo agents
hijackednation | September 26, 2009
Insight into how governments discredit and eliminate dissident movements special thanks to WeAreChangeLA.
DHS Implementing No Work List: Citizens Must Get Government Approval to Work in Private Sector Jobs
You’ve heard of no fly and no buy lists – get ready for no work lists. Millions of workers now must apply to the DHS and prove they are not terrorists in order to be granted permission by the government to work.
By Kurt Nimmo | Infowars | December 16, 2010
On the Alex Jones Show today, a caller pointed to information posted on a union website for ironworkers spelling out details on the Department of Homeland Security’s TWIC and SWAC programs.
TWIC is short for Transportation Worker Identification Credential and SWAC stands for Secure Worker Access Consortium.
TWIC “is a biometric credential that ensures only vetted workers are eligible to enter a secure construction site, unescorted,” Ironworkers Local 361 in Ozone Park, New York, explains. “Before issuing a TWIC, TSA must conduct a security threat assessment on the TWIC applicant. An applicant who, as a result of the assessment, is determined to not pose a security threat, will be issued a TWIC card.”
In other words, construction workers in New York will need permission from the TSA and DHS in order to practice their profession and earn a living. It was much the same in the former Soviet Union and authoritarian states such as China where the government determines all aspects of an individual’s life and where even the mildly rebellious are severely punished.
SWAC is even more draconian. It is “a large-scale collaborative effort among public and private authorities, facility owners, contractors, and labor organizations who are partnering to prevent terrorist activity by creating a trusted contractor community. Over 500 organizations, including the Port Authority of NY and NJ, which manages and maintains the bridges, tunnels, bus terminals, airports, PATH, and seaports that are essential to the bi-state region’s trade and transportation capabilities, have joined this effort,” according to the union website.
SWAC also requires a background investigation by the government, so if construction, port workers, longshoremen, and truck drivers are involved in political activity frowned upon by the feds – for instance, 9/11 truth, considered dangerous and subversive by the State Department – it is likely they will have to find another line of work.
A SWAC PDF specifically mentions “treason” in an exhaustive list of crimes and misdeeds that will result in the federal government denying a person the right to earn a living.
The TWIC Disclosure and Certification form states the following: “I acknowledge that if TSA or other law enforcement agencies determine that I pose an imminent threat to national security or transportation security, my employer may be notified.”
The TSA no-fly list contains thousands of names, including journalists and political activists. If the government determines you hold the wrong political beliefs, according to the TWIC document, your employer will be told and you may lose your job and the ability to provide for your family.
The TWIC application also mentions “treason” and “sedition” as a criteria to put an end to an individual’s employment.
Sedition is defined as overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by officialdom to tend toward insurrection against the establishment. The Sedition Act of 1918 forbids the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. The Sedition Act was updated on October 26, 2001, when Congress signed the USA Patriot Act into law. In the mid 70s, the Church Committee discovered that the government had carried out an aggressive campaign for decades to neutralize – as FBI director Hoover characterized it – political activity the establishment considered a threat to its monopoly on power.
As noted above, TWIC plans to force an expensive biometric ID on workers. This idea is hardly new. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Homeland Security in order to get details on then director Tom Ridge’s plan to introduce a biometric national ID card. Ridge and the government have stated repeatdly that “national security requirements would ultimately make such cards a reality.”
Earlier this year, Democrats pushed the idea making a biometric national ID card mandatory for all Americans. “Everyone would have to produce the card to get a job, or keep a job,” the UPI reported on May 9. “On a five-year timetable the biometric cards would replace Social Security cards and would be used to prove eligibility for employment. Card scanners would be issued to all U.S. employers. The cards would at least have the capability of being linked to a central data system.”
TWIC and SWAC represent an incremental effort by the national security state to introduce biometric ID as a prerequisite for employment. In the months ahead, we can expect more intrusions by the government on our rights as spelled out by the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” that document states.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, however, according to the government, will soon be predicated on a national biometric ID card and inclusion of our most private information in sprawling databases.
In the coming Brave New World Order, only citizens vetted by a totalitarian government will be allowed to work and feed their families. All others will be locked out of the system like the mutants in Total Recall, the dystopian movie based on a story by Phillip K. Dick.
Federal court blocks Obama Administration attempt to spy on cell phones without a warrant
By John Byrne | Raw Story | December 16th, 2010
The Obama Administration’s effort to obtain your location from cell phone towers without a warrant was rebuffed Wednesday by a federal court.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the Justice Department cannot obtain information about which cell phone towers mobile phones communicate with without a warrant.
The decision was first reported by Wired’s David Kravets, and has received almost no coverage in the press. The Obama Administration is seeking to reverse an earlier ruling giving judges the authority to require a warrant for the government to obtain cell phone tracking data.
In October, Obama Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer filed a brief seeking the power to obtain cell phone location data without a warrant, arguing that it was essentially communication made in a public place.
Referencing a 1979 case, Smith vs. Maryland, the Assistant Attorney General wrote that because telephone callers cannot expect privacy in the numbers they dial, they can’t expect privacy in the locations of towers their cell phones interact with.
“In Smith, the Supreme Court held both that telephone users have no subjective expectation of privacy in dialed telephone numbers and also that any such expectation is not one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable,” Breuer wrote, along with several other officials. “The Court’s reasoning applies equally to cell-site information. The Court stated: “we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial. All telephone users realize that they must ‘convey’ phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed.” Similarly, cell phone users understand they must convey a signal to a cell phone tower before their call may be completed.” (p. 12 – pdf)
The brief was co-written by US Attorney David Hickton, Assistant US Attorney Robert Eberhardt, and and Associate Director of the US Justice Department’s Office of Enforcement Operations.
Wired‘s David Kravets noted that the decision to bar law enforcement from routine collection of cell-site data comes in a broader context of rulings favoring electronic privacy.
“The decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is one in a string of court decisions boosting Americans’ privacy in the digital age — rulings the government fought against,” Kravets penned Wednesday. “The most significant and recent decision came Tuesday, when a different federal appeals court said for the first time the government must obtain a court warrant for an internet service provider to grant the authorities access to a suspect’s e-mail.”
“The case that concluded Wednesday concerns historical cell-site location information, which carriers usually retain for about 18 months,” Kravets added. “The data identifies the cell tower the customer was connected to at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call — and is often used in criminal prosecutions and investigations.”
In September, the appeals court ruled that judges should have the power to require warrants for the government to obtain cell-site information. The Obama Administration appealed that decision, and the ruling Wednesday rebuffed their efforts.
Earlier this month, Law.com provided a description of how law enforcement can use cell-site information in investigations.
…Cell phone records can track the movements of the person or persons in possession of a cell phone that has been activated, even when no one is making a call on the phone, that the tracking can be quite granular, within 146 feet, or 50 meters, and, in many cases, within 40 feet, and that the increase in cell phone towers and improvements in technology will continue to make tracking even more granular. Telephones equipped with Global Positioning System applications can be tracked by GPS satellites that orbit the earth and whose purpose is to track all GPS targets.
Though not all phones are equipped with GPS capabilities, all cell phones can be tracked through network-based tracking.
Cell phones are supported by a network of cell towers that relay messages from the caller through the carrier to the recipient. There are hundreds of thousands of cell phone towers in the United States. Activated cell phones are in constant contact with cell phone towers, keeping contact with the closest one as the cell phone moves across space so that if and when a call comes in or goes out it will do so instantly.
By tracking the “hops” a cell phone makes from cell phone tower to tower, law enforcement can track the movements of that phone — and, ostensibly, its owner — for as long as the records are kept by the carrier.
Kravets, at Wired, noted that the Obama Administration is also seeking permission to affix GPS devices to vehicles without a court warrant.
“The administration has also asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reverse its August ruling requiring court warrants to affix GPS devices to vehicles to track their every move,” he wrote. “The administration said Americans should expect no privacy ‘in the totality of his or her movements in public places.'”
“The appellate court’s answer is pending,” he added.
Illegal U.S. Experiments Went Far Beyond Guatemala
Inside Costa Rica | 14 December 2010
GUATEMALA – The illegal experiments conducted on human beings by a U.S. medical team in the 1940s went far beyond Guatemala, according to local news reports.
The team headed by Dr. John Cutler did the same thing in the United States, India, and African nations, said Leon Arango, member of the commission in charge of investigating the experiments on Guatemalans, quoted in the Diario de Centro America newspaper on Monday.
Cutler headed a team that from 1946 to 1948 intentionally infected 610 Guatemalans with venereal diseases, including prostitutes, prisoners, soldiers, and mentally disabled people, according to a report published by a U.S. investigator.
That disclosure triggered a wave of indignation in that country. President Alvaro Colom called the incident a crime against humanity, and ordered the creation of a commission to make the corresponding investigations.
Arango said he had information that showed the experiments were also conducted on U.S. prison inmates and citizens from a community in Alabama, as well in African countries and in India.
As was the case in Guatemala, the alleged studies to find medicines to fight venereal diseases were allowed by authorities in Africa and India in return for the setting-up of clinical labs.
The former chief of the Public Health Department for Venereal Diseases, Juan Funes, was the one who encouraged those experiments. At that time, he was being trained at a New York institute for research on venereal diseases, Arango said.
Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap?
By Glen Ford – Black Agenda Report – 12/14/2010
The FBI’s war of entrapment amounts to a huge extortion scheme targeting the American people. The object is to terrify the public into surrendering their civil liberties in a twilight struggle with a mostly nonexistent domestic enemy. “These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama.”
Attorney General Eric Holder told hundreds of Muslims near San Francisco that the FBI’s sting operations penetrating mosques across the country are an essential “tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.” But of course, most of the FBI’s high profile prosecutions for alleged domestic terrorism involve plots that were hatched in almost every detail by paid FBI informants who nurtured the schemes to their pre-planned conclusions. So, in point of fact, the FBI has not been engaged in “uncovering and preventing terrorist attacks,” as Eric Holder claims, but rather, it has spent tens of millions of dollars and many thousands of man-hours concocting, financing, and providing training and equipment for crimes purely of its own invention. The FBI – first under George Bush and then even more aggressively under Barack Obama – has fabricated the illusion of a wave of terror that did not, for the most part, exist. In doing so, the U.S. government has perpetrated at least two classes of crimes: one, against those it has directly entrapped and prosecuted for crimes conceived and executed by the government, itself; and the second, larger class of crime, conspiracy to deliberately deceive and terrorize the American people, for the purpose of depriving the American people of their civil rights, and to foment a public hysteria that would facilitate the launching of military attacks on other peoples.
These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama. The irony is, the very atmosphere of hysteria and war fever that the fake terror plots engender among the public, insulates the perpetrators from accountability for their crimes. No wonder the incoming Obama administration shielded the outgoing Bush gang from prosecution. Obama instructed Eric Holder to expand the phony terror racket, not to shut it down. Both presidents’ historical legacies are now inextricably tied to a domestic war on terror that is largely a fiction.
The fiction has real victims, including the poor and powerless, largely Black and brown men who were manipulated like puppets in theatrical productions directed by the FBI for purpose of frightening an audience of 300 million Americans. The families of some of these entrapped, involuntary actors in the FBI’s fake terror dramas are scheduled to gather at New York University, in Manhattan, on December 16, to devise strategies for seeking justice.
Muslim Americans have been criminalized as a community. In Irvine, California, an FBI operative was so brazen in soliciting recruits for jihad, mosque members got a court restraining order to shut him up. It turns out the informant was paid $177,000 to incite a holy war – the going rate, apparently, for inventing terror where none has previously existed.
So who is the real target of government entrapment? It could not be the individuals sucked into the FBI vortex, since Eric Holder’s men knew they were incapable of independently carrying out the crimes and, therefore, represented no danger to society. No, American society, itself, has been entrapped by the Bush and Obama manipulators. The object is to terrify the American public, so that they will surrender their civil liberties – possibly the greatest extortion scheme in U.S. history.
GA Prison Inmate Strike Enters New Phase, Prisoners Demand Human Rights, Education, Wages For Work
By Bruce A. Dixon | Black Agenda Report | December 15, 2010
The historic strike of Georgia prisoners, demanding wages for their labor, educational opportunities, adequate health care and nutrition, and better conditions is entering a new phase. Strikers remain firm in their demands for full human rights, though after several days many have emerged from their cells, if only to take hot showers and hot food. Many of these, however, are still refusing their involuntary and unpaid work assignments.
A group that includes relatives, friends and a broad range of supporters of the prisoners on the outside has emerged. They are seeking to sit down with Georgia correctional officials this week to discuss how some of the just demands of inmates can begin to be implemented. Initially, Georgia-based representatives of this coalition supporting the prisoner demands included the Georgia NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the National Association for Radical Prison Reform, the Green Party of Georgia, and the Ordinary Peoples Society among others. Civil rights attorneys, ministers, community organizations and other prisoner advocates are also joining the group which calls itself the Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoner Rights.
Prisoners have stood up for themselves, and the communities they came from are lining up to support them. Today, at a groundbreaking for a private prison 300 miles southeast of Atlanta in Millen GA, residents of that local community opposed to the private prison are greeting the governor and corrections brass with a protest. They will be joined by dozens more coming in from Atlanta who will respectfully urge state authorities to talk to the prisoners. We understand that one person there has been arrested. Black Agenda Report will have photos and footage of that event on Thursday.
The broad-based Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoners Rights fully supports the heroic stand of Georgia’s prisoners. “This isn’t Attica,” one representative of the coalition explained. “No violent acts have been committed by any of the inmates involved. We hope state corrections officials will be as peaceful and respectful as the prisoners have been, and start a good faith dialog about quickly addressing their concerns.”
Right now, the ball is in the hands of state corrections officials, and reports are that in some of the affected prisons, authorities are fumbling that ball, engaging
“They transferred some of the high Muslims here to max already,” one prisoner told Black Agenda Report this morning. “They want to break up the unity we have here. We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground. We all want to be paid for our work, and we all want education in here. There’s people in here who can’t even read…
“They’re trying to provoke people to violence in here, but we’re not letting that happen. We just want our human rights.”
The transfers are intended to deprive groups of leadership and demoralize them. In some cases they may be having the opposite effect, stiffening prisoner morale and making room for still more leaders to emerge.
“The prisoners insist that punitive transfers are an act of bad faith, the opposite of what we should be doing,” said Minister Charles Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam in Atlanta. “The coalition supports them and demands no punitive transfers, either within or between institutions, and absolutely no transfers to institutions outside Georgia.”
Members of the public should continue to call the prisons listed below, and the GA Department of Corrections and the office of Georgia’s governor, Sonny Perdue. Ask them firmly but respectfully to resolve the situation non-violently and without punitive measures. Tell them you believe prisoners deserve wages for work and education. Ask them to talk to prisoners and the communities they come from.
It’s simple. With one in twelve Georgia adults in jail or prison, parole or probation or other court and correctional supervision, prisoners are us. They are our families. They are our fathers and our mothers, our sons and daughters, our nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles and cousins. Most prisoners will be back out in society sooner, not later. It’s time for us all to grow up and realize that warehousing, malnourishing, mistreating and abusing prisoners does not make us safer. Denying prisoners meaningful training and educational opportunities, and forcing them to work for no wages is not the way to do.
It’s time to fundamentally reconsider prison as we know it, and America’s public policy of mass incarceration.
See also:
Elaine Brown on GA Prison Strike, December 14 Democracy Now Video Interview

