Octavia Nasr’s firing and what the liberal media allows
By Glenn Greenwald | July 8, 2010
CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world’s most beloved religious figures: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah . . . . One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and other neocon precincts, and CNN quickly (and characteristically) capitulated to that pressure by firing her. The network — which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years — justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s “credibility” had been “compromised.” Within this episode lies several important lessons about media “objectivity” and how the scope of permissible views is enforced.
First, consider which viewpoints cause someone to be fired from The Liberal Media. Last month, Helen Thomas’ 60-year career as a journalist ended when she expressed the exact view about Jews which numerous public figures have expressed (with no consequence or even controversy) about Palestinians. Just weeks ago, The Washington Post accepted the “resignation” of Dave Weigel because of scorn he heaped on right-wing figures such as Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. CNN’s Chief News Executive, Eason Jordan, was previously forced to resign after he provoked a right-wing fit of fury over comments he made about the numerous — and obviously disturbing — incidents where the U.S. military had injured or killed journalists in war zones. NBC fired Peter Arnett for criticizing the U.S. war plan on Iraqi television, which prompted accusations of Treason from the Right. MSNBC demoted and then fired its rising star Ashleigh Banfield after she criticized American media war coverage for adhering to the Fox model of glorifying U.S. wars; the same network fired its top-rated host, Phil Donahue, due to its fear of being perceived as anti-war; and its former reporter, Jessica Yellin, confessed that journalists were “under enormous pressure from corporate executives” to present the news in a pro-war and pro-Bush manner.
What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right. Isn’t that a strange dynamic for the supposedly Liberal Media: the only viewpoint-based firings of journalists are ones where the journalist breaches neoconservative orthodoxy? Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall. I foolishly thought that when George Bush’s own Press Secretary mocked the American media for being “too deferential” to the Bush administration, that would at least put a dent in that most fictitious American myth: The Liberal Media. But it didn’t; nothing does, not even the endless spate of journalist firings for deviating from right-wing dogma.
Beyond journalism, speech codes concerning the Middle East are painfully biased and one-sided. Chas Freeman was barred from a government position — despite a long and accomplished record of public service — due to AIPAC-led anger over comments deemed insufficiently devoted to Israel. Juan Cole was denied a tenured position at Yale after a vicious neocon campaign based on his allegedly anti-Israel remarks, and Norman Finklestein suffered the same fate, despite a unanimous committee recommendation for tenure, after an Alan-Dershowitz-led demonization campaign based on his blasphemous scholarship about Israel. Does anyone ever suffer career-impeding injuries of this type — the way Nasr and Thomas also just have — for expressing anti-Muslim or anti-Arab views? No. The speech prohibitions and thought crimes on the Middle East all run in one direction: to enforce “pro-Israel” orthodoxies. Does this long list of examples leave room for doubt about that fact?
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Then there’s the Nasr case itself. Look at how our discourse is completely distorted and dumbed-down by the same stunted, cartoonish neocon orthodoxies that have also destroyed our foreign policy. In our standard political discussions, the simplistic and false notion — obviously accepted by CNN — drives the discussion: Fadlallah is an Evil Hezbollah Terrorist!!, and Nasr probably is as well given the “respect” she expressed for him during his death. Thus: CNN got caught employing an Israel-hating Terrorist-lover, and once she revealed herself, she had to be fired immediately!!!! That really is the primitive level of agitprop churned out by neocon polemicists and then dutifully ingested and embraced by CNN.
The reality, though, is completely different. Fadlallah was a revered figure to a large chunk of the world, and was quite mainstream even in parts of the West. As the AP put it today, Fadlallah was “one of Shiite Islam’s highest and most revered religious authorities with a following that stretched beyond Lebanon’s borders to Iraq, the Gulf and as far away as central Asia.” Ironically, he was the religious guide for Iraq’s Dawa Party: the party of our close ally, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who took the very unusual step of leaving Iraq to attend Fadlallah’s funeral. As ThinkProgress’ Matt Duss put it:
So here’s the neocon logic: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over 4,000 of its own troops and over 100,000 Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.
Writing in Foreign Policy — not exactly a radical, Terrorist-loving outlet — David Kenner described how even moderate, U.S.-friendly officials such as Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri praised Fadlallah as “a voice of moderation and an advocate of unity,” and Kenner documents that even Fadlallah’s alleged ties to Hezbollah are dubious at best.
Most striking, the British Ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, heaped praise on Fadlallah far more gushing than anything Nasr said. In a piece she entitled “The Passing of Decent Men,” Ambassador Guy wrote that he was one of the people whom she enjoyed meeting most and with whom she was most impressed; that he was “a true man of religion, leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith”; that “Lebanon is a lesser place the day after his absence”; and that “the world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths.”
And Nasr herself wrote a moving explanation after the controversy over her tweet erupted, explaining that the respect she expressed for Fadlallah had nothing to do with some of his uglier views about the justifiability of civilian attacks on Israel or Holocaust disparagement, but was rather driven by his important and virtuous call for greater rights and respect for Muslim women, his desire for greater religious tolerance in Muslim nations, and the fact that he “spread what many considered a more moderate voice of Shia Islam than what was coming out of Iran.” She recounted the respect he showed her when she interviewed him 20 years ago. And she explained that “it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission — resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon — that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.” By all accounts, Fadlallah became particularly radicalized in his hostility toward the U.S. when the Reagan administration — working in concert with Saudi Arabia — attempted to assassinate him with a car bomb in Beirut, missed, and slaughtered 80 innocent civilians instead.
In other words, like many people involved in protracted and religiously-motivated violent conflicts, Fadlallah was a profoundly complex figure, with some legitimate grievances, some entrenched hatreds and ugly viewpoints, and a substantial capacity for good. Nasr was expressing a very mild and restrained form of sadness and respect for someone who had just died: sentiments shared in much stronger form by hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and even Western world. The sentiment she expressed, while infuriating neocons, is widespread and completely unnotable for large parts of the world.
What makes Nasr’s summary firing even more astonishing is that Nasr herself was an unremarkable journalist who rarely if ever provoked controversy, had no history of anti-Israel or pro-Terrorist sentiments, and blended perfectly into the American corporate media woodwork. Indeed, Middle East expert and neocon critic Nir Rosen ironically noted yesterday that — as almost happened to Michael Steele — “Octavia Nasr got fired for the one smart thing she ever said.”
This was a banal and very cautious establishment journalist who survived and advanced at Time Warner, Inc. for 20 years by adhering to all the prevailing codes.
But no matter: as we’ve seen repeatedly, in American media and political culture, Middle East orthodoxies are the most sacred and inviolable. Thus, her 2o-year loyal service is brushed to the side because of a 140-character blip of blasphemy. As the Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah put it: she “wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. That’s the point. EVEN someone usually so cautious cannot survive.” He added: “More than ever, [CNN, NPR, The New York Times] are purveyors of official, accepted opinion. Their job is to police what/who we can hear.” That’s what Nicholas Kristof meant when, writing today from Jerusalem, he observed that Israel “tolerates a far greater range of opinions than America”: it’s even more acceptable to utter blasphemy about Israel in Israel than it is in the U.S., as Octavia Nasr was but the latest to discover.
* * * * *
With the Nasr firing, here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. And as Jonathan Schwarz wrote of the Nasr firing:
William Barr is on the board of directors of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. Barr was a senior adviser in the Reagan administration, which attempted to assassinate Fadlallah, missing him and killing more than eighty bystanders.
Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. And having a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel (just watch Blitzer in this 5-minute clip if you have doubts about that) is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”
All of this would be so much more tolerable if CNN would simply admit that it permits its journalists to hold and express some controversial opinions (ones in accord with official U.S. policy and orthodox viewpoints) but prohibits others (ones which the neocon Right dislikes). Instead, we are subjected to this patently false pretense of opinion-free objectivity.
The reality is that “pro-Israel” is not considered a viewpoint at all; it’s considered “objective.” That’s why there’s no expression of it too extreme to result in the sort of punishment which Nasr just suffered (preceded by so many others before her). Conversely, while Hezbollah is seen by much of the world as an important defense against Israeli aggression in Lebanon, the U.S. Government has declared it a Terrorist organization, and therefore “independent” U.S. media outlets such as CNN dutifully follow along by firing anyone who expresses any positive feelings about anyone who, in turn, has any connection to that group. That’s how tenuous and distant the thought crime can be and still end someone’s career. It’s true that much of the world sees some of Hezbollah’s actions as Terrorism; much of the world sees Israel’s that way as well. CNN requires the former view while prohibiting the latter. As usual, our brave journalistic outlets not only acquiesce to these suffocating and extremely subjective restrictions on what our political discourse allows; they lead the way in enforcing them.
Europe approves US mass data grab
By John Oates • The Register • 29th June 2010
Europe has signed a deal to hand over all bank transaction data to the US in order to help the ongoing war on terrorism.
The SWIFT agreement was signed yesterday in Brussels by Spanish minister for home affairs Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and the US embassy’s economic economic officer to the EU, Michael Dodman.
Rubalcaba welcomed the “excellent agreement”, which he said had been reached after discussions with the European Parliament.
The treaty must now be approved by the European Parliament. Assuming it does pass it will be in force for five years.
IT gives the US Treasury access to bank transactions although there is now some filtering at the European end. The agreement will be overseen by Europol.
The Swift agreement was first approved in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It lapsed in February after the European Parliament rejected an earlier draft.
The European Data Protection Supervisor remains unimpressed and has questioned the need for bulk transfers of data and the time such data is kept without being investigated by US authorities. The EDPS has also called for better oversight of the process.
Most of the world’s bank transactions are transmitted by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), based in Belgium.
Jerusalem lawmaker detained; expulsion expected
Ma’an – 30/06/2010
Jerusalem resident and elected Palestinian official Mohammad Abu Tier was detained by Israeli police on Wednesday, and reportedly taken to the Russian Compound for questioning.
Former Minister of Jerusalem Affairs for the Palestinian Authority Khalid Abu Arafa confirmed the arrest, which he said was carried out near the official’s Sur Baher home, in a neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
According to a report in Israel’s daily Haaretz newspaper, police representatives will submit a request to Israeli courts on Thursday, requesting that the official remain in police custody.
Abu Arafah said that the move was in preparation for the execution of deportation orders okayed by and Israeli court last week. The orders would see Abu Tier stripped of his Jerusalem residency card and prohibited from accessing the city.
The former minister called the detention of an elected official “beyond the red line,” and said it demonstrated Israel’s willingness to expel all Palestinian leaders from the city, starting with Abu Tier, and the three other officials – including himself – who were elected in the 2006 Palestinian vote with Hamas.
An Israeli police source said Abu Tier was not part of a deal made by Palestinian Authority officials from Ramallah. President Mahmoud Abbas met with the four lawmakers on Friday, and following the meeting sources within the PA said a deal had been struck to ensure the lawmakers were not expelled from their native Jerusalem.
A second police source said Abu Tier would go before the Jerusalem court and be deported to the West Bank or Gaza.
Earlier reports said the four men would have to renounce their affiliation with the Hamas movement if they hoped to remain in Jerusalem.
Deportation orders had been handed down in 2006 when the four were elected, but were only handed out within the past months, following the activation of Israel’s military orders 1649 and 1650, which expanded the definition of infiltrator to any individuate living in an Israeli-controlled area without express permission by unidentified Israeli bodies.
Other PLC members targeted in the expulsion include Mohammed Totach and Ahmed Atoun. All four were given until July to leave Jerusalem.
NY police ‘beat up’ Iranian professor
Press TV – June 30, 2010
Professor Kaveh Afrasiabi
A US-based Iranian university professor and senior political analyst, Kaveh Afrasiabi, says he has been brutally beaten up by police officers in New York.
Speaking to IRNA on Tuesday, professor Afrasiabi explained about the unusual manner in which he was arrested, saying that he was handcuffed and sent to jail under the pretext that he had not paid his traffic ticket.
“While handcuffed I was pushed to the front. Then my head hit a metal rod and I was seriously wounded. I was then sent to the hospital in an ambulance due to severe injuries,” said Afrasiabi who could hardly speak.
After he was discharged from the hospital, the police took him to court where the judge ordered his release.
Afrasiabi said his arrest came over a traffic ticket which he had to pay 25 years ago.
Afrasiabi has taught political science at Tehran University, Boston University, and Bentley College. He has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, UC Berkeley and Binghamton University.
The Iranian professor, who is a former consultant to the UN program of Dialogue Among Civilizations, has appeared on numerous television talk shows, including Press TV, CNN, MSNBC and Al-Jazeera. He has also worked as a consultant to CBS’s 60 Minutes program.
He has also authored the book After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy and is a co-author of Reading in Iran Foreign Policy After September 11.
Guess Who Wants to Kill the Internet?
It would be hard to think of anyone who has done more to undermine American freedoms than Joseph Lieberman. Since 9/11, the Independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the “global war on terror” which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.
On October 11, 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Lieberman introduced S. 1534, a bill to establish a Department of Homeland Security. Since then, he has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and the proposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans suspected of terrorism. And now the senator from Connecticut wants to kill the Internet.
According to the bill he recently proposed in the Senate, the entire global internet is to be claimed as a “national asset” of the United States. If Congress passes the bill, the US President would be given the power to “kill” the internet in the event of a “national cyber-emergency.” Supporters of the legislation say this is necessary to prevent a “cyber 9/11” – yet another myth from the fearmongers who brought us tales of “Iraqi WMD” and “Iranian nukes.”
Lieberman’s concerns about the internet are not new. The United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which Lieberman chairs, released a report in 2008 titled “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat.” The report claimed that groups like al-Qaeda use the internet to indoctrinate and recruit members, and to communicate with each other.
Immediately after the report was published, Lieberman asked Google, the parent company of You Tube, to “immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations.” That might sound like a reasonable request. However, as far as Lieberman is concerned, Hamas, Hezbollah and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are terrorist organizations.
It’s hardly surprising that Lieberman’s views on what constitute terrorism parallel those of Tel Aviv. As Mark Vogel, chairman of the largest pro-Israel Political Action Committee (PAC) in the United States, once said: “Joe Lieberman, without exception, no conditions … is the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress. There is nobody who does more on behalf of Israel than Joe Lieberman.”
Lieberman has been well-rewarded for his patriotism – to another country. In the past six years, he has been the Senate’s top recipient of political contributions from pro-Israel PACs with a staggering $1,226,956.
But what is it that bothers Lieberman so much about the internet? Could it be that it allows ordinary Americans access to facts which reveal exactly what kind of “friend” Israel has been to its overgenerous benefactor? Facts which they have been denied by the pro-Israel mainstream media.
How much faith would American voters have in the likes of Lieberman, who claims that the Jewish state is their greatest ally, if they knew that Israeli agents planted firebombs in American installations in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to undermine relations between Nasser and the United States; that Israel murdered 34 American servicemen in a deliberate attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967; that Israeli espionage, most notably Jonathan Pollard’s spying, has done tremendous damage to American interests; that five Mossad agents were filming and celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001; that Tel Aviv and its accomplices in Washington were the source of the false pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and about countless other examples of treachery?
In his latest attempt to censor the internet, does Lieberman really want to protect the American people from imaginary cyber-terrorists? Or is he just trying to protect his treasonous cronies from the American people?
Peace campaigner, 85, classified by police as ‘domestic extremist’
By Paul Lewis and Rob Evans | The Guardian | 25 June 2010
For John Catt, protest has never been about chaining himself to a railing or blocking a road in an act of civil disobedience. The 85-year-old peace campaigner’s far milder form of dissent typically involves turning up at a demonstration with his daughter, Linda, taking out his sketch pad and drawing the scene.
However this, it seems, has been enough for police to classify Catt and his 50-year-old daughter “domestic extremists”, put their personal information on a clandestine national database and record their political activities in minute detail.
Secret files have revealed how police have systematically documented their political activities, undermining official claims that only hardcore activists were placed under surveillance.
The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) recorded their presence at more than 80 lawful demonstrations over four years, logging details such as their appearance, and slogans on their T-shirts.
Catt and his daughter, from Brighton, were aware that surveillance teams were often in the vicinity during their protests, but they had no idea how closely they were being monitored until their files were released under the Data Protection Act
Police said they did not legally have to disclose them, but did so to show there was “nothing sinister in what we hold”.
The Catts, who have no criminal records, said they were “shocked and terrified” when they read their files. “Our activities were totally legitimate – we were not interested in non-violent direct action,” said Linda . “My dad likes to sketch and I will hold a banner and shout a few things. But I’m careful about what I say.”
They said the most worrying aspect was the seemingly banal information the surveillance officers had been logging, from observations about their demeanour and car number plates, to notes about their conversations with local reporters.
Amid the pages of detailed logs was an entry that noted how on the morning of 25 September 2005, John Catt was “clean shaven” when he attended a demonstration by Sussex Action for Peace. The Catts have been part of a long running campaign against an arms factory in Brighton, run by the American-owned EDO MBM Technology, over sales to Israel.
Since 2004, campaigners have mounted more or less weekly demonstrations outside the factory, in particular protests at which the activists bang drums and other objects to produce a cacophony.
Catt’s artistic endeavours received particular scrutiny. “John Catt sat on a folding chair by the southern most gate of EDO MBM and appeared to be sketching,” states one of several logs. “He was using his drawing pad to sketch a picture of the protest and police presence,” said another from 10 March 2006. A separate report, about his sketch of a Guantánamo Bay detainee, noted: “John Catt was very quiet and was holding a board with orange people on it.”
Last year, anti-EDO campaigners held a series of a “anti-war creativity” workshops with music, poetry and artwork. These included an exhibition of art by Catt and others, a fact recorded on the NPOIU database as “including … the classic drawings of John Catt, veteran anti-war activist”.
When the Guardian first revealed details about a police monitoring system that keeps tabs on political activists last year, police gave assurances they were not interested in everyday campaigners. They said surveillance was needed to monitor “domestic extremists” – a term that has no legal basis but is defined by police as activists who are determined to break the law to further their political aims.
Anton Setchell, who is national co-ordinator for domestic extremism for the Association of Chief Police Officers and is responsible for the NPOIU database, said most campaigners would never be considered domestic extremists.
However, information about the Catts has been transferred to the Police National Computer in Hendon and in July 2005, they were stopped by police under the Terrorism Act after driving into the east London to help a family member move house. They later discovered police had placed a marker against their car registration on the database, triggering an alert – “of interest to public order unit, Sussex police” – each time they drove beneath an automatic number plate reading camera.
The Catts said they were particularly shocked to discover that they had been tracked for two days in Manchester in 2008, during the Labour party conference, while their involvement in events only fleetingly connected to protest activity was recorded. “At 1020 hours … seen at Lobby point on Peter Street were two anti-war protesters from Brighton, John Catt and Linda Catt”, reads the entry.
Three times police noted Linda Catt had sat in the public gallery of Brighton magistrates court, to witness the trial of fellow campaigners for alleged breaches of public order law or local bylaws arising out of the EDO MBM protests.
The final entry on John and Linda Catt’s file was on 27 September last year, after the pair marched against New Labour. The record observed that the protest had been “organised by a number of trade unions”, adding: “Seen as part of the protest was John Catt and Linda Catt”.
When asked about the Catts today, Setchell said most of the protests against EDO had been “lawful … but some have been violent and disorderly, leading to a large number of arrests”.
Police had therefore monitored the demonstrations and “a small number” of lawful protesters, including the Catts, “will have their names recorded alongside others at protest events”. He accepted the Catts had not been responsible for the violent disorder.
Last year Setchell had said: “If it is just a street type of protest, or sitting in a field or something, I will probably never ever speak to those forces about it whatsoever. I deal with the more serious stuff, that requires slightly more sophisticated analysis and co-ordination and investigation, which doesn’t mean people sitting in roads or chaining themselves to a fence.”
A sample entry from police log of the Catts’ activity on the National Public Order Intelligence Unit database:
“At 16.24 hrs on Wednesday 24th of September 2008 a Silver Car was driven to Home Farm Road by Linda Catt,” said one entry on the UK-wide system that stores information about campaigners. The Catts were among protesters campaigning to close down a local arms factory owned by EDO MBM, a US-owned firm, over sales to Israel.
“John Catt was in the front passenger seat. Upon arrival the vehicle parked close to the footpath entrance and both occupants got out of the vehicle. John Catt removed a frame piece of art work from the rear of the vehicle and put it on display. The artwork was a cartoon sketch of the EDO MBM site with the following text: ‘EDO MBM Listed on the stock exchange’. During the demonstration Linda Catt and an individual had a discussion together away from the main group.”
Rwanda ‘assassins’ kill reporter
BBC | June 25, 2010
A journalist working for a private newspaper has been shot dead in front of his house in the Rwandan capital.
Witnesses say Jean Leonard Rugambage, the acting editor of Umuvugizi newspaper, was fired on by two men who then fled in a car.
The authorities had recently suspended the paper, prompting it to start publishing online instead.
Police say they do not know who was behind the attack – the paper’s exiled chief editor has blamed the government.
‘South Africa shooting link’
Editor Jean Bosco Gasasira, who fled to Uganda in April after his paper was suspended, said Kigali had master-minded the assassination of Mr Rugambage who died in hospital after the shooting.
“I’m 100% sure it was the office of the national security services which shot him dead,” he told US state-funded radio Voice of America.
Mr Gasasira said it was because of an article published on the Umuvugizi website relating to the attempted killing last weekend of former army chief Lt Gen Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa.
Rwanda has denied accusations it was behind the shooting of Lt Gen Nyamwasa.
He went into exile in South Africa earlier this year after falling out with President Paul Kagame, who he accused of corruption.
Mr Kagame denies these charges and his government accuses Lt Gen Nyamwasa of being behind grenade attacks in Rwanda earlier this year.
In April, Mr Kagame reshuffled the military leadership and two high-ranking officers were also suspended and put under house arrest.
Earlier in the month, Umuvugizi was suspended for six months by the press council for inciting opposition to the government.
Its website, launched in May, is not currently accessible through Rwandan internet providers; the authorities deny involvement in blocking it.
Mr Rugambage, who is survived by his wife and a child, was acquitted of genocide crimes by a local “gacaca” court in 2006.
The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in Kigali says his death has shocked many journalists in the country.
Presidential elections are due in Rwanda in August – the second such vote since the 1994 genocide.
Human rights groups have accused the Rwandan government of repressing independent media in the country, which Kigali denies.
Mr Kagame’s government argues that it must take care to control the media and politicians to avoid a repeat of the genocide, in which some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.
Earlier this week, UN chief Ban Ki-moon appointed Mr Kagame to co-chair a committee of “superheroes to defeat poverty” – to push for progress in achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
He has been praised for trying to modernise Rwanda’s economy since coming to power at the end of the genocide.
IOF soldiers abduct daughter of businessman, serve demolition notice
Palestine Information Center – 26/06/2010
File Photo – IOF Home Invasion
TULKAREM — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) have stormed the home of Palestinian businessman Ali Al-Dadu in Tulkarem city and kidnapped his daughter Yasmin after confiscating a number of personal computers in the house.
Local sources said that the IOF troops broke into the house before dawn Friday and thoroughly searched it, wreaking havoc in the process.
The IOF soldiers had detained Dia, Yasmin’s brother, a couple of days ago at the Karame crossing on returning from Jordan into the West Bank.
Dadu’s shop was burnt at the hands of Fatah elements after Hamas took over control of the Gaza Strip more than three years ago and his losses were estimated at millions of dollars. The businessman and his sons were repeatedly detained by Fatah militias and the IOF soldiers since then.
Hebrew press had reported that the IOF soldiers rounded up six Palestinians on Friday in northern and southern areas of the West Bank including two brothers in Qabatia, Jenin district.
Meanwhile, IOF troops delivered a demolition notice to a citizen in the northern Jordan Valley on Friday following a series of similar demolition notifications in the area.
Local sources told the PIC that the IOF soldiers handed Ahmed Nawaja’a a written order not to live or be present in the area of his residence and asked him to evacuate his home within 24 hours.
Obama forgot vow of closing Gitmo?
Press TV – June 26, 2010
US President Barack Obama has sidelined efforts to close the Guantanamo prison, making it unlikely that he will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013, US senators say.
The White House acknowledged last year that Obama will miss his initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison and to eventually move the detainees to one in Illinois.
“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan.
He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.
And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who supports the plan to close the plan, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.”
He says some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis,” have stymied the plan, The New York Times reported.
Some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison, and blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.
But Levin says the US administration is unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence.
Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantanamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.
“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Levin said of White House officials.
A recent Pentagon study, obtained by The New York Times, shows US taxpayers spent more than $2 billion between 2002 and 2009 on the prison.
The US Administration officials believe taxpayers would save about $180 million a year in operating costs if Guantanamo detainees were held at Thomson, which they hope Congress will allow the Justice Department to buy from the State of Illinois at least for federal inmates.
Idiocy holds sway on the Supreme Court and inside the Obama administration
By Paul Woodward on June 25, 2010
It seems hard to fathom but the evidence is now overwhelming: if someone repeats the word “terrorist” often enough their brain will become functionally useless.
Consider the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday in support of the Obama administration’s sweeping definition of “material support” as applied to so-called Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) — a designation applied by the State Department.
If an NGO such as the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP) wants to train a group such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on how to use humanitarian and international law to peacefully resolve disputes, then the HLP risks criminal prosecution. Why? Such training could help legitimize the PKK and also free up resources that it can dedicate to its terrorist activities.
Solicitor General Elena Kagan (who is nominated to become a Supreme Court Justice) argued the case for the Obama administration.
Kay Guinane described the decision:
The Court ruled that even though pure speech is entitled to a high level of constitutional scrutiny, it would forgo such scrutiny and defer to Congress and the executive branch, which asserted unsupported, theoretical findings that support aimed at countering violence can somehow indirectly support violence. The Court’s reasoning was that the matter involves national security.
With its overly deferential approach, the Court failed to fulfill its responsibilities in the checks-and-balances system that keeps our democracy healthy. If it had looked behind the broad generalizations cited by the government, it would have seen there are no facts either in the Congressional Record or elsewhere that support the Congressional or State Department “findings.” And even if there are some circumstances where conflict mediation and human rights training can be co-opted to support violence, it is not inevitable that it will happen in all cases.
For an obvious example of the fault in the findings, one need look no further than the Good Friday Accords that brought a lasting peace to Northern Ireland for the first time in more than eight centuries. For years, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had worked to bring violent factions of Catholics and Protestants to the bargaining table. Their work behind the scenes was instrumental in persuading those groups — “terrorists” in the eyes of most of their captive civilian populations, as well as the governments seeking to disarm them — to put down their weapons and negotiate a peaceful resolution to 850 years of violence.
If the “material support” law had been in place, as authorized by the Supreme Court today, those organizations would have been criminals. And the people of Northern Ireland would likely still be victims of sectarian violence that only a very few supported.
“Orwellian” doesn’t begin to describe a law that makes it a crime to promote peaceful conflict resolution.
If the administration actually intends to uphold the law in the way they argue it should be applied, then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be expected to continue forever.
There is a rather broad consensus among foreign policy analysts in the US and Europe, that Hamas, a designated FTO, has far too much grassroots political support among ordinary Palestinians for the organization to be destroyed. Neither Israel’s war on Gaza nor it’s internationally supported siege of Gaza, succeeded in bringing the Islamist organization and democratically-elected government to its knees.
If the Obama administration wants to revive the Middle East peace process, sooner or later Hamas will have to be involved. It’s hard if not impossible to anticipate that those involved in the initial efforts to open dialogue with Hamas can avoid falling foul of the broad definition of “material support” that the Supreme Court has just upheld.
The Obama administration told the Supreme Court that the United States is engaged in an effort to “delegitimize and weaken” groups such as Hamas, yet it would behoove Washington and democratic governments everywhere to remember where political legitimacy springs from: not idiotic Supreme Court rulings, but the will of the people — and that includes the Palestinians.
Losing It at the Airport Checkpoint
TSA’s War on the Bill of Rights
By RALPH NADER | June 25, 2010
If you are planning to fly over the 4th of July holiday, be aware of your rights at airport security checkpoints.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has mandated that passengers can opt out of going through a whole body scanning machine in favor of a physical pat down. Unfortunately, opting for the pat down requires passengers to be assertive since TSA screeners do not tell travelers about their right to refuse a scan. Harried passengers must spot the TSA signs posted at hectic security checkpoints to inform themselves of their rights before they move to a body scanning security line.
Since the failed Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a passenger hiding explosives in his underwear, TSA has accelerated its program of deploying whole body scanning machines, including x-ray scanners, at airport security checkpoints throughout the United States. Scanning machines peak beneath passengers’ clothing looking for concealed weapons and explosives that can elude airport metal detectors. So far, TSA has placed 111 scanners at 32 airports. They expect to have 450 scanners deployed by the end of the year at an estimated cost of $170,000 each.
Privacy, civil rights and religious groups object to whole body scanning machines as uniquely intrusive. Naked images of passengers’ bodies are captured by these machines that can reveal very personal medical conditions such as prosthetics, colostomy bags and mastectomy scars. The TSA responded by setting the scanners to blur the facial features of travelers, placing TSA employees who view the images in a separate room and assuring the public that the images are deleted after initial viewing.
Yet, a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uncovered documents showing that the scanning machines’ procurement specifications include the ability to store, record and transfer revealing digital images of passengers. The specifications allow TSA to disable any privacy filters permitting the exporting of raw images, contrary to TSA assurances.
It begs logic that the TSA would not retain their ability to store images particularly in the event of a terrorist getting through the scan and later attacking an aircraft. One of the first searches by the TSA would be to review images taken by the scanners to identify the attacker.
The Amsterdam airport is using a less intrusive security device called “auto detection” scanning which generates stick figures instead of the real image of the person and avoids exposing passengers to radiation. Three United States Senators recently wrote to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano urging her to consider these devices.
More pointedly, security experts, such as Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have come forward questioning the effectiveness of whole body scanners since they can be defeated by hiding explosives in body cavities. The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, has stated that it is unclear whether scanners would have spotted the kind of explosives carried by the “Christmas Day” bomber.
About one-half of these body scanning machines use low dose x-rays to scan passengers. Last May, a group of esteemed scientists from the University of California, San Francisco wrote to John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, voicing their concerns about the rapid roll out of scanners without a rigorous safety review by an impartial panel of experts. The scientists caution that the TSA has miscalculated the radiation dose to the skin from scanners and that there is “good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations.”
David Brenner, director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, has also voiced caution about x-raying millions of air travelers. He was a member of the government committee that set the safety guidelines for the x-ray scanners, and he now says he would not have signed onto the report had he known that TSA wanted to scan almost every air traveler.
Passenger complaints to TSA and newspaper accounts of passenger experiences with scanners contradict TSA assurances that checkpoint signs provide adequate notice to travelers about the scanning procedure and the pat down option. Travelers, who reported that they were not fully aware what the scanning procedure involved, said they were not made aware of alternative search options.
Many travelers complained about their privacy, and their families’ privacy, being invaded. Some were concerned about the radiation risk, particularly to pregnant women and children. Some travelers felt bullied by rude TSA screeners. The Wall Street Journal reported that one woman who refused to go through the body scanner was called “unpatriotic” by the TSA screener.
Expensive state-of-the-art security technology that poses potentially serious health risks to vulnerable passengers, invades privacy, and provides questionable security is neither smart nor safe. For the White House it is a political embarrassment waiting to happen.
President Obama should suspend the body scanning program and appoint an independent panel of experts to review the issues of privacy, health and effectiveness. After such a review, should the DHS and TSA still want to deploy body scanners at airports, they should initiate a public rulemaking, which they have refused thus far, so that the public can have their say in the matter.
If you experience any push-back from TSA screeners when you assert your right to refuse to go through a whole body scanner and request a pat down security search instead, please write to info@csrl.org.
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