GAZA CITY, PALESTINE — Israeli officials have deemed peaceful protests by Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip to be tantamount to a “state of war,” arguing that soldiers were well within their rights firing live ammunition at unarmed protesters participating in ongoing mass mobilizations at the eastern fence enclosing the besieged territory.
In response to a High Court petition by human rights advocates, authorities in Tel Aviv noted that “the state opposes the applying of human rights law during an armed conflict,” arguing that even the Red Cross deemed human rights law inapplicable during wartime.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 50 Palestinians have been killed in the protests while over 6,200 protesters have sustained injuries at the hands of Israeli forces deploying live ammunition or rubber-coated steel rounds and other less-lethal munitions.
The state attorneys’ argument attempts to give international and domestic legal status to the military suppression of peaceful protest and the suspension of international human rights law enforcement, allowing occupation forces the right to use lethal force against unarmed demonstrators.
Since March 30, residents of the captive region have held large-scale demonstrations to draw attention to the continuing dispossession of the people of Palestine and theft of their ancestral land by the Tel Aviv government, with the support of the U.S. government.
Organizers hope to continue the rallies until May 15, when Israelis will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. The date is mourned by Palestinians as Nakba Day, or “The Day of Catastrophe,” when the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing and expansionism was commenced by the extremist Zionist militia, which later united as the “Israeli Defense Forces” or Israeli military. From 1947 to 1949, around 750,000 Palestinians out of a total population of nearly 1.9 million were expelled from the land of Palestine.
Around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians are war refugees, or their descendants, who are confined to what is tantamount to a large-scale, open-air prison camp. Speaking to Reuters, 24-year-old protester Ahmed said:
If it wasn’t for the occupation we would have lived as free as people like in other countries … If they don’t allow us back, at least they should give us a state.”
Grim facts reveal intentional abuse
The manner in which protesters, including children, have been injured – live ammunition fired at the groin, neck, limbs, and abdomen – suggests that Israeli troops intentionally aim to inflict maximum harm that could result in life-altering disabilities, paralysis, amputation or the sterilization of civilian participants in the marches.
Many are struck by a new explosive type of ammunition known as the “butterfly” bullet, which causes massive deformities and creates exit wounds as large as a fist. The bullet expands upon hitting targets, decimating human flesh and bone or “pulverizing” internal organs, according to local health officials.
According to Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, the head of the Doctors Without Borders mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Half of the more than 500 patients we have admitted in our clinics have injuries where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone … These patients will need to have very complex surgical operations, and most of them will have disabilities for life.”
The Israelis, however, cite the law when justifying their use of deadly force. In a statement to Al Jazeera, an Israeli military official said:
The IDF only employs means that are lawful under international law. No new bullets or gas have been employed during the recent events in the Gaza Strip.”
Cold-blooded mass murder and repression
While Israeli authorities claim that the peaceful protests in Gaza constitute a state of war, videos captured of Israeli soldiers show them casually discussing how best to inflict harm on unarmed Palestinians while facing little to no danger from protesters.
In a video released in April, a sniper can be seen expressing elation after shooting a protester who was allegedly throwing rocks, exclaiming “Yes!”
According to a new survey by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University, 83 percent of Israeli respondents “strongly support” the open-fire policy while around 71 percent of Israelis reject the easing of a crippling blockade imposed on Gaza for the past 11 years.
Israeli authorities consistently claim that the protests are organized by Islamist Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which has ruled the Strip since winning elections in 2007, and that the protest aims to provide cover for alleged “terrorist attacks” using stones and Molotov cocktails. Various factions and civil-society groups have endorsed the march, however, and deny that Hamas has a monopoly on leading the mass actions or that the protests have any ulterior motives beyond the stated demands for the right to return to their former homes in historic Palestine.
Palestinian academic Rashid Khalidi noted that the methods used by the Israeli army indicate a fear of peaceful protest as well as an inherently racist attitude toward the people of Palestine:
So, heavily armored Israeli soldiers with sniper rifles at hundreds of meters are picking off, systematically, Palestinian protesters or people who try to approach the fence or whatever. And that this is a policy that the government is proud of … I think it tells us a lot about Israel’s attitude towards Palestinians, that they are subhuman.
… [A]t the rate at which things are going, unfortunately, we’re probably likely to see even more savage, vicious, brutal, murderous repression.”
May 4, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank village of ‘Einabus with the assistance of Israeli soldiers, according to a new report by human rights NGO B’Tselem.
On the morning of 6 March, two Palestinians – ‘Ahed Hamad and Yasser Hamad – went to the northern part of the village to pave a road intended to help residents access their farmland.
Shortly after they began work, some 30 Israeli settlers, “some of them masked”, arrived from the direction of the notorious Yitzhar settlement, located some four kilometres away.
“The settlers surrounded the bulldozer and began throwing stones at it, breaking the windshield,” stated B’Tselem. “The two men tried to escape, but some of the settlers pursued them, throwing stones and hitting them, until they managed to escape into the village.”
“The settlers who remained near the bulldozer threw stones and sticks at it and slashed its tyres.”
Some 50 village residents then went to protect their lands, after which “the settlers returned in larger numbers, accompanied by soldiers”.
Settlers and Palestinian residents “threw stones at each other”, while Israeli occupation forces “fired live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets and teargas” at the Palestinians. Six Palestinians were injured, of whom four were taken to hospital.
According to B’Tselem: “This incident is not unusual: settlers have attacked Palestinians in the presence of soldiers hundreds of times, with the soldiers sometimes – as in the present case – joining in the assault.”
Israel effectively condones this conduct and reaps the benefits: the Palestinian residents, who know they face a possible attack with no protection at any given time, hold back from going to their farmland – to tend the land or graze flocks – and this makes it easier for the state to take over the land.
May 4, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israeli settlement, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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“Here I stand, I can do no other,” James Comey told President George W. Bush in 2004 when Bush pressured Comey – who was then Deputy Attorney General – to approve an unlawful antiterrorist policy. Comey, who was FBI chief from 2013 to 2017, was quoting a line reputedly uttered by Martin Luther in 1521, when he told Holy Roman Emperor Charles V that he would not recant his sweeping criticisms of the Catholic Church. Comey’s quotation of himself quoting the father of the Reformation is par for the self-reverence of his new memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently declared, “James Comey made his bones by standing up against torture. He was a made man before Trump came along.” Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, in a column declaring that Americans should be “deeply grateful” to lawyers like Comey, declared, “The Bush administration wanted to claim that its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were lawful. Comey believed they were not… So Comey pushed back as much as he could.”
Martin Luther risked death to fight against what he considered the heresies of his time. Comey, a top Bush administration policymaker, found a safer way to oppose the worldwide secret U.S. torture regime widely considered a heresy against American values. Comey approved brutal practices and then wrote some memos and emails fretting about the optics.
Comey became Deputy Attorney General in late 2003 and “had oversight of the legal justification used to authorize” key Bush programs in the war on terror. At that time, the Bush White House was pushing the Justice Department to again sign off on an array of extreme practices that had begun shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A 2002 Justice Department memo had leaked out that declared that the president was entitled to ignore federal law in approving extreme interrogation techniques. Photos had also leaked from Abu Ghraib prison showing the stacking of naked prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution via a wire connected to a man’s penis, guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers celebrating the bloody degradation. A confidential CIA Inspector General report had just warned that post-9/11 CIA interrogation methods may violate the international Convention Against Torture.
Rather than ending the abuses, Comey repudiated the memo. Speaking to the media in a not-for-attribution session on June 22, 2004, Comey declared that the 2002 memo was “overbroad,” “abstract academic theory,” and “legally unnecessary.” Comey helped oversee crafting a new memo with different legal footing to justify the same interrogation methods.
Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboarding, which sought to break detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S. government since the Spanish American War.
Comey wrote in his memoir that he was losing sleep over concern about Bush administration torture polices. But losing sleep was not an option for detainees because Comey approved sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique. Detainees could be forcibly kept awake for up to 180 hours until they confessed their sins. How did this work? At Abu Ghraib, the notorious Iraqi prison, one FBI agent reported seeing a detainee “handcuffed to a railing with a nylon sack on his head and a shower curtain draped around him, being slapped by a soldier to keep him awake.”
Comey also approved “wall slamming” – which, as law professor David Cole wrote, meant that detainees could be thrown against a wall up to 30 times. Comey also signed off on the CIA using “interrogation” methods such as facial slaps, locking detainees in small boxes for 18 hours, and forced nudity. When the secret Comey memo approving those methods finally became public in 2009, many Americans were aghast – and relieved that the Obama administration had repudiated Bush policies.
When it came to opposing torture, Comey’s version of “Here I stand” had more loopholes than a reverse mortgage contract. Though Comey in 2005 approved each of 13 controversial extreme interrogation methods, he objected to combining multiple methods on one detainee. It was as if Martin Luther grudgingly approved of the Catholic Church selling indulgences to individually expunge sins for adultery, robbery, lying, and gluttony but vehemently objected if all the sins were expunged in one lump sum payment.
In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a massive report, Americans learned grisly details of the CIA torture regime that Comey helped legally sanctify – including death via hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and dozens of cases of innocent people pointlessly brutalized. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. The only CIA official to go to prison for the torture scandal was courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou.
If Comey had resigned in 2004 or 2005 to protest the torture techniques he now claims to abhor, he would deserve some of the praise he is now receiving. Instead, he remained in the Bush administration but wrote an email summarizing his objections, declaring that “it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. [Attorney General] and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong.” A 2009 New York Times analysis noted that Comey and two colleagues “have largely escaped criticism [for approving torture] because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.” In Washington, writing emails is “close enough for government work” to convey sainthood.
When Comey finally exited the Justice Department in August 2005 to become a lavishly-paid senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, he proclaimed in a farewell speech that protecting the Justice Department’s “reservoir” of “trust and credibility” requires “vigilance” and “an unerring commitment to truth.” But Comey perpetuated policies that shattered the moral credibility of both the Justice Department and the U.S. government. Comey failed to heed another Martin Luther admonition: “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012’s Public Policy Hooligan, and 2006’s Attention Deficit Democracy. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications.
May 3, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, FBI, Human rights, James Comey, United States |
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Bahrain’s main Shia opposition group, al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, says authorities have made thousands of citizens jobless over the past few years due to their political and religious beliefs as the ruling Al Khalifah regime presses ahead with its heavy-handed crackdown in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom.
The dissolved political party, in a statement released on International Workers’ Day, also known as Labor Day or Workers’ Day, said 4,400 Bahrainis have lost their jobs as a result, warning that the number is on the rise.
Al-Wefaq then pointed to the Manama regime’s “policy of starvation and impoverishment against citizens because of their political opinions.”
The statement further noted that a small fraction of those unemployed people have been hired, but in lower-paying jobs.
Al-Wefaq also paid tribute to Bahraini workers, who lost their lives while taking part in the country’s popular uprising, as well as those who have been permanently disabled due to brutal torture in the regime’s prisons.
Thousands of anti-regime protesters have held demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis ever since a popular uprising began in the country in mid-February 2011.
They are demanding that the Al Khalifah dynasty relinquish power and allow a just system representing all Bahrainis to be established.
Manama has gone to great lengths to clamp down on any sign of dissent. On March 14, 2011, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were deployed to assist Bahrain in its crackdown.
Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of the Al Khalifah regime’s crackdown.
On March 5, 2017, Bahrain’s parliament approved the trial of civilians at military tribunals in a measure blasted by human rights campaigners as being tantamount to imposition of an undeclared martial law countrywide.
The Bahraini king ratified the constitutional amendment on April 3 last year.
May 1, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Bahrain, Human rights, Saudi Arabia |
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A former Qatari detainee, accused by the US government of being involved in the planning of the September 11 attacks in 2001, says he had been tortured and abused during 13 years of incarceration on American soil.
Speaking for the first time after his release three years ago, Ali al-Marri said his FBI interrogators would restrain him using duct tape and subjecting him to what he described as “dry-boarding,” a torture technique which includes having socks stuffed down the throat.
“I have never experienced death, but I assume this is the nearest thing to dying,” he told the ITV News on Wednesday.
“You’re suffocating, you can see your life coming out of your face and you cannot even move,” he said.
The Qatari man alleged that threats were made to his wife and children while being held in solitary confinement.
“Threatening to sodomize me, threatening to rape my wife, threatening to bring in my kids, that’s torture. Threatening to send me to a black site, to become a military lab rat, choking me to near death. This is torture,” he said.
The former detainee also said he was subjected to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, among other extreme measures.
Al-Marri, who was in solitary confinement without charge for six years at a naval brig in South Carolina, said he was innocent and wanted his interrogators brought to account.
Al-Marri had traveled to the US with his wife and five children legally on 10 September 2001, the day before the attacks, to attend graduate school in Illinois.
He was initially charged with fraud based on information found on his computer, but the then-president George Bush declared him an “enemy combatant.”
Al-Marri has never answered the allegations. In 2009, he pleaded guilty in a civilian court to conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida and was jailed for 15 years, a sentence that took into account his previous captivity.
US government documents seen by ITV News said “On 11 March 2004, in response to al-Marri’s continuous chanting in Arabic, the lead interrogator wrapped duct tape over al-Marri’s mouth on three occasions.”
In a statement released to ITV News, the FBI said it “does not engage in torture and we maintain that rapport-building techniques are the most effective means of obtaining accurate information in an interrogation.”
Al-Marri was the only al-Qaeda-linked prisoner held outside the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison following the September 11 attacks.
His allegations of torture are supported by detention logs which are set to reignite the controversy over the US handling of al-Qaeda suspects.
US officials assert that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
In several cases, hundreds of victims’ relatives and injured survivors, along with insurance companies and businesses say, the Saudi government assisted the attacks through a variety of activities in support of al-Qaeda over a number of years.
April 26, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | FBI, Human rights, United States |
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A detainee was forced to endure an almost three-week journey between Virginia and Texas in a privately-owned prisoner transport van. A lawsuit alleges he was denied medication, inadequately fed, and forced to sit in human waste.
Edward Kovari was arrested in Winchester, Virginia, in 2016 on suspicion of stealing a car in Houston. While his charges were later dropped, a lawsuit filed in Virginia alleges that Kovari suffered inhumane conditions while en route to Houston, a violation of his 14th Amendment rights, reported the Washington Post.
The van, operated by Prisoner Transportation Services, stopped several times in seven states to pick up more prisoners. The normally 20-hour journey took 18 days.
Kovari was shackled tightly in chains, and denied his prescription medication for hypertension. When the van arrived in Houston, Kovari was unable to walk and his blood pressure was above 200, the lawsuit alleges.
Throughout the journey, cramped conditions meant that Kovari could not sleep for days on end. Water was rationed and detainees were occasionally fed fast food. In lieu of bathroom breaks, the prisoners were instructed to urinate in bottles or defecate in their clothes.
Kovari’s calls for medical attention were ignored, and he was threatened with tasing for causing a disturbance, the suit alleges.
Prisoner Transportation Services is America’s largest for-profit extradition company. Picking up as many prisoners in the same journey allows companies like this to maximize profits. Tens of thousands of prisoners are packed into vans every year, and multiple deaths and injuries have occurred in these “mobile jails.”
April 25, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, United States |
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The US military has started construction for a huge military base in the African country of Niger, which officials say will be used for airstrikes and intelligence operations by unmanned aircraft in West Africa.
US Air Force personnel have been constructing hangars and runways for drones in central Niger for some time now, The Associated Press reported Monday, stating that the base was being built outside of Agadez upon a request by Niger’s government.
It was not clear how many drones the USAF was going to deploy to the base, which unnamed officials said was going to be the “largest troop labor construction project in US history” with an estimated cost of more than $110 million.
The report did not mention how the base was going to help American military plans in Africa, which for the large part have remained secret.
Niger has been playing a key role in those plans as the Pentagon has doubled the number of its troops in the country to around 800 over the past few years.
Additionally, US Army Green Berets have been training Nigerien military forces near the nascent military base.
“Already the US military presence here is the second largest in Africa, behind the sole permanent US base on the continent, in the tiny nation of Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa,” the AP noted.
More light is expected to be shed on the US military’s missions in Niger once the Pentagon concludes a high-profile investigation into a deadly ambush in October of last year that killed four American soldiers near Niger’s border with Mali.
It was a month after this attack that Nigerien Defense Minister Kalla Mountari said his country was open to allowing US drone strikes against terror outfits such as Daesh.
The growing US presence in Niger has stirred concern among the officials of the poor, former French colony.
“We are afraid of falling back into the same situation as in Afghanistan, with many mistakes made by American soldiers who did not always know the difference between a wedding ceremony and a training of terrorist groups,” Nigerian government official Amadou Roufai told AP.
According to the report, the US will use the base to operate the MQ-9 Reaper drone, arguably the most advanced drone in the Pentagon’s arsenal.
With a range of around 1,150 miles (1850km), the aircraft can provide strike support and intelligence gathering capabilities across West and North Africa.
The aircraft can carry GBU-12 Paveway II bombs and four Hellfire air-to-ground anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles.
Once completed, the base would add to the US military’s inventory of over 800 bases in more than 70 countries.
April 25, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Subjugation - Torture | Africa, Niger, United States |
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BETHLEHEM – Israeli army forces on Tuesday detained the Dean of Student Affairs at Bethlehem University, according to a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS).
PPS reported that the dean, Mahmoud Hammad, was detained. The circumstances surrounding his detention remain unknown.
The group added in a statement that Israeli forces also detained Muhammad Samer Sirhan, 14, from occupied East Jerusalem.
Israeli search and arrest operations are a near-nightly occurrence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
According to UN documentation, between March 27th and April 9th, Israeli forces carried out 159 raids.
Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer reported that as of March, there were 6,050 Palestinians being held as political prisoners in Israeli jails.
April 24, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Bethlehem University, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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Is the U.S. government evil?
You tell me.
This is a government that treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, tracked, tortured, and eventually eliminated once they’ve outgrown their usefulness.
This is a government that treats human beings like lab rats to be caged, branded, experimented upon, and then discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
This is a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn.
This is a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and then turns a blind eye and a deaf ear while its henchmen rape and kill and pillage.
No, this is not a government that can be trusted to do what is right or moral or humane or honorable but instead seems to gravitate towards corruption, malevolence, misconduct, greed, cruelty, brutality and injustice.
This is not a government you should trust with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.
This is the face of evil, disguised as a democracy, sold to the people as an institution that has their best interests at heart.
Don’t fall for the lie.
The government has never had our best interests at heart.
Endless wars. The government didn’t have our best interests at heart when it propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback.
A police state. There is no way the government had our best interests at heart when it passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us.
Battlefield America. Certainly the government did not have our best interests at heart when it turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free” military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas.
Secret human experimentation. One would also be hard-pressed to suggest that the American government had our best interests at heart when it conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. The government reasoned that it was legitimate (and cheaper) to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.
For instance, there was the CIA’s Cold War-era program, MKULTRA, in which the government began secretly experimenting on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel by dosing them with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug secretly slipped into their drinks, so that the government could explore its uses in brainwashing and controlling targets. The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.
Sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theorists, I know, but the government’s track record of treating Americans like lab rats has been well-documented, including its attempts to expose whole communities to various toxins as part of its efforts to develop lethal biological weapons and study their impact and delivery methods on unsuspecting populations.
John Lennon was right: “We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”
Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Just recently, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).
Mind you, there is no clear evidence to suggest that these particular documents were created by a government agency. Then again, the government—no stranger to diabolical deeds or shady experiments carried out on an unsuspecting populace—has done it before.
After all, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
For too long now, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the American people have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for phantom promises of security and, in the process, have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
No matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.
So how do you fight back?
How do you fight injustice? How do you push back against tyranny? How do you vanquish evil?
You don’t fight it by hiding your head in the sand.
Stop being apathetic. Stop being neutral. Stop being accomplices.
Start recognizing evil and injustice and tyranny for what they are. Demand government transparency. Vote with your feet (i.e., engage in activism, not just politics). Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils.
As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.”
It’s time for good men and women to do something. And soon.
April 23, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, United States |
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A Palestinian family on Saturday accused Israel’s spy agency Mossad of killing a Palestinian lecturer in Malaysia.
Fadi Mohammed al-Batsh, 35, was shot dead by two gunmen on a high-powered motorcade near his home in the capital Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, Malaysian police said.
“The suspect fired 10 shots, four of which hit the lecturer in the head and body. He died on the spot,” the official Bernama news agency quoted Kuala Lumpur police chief Mazlan Lazim as saying.
Mazlan said a recording of a closed-circuit television camera near the scene showed the two assailants waited for about 20 minutes for the Palestinian lecturer.
“We believe the lecturer was their target because two other individuals walked by the place earlier unharmed,” he said.
The lecturer’s family, meanwhile, said Mossad was behind his assassination.
“We accuse Mossad of standing behind the energy researcher’s assassination,” the al-Batsh family in the Gaza Strip said in a statement.
The family called on the Malaysian police to launch an investigation into the killing.
There has been no comment from Israeli authorities on the accusations.
Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, confirmed that the lecturer was a group member.
“The martyr was distinguished by his excellence and scientific creativity,” Hamas said in a statement.
It, however, did not accuse any side of killing al-Batsh.
In late 2016, Palestinian drone expert Mohamed al-Zawari, was shot dead in Tunisia, with Hamas accusing Israel of killing him.
Israel is widely believed to have killed numerous Palestinian resistance activists in the past, many of them overseas.
In 1997, Mossad agents tried — and failed — to kill Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal in Jordan by spraying poison into his ear.
Mossad is also believed to have been behind the assassination in 2010 of top Hamas commander Mahmud al-Mabhuh in a Dubai hotel.
Israel has never confirmed or denied its involvement in Mabhuh’s murder.
April 21, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Zionism |
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WASHINGTON – The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) is allegedly involved in a series of crimes, including torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, the State Department said in its annual human rights report released on Friday.
“Human rights groups and the United Nations noted significant deficiencies in investigations into human rights abuses committed by [Ukraine’s] government security forces, in particular into allegations of torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and other abuses reportedly perpetrated by SBU,” the report said.
The perpetrators of the 2014 Euromaidan shootings in the country’s capital Kiev have not been held accountable, the report added.
At the same time, the SBU continues to impose pressure on media outlets concerning “reporting on sensitive issues, such as military losses,” according to the report.
The US State Department also noted that Ukraine’s government committed a series of human rights violations, including corruption, censorship and violence against ethnic minorities.
“Abuses included widespread government corruption, censorship, blocking of websites, government failure to hold accountable perpetrators of violence against journalists and anti-corruption activists, violence against ethnic minorities and LGBTI persons,” the report reads.
The State Department said the “most significant” abuses occurred in the Donbass region, where it said unlawful killings and politically motivating disappearances have occurred.
The report also cited “multiple reports of attacks on journalists investigating government corruption” and accused Ukrainian authorities of restricting media content “on vague grounds.”
The State Department report documents the status of human rights and worker rights in nearly 200 countries and territories. Its latest issue addresses violations that happened in 2017.
April 21, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Ukraine |
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Introduction
As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozen are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.
The Israeli government praised the ‘restraint and morality’ of the IDF, as did the fifty-two Major Jewish American Organizations (MJAO) who largely control the US Congress. These grotesque massacres began during the Christian Holy Week on Good Friday and Easter, coinciding with the Jewish Passover. The self-righteous officials of the MJAO and their relatives and friends broke matzos at joyful Seders as the blood of Palestinians soaked into ground at the fence containing the largest open-air prison camp in history, Gaza.
While tribal loyalties bonded the Israeli and Jewish American leaders, the politicians of the Western oligarchic electoral regimes refrained from criticizing the shocking display of brute force and even defended Israel’s cold blood mass killings of Palestinian civilians in their Gaza prison.
This paper will discuss and analyze the reasons for Israel’s willing Western accomplices and the centrality of its fifth column in the United States.
Israel’s Willing Accomplices
Because of the US veto power, the United Nations Security Council refused to condemn or even discuss Israel’s wanton slaughter in Gaza. The Secretary General of the UN meekly mentioned ‘violence’ and the need for an ‘investigation’ into the killings. The United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, prevented any investigation into the ongoing Israeli war crimes. She characterized Israel’s mass murder of unarmed Palestinians as ‘defensive action against terrorists’.
Both major US political parties defended Israel’s crimes against humanity and threatened critics, labeling them as ‘hypocrites’, while deflecting attention away from the state slaughter of Palestinian civilians, pointing to the behavior of the Arab countries.
With the notable exception of Bernie Sanders, both legislative houses and the executive branch expressed unconditional support for Israel’s ongoing slaughter.
The mass media, including all the major television, newspaper and radio outlets echoed the vituperative speeches of Israel’s Ziofascist leaders.
All the major political lobbies in Washington followed the leading arm of the US-Israel lobby, the ‘52 MJAO’.
The key question is what explains the power of Israel to continuously commit crimes against humanity with impunity?
Clearly Israel, by itself, lacks the economic, political and media power to influence international organizations. Nor does Israel exercise sufficient ‘soft power’ or cultural influence to neutralize the tens of millions of critics around the world with any persuasive arguments . . . except in the United States.
Where does the power that protects Israel from any consequences for its brutal crimes reside?
The key to Israel’s impunity lies in a chain of command beginning with the local grass roots of hundreds of fanatical, unconditional Zionist-Israel First organizations in the US.
Every major and minor US city has local Zionist-councils who use their influence to intimidate local professional, business, political and media groups into ensuring that critics are censored and Israel’s war crimes are covered up. The tactics range from ‘friendly’ influence within local civic organizations to outright threats, bullying and slander.
Local Zionist organizations are linked to state-wide and national political and economic confederations that influence the nomination and financing of all candidates, the elected officials and the composition of editorial boards of the major media outlets.
Equally important, Zionist activists pressure and recruit leaders of civil society groups through guided propaganda tours to Israel. They enforce obedience and submission to Zionist objectives by blacklisting critics, contacting their places of employment and demanding they be fired. They employ even more repressive tactics against perceived threats to Israel’s interests, including threatening phone calls and unwelcome ‘visits’. At the commanding heights of the Zionist pyramid, hundreds of billionaires and millionaires finance and influence the corporate mass media, the political parties and conservative and liberal religious and educational institutions and demand adherence to Israel’s agenda.
The Zionist power configuration (ZPC) parlays its influence far beyond its dues-paying members, who, in reality, comprises only a very tiny fraction of the US population.
Wider networks extend and magnify the Zionist presence, multiplying power centers up to the highest levels of public policy making. The ideological influence of the Israel Fifth Column is concentrated on a single issue: Defending Israel and its crimes against humanity. They succeed because of their enormous impact on the US role in world politics, including Washington’s trade and military policy in strategic regions, especially in the Middle East.
The members of Israel’s Fifth Column may be liberal or conservative on a broad spectrum of domestic socio-cultural issues, (gay rights, immigration reform, racial and cultural identity, feminism, the environment, etc . . . ) while, at the same time, they provide unconditional support for Israel’s oppression, imprisonment, expulsion and massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In fact, the Fifth Column’s primary commitment to Israel has guaranteed that the US would wage a sequence of catastrophic wars against Israel’s regional rivals and targeted adversaries – Iraq, Libya and Syria – even at enormous cost in US lives and wasting multi-trillions of dollars of US taxpayers funds. This Zionist-promoted drain on the US treasury to finance disastrous wars has completely undermined any policies to address the domestic needs of US working people (which the progressive Zionists have loudly claimed to support!) The consequences have been tragic to the people of the Middle East and to the increasingly impoverished and desperate American working poor and minorities.
Israel’s power to freely murder unarmed civilians in Gaza is derived from the Fifth Column’s influence in the US. Without it Israel would have no power to block the UN from imposing sanctions, or the International Court of Justice from convening a tribunal for war crimes. Israel would not have nuclear weapons or advanced missiles to threaten its neighbors and destabilize the hundreds of millions of civilians who live in the greater Middle East, were it not for the its US-based Zionist power configuration. The nation of Israel would be ‘confined’ within internationally agreed borders and it would be forced to reverse its policy of ethnic cleansing. Israel would have to become a diverse – society based on laws, instead of a lawless, apartheid ethno-fascist police state dedicated to oppressing half of the people within its declared and occupied territories.
The key to Israel’s power is found in its leaders’ command structure, which dictates policy to its tribal diaspora. Their overseas accomplices command the regional, state and local organizations to relay “the message” and apply various means to enforce it. Dissent by Jews and non-Jews is swiftly and viciously punished, adherence to Zionist dictates is rewarded.
Opponents are ostracized, blacklisted and slandered – without recourse.
Ideological conformity or submission to the Zionist agenda ensures employment, promotions and political and judicial appointments. No Jewish critics of Zionism, no matter how prestigious, have ever received senior political or economic appointments. Even academic careers are systematically derailed. This is well understood by everyone in the US, especially by upwardly mobile ‘silenced critics’.
The so-called ‘uniformity’ of the Zionist-Jewish community is maintained by the stick and carrot. The leading stockbrokers, bankers, casino and media moguls know they can hold liberal or conservative opinions on US domestic issues but must support or remain silent on Israel’s war crimes or else . . . suffer reprisals.
Even critics are careful to temper their dissent by blaming ‘both sides’: They equate the 25 murdered civilians in Gaza with the IDF snipers who complain of fatigue from repeatedly pulling the trigger.
Conclusion
Defending Palestinian rights and finally stopping the massacre(s) in Gaza requires taking on the Israel-Zionist chain of command in the United States. First and foremost, it requires opposing Israel’s corrupt and spineless apologists in the US Congress, who have consistently supported the policies of Israel, taken Israeli-Zionist money, submitted to Zionist blackmail and sent thousands of American troops to their deaths to support Israel’s interests in the Middle East. It requires taking on the local Zionist boosters, including the thugs and blackmailers, as well as the local ‘respectable’ elite.
The prestigious Israel First crowd at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite Ivy League universities just celebrated Passover. Meanwhile, the thuggish enforcer of Zionist expansion, a former nightclub bouncer, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman praised the IDF snipers who murdered Gazan school kids, saying they “deserved commendation” (FT, 4/2/18 p. 3).
Not a single US Congressperson raised a critical voice against the grotesque brutality of Lieberman fearing the Fifty-Two Presidents of the Major Jewish American Organizations. The 52 respectable presidents endorsed the wounding of nearly three thousand unarmed Palestinian civilian protesters, who never even crossed from their horrific mass prison into the Zionist state of Israel.
To support a meaningful protest one must shame and name the Zionist 5th column close at hand, because they are politically responsible for making sure that US political leaders submit to Israel’s agenda and guarantee total impunity and indeed praise for all the brutal ‘Liebermans’.
Zionist tribal organizations and leaders, their networks and organizers who ‘commend’ the IDF killers need to be named, exposed and confronted.
The US enablers, who protect, promote and defend Israeli war criminals are Zionist psychologists, lawyers, journalists and experts who can talk at great lengths about ‘Jewish ethics’ but who have never shown a shred of decent human compassion and solidarity for the victims in Gaza.
The issue of Zionist crimes resonates across the social spectrum.
Prominent progressive working-class leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labor Party, are routinely slandered as anti-Semites for speaking publicly about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Leading Zionist spokespeople have launched a vindictive media campaign to destroy Corbyn and prevent a courageous politician from leading tens of millions of British workers in their struggle for social justice.
In the United States, Zionists organize to slander any and all popular leaders engaged in the struggle for social justice, labor and minority rights if they dare to speak against Israel’s injustice against their counterparts – workers and oppressed minorities in Palestine.
The struggle for Palestinian self-determination has a profound significance for the United States as its youth and minorities confront increasing desperation and injustice in their communities. American youth and minorities see their own struggles for justice against an increasingly oligarchic police state mirrored in the protests of Palestinian youth. Their defense of free speech (including the freedom to criticize and confront Israel’s war crimes), freedom of assembly (including the freedom to organize boycotts of Israeli products) and self-determination, mean that American working class youth must confront the oligarchy run by and for the plutocrats at home and in Israel.
April 8, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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