Congress reaffirms indefinite detention of Americans under NDAA
RT | May 22, 2014
The US House of Representatives approved an annual defense spending bill early Thursday after rejecting a proposed amendment that would have prevented the United States government from indefinitely detaining American citizens.
An amendment introduced in the House on Wednesday this week asked that Congress repeal a controversial provision placed in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that has ever since provided the executive branch with the power to arrest and detain indefinitely any US citizen thought to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda or associated organizations.
“This amendment would eliminate indefinite detention in the United States and its territories,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), a co-author of the failed amendment, said during floor debate on Wednesday, “So basically anybody that we captured, who we suspected of terrorist activity, would no longer be subject to indefinite detention, as is now, currently, the law.”
“That is an enormous amount of power to give the executive, to take someone and lock them up without due process,” Smith added. “It is an enormous amount of power to grant the executive, and I believe places liberty and freedom at risk in this country.”
Pres. Barack Obama vowed when he signed the 2012 NDAA into law on December 31, 2011 that he would not use the indefinite detention powers provided to him by Congress. When that provision was challenged in federal court, however, the White House fought back adamantly and appealed a District Court ruling that initially reversed the indefinite detention clause, eventually sending the challenge to the Supreme Court where it stalled until earlier this month when the justices there said they would not consider the case.
The bill sponsored by Smith and co-author Rep. Paul Broun (R-Georgia) would have given the legislative branch a chance to repeal the same provisions that SCOTUS declined to hear, but the bipartisan amendment failed on a vote of 191 to 230.
A separate proposal from Rep. Smith meant to expedite the shut-down of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was also rejected early Thursday; an amendment from Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Florida) intended to cut federal funding for recreational facilities at Gitmo, however, was approved in the NDAA draft that left the House on Thursday.
On Twitter, Smith said he was “disappointed” but “won’t stop fighting to pass this critical legislation.”
And while the White House is unlikely to abandon its own fight with regards to keeping the indefinite detention provision intact, the Obama administration threatened to veto this year’s NDAA because it would continue to complicate the president’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay facility — a vow older than his own administration.
“If this year’s Defense Authorization bill continues unwarranted restrictions regarding Guantanamo detainees, the president will veto the bill,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement Wednesday evening.
When the 2011 NDAA passed Congress with the controversial indefinite detention provision included, the White House said at the time that it would veto the legislation before Pres. Obama eventually balked.
Kiev denies OSCE mission access to LifeNews detained journalists
RT | May 21, 2014
Ukrainian authorities are not letting the OSCE special monitoring mission visit the detained journalists from Russia’s LifeNews channel, Andrey Kelin, Russia’s permanent representative to the organization, said.
“At our request, the OSCE mission is demanding a meeting with the journalists, but the Kiev authorities forbid them from doing,” Kelin told ITAR-TASS news agency.
Russia will continue pushing for action on the part of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) aimed at releasing the LifeNews crew, he added.
According to the representative, the situation around journalists, Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko, “continues to deteriorate.”
“We know that they’re accused of terrorism, with other far-fetched charges being pressed against them,” he explained.
Russia intends to raise the issue of “grave violation of the rights of journalists in Ukraine” at a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council on Thursday, he stressed, adding that the “same question will be asked by delegations from other countries as well.”
Russia’s permanent mission has passed the address from the country’s National Broadcasting Association to the OSCE leadership, in which the violations against Russian journalists by Kiev’s coup-imposed government are described, Kelin said.
There are more and more concerns about the obstruction of the media in Ukraine in anticipation of the presidential election in the country on May 25, he concluded.
Sidyakin and Saichenko were detained on Sunday soon after they released a scandalous video, which showed a UN-marked helicopter being used by the Ukrainian army in a military operation in the rebelling eastern regions.
On Tuesday, RT’s contributor Graham Phillips was arrested by Ukrainian forces at a checkpoint in the city of Mariupol. He was released after almost 36 hours of detention by various Kiev security forces.
On Monday, The OSCE’s representative on freedom of the media, Dunja Mijatovic, has addressed Kiev in a letter, urging it to “stop intimidating and threatening members of the media” and release the journalists.
In the last couple of days, journalists from various Russian media outlets were also prevented from entering Ukraine, including Zvezda, NTV, Channel One and TVC channels as well as a crew from RT’s Arabic channel.
US State Dept. fails to recognize ‘individuals’ detained by Kiev as Russian journalists
RT | May 20, 2014
Washington has failed to condemn the detention of Russian journalists working in Ukraine, instead doubting they were journalists at all and accusing them of smuggling weapons based on a “reports and conversations” on the ground.
The US State Department claims that Russian journalists were in possession of press accreditation that was given to them by the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic, which Ukraine and the US do not recognize.
“The Ukrainian Security Services, according to reports, have detained a number of people who were in possession of fake journalist credentials issued by the non-existent Donetsk People’s Republic,” US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at a daily press briefing.
Psaki did not specify precisely which journalists she was referring to, but Associated Press reporter Matt Lee at the briefing was asking about the Russian TV crew working for LifeNews who were detained by the Ukrainian Security Forces (SBU) on Sunday.
“Reportedly they were carrying portable aircraft missiles in the trunks of their cars at the time of their detention. So I haven’t looked in your trunk lately but it is unlikely you have those in there. That raises some questions about these individuals and whether they were actually journalists,” Psaki said.
After persistent attempts by Lee to find out whether Psaki had any proof or credible source to back such claims, she acknowledged that these reports were “credible” as considered by a US “team on the ground” which is “in touch with Ukrainian authorities.”
Reports “about these individuals and what they were carrying with them, certainly raises the question as to who they are,” Psaki answered
When again pushed to answer whether the accusations were based on rumors, Psaki hinted that the information comes from Kiev.
“This is from our team on the ground who are certainly in touch with our Ukrainian authorities,” Psaki replied.
When asked about the detention of an RT stringer working on the ground in eastern Ukraine, Graham Phillips, Psaki replied that she was not aware of “specific details” of his arrest yet, but promised to look into that.
Psaki said that the State Department will condemn the move of illegal detention of journalists, however emphasizing that Washington will first of all focus on “continuing to press for the release of the Ukrainian and international journalists who have been detained by Russian separatists.”
On Sunday, two Russian LifeNews journalists, Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko, were captured by Ukrainian troops near Kramatorsk in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
Ukrainian authorities claimed on Tuesday that the detained journalists confessed during interrogation to entering the territory of the country without press cards. The crew are now in Kiev but so far have not been charged.
Previously the OSCE urged the Kiev authorities to release the Russian journalists saying that intimidation and obstruction of media is “unacceptable.”
In the meantime, RT has lost contact with the channel’s contributing journalist Graham Phillips who had earlier reported that he had been detained by the National Guard at a check point in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine. The British journalist Phillips may be turned over to the Ukrainian Security Service and sent to Kiev as well, a source told RT
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights labeled the harassment of journalists as the obstruction of media that doesn’t support the coup-appointed authorities’ policy.
“This is another step de facto made by Ukrainian authorities to curb the activities of unwanted journalists,” said Konstantin Dolgov. “The journalists who work professionally and show an objective picture, the ugly side of the outrages made by ultra-nationalists, the results of [Kiev’s] punitive operation in the southeast.”
Journalists Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko. Image from http://www.lifenews.ru
In both cases involving the RT stringer and LifeNews crew, it appears the SBU was responsible in detaining and neutralizing reporting. Dolgov added that Phillips’ arrest followed the “unlawful seizure, detention of Russian journalists,” adding that Moscow is continuing to work for their speedy release.
On Monday, pro-Kiev activists again called to “immediately detain and deport” Phillips, who they believe is “cooperating with terrorists,” according to a message posted on EuroMaidan Kharkov’s Facebook page.
The same day, LifeNews said that journalists held captive by Ukraine’s coup-installed government were reportedly arrested after they released footage showing a UN-marked helicopter used by Kiev’s armed forces engaged in an operation against civilians in the east. A few days prior to the journalists’ arrest on Sunday, the authorities in Kiev issued an order to “find and neutralize” the authors of the video, a LifeNews source in SBU told the channel.
Meanwhile, RT Arabic’s news crew who arrived in Kiev to cover the upcoming May 25 Ukrainian presidential election has not been allowed into the country and was sent back to Moscow under the pretext that they were unable to properly explain the purpose of their visit, despite being accredited by the Ukrainian Central Election Commission.
Obama ignores campaign promise as FCC targets net neutrality
RT | May 16, 2014
United States President Barack Obama’s commitment to net neutrality is being questioned after the Federal Communications Commission officials appointed on his watch voted Thursday to advance a plan believed by many to be a blow to the open internet.
This week’s three-two decision by the FCC to consider proposed rules regarding net neutrality isn’t the final nail in the coffin of the open internet. Rather, the five-person panel agreed Thursday morning to open up for comments a proposal drafted by Chairman Thomas Wheeler that would set rules in place meant to address a federal appeals court’s decision earlier this year that paved the way for the possibility of paid prioritization with regards to how Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, deliver web content to customers.
As the panel weighs Wheeler’s plan, the public now has 120 days to offer their own critique before another vote is held. In the meantime, though, Pres. Obama is likely to draw fire from critics on his own in light of previous statements he made pledging to preserve and protect the open internet.
“Barack Obama was crystal clear during the 2008 campaign about his commitment to ensuring equal treatment of all online content over American broadband lines,” Haley Sweetland Edwards wrote for TIME on Friday. “But on Thursday, the president made no public statement when three Democrats he appointed to the FCC voted to move forward with a plan to allow broadband carriers to provide an exclusive ‘fast lane’ to commercial companies that pay extra fees to get their content transmitted online.”
Instead, Edwards acknowledged, White House press secretary Jay Carney offered a brief statement reiterating the president’s promise.
Obama, Carney wrote, “has made clear since he was a candidate that he strongly supports net neutrality and an open Internet. As he has said, the Internet’s incredible equality – of data, content and access to the consumer – is what has powered extraordinary economic growth and made it possible for once-tiny sites like eBay or Amazon to compete with brick and mortar behemoths”
Indeed, in 2010 the president’s chief technology officer wrote on the White House’s blog that “President Obama is strongly committed to net neutrality in order to keep an open Internet that fosters investment, innovation, consumer choice and free speech.”
Years before that on the campaign trail, then-Senator Obama said his hypothetical FCC appointments would defend the notion of a “level playing field for whoever has the best idea.”
“As president, I am going to make sure that that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward,” he said.
With Friday’s vote, however, the FCC is well on track to implement rules that, while not necessarily encouraging the paid prioritization of web traffic, is expected to allow ISPs and other major players tied to the infrastructure of the internet to cut deals with content producers that, prior to January’s appellate decision, were illegal.
“Following the court of appeals decision earlier this year, there are no legally enforceable rules ensuring internet openness,” Julie Veach, chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau, acknowledged at Thursday’s hearing.
In Response, Wheeler said his plan offers “enforceable rules to protect and promote the open internet,” while denying allegations that it authorizes paid prioritization.
“The consideration that we are beginning today is not about whether the internet must be open, but about how and when we will have rules in place to assure an open internet,” he said.
Nevertheless, two of his co-commissioners dissented from his proposal at Thursday’s hearing, and suggested that perhaps the FCC is moving too swiftly to respond to January’s ruling.
As the panel moves forward, however, the president’s campaign trail promise could come under attack. Although all five members of the panel were appointed by his office, the three Democratic members of the president’s own political party, including Wheeler, approved the chairman’s proposed rules. Dissenting were Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly, both Republicans.
“The FCC is an independent agency, and we will carefully review their proposal,” Carney told reporters on Thursday. “The FCC’s efforts were dealt a real challenge by the Court of Appeals in January, but Chairman Wheeler has said his goal is to preserve an open Internet, and we are pleased to see that he is keeping all options on the table. We will be watching closely as the process moves forward in hopes that the final rule stays true to the spirit of net neutrality.”
But comments from some have suggested that a statement delivered by the White House press secretary might not be enough to reassure fears about the future of the internet. Marvin Ammori, a technology-policy consultant, told the Washington Post this week that Silicon Valley is “very frustrated,” and that the tech community largely threw its weight behind Obama, and not his Democratic challenger, when he vied for the party’s bid ahead of the 2008 elections.
“We’re surprised by his silence, given every indication that the rule being proposed would allow the kind of pay-for-prioritization practices Obama spoke against in the past,” Timothy Karr, a senior director of strategy for the Washington-based media and technology public interest group Free Press, said to the Washington Examiner of the president.
Meanwhile, a petition on the White House website posted after the January ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has garnered the electronic signature of over 105,000 people asking the president to restore net neutrality.
Zionist Canada bows to the holocaust religion
By Brandon Martinez | May 16, 2014
Officials of the Harper regime recently announced the construction of a new “holocaust” monument in Ottawa set to be completed in the fall of 2015.
“The monument features a large gathering space for ceremonies — with room for 1,000 visitors — enclosed by six triangular, concrete volumes to create the points of a star. … Monochromatic photographs by Burtynsky depicting Holocaust sites will be embedded upon concrete surfaces,” reported the Toronto Star.
It should come as no surprise that the Harper regime is backing this new holocaust monument project, considering that the ruling neo-conservatives in Ottawa have openly expressed their adherence to Jewish supremacist ideology on numerous occasions. Harper and his lackeys in Parliament have incessantly praised the apartheid state of Israel (a nation birthed through ethnic cleansing and mass terror) and have vehemently denounced those who challenge or criticize Israeli imperialism and state-terrorism.
At a May 14, 2014, speech before the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum, Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird told the room of Zionist fanatics that Israel is a “truly special nation” that is a “great example to the world.” A great example for what? Ethnic cleansing, mass murder and ruthless deception? Not shy to announce his belief in Jewish exceptionalism, the Zionist puppet foreign minister added that Israel is a “most extraordinary society.”
Many have argued that the holocaust promotion industry is an extortion racket designed to bolster Jewish privilege. By emphasizing Jewish victimhood above that of all other peoples, the Zionists aim to suffocate the public at large underneath a blanket of self-serving propaganda so that evidence of wrongdoing on the part of these tribal zealots will not see the light of day. Not only are Jews today not victims of any sort or underdogs in any sense of the term, they are in fact the most affluent and influential segment of every society in which they live. “Jewish families [are] among the wealthiest families in the United States. According to Forbes, 25 to 30 percent of U.S. multimillionaires and billionaires are Jewish,” noted James Petras in his book The Power of Israel in the United States.
A similar situation to the one described by Petras exists in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, etc.
The sages and holy men of holocaustianity have endeavored to promote this quasi-religion to the four corners of the earth. Hundreds of holocaust museums, memorials, monuments, research centers, etc., have been erected across Europe, Russia, North America, Latin America and even Asia. Hundreds of holocaust-themed films and television shows have been broadcasted throughout the Americas and Europe. Countless books, memoirs and other literature relating to the sacred Shoah have flooded the libraries and bookstores of all Western countries. Dozens of governments have created laws forbidding any revision of the rigid, one-sided narrative engineered by the winners of World War II.
In his book The Holocaust Industry, Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein labeled these practitioners of professional victimhood “a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums and hucksters.” One such charlatan was Herman Rosenblatt who appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show multiple times and attained a movie deal based on his fallacious fibbing. After admitting that climactic portions of his memoir An Angel at the Fence were manufactured, he unapologetically told ABC News: “It was not a lie because in my imagination I believed it.”
Another holocaust faker, Misha Defonseca, was ordered by a judge to pay back her publisher $22.5 million after it was revealed that her best-selling 1997 memoir, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, was entirely fictional. Defonseca claimed that as a young girl she journeyed across Europe in search of her parents who were taken away to a German concentration camp during WW2, and that amid her search she was taken care of and raised by a pack of wolves who adopted her as one of their own. “It’s not the true reality, but it is my reality,” Defonseca told The Guardian. “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world,” the mythomaniac explained.
Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1994 holocaust memoir Fragments was exposed as a fraud. He was never interned in any camp and actually lived in neutral Switzerland during the war. Rudolf Vrba admitted on the stand at the Toronto trial of Ernst Zundel in 1985 that his memoir I Cannot Forgive was an “artistic picture” that contained embellishments and exaggerations. Elie Wiesel, the veritable pope of the holocaust religion, has long been suspected of at least partially fabricating his story of survival. In his memoir Night, he tells of how a doctor performed surgery on his infected foot while interned at the “death camp” Auschwitz. One might ask: what is the purpose of a doctor in a “death camp”? Then, reported Wiesel, he and his sick father chose to evacuate that camp in January of 1945 alongside the retreating German Army and SS-men instead of waiting for the Red Army to arrive. Miraculously he survived this supposedly “genocidal” ordeal.
Wiesel collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to preach “tolerance” to the world, while simultaneously advocating vicious hatred of German people. “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -healthy virile hate- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German,” wrote the man once described by the Chicago Tribune as a ‘beacon for human rights’ in his book Legends of Our Time. The unscrupulous pretender and money-getter has shown blatant disregard for Palestinian human rights because their oppressors are members of a master class of “chosen people” of which he is a Learned Elder.
Also not visible on Wiesel’s “human rights” radar are the tens of millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans, mostly Christians, who were starved, shot, tortured and enslaved by the Jewish-dominated Bolshevik regime in Russia. “Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity,” wrote the Israeli journalist Sever Plocker in an op-ed for Ynet News. “Even if we deny it,” the Jewish writer concluded, “we cannot escape the Jewishness of ‘our hangmen,’ who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment.”
Why have Stalin’s Jewish executioners and secret police torturers not received the same level of scrutiny that the Nazis have? Why have there been no Hollywood movie depictions of what happened in Stalinist Russia? When the subject has been broached, kosher commentators and careerist historians have been reluctant to note the fact that a large percentage of the top officials of the Soviet regime and the post-WW2 communist regimes of Eastern Europe were Jewish chauvinists.
When in 2009 the Ukrainian security service published a list of Soviet and Communist Party officials responsible for the Holodomor – the famine-genocide sponsored by Moscow in 1932 that took the lives of 6-7 million Ukrainians – Jewish groups cried foul, contending that publicizing such a list was a bad idea because most of the names on it were Jewish and would thus cause anti-Jewish sentiments, reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Instead of learning about the true nature of this unspeakable crime and the culprits responsible, Ukrainians should just “forget history” — at least that is what the Israeli politician Shimon Peres implored them to do in a 2010 speech.
Ukrainians are commanded by the Zionists to forget their history; as are the Palestinians. But we, the ‘gullible goyim,’ must “never forget” what may or may not have happened to Jews during the Second World War. In this New World Order of Malthusian mayhem and Orwellian mind control, the Zionists hope to lock us in a mental dungeon where unwelcome thoughts are extirpated with ruthless efficiency and cold determination.
Unfortunately for them, the truth can only be hidden from public sight but never extinguished.
US Government Begins Rollout Of Its ‘Driver’s License For The Internet’
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | May 5, 2014
An idea the government has been kicking around since 2011 is finally making its debut. Calling this move ill-timed would be the most gracious way of putting it.
A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”
Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.
Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.
The NSTIC program has been in (slow) motion for nearly three years, but now, at a time when the public’s trust in government is at an all time low, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST — itself still reeling a bit from NSA-related blowback) is testing the program in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The first tests appear to be exclusively aimed at accessing public programs, like government assistance. The government believes this ID system will help reduce fraud and overhead, by eliminating duplicated ID efforts across multiple agencies.
But the program isn’t strictly limited to government use. The ultimate goal is a replacement of many logins and passwords people maintain to access content and participate in comment threads and forums. This “solution,” while somewhat practical, also raises considerable privacy concerns.
[T]he Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”
And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.
Beyond the privacy issues (and the hints of government being unduly interested in your online activities), there are the security issues. This collected information would be housed centrally, possibly by corporate third parties. When hackers can find a wealth of information at one location, it presents a very enticing target. The government’s track record on protecting confidential information is hardly encouraging.
The problem is, ultimately, that this is the government rolling this out. Unlike corporations, citizens won’t be allowed the luxury of opting out. This “internet driver’s license” may be the only option the public has to do things like renew actual driver’s licenses or file taxes or complete paperwork that keeps them on the right side of federal law. Whether or not you believe the government’s assurances that it will keep your data safe from hackers, keep it out of the hands of law enforcement (without a warrant), or simply not look at it just because it’s there, matters very little. If the government decides the positives outweigh the negatives, you’ll have no choice but to participate.
Egyptian Court Sentences Brotherhood Chief and 682 Others to Death
Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie
Al-Manar | April 28, 2014
An Egyptian court sentenced Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and 682 others of the organization to death Monday, a lawyer and prosecutor said, after two brief sessions which the defense partly boycotted.
The same court also reversed 492 of 529 death sentences it passed in March, commuting most of those to life in prison.
The court presided over by judge Said Youssef Sabry had sparked an international outcry with its initial sentencing last month, which came amid an extensive crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohammad Mursi.
Under Egyptian law, death sentences are referred to the top Islamic scholar for an advisory opinion before being ratified. A court may choose to commute the sentences, which can later be challenged at an appeals court.
Of the 683 sentenced on Monday, only about 50 are in detention. The judge will confirm the verdict on June 21. The others have a right to a retrial if they hand themselves in.
The verdict was the first against Badie, the spiritual head of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, in the several trials he faces on various charges along with Mursi himself and other Brotherhood leaders.
Those sentenced on Monday were accused of involvement in the murder and attempted murder of policemen in Minya province on August 14, the day police killed hundreds of Mursi’s supporters in clashes in Cairo.
Defense lawyers boycotted the last session, branding it “farcical” after the mass death sentencing which the United Nations denounced as a breach of international human rights law.
Defense lawyer Khaled Elkomy claims that 60 percent of the 529 defendants, including teachers and some doctors, have evidence that “proves they were not present the day they were accused of attacking the Matay police station” in Minya, a statement released by human rights group Avaaz said.
The government has defended the court’s handling of the first mass case, insisting that the sentences were passed only “after careful study” and were subject to appeal.
Source: AFP
Honduras: Gangsters’ Paradise
By Nick Alexandrov | CounterPunch | April 25, 2014
Nearly five years after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) first called on the Honduran government to protect Carlos Mejía Orellana, the Radio Progreso marketing manager was found stabbed to death in his home on April 11. “The IACHR and its Office of the Special Rapporteur consider this a particularly serious crime given the precautionary measures granted,” the Commission stated, assuming Mejía really was being guarded. But since the 2009 coup, asking the Honduran state to defend journalists is as effective as entreating a spider to spare a web-ensnared fly.
The coup, which four School of the Americas (SOA) graduates oversaw, toppled elected president Manuel Zelaya, and was “a crime,” as even the military lawyer—another SOA alum—charged with giving the overthrow a veneer of legitimacy couldn’t deny. A pair of marred general elections followed. Journalist Michael Corcoran recognized widespread “state violence against dissidents” and “ballot irregularities” as hallmarks of the first, in November 2009, which Obama later hailed as the return of Honduran democracy. And there was little dispute that the subsequent contest, held last November, was equally flawed. The State Department, for example, admitted “inconsistencies” plagued the vote, the same charge Zelaya himself leveled and an echo of the SOA Watch delegation’s findings, which identified “numerous irregularities and problems during the elections and vote counting process[.]” But while grassroots and governmental observers described the election in similar terms, they drew dramatically different conclusions about its validity. Canadian activist Raul Burbano, for example, acknowledged that “corruption, fraud, violence, murder, and human rights violations” dominated the situation. For Secretary of State Kerry, “the election process was generally transparent, peaceful, and reflected the will of the Honduran people.”
Kerry, to be sure, was referring to the class of “worthy” Hondurans, whose will was indeed reflected in the contest. One might be “a policeman, a lumber magnate, an agro-industrialist, a congressman, a mayor, an owner of a national media outlet, a cattle rancher, a businessman, or a drug trafficker”—all belong to this sector, Radio Progreso director Rev. Ismael Moreno Coto, S.J., known as Padre Melo, points out, adding that these “worthy” Hondurans use the state as a tool to maintain, if not enhance, their power. The results for the rest of the population are what you’d expect. The government no longer pays many of its employees, for example; Peter J. Meyer’s Congressional Research Service report on “Honduran-U.S. Relations,” released last July, cites “misused government funds” and “weak tax collection” as two factors contributing to the current situation, a kind of wage slavery sans wages. Doctors, nurses and educators toil for free throughout the country, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research reported last fall that over 43% of Honduran workers labored full-time in 2012 without receiving the minimum wage. That same year, nearly half of the population was living in extreme poverty—the rate had dropped to 36% under Zelaya—and 13,000 inmates now crowd a prison system designed for 8,000. In San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city after Tegucigalpa, some 5,000 children try not to starve to death while living on the streets; this figure includes 3,000 girls, aged 12-17, who roam the roads as prostitutes.
Confronting this reality—asking fundamental questions, like whose interests dominant Honduran institutions serve—“means living with anxiety, insecurity, suspicion, distrust, demands, warnings, and threats. It also means having to come to grips with the idea of death,” Padre Melo emphasizes, explaining that a reporter in Honduras “only has to publish or disseminate some news that negatively affects the interests [of] a powerful person with money and influence…for the life of that news reporter to be endangered.” Melo was making these points in July 2012, well before Mejía’s recent murder, but when it was already obvious that open season had been declared on Honduran correspondents. It’s likely that “few observers could have foreseen the deluge of threats, attacks, and targeted killings that has swept through Honduras during the last five years,” PEN International noted in January, highlighting “the surge in violence directed against journalists following the ouster of President José Manuel Zelaya in June 2009.” A great deal “of the violence is produced by the state itself, perhaps most significantly by a corrupt police force,” and now over 32 Honduran journalists—the equivalent U.S. figure, as a percentage of the total population, would be well over 1,200—are dead.
These killings are part of a broader Honduran trend, namely what Reporters Without Borders calls “a murder rate comparable to that of a country at war—80 per 100,000 in a population of 7 million.” One crucial battlefield is the Bajo Aguán Valley, where at least 102 peasant farmers were killed between January 2010 and May 2013. The conflict there can be traced back to the ’90s, when a “paradigm promoted by the World Bank” spurred “a massive re-concentration of land in the Aguán into the hands of a few influential elites,” Tanya Kerssen writes in Grabbing Power, her excellent book. These land barons, particularly Dinant Corporation’s Miguel Facussé, thrived as “the Aguán cooperative sector was decimated,” some three-quarters of its land seized, Kerssen concludes. Campesinos, suddenly dispossessed, first sought legal recourse, which failed. They subsequently “protested and occupied disputed land,” Rights Action’s Annie Bird observes in an invaluable study (“Human Rights Violations Attributed to Military Forces in the Bajo Aguán Valley in Honduras,” February 2013), prompting government authorities to review the legitimacy of World Bank-promoted territorial transfer. But the June 2009 coup ended this appraisal, and since then Honduras’ 15th Battalion, Washington-aided “since at least 2008,” has “consistently been identified as initiating acts of violence against campesino movements,” with police forces and Dinant’s security guards getting in on the kills, Bird explains
After Brazil, Honduras is the most dangerous place on the planet for land-rights defenders, according to “Deadly Environment,” a new Global Witness investigation, which notes that “more and more ordinary people are finding themselves on the frontline of the battle to defend their environment from corporate or state abuse, and from unsustainable exploitation.” At least 908 worldwide died in this conflict from 2002-2013, and Washington’s “counterdrug” policies in the region have helped raise the stakes, Dr. Kendra McSweeney’s research suggests. “In Honduras, the level of large-scale deforestation per year more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2011, at the same time as cocaine movements in the country also showed a significant rise,” BBC correspondent Matt McGrath summarizes her findings. “Once you start fighting” the traffickers, McSweeney elaborates, “you scatter them into more remote locales and greater areas become impacted,” as smugglers clear forests to build airstrips and roads, and “worthy” Hondurans in, say, the palm oil and ranching sectors capitalize on booming drug profits.
“Today it’s the same” as it was in the 1980s, Honduran activist Bertha Oliva remarked a year ago, referring to the decade when “the presence of the U.S. in the country was extremely significant,” and “it was clear that political opponents were being eliminated.” Obama’s Honduras policy is Reagan’s redux, in other words. The thousands of child prostitutes and street children, the prisons teeming with inmates, the scores of slaughtered peasants and dozens of murdered journalists—all indicate the type of nation Washington helps build in a region where it’s free to operate unimpeded, revealing which “American values” really drive U.S. foreign policy.
Nick Alexandrov lives in Washington, DC.
Colombia Professor Victorious in His Quest for Academic Freedom
KAKE | April 21, 2014
After Iymen Chehade’s class at Columbia College Chicago was canceled, he realized that his academic freedom had been violated and skillfully protested until his class was reinstated. In this interview, Chehade discusses the importance of recognizing and fighting for academic freedom in schools across the globe.
(Interviewer: Kellen Winters @_ITSKELS @_KAKEME – Filmed and edited by @AndrewZeiter & @FragDfilms.)
Brazil passes ‘internet constitution’ ahead of global conference on web future
RT | April 23, 2014
Ahead of a two-day Net Mundial international conference in Sao Paulo on the future of the Internet, Brazil’s Senate has unanimously adopted a bill which guarantees online privacy of Brazilian users and enshrines equal access to the global network.
The bill known as the “Internet constitution” was first introduced in the wake of the NSA spying scandal and is now expected to be signed into law by President Dilma Rousseff – one of the primary targets of the US intelligence apparatus, as leaks by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden revealed.
Rousseff plans to present the law on Wednesday at a global Internet conference.
The bill promotes freedom of information, making service providers not liable for content published by their users, but instead forcing the companies to obey court orders to remove any offensive material.
The principle of neutrality, calling on providers to grant equal access to service without charging higher rates for greater bandwidth use is also promoted. The legislation also limits the gathering and use of metadata on Internet users in Brazil.
Approval of the Senate was assured after the government dropped a provision in the legislation requiring Internet companies such as Twitter and Facebook to store data on Brazilian users at home.
The final version bill states that companies collecting data on Brazilian accounts must obey Brazilian data protection laws even if the data is collected and stored on servers abroad.
The demand of the use of Brazilian data centers had been added to the legislation last year after Snowden’s leaks revealed the extent of NSA’s spying network and wiretapping of President Dilma Rousseff communications.
The NSA was also involved in spying on Brazil’s strategic business sector, particularly on state-run oil company Petrobras. In response to US spying, Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington in October and called on the UN, together with Germany, to adopt a UN resolution guaranteeing internet freedoms.
The adoption of the bill was a top priority for the Brazilian leader as a two-day Net Mundial conference in Sao Paulo is scheduled to open in Brazil on Wednesday.
The aim of the global event on internet governance is to discuss cyber security amid the NSA spying scandal. Safeguarding privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet are among the topics to be discussed according to a draft agenda.
US officials will attend the meeting alongside representatives from dozens of other states.
“All of them should have equal participation in this multi-stakeholder process,” Virgilio Almeida, Brazil’s secretary for IT policy, who will chair the conference, told Reuters.
As part of the discussion, Russia and China have submitted a proposal jointly with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan asking for the UN to develop a code of conduct for the Internet.
“Most participants here want a multi-stakeholder model for the Internet,” Almeida told Reuters. “China wants a treaty at the United Nations, but only governments are represented there.”
The event is not expected to result in any binding policy decisions, but Almeida said it will facilitate a debate that will “sow the seeds” for future reforms of internet governance.
UK Filters And The Slippery Slope Of Mass Censorship
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 23, 2014
We’ve covered the ridiculousness of the UK’s “voluntary” web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping “pornography” (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.
The pattern is not hard to recognize, because it happens over and over again. Government officials find some absolute horror — the kind of thing that no one will stand up for — to push for some form of censorship. Few fight back because no one wants to be seen as standing up for something absolutely horrific online, or be seen as being against “family values.” But, then, once the filters are in place, it becomes so easy both to ignore the fact that the filters don’t work (and censor lots of legitimate content) and to constantly expand and expand and expand them. And people will have much less of a leg to stand on, because they didn’t fight back at the beginning.
That appears to be happening at an astonishingly fast pace in the UK. Index On Censorship has a fantastic article, discussing how a UK government official has already admitted to plans to expand the filter to “unsavoury” content rather than just “illegal.”
James Brokenshire was giving an interview to the Financial Times last month about his role in the government’s online counter-extremism programme. Ministers are trying to figure out how to block content that’s illegal in the UK but hosted overseas. For a while the interview stayed on course. There was “more work to do” negotiating with internet service providers (ISPs), he said. And then, quite suddenly, he let the cat out the bag. The internet firms would have to deal with “material that may not be illegal but certainly is unsavoury”, he said.
And there it was. The sneaking suspicion of free thinkers was confirmed. The government was no longer restricting itself to censoring web content which was illegal. It was going to start censoring content which it simply didn’t like.
It goes on, in fairly great detail, to describe just how quickly the UK is sliding away down that slippery slope of censorship. It highlights how these filters were kicked off as an “anti-porn” effort, where the details were left intentionally vague.
But David Cameron positioned himself differently, by starting up an anti-porn crusade. It was an extremely effective manouvre. ISPs now suddenly faced the prospect of being made to look like apologists for the sexualisation of childhood.
Or at least, that’s how it was sold. By the time Cameron had done a couple of breakfast shows, the precise subject of discussion was becoming difficult to establish. Was this about child abuse content? Or rape porn? Or ‘normal’ porn? It was increasingly hard to tell.
And, of course, the fact that the filters go too far, is never seen as a serious problem.
The filters went well beyond what Cameron had been talking about. Suddenly, sexual health sites had been blocked, as had domestic violence support sites, gay and lesbian sites, eating disorder sites, alcohol and smoking sites, ‘web forums’ and, most baffling of all, ‘esoteric material’. Childline, Refuge, Stonewall and the Samaritans were blocked, as was the site of Claire Perry, the Tory MP who led the call for the opt-in filtering. The software was unable to distinguish between her description of what children should be protected from and the things themselves.
At the same time, the filtering software was failing to get at the sites it was supposed to be targeting. Under-blocking was at somewhere between 5% and 35%.
Children who were supposed to be protected from pornography were now being denied advice about sexual health. People trying to escape abuse were prevented from accessing websites which could offer support.
And something else curious was happening too: A reactionary view of human sexuality was taking over. Websites which dealt with breast feeding or fine art were being blocked. The male eye was winning: impressing the sense that the only function for the naked female body was sexual.
But, of course, no one in the UK government seems to care. In fact, they’re looking to expand the program. Because it was never about actually stopping porn. It was always about having a tool for mass censorship.
The list was supposed to be a collection of child abuse sites, which were automatically blocked via a system called Cleanfeed. But soon, criminally obscene material was added to it – a famously difficult benchmark to demonstrate in law. Then, in 2011, the Motion Picture Association started court proceedings to add a site indexing downloads of copyrighted material.
There are no safeguards to stop the list being extended to include other types of sites.
This is not an ideal system. For a start, it involves blocking material which has not been found illegal in a court of law. The Crown Prosecution Service is tasked with saying whether a site reaches the criminal threshold. This is like coming to a ruling before the start of a trial. The CPS is not an arbiter of whether something is illegal. It is an arbiter, and not always a very good one, of whether there is a realistic chance of conviction.
As the IWF admits on its website, it is looking for potentially criminal activity – content can only be confirmed to be criminal by a court of law. This is the hinterland of legality, the grey area where momentum and secrecy count for more than a judge’s ruling.
There may have been court supervision in putting in place the blocking process itself but it is not present for individual cases. Record companies are requesting sites be taken down and it is happening. The sites are only being notified afterwards, are only able to make representations afterwards. The traditional course of justice has been turned on its head.
And it just keeps going on and on. As the report notes, “the possibilities for mission creep are extensive.” You don’t say. They also note that technologically clueless politicians love this because they can claim they’re solving a hard problem when they’re really doing no such thing (and really are just creating other problems at the same time):
MPs like filtering software because it seems like a simple solution to a complex problem. It is simple. So simple it does not exist.
Of course, if you recognize that the continued expansion of such filters was likely the plan from the beginning, then everything is going according to plan. The fact that it doesn’t solve any problems the public are dealing with is meaningless. It solves a problem that the politicians are dealing with: how to be able to say they’ve “done something” to “protect the children” while at the same time building up the tools and powers of the government to stifle any speech they don’t like. To those folks, the system is working perfectly.
Russian journalist detained, questioned for 15 hours by Ukraine law enforcement
RT | April 17, 2014
A journalist for Russia’s LifeNews has been released after being detained and questioned for 15 hours by Ukraine law enforcement. Police allegedly “kicked” the reporter and “other peaceful civilians” during an armed confrontation in Mariupol on Wednesday.
Kristina Babayeva was detained following an armed confrontation between anti-government protesters and soldiers stationed at a military base in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Wednesday. Her colleague, camerawoman Maria Povalyaeva, still remains at the local police station.
“She is being actively interrogated,” Babayeva told RT.
Babayeva said she was working at the scene when the shooting began. She said the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and police then “launched an operation,” throwing her and other peaceful civilians on the ground.
“Many were kicked, including me. They were talking to us really harshly and said that if we moved a finger they would shoot to kill,” the journalist said, adding that she received several bruises.
According to the reporter, there was “total chaos” and police were shooting in different directions. Once anyone flashed a torch, they “fired at that direction without a warning,” Babayeva said, adding that real bullets were used – not rubber ones.
People were kept on the ground, their faces down, for about half an hour, before they were placed in a van to be taken to a local police station, Babayeva said.
She was questioned for 15 hours by the SBU and police officers, who attempted to accuse her of complicity in the armed seizure of the military base located in the turbulent Donetsk region.
Babayeva said police were aware that she is a Russian journalist and saw all her documents, seized her microphone, and two phones.
“They saw that I had made calls to activist – on the eve of the incident we were filming a report near the city council building. That’s why they accused me in complicity to the armed seizure, as they put it,” she said.
No violence was used against her at the police station, she said.
According to LifeNews, the journalist demanded that she be provided with a lawyer and given an opportunity to speak to a Russian consul, but law enforcers refused to do so.
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From the Archives
MI5 plotted assassination of Irish PM in 1985 – Ulster Volunteer Force
RT | December 29, 2017
Former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was warned by loyalist paramilitaries that they were once tasked with murdering him in an assassination plot purportedly dreamt up by the British secret service.
The sensational disclosure was sent in a letter to the Irish government, newly released under the Public Records Act, which requires documents of historical value to be published by the National Archives within 30 years.
Written on Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) signature paper, the warning claims the terrorist organization was asked by an MI5 operative about the prospect of carrying out an attack on Republic of Ireland leader Haughey in 1985.
At the time, Haughey would have been in opposition as head of political party Fianna Fáil, but details of the solicitation did not become known to Irish authorities until 1987.
“In 1985 we were approached by a M15 officer attached to the Northern Ireland Office and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name,” the letter reads, according to the Irish Times. “He asked us to execute you.”… continue
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Aletho News- Armando Mema: Finland Used as New Frontline Against Russia
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