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Are Terrorist Attacks in Turkey State-Sponsored?

By Stephen Lendman | January 14, 2016

Blaming recent terrorist attacks in Turkish cities on ISIS (or other non-state actors) is dubious at best. Erdogan supports Daesh. Why would it target a valued ally?

The latest incidents happened this week following earlier ones. An alleged suicide bomber killed 10 tourists in Istanbul’s historic district, mostly German nationals. At least 15 others were injured.

Erdogan’s “condemn(ation)” of what happened rang hollow. Angela Merkel blamed “international terrorism.”

Former Obama State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin claimed ISIS is “determined to target more soft targets outside their areas… in Syria and Iraq” – without explaining what it could hope to gain strategically.

On Thursday, a huge blast largely destroyed a police headquarters building in Turkey’s Diyarbakir province. At least five deaths were reported, dozens injured.

Kurdish PKK militants were blamed despite no evidence proving it. Reports claimed eight “terrorists” were killed in clashes with police following the bombing.

What’s going on? Is Turkey especially vulnerable to terrorist attacks given their frequency in recent months? Or does responsibility lie elsewhere?

Were high-profile attacks in its cities state-sponsored? Erdogan supports terrorist groups while claiming to combat them.

He heads a fascist police state. He’s an international criminal with megalomaniacal aims, wanting political opponents eliminated, waging war on freedom, tolerating no internal critics, charging them with treason.

Putin calls him an “accomplice of terrorists” – aiding ISIS, Al Qaeda and other groups complicit with Washington, waging war without mercy on Turkish Kurds, hugely responsible for regional violence and instability.

He seeks unchallenged tyrannical powers under the mantle of presidential rule, wanting Ankara’s constitution rewritten to oblige him.

Turkey has enjoyed nearly 140 years of parliamentary governance – despite four military coups and execution of a prime minister. It has never taken steps to shift to iron-fisted one-man presidential rule.

Fear-mongering is longstanding US policy. Erdogan appears to be following the same strategy, aiming to overcome parliamentary opposition to his power-grabbing scheme – using alleged terrorist attacks to enlist support for iron-fisted presidential rule on the pretext of protecting national security.

As long as Erdogan remains Turkey’s leader, tyranny will substitute for democratic freedoms. His next moves to solidify power remain to be seen.

Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Eight Problems With Police “Threat Scores”

By Jay Stanley | ACLU | January 13, 2016

The Washington Post Monday had a piece about the use of “threat scores” by law enforcement in Fresno, California. This story follows release of information about this predictive-policing program obtained through an open-records request by my colleagues at the ACLU of Northern California.

The scores are generated by software called “Beware,” made by a company called Intrado. According to a promotional pamphlet obtained by the NorCal ACLU, the software’s purpose is “searching, sorting and scoring billions of commercial records” about individuals. It scours the internet for social media posts and web site hits and combines it with other information such as public records and “key data elements from commercial providers.” Intrado claims that its product is “based on significant amounts of historical work in mathematical science, decisioning science and link analysis,” and “uses a comprehensive set of patent-pending algorithms that search, sort and score vast amounts of commercial records from the largest and most reputable data mining companies in the industry.”

Intrado boasts that its software can target an address, a person, a caller, or a vehicle. If there’s a disturbance in your neighborhood and you have to call 911, the company would have the police use a product called “Beware Caller” to “create an information brief” about you. Police can also target an area: a product called “Beware Nearby” “searches, sorts and scores potential threats within a specified proximity of a specific location in order to create an information profile about surrounding addresses.” So the police may be generating a score on you under this system not only if you call the police but if one of your neighbors calls the police.

The prospect of a democratic government making unregulated, data-driven judgments about its own citizens outside the protections of the justice system raises some fundamental and profound questions about the relationship between the individual and the state. Citizens in a democratic society need to be able to monitor their government, and make judgments about how it is performing. Is it healthy for the government to begin to do the same to its citizens? At what point does that begin to resemble China’s incipient “citizen scoring” system, which threatens to draw on social media postings and include “political compliance” in its credit-score-like measurements?

The governmental scoring of citizens is an imperative we have seen before, not just in the context of policing—for example in Chicago’s “Heat List”— but in other security contexts as well. The TSA, for example, pushed hard under President Bush for a program known as CAPPS II, under which the government would have tapped into commercial data sources to perform background checks on the 100 million Americans who fly each year, and build a profile of those individuals in order to determine their “risk” to airline safety. As with this Beware software, it was originally envisioned as giving a red, yellow, or green light to each subject. CAPPS II was highly controversial from the start, and after a battle that lasted approximately five years the government abandoned the concept (though it does threaten to come creeping back).

There are numerous problems with this or any system for generating “threat scores” on citizens:

  • Scoring Americans in secret. Like the TSA before it, Intrado says that its methods for generating risk assessments will be secret. This is a cutting-edge technology being used for a novel and highly sensitive purpose. Given the vast uncertainties that surround the making of automated predictive judgments about individuals, especially in a law enforcement context, public transparency is vital so that we as a society can begin to evaluate such approaches. We are a democracy after all, and the highly fraught value judgments about what if any uses of “big data” to make in policing must be made publicly.
  • Inaccurate data. We do know that the source data used for such judgments is likely to include many errors and inaccuracies. Anyone who has looked at their credit report knows how frequently those reports get basic facts wrong, confuse different individuals with similar names, etc. The contracts among commercial data brokers and their clients “include few provisions regarding the accuracy of their products,” the FTC has found. For private data companies, accuracy levels beyond a certain point are simply not worth the cost. But the FBI too felt compelled to exempt its primary criminal database from a legal requirement that the agency maintain its records with sufficient accuracy to “assure fairness to the individual” — and damage to people’s lives has been the predictable result. With the Beware software’s scoring formula kept secret, there will be little check against such errors.
  • Questionable effectiveness. Without public scrutiny, the public will not know what data sources are used to generate the scores, how reliable that source data is, how the different variables are weighed and interpreted, and how valid the assumptions behind the inclusion and relative weight of each variable are. Those are highly methodologically and sociologically complex questions, and robust, valid, broadly acceptable answers are unlikely to emerge from the corporate suite of a small company that sells software to police, no matter how much “mathematical science” it brings to the task. Even if the project of rating citizens were acceptable, it could never be done properly without the broad public and expert scrutiny that transparency to “a million eyeballs” brings. Another effectiveness problem comes from the limited ability of key word-based evaluation systems to understand human communications. Scary-sounding language used in private almost always consists of sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, jokey boasting, quotations of others, references to works of fiction, or other innocuous things. Despite many advances, computers are still far away from understanding human social life with enough sophistication to tease out such contexts.
  • Unfairness and bias. Without transparency a major question about secret risk scores is whether and to what extent they will have intentional or unintentional racial, ethnic, religious, or other biases, or whether they include elements that are just downright unfair (such as guilt-by-association credit ratings that penalize people for shopping at stores where other customers have bad credit). There is nothing magical about taking a lot of data and creating a score; the algorithm by which that is done will do no more than reflect its creators’ understanding of the world and how it works (at least if it is not based on machine learning—which I doubt this system is, and which in any case has other problems of its own). Ultimately the danger is that existing societal prejudices and biases will be institutionalized within algorithmic processes, which just hide, harden, and amplify the effects of those biases.
  • Potentially dangerous results. The consequences of inaccurate and biased data may be dangerous and even deadly if it leads police officers, many of whom are already far too prone to use force, to come into an encounter already frightened and predisposed to believe that a subject is dangerous. And officers who do use unnecessary force will inevitably cite the scores as evidence that their actions were subjectively reasonable.
  • An unjustified government intrusion. These risk assessments are being built out of two sources of data that we should not want our government to access: citizens’ social media conversations, and the dossiers that the data broker industry is compiling on virtually all Americans. While public social media postings, unlike private online conversations, are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, as a policy matter we do not want our law enforcement troweling through our online conversations. This would largely waste the time of the public officials we are paying to keep us safe, and create chilling effects on our raucous online discourse. We don’t want secret police in America, or their computerized equivalent, circulating among law abiding citizens as they exercise their constitutional rights—online or off—just to monitor what they are doing. We don’t want Americans to have to pause before they speak to ask, “will this be misinterpreted by a computer?” Nor should the authorities be buying information, directly or indirectly, from the privacy-invading data broker industry, which builds dossiers on virtually all Americans without their consent. While it does this for commercial reasons, the result is nonetheless comparable to what we’ve seen in totalitarian states. The questionable benefits of these invasions of privacy are not worth the chilling effects and danger of abuse they bring.
  • First Amendment questions. Other First Amendment problems stem from the fact that our law enforcement unfortunately has a long history of antagonism toward even peaceful political activists and protesters seeking to make the world a better place—a history that has continued right up to the present. This alone provides ample reason to worry that a ratings system will hurt and chill political activists. The problem is only confirmed by the inclusion (as my colleague Matt Cagle describes) of hashtags such as #Blacklivesmatter, #Mikebrown, #Weorganize, and #wewantjustice on a police social media monitoring list of key words touted as “extremely effective in pro-active policing.” A timid citizen considering tweeting about a political protest could be seriously chilled from expressing himself by the prospect that doing so might make him a “yellow light” in the eyes of the authorities.
  • Mission creep. If this system is sold, snuck, or forced into American policing, it will, once entrenched, inevitably expand. First, in the data that it draws upon as companies and agencies seek ever-more data in a futile quest to improve their inevitably crude assessments of individuals’ risk. Second, the purposes for which it is used may expand as police departments go beyond using them for individual police calls to other uses (force deployment decisions, perhaps, and who-knows-what-else). Risk assessments may be created not just on an individual basis for police calls, but on a wholesale basis for entire populations. And of course the scores may be shared with and adopted by other agencies for use in a wide variety of governmental purposes. They may also spread to the private sector—starting with corporate security forces, perhaps, which often work very closely with police and might use them for anti-union activities, the vetting of customers, or any other corporate goals. In general the danger is that these assessments, once brought into being, could come to reverberate through individuals’ lives in many ways.

Overall there is a lot more easily accessible data floating around about everybody in today’s society. How should the police make use of all that data? How much should be fed to officers in different situations, and in what form? The data revolution raises complex questions for policing that we as a society are going to have to work through—but any law enforcement use of big data needs to be approached carefully and thoughtfully, and hashed out publicly and democratically. That means total transparency. And the risk scoring of individuals should have no part in it.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

4 journalists sentenced to 3 years for disseminating false news, belonging to banned group

Mada Masr | January 12, 2016

In what appears to be an ongoing security crackdown on media personnel, four journalists were sentenced to three years in prison by the Sayeda Zeinab Criminal Court on Sunday. They were convicted of disseminating false information and belonging to a banned organization.

Abu Bakr KhallafElectronic Media Syndicate chairperson Abu Bakr Khallaf was the only defendant present in the courtroom for the sentencing — the three other journalists were tried in absentia.

Khallaf allegedly made his LE1,200 bail on Monday, defense lawyer Hany al-Sadeq told the local rights group Journalists Against Torture Observatory, but it is unclear whether he has yet been released from detention. The first hearing in his appeal has been scheduled for March 17.

Khallaf was arrested on July 21 after the state-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation summoned him to their headquarters for interrogation on charges of operating the Electronic Media Syndicate (which was established in 2011) without a license. He was also accused of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The other journalists in the case — Mohamed Adly of the privately owned Al-Tahrir newspaper, Hamdy Mokhtar of the privately owned Al-Shaab newspaper and videographer Sherif Ashraf — were arrested while reporting outside the Zeinhom morgue on July 1. The journalists say they were there to report on the deaths of nine Muslim Brotherhood leaders fatally shot by police forces in a 6th of October City apartment on that day.

Rights organizations including the New York-based Human Rights Watch have questioned whether police claims of a “shootout” with the nine men were covering up a case of “extrajudicial execution.”

The Journalists Syndicate’s Liberties Committee will hold a session on Tuesday to discuss the three prison sentences issued in absentia, according to a statement posted to the syndicate’s official website. In that meeting, the committee also plans to discuss the referral of six journalists — including three chief editors — to judicial hearings at the request of Justice Minister Ahmed al-Zend.

The committee will seek to resolve these cases in favor of the journalists, as well as five other lawsuits that have been filed against media workers, the syndicate said.

On Monday, the prosecutor general ordered investigations into charges that high-profile journalist and editor Ibrahim Eissa and his colleague Ahmed Samer insulted the judiciary. The investigations were ordered after a lawsuit was filed against the two men for defamation.

Samer was targeted for his article, “The state that spurns itself,” published in the privately owned Al-Maqal newspaper, which is edited by Eissa. The article discussed the recent prison sentence levied against reformist preacher Islam al-Beheiry for religious commentary on his talk show.

As of last month, at least 32 journalists were in detention across Egypt, the Liberties Committee said, of whom 18 were arrested while reporting in public space.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

How Obama Went From the Anti-Bush to a Bush on Steroids

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Sputnik – January 12, 2016

In a recent article for independent German magazine Zeiten Schrift, contributor Klaus Faissner reflected on the US president’s journey from an electrifying candidate with a savior-like quality to a tired leader tarnished by drone strikes, mass surveillance, and a relationship with the media reminiscent of the worst days of the Nixon administration.

In his article, republished and translated by foreign media translation service WhatTheySayAboutUSA.com, Faissner recalled that in the run-up to his presidency, while he was still a candidate, Barack Obama “was presented as the savior of the world – almost a Messiah.”

“He was rapturously greeted by a crowd of over 200,000 in Berlin in 2008 – even before he had been officially crowned as President of the USA. “Yes, We Can!” was the campaign slogan that electrified the crowd, even before he began speaking. The American presidential candidate gathered bigger crowds in Germany than even the Pope, rock stars, or a football game with the national team. He promised to liquidate nuclear arms, reestablish good relations with Russia, pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan – and to close the US’s nefarious concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.”

“As the US’s first black president,” Faissner reflected, “Barack Obama ought to have become the antithesis of everything that George ‘Dubya’ Bush had stood for – a president whose wars had run through the world like cancer, whilst clamping down on basic freedoms for his own people. This was the way the media presented the incoming President Obama – and the world believed the simulacrum they’d been given.”

Unfortunately, the journalist recalled, “what the press wasn’t reporting, however, was that [by the end of his first term], Obama signed more orders for drone assaults than Bush Jr. had done in the entire eight years of his presidency. These were drone strikes which caused catastrophic levels of non-combatant casualties, which America simply wrote-off under the euphemism of ‘collateral damage.'””Like his predecessor, Obama threw all his weight behind GMO agriculture; he didn’t give the slightest thought to his promises to close Gitmo; he showed no interest whatsoever in improving relations with Russia, and he worked actively on destabilizing the situation in the Middle East.”

A ‘Tense’ Relationship With Journalists

“In 2009,” Faissner recalled, “the incoming president declared his intentions for a previously unprecedented level of transparency in government and the apparatus of national administration. ‘Openness will strengthen our democracy,’ as he stressed in subsequent legislation.”

However, “now that Obama has been at the helm for nearly seven years, it’s clear that all these promises were empty piffle. No president after Richard Nixon has been so aggressively opposed to the media, as was highlighted in a piece written by the former Washington Post chief editor Leonard Downie, published in 2013 – about freedom of speech in the United States. Downie suggested the Obama administration was operating a misinformation policy, used electronic snooping on journalists, and was behind a ratcheted-up campaign of persecution against whistleblowers and journalists involved in investigation.”

“An atmosphere of fear pervaded the work of journalists, Downie wrote, with their investigations permanently occluded in secret observation by the state. Despite the administration’s promises to end the ‘unreasonable secrecy’ that typified the Bush era, Obama has in fact continued to expand it. Often entirely irrelevant documents are systematically classified ‘top secret’ to deny reporters access to them.””On top of this,” Faissner laments, “Obama administration staffers frequently take personal offense to articles criticizing government policy. To ward off the increasing frequency of such articles, the Obama administration is increasingly reaching out for the 1917 Espionage Act. Although it had only been employed three times in the first 90 years of its existence, over the period between 2009 to 2013… eight different government officials were arraigned with it, charged with passing governmental information to journalists, putting out a powerful resonance on Capitol Hill. One of those thus charged was Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on government snooping on the whole world’s population by the National Security Agency. Bob Woodward, who broke the news of the Watergate scandal in the Nixon era, warns that any fight against critical journalists only leads in the long term to weaken the nation’s national security.”

A Unique and Powerful Surveillance System

“In reality,” Faissner warned, “Obama has set up a unique system of surveillance. It was done in such a way that people around the world have no idea that Obama’s policies are a continuation, or even a worsening of those of George W Bush. Since October 2011 government staffers in every branch of the administration have been encouraged to snitch on their colleagues. Staff in Federal departments have been obliged since 2012 to report all their contacts with the media, and moreover to report on suspicious colleagues. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA, said the program had been incepted to ‘block all contact.’ Even staffers of new agencies who are remote from revolutionary activities, such as Associated Press or Fox News have come under the crosshairs of the Obama administration.”

“One such journalist has been James Rosen of the Fox News television channel, who came under observation from the Justice Department, for using information he had received from a highly-placed government official.  The information referred to the international community ratcheting up sanctions against Pyongyang over new nuclear weapons testing by North Korea. The Washington Post notes that the FBI monitored Rosen’s phone calls, and even screened his private email correspondence.”Moreover, Faissner suggests, “the situation worsened drastically in 2015. In a document entitled ‘Law on War’ [a set of instructions on the legitimate warfare practices approved by the US military], the Pentagon stated that journalists could be treated as ‘unprivileged belligerents,’ a status which, according to a representative from the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, ‘gives U.S. military commanders across all services the purported right to at least detain journalists without charge, and without any apparent need to show evidence or bring a suspect to trial.'”

“If the Pentagon is putting spying in the same basket as journalism, the New York Times noted, then this is a step in the same direction as totalitarian regimes. It’s hardly surprising that in the World Press Freedom Index for 2015, the USA is rated at 49 place – on a par with El Salvador, Burkina Faso and the Republic of Niger.”

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Metadata Comes Home With New ‘Threat Score’ Policing Tools

Law enforcement agencies rolling out technology that lets them dig into metadata to determine a citizen’s potential for violence

New software like “Beware” calculates a “threat score” using metadata, which critics say threatens civil liberties and privacy rights. (Photo: Jeffrey Smith/flickr/cc)
By Nadia Prupis | Common Dreams | January 11, 2016

Police in the U.S. are rolling out new technology that gives them “unprecedented” power to spy on citizens and determine their “threat score” based on metadata, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

Fresno, California’s police department was one of the first to adopt the software, known as “Beware,” which allows officers to analyze “billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and… social-media postings” to calculate an individual’s alleged potential for violence, the Post explained.

Officers say the tool, made by a company called Intrado, can help them thwart mass shootings and other attacks like the ones that took place in Paris and San Bernardino last year. But critics say it’s just another weapon in the mass surveillance arsenal, one that further threatens privacy and civil liberties and fuels police overreach.

Journalist D. Brian Burghart, who operates FatalEncounters.org, a searchable database of police killings of citizens, told Common Dreams that the swell of surveillance technology was an “outgrowth” of post-9/11 fear-mongering. “I’m not sure what’s new about this except they put a name on it,” Burghart said. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better. Nobody ever puts away technology.”

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Post, “This is something that’s been building since September 11. First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”

Rob Nabarro, a civil rights lawyer in Fresno, added, “It’s a very unrefined, gross technique. A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen.”

The Post continues:

Nabarro said the fact that only Intrado — not the police or the public — knows how Beware tallies its scores is disconcerting. He also worries that the system might mistakenly increase someone’s threat level by misinterpreting innocuous activity on social media, like criticizing the police, and trigger a heavier response by officers.

A potential threat that comes from an individual should not be addressed by a machine, he said.

In addition to Beware, police departments are equipping officers with tools like Media Sonar, which analyzes social media for “illicit activity,” among other technology, the Post reported.

Others criticized the implementation of such law enforcement tools while police brutality remains widespread and activists continue to call for an overhaul of the policing system.

Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, told the Post, “We think that whenever these surveillance technologies are on the table, there needs to be a meaningful debate. There needs to be safeguards and oversight.”

The Post described one incident in which the Fresno police department demonstrated Beware at a town hall meeting following constituent complaints about the use of invasive surveillance technology:

[One] council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman’s threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled “Rage,” which could be a keyword in Beware’s assessment of social media.

Councilman Clinton J. Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said Beware was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel and asked [Fresno Chief of Police Jerry] Dyer a simple question: “Could you run my threat level now?”

Dyer agreed. The scan returned Olivier as a green, but his home came back as a yellow, possibly because of someone who previously lived at his address, a police official said.

“[Beware] has failed right here with a council member as the example,” Olivier said.

As Burghart added, “I spend eight hours a day researching police violence, so I don’t know how many times I’ve typed the words ‘police killed.’ I imagine I’d probably score pretty good on this thing. Most journalists would.”

January 12, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Turkey Bans Media From Publishing Information on Istanbul Explosion

Sputnik — 12.01.2016

Turkish authorities introduced a gag order on the media on Tuesday to restrict the dissemination of information about the explosion that shook Istanbul earlier that day, local media reported.

The ban on the distribution of information will affect all kinds of news, interviews, analyses and other article formats in the printed press, on television, on the radio, via social networks and on the Internet, Anadolu news agency reported.

The decision will take effect immediately, once all Turkish media outlets have been officially notified by Ankara, according to the agency.

At least 10 people died and 15 were injured in an explosion in Istanbul’s historical center earlier on Tuesday, according to local authorities.

January 12, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Health of Palestinian journalist on hunger strike in Israeli jail ‘deteriorating’

Press TV – January 11, 2016

-389493586A Palestinian official says the health condition of a Palestinian journalist on hunger strike in an Israeli prison is worsening.

The Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, Issa Qaraqe, said on Monday that Mohammed al-Qeq, 33, is in “critical condition” on the 48th day of his hunger strike. The journalist was arrested in November 2015, when Israeli forces blew up the front door of his house and took him in for interrogation.

Following his arrest, and for several days, he was not allowed to contact either his wife or his attorney.

He has been protesting his detention without trial or charge with the hunger strike.

Sources close to al-Qeq said he was interrogated for “journalistic incitement,” and when he refused to cooperate, he was put in administrative detention for a period of six months.

According to the sources, Israeli forces tortured al-Qeq during his interrogation, when he was subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, and other forms of abuse.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time.

January 11, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Birzeit University condemns Israeli ‘military attack’ on campus

Ma’an – January 11, 2016

362009CBETHLEHEM – Birzeit University on Monday condemned an Israeli army raid into its campus in Ramallah overnight, during which it said Israeli forces confiscated and damaged university equipment.

“Birzeit University condemns this attack and the direct violation of the sanctity of the university campus,” the university said in a statement. “This is a belligerent military attack on the university and our right to education and all the principles involved in the freedom of education.”

The university said that Israeli soldiers raided the campus in more than 15 military vehicles shortly before 3 a.m., breaching the campus’ western gate and storming the university’s student council and faculty of science.

“The military confiscated equipment and computers used in the activities of the students council and destroyed and damaged furniture leaving a great deal of havoc behind,” the university said.

“This is a blatant attack on our student council and the sanctity of democratic values. This violation of the campus is a part of a blatant and systematic attack on the right of education and freedom of expression.”

Birzeit University condemned a range of other “outrageous acts” by Israel, including the detention of some 80 students, including more than 25 taken into Israeli custody since a wave of unrest swept the occupied Palestinian territory in October.

“Stealing our students’ lives and working to destroy the sanctity of our university campus and our right to education is an atrocious and obvious attempt to destroy the will of the Palestinian people,” the university said.

The university added that the “constant” attacks against it would “strengthen the university’s commitment to its noble cause — education.”

The Israeli army confirmed that the raid took place. An army spokesperson said that Israeli forces had “seized material, including propaganda belonging to Hamas.”

January 11, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Istanbul police raid district office of pro-Kurdish opposition party

Press TV – January 8, 2016

Police in Istanbul have raided a district office of Turkey’s main opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

Turkish media reports said on Friday that several people were detained and party documents seized during the two-hour raid at the Beyoglu headquarters of the HDP.

The co-chair of the district branch, Rukiye Demir, was among the detainees.

Turkish authorities have stepped up pressure on the HDP while Ankara’s military apparatus has been engaged in a security operation against suspected militants in the Kurdish-majority south and southeast of the country in the recent past, running offensives against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants all the way into northern Iraq.

Turkish authorities accuse the HDP of acting as the political arm of the PKK.

Turkey and countries such as the United States and Britain consider the PKK as a terrorist group. The HDP strongly denies any links with the militants.

On July 20, 2015, a bomb attack in the southern Kurdish-majority town of Suruc claimed more than 30 lives. The Turkish government blamed it on the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group. After the bombing, the PKK, accusing the government of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish police and security forces, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

Ankara said Thursday that 305 PKK militants have been killed since December 14, 2015, when its security operation intensified.

The militant group has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since 1980s.

January 8, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

New Jersey high schooler accused of violating bullying laws for making anti-Israel tweets

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@bendykoval / Twitter
RT | January 7, 2016

A social media storm erupted after administrators at a New Jersey high school accused a student of bullying because of anti-Israel comments that she posted on Twitter. They say that the tweets may have violated the state’s broad anti-bullying laws.

Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said on Wednesday that she was called to the principal’s office at Fair Lawn High School and reprimanded for making tweets criticizing Israel and mentioning that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her on Twitter.

Administrators warned her that she could face legal consequences for her actions, since New Jersey has some of the strictest anti-bullying legislation in the country. Under the New Jersey Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act, which only came into force in 2011, she could be suspended or expelled.

Koval is a prolific Twitter user. She had made over 21,000 tweets and has almost 7,000 followers, many of whom she gained in the last few days. The fiasco that she is the center of has since become a social media sensation.

The outspoken high schooler has been met with both support and opposition online.

When Koval was called down to the principal’s office, she began documenting the situation on Twitter.

“I’m about to be exposed for being anti-Israel. Pray for me,” she tweeted.

A few minutes later, she tweeted that the administrator threatened to “file a bullying case” against her.

“It’s against state law to express unpopular political views on the Internet, now.”

In addition to rebuking her and warning her about legal consequences, the administator searched Koval’s phone to make sure that she had not recorded their conversation. The student could be sued if she had, he told her.

The administrator was correct in their assumption; Koval posted videos of the meeting on Twitter. In one recording, Koval can heard telling the administrator that her tweets may have been controversial, but she didn’t think they were “problematic.”

“Well that’s your interpretation,” the administrator said. “There’s a state law that might interpret it differently.”

In a second clip, the administrator can be heard warning her about legal consequences again.

“You can sit there with your smug attitude right now, but if it’s got to go into a bullying case because you think it shouldn’t be and the state says it is, you’re going to lose,” he said.

Fair Lawn High School Principal James Marcella told The New York Times that the issue has been referred to the school district’s superintendent, Bruce Watson, and that a statement would be released on Thursday afternoon.

Stanley Cohen, a lawyer consulted by Koval’s family, said that he doubted that the complaints over her tweets would end up being a legal matter. He said he hoped school officials would look beyond “the emotion of the moment and say ‘Move on, this is no big deal,’” adding that he believes that young people should be encouraged to express their opinions in an academic environment.

READ MORE: UCLA and Berkeley anti-Semitism resolutions ‘blur lines,’ hurt debate – critics

January 7, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Saudi leadership defends execution of protestors

Reprieve – January 7, 2015

Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince has used his first major interview since taking office to defend the country’s recent mass execution, claiming that human rights are ‘important’ to his government.

Speaking to the Economist, Mohammed bin Salman – the son of King Salman, and the country’s Defence Minister – sought to justify the execution on Saturday of 47 prisoners, saying they were “sentenced in a court of law.” Those killed included Sheikh Nimr, a prominent critic of the government, and three young political protestors – all four of whom were sentenced to death on charges that included shouting slogans and organizing protests.

Prince Mohammed also claimed, incorrectly, that those executed had had fair trials, saying they “had the right to hire an attorney and they had attorneys present throughout each layer of the proceedings.” He went on to say that “the court doors were also open for any media people and journalists, and all the proceedings and the judicial texts were made public.”

In fact, the protestors’ trials in the secretive Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) took place in largely closed hearings. Lawyers barred from attending hearings and from meeting their clients to take proper instructions, while police investigations were kept secret. The court also relied heavily on ‘confessions’ extracted under torture, in breach of international and Saudi law. Human rights organization Reprieve – which is assisting three juveniles who were sentenced to death in the SCC after attending protests – has repeatedly raised concerns about these trial conditions.

Prince Mohammed also said that Saudi Arabia would “always take criticism from our friends. If we are wrong, we need to hear that we are wrong.” He added that: “We have our values […] It is important to us to have our freedom of expression; it is important to us to have human rights.” He also claimed that “any regime that did not represent its people collapsed in the Arab Spring”– the period that saw widespread protests, and arrests of protestors, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.

Research by Reprieve in 2015 found that, of those facing execution in Saudi Arabia, the vast majority – 72 per cent – were convicted of non-lethal offenses such as political protest or drug-related crimes, while torture and forced ‘confessions’ were frequently reported. Reprieve has also established that the Saudi authorities executed at least 158 people in 2015 – a marked increase on the previous year.

Among those currently facing execution in Saudi Arabia are the three juveniles – Ali al-Nimr, Dawoud al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher – all of whom were sentenced to death in the SCC for attending protests, after being tortured into signing statements.

Commenting, Maya Foa, head of the death penalty team at Reprieve, said: “Mohammed bin Salman says he wants to hear when the Saudi government is wrong. Well, it’s safe to say that he is dead wrong on this occasion. Contrary to his claims, we know that Sheikh Nimr and three protestors killed on Saturday – as well as the three juveniles now awaiting execution – had catastrophically unfair trials, where the authorities relied on torture and forced ‘confessions’. The defence lawyers were excluded from attending hearings, or even meeting their clients. If the Saudi government wants to endear itself to the international community, it could start by halting its plans to execute juveniles and others who dare to express dissent.”

January 7, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

DHS releases best practices for government drone use, says nothing about warrants

PrivacySOS | January 4, 2015

In late December 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its “Privacy, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Unmanned Aircraft Systems Working Group” best practices recommendations for government drone use. The 11 page document does not contain the word “warrant,” nor any recommendations to federal, state, or local law enforcement about getting judicial approval to use drones to monitor people.

The best practices DHS offers mostly concern basic data security issues, including recommendations to delete data when it’s not needed, to limit collection where possible, to be (a little—not too) transparent with the public about drone acquisitions and operations, to avoid mission creep, and to refrain from spying on people based on their political views or protected class alone.

Those are all good things, but these recommendations are just that—suggestions. The document isn’t legally binding. And it completely avoids tackling a very important issue: judicial oversight and approval of police drone use. There’s little chance that congress will pass legislation mandating that police get warrants to use drones any time soon, so the responsibility for filling in the gap falls to state legislatures and courts.

While at least 20 states have passed laws to regulate drones, many of them don’t put any restrictions on law enforcement. Maine and Virginia require police to acquire warrants before deploying drones in most circumstances. The Drone Privacy Act in Massachusetts would require that police get a warrant before spying on us with drones, and ban the use of weaponized drones among state and local law enforcement.

January 6, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

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