Britain ‘falsely blamed’ IRA for bombing
By Paddy McGuffin | Morning Star | December 6, 2012
The Heath government orchestrated a smear campaign in an attempt to falsely blame the IRA for an infamous Belfast bar bombing in 1971, a Labour MP told Parliament today.
Fifteen people died when a UVF bomb tore through McGurk’s Bar in Belfast on December 4 1971.
Despite evidence to the contrary, the security forces initially blamed the atrocity on the accidental detonation of a republican device and suggested that IRA members who were carrying it may have been among the dead.
Then Stormont home affairs minister John Taylor said he believed the IRA was responsible.
In 1978 UVF member Robert Campbell was convicted for his part in the attack.
Last year the police Ombudsman said that there had been no collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries but concluded that there had been investigative bias towards blaming republicans for the massacre.
Speaking in the Commons, Michael Connarty MP said that a new book by Ciaran MacAirt cast doubt on the findings of the ombudsman’s report.
“There was collusion and it was clearly the British government, possibly up to the-then prime minister Edward Heath, who colluded and not only co-operated, but instructed that the false story be spread that this was a bomb carried by the people into that bar and it was an IRA bomb in transit,” he said.
Mr Connarty urged Prime Minister David Cameron to apologise and order a full investigation.
“Is it not time now for a proper investigation by the British government into the facts of this case, with all the files being open and the Prime Minister coming here to apologise to those families and the community for the malign way in which they were, for six years, blamed for a bomb that was clearly a vicious act against them?”
Leader of the House Andrew Lansley said he would ask ministers to respond to Mr Connarty’s claims.
Fukushima deception confirmed by UN
By JOHN LAFORGE | CounterPunch | December 5, 2012
When the Fukushima-1 reactor complex in Japan went into radioactive apoplexy on March 11, 2011, the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. — like the Russians at Chernobyl before them — began minimizing the risks of radiation and the known and potential effects of radiological disasters.
The principle mouthpiece for this well-rehearsed minstrel show was Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano who told the world that evening, “Let me repeat that there is no radiation leak, nor will there be a leak.”(1) Edano is now the Trade and Industry Minister and oversees federal cleanup and recovery efforts.
Independent observers like Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and a founder of the Low-Level Radiation Campaign in England, warned four days into the disaster: “Reassurances about radiation exposures issued by the Japanese government cannot be believed.” Likewise, physicist Nils Bøhmer, with the Oslo-based environmental foundation Bellona, insists that throughout the crisis Japan has been withholding information about radiation dangers.
Even the New York Times reported Nov. 30 on “The gap between the initial assurances given by company and government officials, and the ultimate scale of the nuclear disaster…”
Deception confirmed by UN
Now 20 months later, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health has issued a draft report charging that Japan “has adopted overly optimistic views of radiation risks and has conducted only limited health checks” among contaminated populations, the AP and CBC reported. According to Anand Grover, the UN investigator, “Japan hasn’t done enough to protect the health of residents and workers affected.”(2)
Previous investigations found that monitoring data from the federal system that tracks plumes of radiation during disasters — called “Speedi,” for System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information — was kept secret when it was needed most. News reports in August 2011 said that the system forecast that Karino Elementary School in the town of Namie would be directly in the path of the radiation plume spewing from the smashed reactors. Yet the warning never reached decision-makers and neither the school nor the town was evacuated. Instead, they became evacuation centers where families even cooked and ate meals outdoors.
Bellona reports that documents obtained by the AP and the New York Times, its own interviews with key officials, and a review of other newly released data and parliamentary transcripts show that “… Japan’s system to forecast radiation threats was working from the moment its nuclear crisis began on March 11, after an earthquake and tsunami pummeled the Fukushima” reactor site.
The UN’s Grover severely criticized the government’s commitment to health care for exposed workers and people in contaminated areas, and complained that its ongoing health checks are “too narrow in scope because they are only intended to cover Fukushima’s two million people.” Surveys of health effects should extend to “all radiation-affected zones” Grover said, a vast area including much of the north-eastern half of Honshu, Japan’s main island.
But so far, only one-fourth of Fukushima’s population has been surveyed. Grover thinks it’s unwise to check only children for thyroid damage. Indeed, Dr. Helen Caldicott told Business Insider last summer that even when lesions are found on a child’s thyroid, they aren’t being biopsied. The lesions “should all be biopsied,” Caldicott warned.
Further minimizing the actual numbers of affected persons, thousands of reactor site workers with short-term contractors “have no access to permanent health checks,” Grover said, and Fukushima residents complain that they have not been allowed access to their own health-check results.
Last March, Human Rights Watch leveled the same charge.(3) “We are really not seeing basic health services being offered in an accessible way and we are not seeing accurate, consistent, non-contradictory information being disclosed to people on a regular basis” Jane Cohen, a researcher at the New York-based rights group, told Reuters. Of the 24,228 workers who risk radiation exposure at the reactor complex, only a mere 904 are eligible for free cancer screenings being provided by the government and Tepco, the daily Asahi Shimbun reported November 22nd. The authorities have limited the scope of the $600 checkups to workers who were exposed to over 50 millisieverts between March 11 and mid-December 2011, but thousands of workers are demanding that the time limit be abolished.
Disinformation and denials confounded by science
Official lullabies, denials and attempted cover-ups are desperate shields against the enormous economic and legal liability that would follow any acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of radiation’s likely effects. Tepco said November 6th that it may need 11 trillion yen, or $137 billion, to cover its damages. Tokyo already set aside ¥9 trillion in July as part of the federal bailout and takeover of the utility. Minister Edano hinted last May that the government may cover some of the costs of decontaminating certain limited areas. Comprehensive decontamination is not even being considered because, as the science ministry reported in November 2011, radioactive fallout from the triple meltdowns was found in every one of its 57 prefectures.(4)
The journal Science reported this fall that 40% of the fish caught off the coast of NE Japan are contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels well above what the government allows.(5) Author Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that there is either a source of cesium on the seafloor, or it is still being dumped into the ocean by Tepco.
Referring to the millions of gallons of cooling water still being poured into the three destroyed reactors and their waste fuel pools, Buesseler told Radio Australia Nov. 20, “Some of that water is getting back into the ocean, either actively being pumped out after some decontamination or through leaks in the building, so [Tepco’s] not able to contain all of the water that they use to cool.”
The government and Tepco moved quickly to deny Science. The federal fisheries ministry claimed that cesium from Fukushima’s wrecked cooling systems — about 16,000-trillion becquerels, what Science called “by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen”— is “sinking into the seabed” and no longer entering the food chain. (A becquerel is one subatomic disintegration per second) Tepco representatives just said contaminated water was not leaking from any of its wreckage.
Oceanographer Kanda at Tokyo University told the journal Nature that his analysis indicates the site itself is leaking about 300 billion becquerels into the sea every month.
Notes
(1) Evan Osnos, “The Fallout: Seven months later: Japan’s nuclear predicament,” The New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2011
(2) AP, “UN says Fukushima nuclear risks underestimated in Japan,” Nov. 26, 2012
(3) Reuters, “Japan too slow in Fukushima health checks-rights group,” Mar. 6, 2012
(4) Hiroshi Ishizuka, “Cesium from Fukushima plant fell all over Japan,” Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 26, 2011
(5) “Fishing for Answers off Fukushima,” Science, Oct. 26
Related articles
- Fukushima Medical University Hospital cover up -An interview with Kazihiko Kobayashi (nuclear-news.net)
- TEPCO, Japanese government denying Fukushima radiation reaching ocean fish (japandailypress.com)
- ABC Radio: “Who’s to blame for radioactive fish? Tepco denies cesium contamination is from Fukushima” (enenews.com)
- AND NOW: ‘TEPCO Considers Net In Fukushima Nuke Plant Port To Prevent Irradiated Fish From Heading Seaward’ (infiniteunknown.net)
IRGC has fully extracted US spy drone’s data
Press TV – December 5, 2012
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says it has fully extracted the data on the US spy drone, it captured over the Persian Gulf on Tuesday.
“Yes, we have fully extracted the drone’s data…,” the IRGC Public Relations Department said on Wednesday, referring to the ScanEagle drone — a long-endurance aircraft built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing.
“The drone, in addition to gathering military data, used to pursue gathering data in the field of energy, especially the transfer of oil from Iran’s oil terminals,” the department said.
It said that the capture of the aircraft helps discovery of “what kind of data they (the Americans) are after.”
Regarding the US denial of the existence of the aerial vehicle in its drone fleet, the department said, “The reaction, the Americans have to the capture of their drones indicates the importance of this matter to them. This is not something they can easily deny.”
The manner by which the aircraft was captured by the IRGC is very important and “it can even be said that the drone’s getting entangled in the IRGC Navy’s security net is more important than the [capture of] the RQ-170 [Sentinel] drone,” it said, referring to the Iranian military’s last-year downing of an intruding US drone, which was flying over the northeastern Iran city of Kashmar.
Related articles
- Iran captures another intruding US drone (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Iran tells US to ‘recount’ drones (dailystar.com.lb)
The Feinstein Fumble: Indefinite Detention Remains
By Blake Filippi | Tenth Amendment Center | November 30, 2012
The proposed language in the 2013 NDAA and the recent Feinstein Amendment do not fix the multiple Constitutional infirmities in section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA. Unfortunately, Congress is now poised to reaffirm the President’s ability to prosecute persons within the USA though military tribunals, potentially allow continued indefinite detention without charge or trial, and do nothing to limit the practice of extraordinary rendition.
The most troubling provisions of section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA provide that the all persons within the USA – including U.S. citizens – whom the President unilaterally determines “substantially supported” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or “Associated forces” may be designated as enemy combatants subject to indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition (the transfer to foreign jurisdiction or entities) or military tribunals. Importantly, there is no knowing and willful requirement to one’s “substantial support.”
While the indefinite detention language in the 2012 NDAA purports to allow no Due Process whatsoever, it is tempered – inadequately tempered — by Supreme Court precedent that requires limited Due Process rights for those designated as enemy combatants subject to indefinite detention.
By way of background: in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that Hamdi – a U.S. citizen captured on a foreign battlefield and held indefinitely within U.S. jurisdiction – generally possessed the right to a meaningful opportunity to challenge his enemy combatant status before a neutral military decision-maker.
In Boumediene v. Bush the Court then further defined the due process rights of enemy combatants captured on a foreign battlefield and held within U.S. jurisdiction. They possess Habeas rights in an Article III court to review the neutral decision-marker. However, as a review of a military decision, the Habeas procedures for continued indefinite detention are shockingly lacking and inadequate compared to normal criminal proceedings. There is no 6th Amendment jury right. Hearsay is freely admissible, i.e. the 6th Amendment right to confront right to face accusers is absent. The burden of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt, not clear and convincing evidence, but a mere preponderance of the evidence. That is more likely than not based on hearsay that someone “substantially supported” a terrorist organization.
Then came the NDAA. The NDAA purports to extend the President’s war powers to the U.S. homeland. All persons within the USA — citizen and non-citizen alike — would now be subject to the Law of War with regards allegations of supporting terrorism, including the same indefinite detention limited Due Process rights articulated in Hamdi and Boumediene, as well as military tribunals and extraordinary rendition.
After the obvious outcry from citizens and States alike, Congress is now poised to pass the 2013 NDAA with what at first blush appear to be fixes to the indefinite detention provisions of the 2012 NDAA. However, the proposed text, and the recent Feinstein Amendment, may do little to restrict the President’s homeland war powers.
The operative language of the 2013 NDAA is contained in Section 1033(a):
“Nothing in the Authorization for Use of Military Force or the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 shall be construed to deny the availability of the writ of habeas corpus or to deny any Constitutional rights in a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution for any person who is lawfully in the United States when detained pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force and who is otherwise entitled to the availability of such writ or such rights.”
First, section 1033 still speaks to ‘detention’ of persons within the USA – as in indefinite detention without charge or trial. And the Constitutional rights purportedly preserved by section 1033 of the 2013 NDAA are likely only the limited protections that are already judicially required under Hamdi and Boumediene for indefinite detention; the right to a limited Habeas reviewin an Article III Court wherein the Constitution does not require numerous procedural safeguards available in normal criminal proceedings. Section 1033 of the 2013 NDAA only appears to be a mere legislative codification of these limited Hamdi and Boumediene indefinite detention procedures. Importantly, the President’s 2012 NDAA authority to dispose of persons captured in the USA — including U.S. citizens – through military tribunal and extraordinary rendition are not curtailed.
Unfortunately, the Feinstein Amendment to the 2013 NDAA may also do little to fix the multitude of problems with the 2012 NDAA, because it 1) may reaffirm the limited indefinite detention Due Process articulated in Hamdi and Boumediene, 2) does not restrict military tribunals with numerous Due Process infirmities for persons within the USA, 3) and it does nothing to limit extrodinary rendition.
The operative language of the Feinstein amendment is as follows:
“(b)(1) An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or a similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charges or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.”
. . . .
“(b)(3) Paragraph (1) shall not be construed to authorize the detention of a citizen of the United States, a lawful permanent resident of United States, or any other person who is apprehended in the United States.”
The initial question is; how does the Feinstein’s amendment actually affect the 2012 NDAA? Feinstein Amendment paragraph (b)(1) still purports to allow indefinite detention upon the express authorization of Congress, and (b)(3) says that the amendment should not be construed to authorize such detention. Yet, section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, intended to clarify the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, specifically authorizes such indefinite detention. Moreover, section 1021 applies broadly to include all persons, including those within the United States (as advocated by the Obama Administration and numerous members of Congress). Thus, section 1021 may still be interpreted as a specific enough authorization under the Feinstein Amendment for indefinite detention of persons within the USA; making the Feinstein Amendment worthless.
Now, let’s suppose the 2012 NDAA does not specify persons within the USA sufficiently to meet the Feinstein Amendment’s specific authorization requirement for indefinite detention; IT LIKELY CHANGES LITTLE.
Here’s why. The Feinstein Amendment does not specify what “charge” or “trial” mean. While this may seem like semantics, it is a very important omission because the judicial forum and attendant Constitutional protections present are not specified.
On one hand, the Feinstein Amendment could be interpreted as requiring the same limited Due Process articulated in Hamdi and Boumediene. Hamdi and Boumediene already require that those subject to indefinite detention are entitled to an opportunity to contest their enemy combatant status before a neutral decision maker, followed by civilian Article III Habeas review (with the extremely limited Due Process articulated above). By requiring charge and trial, the Feinstein Amendment may only legislatively codify the existing Hamdi and Boumediene limited Due Process rights those indefinitely detained under the 2012 NDAA are already entitled to. While this interpretation seems a stretch, we must remember that the Obama Administration has gone so far to declare that the President’s contemplation was sufficient Due Process prior to the drone assassination of U.S. citizens Al Allawaki and son.
On the other hand, it is more likely that the Feinstein Amendment’s “charge and trial” require more than the Hamdi and Boumediene procedures to contest indefinite detention as an enemy combatant (which procedures are not the product of formal charges or trials). We must remember that in addition to indefinite detention without trial or charge, section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA purports to authorize military tribunals. Military tribunals are initiated through formal charges and are deemed trials. Although the 2013 NDAA seeks to preserve Habeas rights and Constitutional protections when in an Article III Court, neither the 2013 NDAA or the Feinstein Amendment require that the actual charge and trial occur in an Article III civilian court (where all the Constitutional protections of normal criminal proceedings are present). The military tribunals authorized in the 2012 NDAA are simply not restricted. Thus, the “charge and trial” specified by the Feinstein Amendment likely refers to a military tribunal; the same tribunals ongoing in Guantanamo Bay.
The Constitutional protections in military tribunals are still woefully inadequate for a civilian arrested within the USA. The right to confront accusers is limited because significant testimonial hearsay can be admissible, the jury is composed of military members instead of peers, an unanimous verdict is not necessary for conviction, Miranda warnings are not applicable and search warrants are not required for admission of evidence. Importantly, Article III, Section III’s requirement that treason be proved by the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act may not be applicable.
Finally, and perhaps most troubling, is that the 2012 NDAA also authorizes the transfer of alleged enemy combatants to foreign jurisdictions and entities; that’s extraordinary rendition. The 2013 NDAA and the Feinstein Amendment do nothing to curb this horrific practice. The Constitution, laws and courts are completely irrelevant once someone has been transferred outside the jurisdiction of the USA. In this context, an accused’s Constitutional rights (and any rights purportedly preserved under in the 2013 NDAA and Feinstein Amendment) are only enforceable when within the jurisdiction of the courts. Nothing has been done to limit the President’s purported authority in the 2012 NDAA to transfer someone outside of the United States to some foreign country, entity, or military base, where they have no ability to compel a hearing to determine enemy combatant status, seek to be charged or tried, or pursue Habeas relief.
At most, the 2013 NDAA and the Feinstein Amendment require that persons within the USA designated as enemy combatants are at least entitled to military tribunals. Thus, the president retains the authority to prosecute according to the Laws of War. While military tribunals are a slight improvement over the Hamdi and Boumediene indefinite detention procedures, they still provide woefully insufficient civilian Constitutional protections. And nothing has been done about the President’s extraordinary rendition powers. Our Founders certainly did not intend for the president to have such domestic war powers – especially over citizens – without a Congressional declaration of War. Instead, Congress unconstitutionally purported to provide these war powers in the 2012 NDAA multi-hundred-page-appropriation-bill, and has done little to limit them with the ineffectual 2013 NDAA and its Feinstein Amendment.
If Congress intends to uphold the Constitution, it must immediately ban indefinite detention and require charge and trial in Article III civilian courts for persons within the USA – especially for civilians and legal aliens – and strike the President’s purported extraordinary rendition powers. Congress must restore the rule of law! Otherwise, the terrorists have won
Blake Filippi [send him email] is a Legal Analyst for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is also the director of the Rhode Island Liberty Coalition, a constitutional attorney and the initial author of resolutions opposing NDAA detention provisions being introduced around the country. Visit RI Liberty online at www.riliberty.com.
Related articles
- NDAA Detention Powers Remain: Blake Filippi Takes on the Talking Heads (tenthamendmentcenter.com)
- Nothing to Worry About on Indefinite Detention? Guess Again (tenthamendmentcenter.com)
- NDAA Nullification Moves Forward in Michigan (tenthamendmentcenter.com)
- Actually, The Newest Version Of NDAA Makes It EASIER To Detain Citizens Indefinitely (economicpolicyjournal.com)
Has-Maher-a! The Not-So-New Depths of Bill Maher’s Delusion and Depravity
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | December 4, 2012
In a recent interview with the Jewish Journal, unfunny comedian Bill Maher has once again praised Israel for its restraint in only committing rampant war crimes in Gaza rather than a full-scale nuclear genocide of a civilian population.
Two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote a lengthy post about Maher’s appalling anti-Islam bigotry and staggering ignorance regarding the factual history of his favorite colonial-settler ethnocracy, Israel. While Maher’s vitriolic attacks on Muslims, grotesque caricature of Palestinians in particular and unconditional fealty to Zionist propaganda has continued unabated in the intervening years, comments made in his Jewish Journal interview – conducted just days after the Israeli military concluded its latest criminal bombardment of besieged Gaza that succeeded in murdering over 160 people, including 42 children – concisely illustrate his warped understanding of reality.
Condemning religious people for ignorance of their own doctrinal scripture, Maher says, “I think if they read the bible, especially the Old Testament, I think they would be appalled,” adding that if biblical stories were de-contextualized and read only as a vengeful deity “wiping these people out and ethnically cleaning [sic] them for no apparent reason, how he does things on a whim and how he’s jealous; They’d go, ‘This is terrible.'”
While Maher may be correct on this point, he then claims that Judaism is “certainly not as dangerous as Islam and Christianity. Those are warlike religions.” One is left to wonder if Maher knows what the Old Testament actually is.
Maher finds elements of Judaism “insane” and “funny” and, in his world, the religion seems to boil down to kooky inventions like the Shabbos Elevator which “doesn’t really threaten anybody’s life.”
For Maher, who seems to be channeling the myopia of Jon Stewart here, every Muslim is a brainwashed terrorist, while every Jew is just a hapless nebbish – one part Catskills-era Jackie Mason, one part whining Yiddish Bubbe. Muslims are violent fanatics who blow things up, whereas Jews are more concerned with hikes in bus fares and guilt-tripping their children. Never in Maher’s mind could Jewish people be seen as racists, occupiers, ethnic cleansers, and colonists. Never could they level neighborhoods, attack civilian populations with the most high-tech killing machines and chemical weapons, or discriminate against communities based solely on their religion or ethnicity. They are victims – always – never aggressors.
It is therefore unsurprising that Maher stated, “Y’know, maybe Arabs and Jews are both crazy, but Jews save a tiny piece of their mind for science, math, and writing sitcoms. Arabs, on the other severed hand, seem to spend all their time handing down grudges from one generation to the next.”
Maher has apparently never stopped to wonder what the world would be like without coffee, carpets, windmills, parachutes, soap, fountain pens, romantic poetry, algorithms, trigonometry, rose windows, pointed arches, scalpels, forceps, dissolving stitches, anesthesia, cataract surgery, cameras and the science of optics – to name just a few – all products of Arab and Muslim minds. And where would we all be without Khalil Gibran, Steve Jobs, and 1980’s pop sensation Tiffany, whose last name is Darwish?
Because he is generally seen as “liberal” in mainstream discourse, the inconsistencies and ignorance in Maher’s conception of world religions and his passionate attachment to Israel are cause for concern.
To his credit, Maher is honest about his proclivities. “I’ve never hid the fact that I don’t think it’s a conflict where both sides are equally guilty,” he told Danielle Berrin, who writes the “Hollywood Jew” column for the Jewish Journal. “I’m more on the side of the Israelis; that’s why Benjamin Netanyahu did my show a few years ago, before he was Prime Minister.”
Is Maher saying here that Netanyahu will only do interviews with Zionists? Maher also neglects to mention that his interview with Netanyahu was in 2006, soon after Israel had decimated southern Lebanon for a month, killing 1,180 people (about a third of whom were children), wounding over 4,050, and displacing about 970,000 others as direct result of the more than 7,000 air attacks by the Israeli Air Force and an additional 2,500 bombardments by the Israeli Navy that deliberately contravened international law and targeted civilian infrastructure.
Maher repeatedly praised the assault in which Lebanese men, women and children were being blown to pieces, claiming that condemning Israeli war crimes (which he benignly referred to as Israel being “forced to kill people in its own defense”) was the same thing as anti-Semitism. Maher seemed blissfully oblivious to the facts, including evidence that Israel had actually instigated the conflict and willfully continued the “widespread destruction of apartments, houses, electricity and water services, roads, bridges, factories and ports… even when it became clear that the victims of the bombardment were predominantly civilians, which was the case from the first days of the conflict.”
At the end of his fawning interview with the once-and-future Prime Minister, Maher quotes a Jerusalem Post article: “The Foreign Ministry would do well to watch Bill Maher to learn how to sell Israel’s case to a TV audience… ,” then asks Netanyahu, “What do you think? I could roll that way!”
Netanyahu’s response? “Hey Bill, watch it, if I’m Prime Minister, you’ll get the job.”
Clearly, they both got their wish.
Maher’s original admission that he is “more on the side of the Israelis” acknowledges that he finds Palestinians – an indigenous population that was dispossessed, displaced and all but destroyed by militarily superior Zionist forces and which has lived as refugees under perpetual occupation, deliberately denied sovereignty, self-determination and self-defense for over six decades; a people demonized, dehumanized and traumatized who are routinely condemned in their desperate resistance to subjugation, colonization and collective punishment for not taking enough care to protect the lives and collective identity of its oppressors and occupiers – far more culpable for the persistence of a century-old “conflict” than the Israelis – a nuclear-armed, superpower-backed, settler society that institutionally discriminates against the non-Jewish communities whose lives it controls.
And this guy is called “liberal”?
Maher’s take on Israel/Palestine boils down to this: “It’s not that complicated: Stop firing rockets into Israel and perhaps they won’t annihilate you,” he told Berrin. Perhaps. Annihilate. That Israel might cease its occupation, blockade, night raids, airstrikes and land theft is obviously not the problem here. No, it’s the futile and frustrated reaction to such trifles that is beyond Maher’s pale. Again, one hundred years of history is erased and replaced by an invented narrative of violent Arabs endlessly attacking innocent Israeli Jews. Maher is obviously unaware that, according to a 2009 study, “it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first” following a ceasefire, thus instigating retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza. “Indeed,” the study concluded, “it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.” The recent Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza is no exception.
Moreover, Maher seems to be unaware that four years have passed since Israel’s massacre in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, claiming that Palestinians “lost over 1,000 people” in the recent Israeli offensive. Keeping abreast of facts, of course, isn’t Maher’s concern when describing a week of devastation wrought upon a caged population of 1.7 million with nowhere to run and no viable means to protect itself as Gaza gets, in Maher’s words, its “ass kicked.” One can assume that, in his childhood, Maher spent many an hour kicking the asses of ants with a magnifying glass.
But all this is merely prologue to where both Maher and his interlocutor Berrin were about to go. Berrin posed a leading question to Maher about proportionality and the vast discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian death tolls and got the answer she was hoping for:
Its obvious that Israelis, in all of their battles with the Palestinians, show restraint. Because they have nuclear weapons. And if the situation was reversed, I don’t doubt for a second that Palestinians would fire them immediately. They’d use the maximum of what they have available and the Israelis don’t.
Ok, ignore the hypothetical nature of role-reversal (how would an indigenous population occupy and colonize parts of its own land?) and leave aside the sheer stupidity of assuming Palestinians in Gaza would launch nuclear weapons at a state in which 20% of the population are themselves Palestinian or that Tel Aviv is roughly 50 miles away from Gaza meaning that Palestinians would essentially be dropping a nuke on themselves. Or the weirdness of suggesting that the Palestinian goal of self-determination, statehood and equal rights in their historic homeland could be achieved by physically obliterating that very homeland and making it literally uninhabitable. And forget that the “restraint” Maher lauds in Israel’s recent round of murder is a casualty ratio of 33-1.
Maher actually contends here that Israel shows “restraint” merely by not engaging in the complete nuclear holocaust of Palestinians, a desperate refugee population Israel itself created through ethnic cleansing and continued occupation. The fact that Israel’s conventional military might and capacity for lethal destruction far surpasses that of most countries on the planet is obviously irrelevant, as is the tragedy that such “restraint” in late November included the murder of ten members of the al-Dalou family, including four children, crushed to death when Israel bombed their three-story home in Gaza. Such is the Israeli conception of “restraint” and Maher’s explicit endorsement of excessive Israeli force against a civilian Palestinian population.
Maher has said similar things before. A few years ago he suggested that, if rockets were fired into the United States from Canada, “we would have nuked them a hundred times by now,” despite the fact that the analogy literally makes no sense. In fact, Maher’s penchant for recycling material is nothing new. On November 21, when a ceasefire was announced, Maher tweeted:
- ✔
Glad Hillary was able to get a cease-fire in Gaza. Otherwise known as Stopping to Reload.
Bill MaherObviously, for Maher, those “reloading” are the Palestinians and not the Israelis, who are annually gifted with $3 billion in military aid from the United States, have their own booming arms industry, and have some of the planet’s most sophisticated and deadly weaponry in its own perennially loaded arsenal. Maher used the same line on March 18, 2011 during an obsequious Real Time interview with Israeli ambassador Michael Oren because, hey, when it’s disingenuous and not funny the first time, why not roll it out a year-and-a-half later?
Before wrapping up the Jewish Journal interview, Maher resorted to tossing out some hackneyed hasbara talking points. While it should be remembered that “the Palestinians do have gripes,” he said (yes, gripes), the real threat to Israel is “becoming a minority Jewish state within their own country.” Whose country? Oh, and, yeah, calling for demographic engineering isn’t particularly progressive, Bill. It’s just racist.
Maher of course can’t let the interview end without interjecting the mother of all hasbara canards: that Israeli actions against the Palestinians in Gaza (aka war crimes) are motivated primarily by “self-defense.” As always, the occupied indigenous refugees with homemade rockets and smuggled AK-47s are transformed into eliminationist aggressors while the colonizing occupiers armed with drones, Apache helicopters, F-16 jets, tanks, warships, white phosphorous and nuclear bombs are the innocent victims of senseless anti-Semitic violence. It goes without saying that, for Maher, Palestinians are never entitled to defend themselves.
But remember, as Maher told the Jewish Journal, Judaism simply isn’t a “warlike religion” like the others – despite the fact that a self-proclaimed “Jewish State” was established atop Palestine, its native inhabitants massacred or driven from the land by Zionist militias, its towns, villages, groves and orchards razed and reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs, tank treads and bulldozers.
Never mind that, during the 2008-9 massacre of Gaza known in Israel as Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military rabbinate actively called upon Jewish soldiers not to “show mercy” towards its “enemy,” comparing Palestinians to ancient Philistines, ripe for righteous slaughter. It disseminated material declaring “a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses,” and insisting, “We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.”
Never mind that chief army rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, made it perfectly clear that the rabbinate’s goal in relation to Israeli soldiers was “to fill them with yiddishkeit and a fighting spirit.” In that campaign, the Israeli military killed over 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of whom were non-combatant men, women and children, and wounding thousands upon thousands more in just over three weeks. Despite the worldwide condemnation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Rontzki remained convinced that “[i]n Israel’s wars, warriors are God-fearing people, righteous people, people who don’t have sins on their hands.”
Never mind that, in November 2009, rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, an Israeli settler who lives in the illegal West Bank colony of Yitzhar near Nablus, published The King’s Torah, which “describes how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law).” According to the Israeli press, “the book contains no fewer than 230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guide for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew” and states that, as non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature,” even children are legitimate targets for murder. “One must consider killing even babies,” the book says, “because of the future danger that will be caused if they are allowed to grow up to be as wicked as their parents.”
Never mind that during the most recent Israeli attacks, with the Biblical moniker Operation Pillar of Cloud, Gilad Sharon, son of former Prime Minister/comatose war criminal Ariel Sharon, declared in The Jerusalem Post that – because Hamas won a majority in Parliamentary elections in January 2006 – “the residents of Gaza are not innocent,” urging the Israeli military to “flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza,” just like the United States decimated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. “There is no middle path here,” Sharon concluded, “either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.”
Never mind that Knesset minister Michael Ben-Ari echoed Sharon’s sentiments, saying, “There are no innocents in Gaza,” imploring the Israeli military to “mow them!” Referring to Gaza as the Biblical Sodom, Ben-Ari addressed soldiers directly, asserting that “there are no righteous men, turn it into rubble. Paint it red! We are worried about you and rely on you. We all do, all of the Nation of Israel,” an unmistakable reference to all Jewish people worldwide, not merely citizens of the State of Israel.
Never mind that, on November 21, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon declared that “most of the people” in Gaza killed by Israel “deserved it,” falsely claiming that those killed and wounded “were just armed terrorists,” when in fact the vast majority were unarmed civilians, including dozens of women, children and babies.
Never mind that more than 90% of Jewish Israelis supported Israel’s November 2012 bombardment of Gaza. Never mind that roughly 94% supported Cast Lead. Never mind that, according to a recent study, Israel remains the single most militarized nation in the world, a distinction it has held for nearly 20 straight years.
No, no, not “warlike.” Not at all.
Back in September 2010, Maher told Larry King that, along with Saudi Salafis and the Afghan Taliban, he thought “Hamas is crazy.” When King asked how “a civilized world” should “deal with crazies,” Maher replied, “I would say, first thing is don’t use the Army.” Considering his obvious affinity for and justification of Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, either Maher somehow exempts the Israeli military from such a prescription or, more appropriately, he doesn’t find Israel to be part of the “civilized world.” It is doubtful Maher would pick the latter option.
To make the point that Maher is uninformed on the topic of Israel and Palestine is obvious. That his enthusiastic promotion of Zionist propaganda and apologia seems not to affect his reputation as a mainstream liberal mouthpiece is considerably more alarming.
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Speak2Tweet: Google & Twitter Partner Up with US State Dept. to Monopolise Information Flow Out of Syria
By Martin Iqbal | Empire Strikes Black | 1 December 2012
Amid Internet and telephone network outages in Syria, US-trained opposition activists are using US-supplied satellite phones to contact Google & Twitter’s ‘Speak2Tweet‘ service. Despite these efforts, the service seems so far to be a resounding failure.
Internet and telecommunications networks have been failing across Syria, leading some including Tony Cartalucci to speculate that NATO may be preparing a psychological warfare operation(1) to bolster the flagging unconventional war against Syria.
Recent developments add weight to this theory. There are now reports(2) that Google and Twitter have re-launched their ‘Speak2Tweet’(3) service to ostensibly aid isolated Syrians affected by the communication network outages.
This is reminiscent of Iran’s CIA-sponsored(4) ‘Green Revolution‘ in 2009 wherein Twitter followed White House instructions(5) to delay its scheduled maintenance, in order to provide continued service to Iran’s Green opposition. If this event hinted at Twitter’s possible status as being a CIA tool in this respect, today’s events should leave little doubt.
‘Speak2Tweet‘ is a communication service which allows the user to dial a conventional telephone number and leave a voice message which is then posted to https://twitter.com/speak2tweet where web users can listen. Speak2Tweet was first launched during Egypt’s January 25th ‘revolution’ back in 2011.
At this important time for Google, Hillary Clinton offered an interesting tidbit yesterday. While giving an especially servile, fawning speech at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy’s Opening Gala Dinner in Washington D.C, she quoted Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt(6) who recently called Israel, “the most important high tech center in the world, after the United States.” I will leave it to the reader to decide whether this suggests a central Israeli role in Google’s recent ventures.
After interviewing Google’s Christine Chen, Al Arabiya tellingly reported:(3) “Although phone connections are also are suspended, some Syrians were able to call and get through.”
This begs the question: if Internet and telecommunications networks have been failing across Syria, how does the opposition manage to communicate using Speak2Tweet, which requires the user to call an international telephone number (using either a mobile telephone or landline)?
US State Department provided Syrian opposition activists with satellite communications equipment and training
Ever since August 2012 Syrian opposition activists have been travelling to Istanbul, Turkey, to receive satellite communications equipment and training from the U.S. State Department.(7) The UK Telegraph reported in August 2012 that the US State Department’s Office of Syrian Opposition Support (OSOS) was overseeing this scheme, with $25 million reportedly being set aside for the project, and a further $5 million coming from Britain.
According to ForeignPolicy.com(8) the activists are all ‘given a satellite phone and computer‘ at the end of their training, and they are expected to return to Syria.
It is important to note at this point that satellite telephony is not affected by Internet and telecommunications network outages, and indeed satellite telephones allow users to call any conventional telephone number. In fact satellite phones are often used in warzones and in areas affected by natural disasters, as terrestrial cell antennas and networks are often damaged and non-operational in such cases.
In view of this it is highly likely as many have posited, that the country-wide communications outages were engineered by the NATO-GCC axis, with a view to allowing the opposition activists to monopolise the information flow using the satellite equipment and training given to them by the U.S. State Department. It should be noted that Google has been involved in training ‘Arab Spring’ opposition activists(9) through its partnership with the US State Department’s Movement.org.
The voice messages that are posted to the service can be listened to online at: https://twitter.com/speak2tweet. After listening to a sample of the messages, at this point in time the service seems to be a resounding failure insofar as the NATO-GCC axis is concerned. Messages range from merely “Allahu Akbar“, to garbled nonsense, and they do nothing to bolster the ongoing propaganda campaign against the Syrian regime. Furthermore, the Speak2Tweet service has most definitely not ‘made waves’ online, with many web users not even being aware of its existence.
Though many of the Speak2Tweet audio messages seem to be coming from people outside Syria, it is eminently clear that the US State Department intended their activist-proxies whom they had trained and supplied with satellite telephones in Istanbul, to be the only people within Syria able to use the service.
As with all aspects of the now struggling NATO-GCC unconventional war against sovereign Syria, this too seems to have been an embarrassing failure and a waste of time and money.
Notes
(1) ‘URGENT: NATO Preparing Psy-Op in Syria’ by Tony Cartalucci.
(2) ‘Google reactivates Speak2Tweet for Syrian Internet cutoff’ – CNET.com, November 30, 2012.
(3) ‘Google and Twitter re-launch ‘Speak2Tweet’ to aid isolated Syrians’ – Al Arabiya, Saturday, 01 December 2012.
(4) ‘Color revolution fails in Iran’ by Thierry Meyssan
(5) ‘US confirms it asked Twitter to stay open to help Iran protesters’ – The Guardian, Wednesday 17 June 2009.
(6) ‘Remarks at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy 2012 Saban Forum Opening Gala Dinner’ – U.S. State Department
(7) ‘Britain and US plan a Syrian revolution from an innocuous office block in Istanbul’ – The Telegraph, 26 Aug 2012.
(8) ‘Holding Civil Society Workshops While Syria Burns’ – ForeignPolicy.com, OCTOBER 10, 2012.
(9) ‘Google’s Revolution Factory’ by Tony Cartalucci.
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Left-leaning despisers of 9/11 Truth movement: Do you really believe in miracles?
David Ray Griffin | Global Research | 06 Jul 2010
An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi.
[1]According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles. … Full article
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