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License Plate Scanners Logging Our Every Move

ACLU | November 21, 2011

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the District of Columbia is engaging in widespread tracking of citizen’s movements using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). According to the Post, the D.C. police:

  • Are running more than one ALPR per square mile;
  • Are planning on sharply increasing the density of these devices until they form a “comprehensive dragnet;”
  • Retain the time/date/location/tag number even of innocent people for whom nothing is found to be wrong;
  • Store that data in a database for three years.

It has now become clear that this technology, if we do not limit its use, will represent a significant step toward the creation of a surveillance society in the United States.

The first we heard of this technology was in a March 2002 piece in The Boston Globe with the headline “Parking Enforcement on a Roll.” At that time, the technology was being deployed to scan parking lots for licenses associated with unpaid parking tickets and other fines. As we said at the time as we began to get questions about the technology, we don’t have any fundamental objections to the technology itself — after all, a police officer could manually phone in all the tags in a parking lot to check for unpaid tickets, and this just did the same thing in a quicker, more efficient way. Sometimes the speed and efficiency of computers does fundamentally change the nature of surveillance compared to non-computerized equivalents — as with GPS tracking, for example. Quantity can change quality. But checking for unpaid tickets and stolen cars does not affect the innocent, so this did not seem to us to be a problem — as long, we said, as the police do not retain location data about innocent people where nothing is found to be wrong.

Our main concern was that the technology not grow into a means for the constant, routine tracking of Americans and their whereabouts.  Sometimes when we say things like that, we’re accused of being paranoid. But I am always amazed by the speed and consistency with which our worst fears for these kinds of technologies turn into reality.

Clearly this technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As we have argued in the context of GPS tracking (and as I said to the Post reporter) that level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

The Post article cites a number of examples in which the technology has proven useful to police. Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

Finally, technologies that have such significant implications for our privacy — and more broadly, what kind of society we want to live in — should not be put in place through what I call “procurement policymaking.” The police should not be able to run out and buy a new technology and put it in place before anybody realizes what’s going on — before society has a chance to discuss and debate it and consider where we want to draw the lines between police power and the freedom to live a private life. That decision is one that should be made through the full, open, democratic process — not quietly and unilaterally by police departments.

November 21, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Bloodshed in Honduras: Obama’s Disgrace

Biofuel Death Squads

By MARK WEISBROT | CounterPunch | November 21, 2011

Imagine that an opposition organizer were murdered in broad daylight in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador or Venezuela by masked gunmen, or kidnapped and murdered by armed guards of a well-known supporter of the government.  It would be front page news in the New York Times, and all over the TV news.  The U.S. State Department would issue a strong statement of concern over grave human rights abuses.  If this were ever to happen.

Now imagine that 59 of these kinds of political killings had taken place so far this year, and 61 the previous year.  Long before the number of victims reached this level, this would become a major foreign policy issue for the United States, and Washington would be calling for international sanctions.

But we are talking about Honduras, not Bolivia or Venezuela.  So when President Porfirio Lobo of Honduras came to Washington last month, President Obama greeted him warmly and said:

“Two years ago, we saw a coup in Honduras that threatened to move the country away from democracy, and in part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we’ve been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope.”

Of course, President Obama refused to even meet with the democratically elected president that was overthrown in the coup that he mentioned, even though that president came to Washington three times seeking help after the coup.  That was Mel Zelaya, a left-of-center president who was overthrown by the military and conservative sectors in Honduras after instituting a number of reforms that people had voted for, like raising the minimum wage and laws promoting land reform.

But what angered Washington most was that Zelaya was close to the left governments of South America, including Venezuela.  He wasn’t any closer to Venezuela than Brazil or Argentina was, but this was a crime of opportunity.  So when the Honduran military overthrew Zelaya in June of 2009, the Obama Administration did everything it could for the next six months to make sure that the coup succeeded.  The “pressure from the international community” that Obama referred to in the above statement came from other countries, mainly the left-of-center governments in South America.  The United States was on the other side, fighting — ultimately successfully — to legitimize the coup government through an “election” that the rest of the hemisphere refused to recognize.

In May of this year, Zelaya  stated publicly what most of us who followed the events closely already guessed was true:  that Washington was behind the coup and helped bring it about.  While no one will likely bother to investigate the U.S. role in the coup, this is quite plausible given the overwhelming circumstantial evidence.

Porifiro Lobo took office in January 2010, but most of the hemisphere refused to recognize the government because his election took place under conditions of serious human rights violations.  In May 2011 an agreement was finally brokered in Cartegena, Colombia, that allowed Honduras back into the Organization of American States. But the Lobo government has not complied with its part of the Cartegena accords, which included human rights guarantees for the political opposition.

Here are two of the dozens of political killings that have occurred during Lobo’s presidency, as compiled by the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN):

“Pedro Salgado, vice-president of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), was shot then beheaded at about 8:00 p.m. at his home in the La Concepción empresa cooperative. His spouse, Reina Irene Mejía, was also shot to death at the same time. Pedro suffered a murder attempt in December 2010. … Salgado, like the presidents of all the cooperatives claiming rights to land used by African palm oil businessmen in the Aguán, had been subject to constant death threats since the beginning of 2011.”

The courage of these activists and organizers in the face of such horrific violence and repression is amazing.  Many of the killings over the past year have been in the Aguán Valley in the Northeast, where small farmers are struggling for land rights against one of Honduras’ richest landowners, Miguel Facussé.  He is producing biofuels in this region on disputed land.  He is close to the United States and was an important backer of the 2009 coup against Zelaya. His private security forces, together with U.S.-backed military and police, are responsible for the political violence in the region.  U.S. aid to the Honduran military has increased since the coup. … Full article

November 21, 2011 Posted by | Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Struggle to Control Libya’s Military Future

By Moammar Atwi | Al-Ahkbar | November 21, 2011

The struggle for control over Libya’s military establishment is on amid concerns that Western powers want to establish a major NATO base in the country under the guise of fighting ‘terrorism’.

The one-month deadline Libya’s Transitional National Council (NTC) had set for itself to form an interim government ended on Sunday.

If the NTC can reach an agreement with rebel field commanders over the formation of the new government, Libyans would have surpassed the first major hurdle on the path to democracy.

However, there are significant divisions behind this facade of agreement between two contending parties.

One current within the council is close to the United States and is seen to be carrying out Washington’s bidding in the state building process that Libya is currently going through.

Another group seeks to maintain good relations with the West, while retaining some level of independence by minimizing interference from those powers who contributed to the toppling of the former regime.

The latter group can be described as patriotic, consisting of nationalists, leftists, Islamists, and independents. They backed the nomination of Abdel Rahim al-Keib for prime minister and therefore succeeded in winning the first round with the opposing faction.

Al-Keib is a businessman and a moderate technocrat. It seems that he is well regarded by both the majority of political parties within Libya and some of Tripoli’s key foreign backers.

However, the pro-US faction managed to win the second round after Khalifa Haftar was chosen as head of the Libyan National Army, which is in the process of being reactivated.

Haftar, who is known to be a reliable Washington ally, used to be an officer in Gaddafi’s army until he was discharged during Libya’s war with Chad in the late 1980s.

Haftar then broke with Gaddafi and joined the opposition, establishing the “National Army” during his captivity in Chad. He then went on to live in the US before returning to Libya and joining the ranks of the transitional council’s forces in the wake of the uprising last February.

Haftar comes from the al-Furjan tribe, one of the biggest in Libya, with a strong presence in Sirte. He fought for leadership of the rebel army, but was initially sidelined by the late general Abdel Fattah Younes.

Younis had a nationalist orientation; he belonged to the al-Obeidat tribe that dominates Benghazi.

Younes was assassinated last July. Though his death was attributed to Islamists, the identity of his assassins is yet to be revealed. This opened the way for Haftar to take over leadership of the armed forces.

According to numerous reports, Haftar is a longtime CIA agent, and it was the American intelligence agency that dispatched him to Libya during the insurrection to represent Washington’s interests in the TNC.

If Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, becomes the defense minister, the relationship between the ministry of defense and the leadership of the army will not be an easy one, to say the least.

The first sign of tensions between the two men surfaced a few days ago during a meeting held to designate the next head of the Libyan army. The meeting fell apart after rebels objected to the participation of a large number of former army officers.

The very next day, about 150 military officers resolved the matter in a meeting in the city of al-Baida, choosing Haftar to fill the post.

Many analysts speculate that the US and the Europeans are hoping the new Libyan army will play a key role in fighting so-called Islamic terrorism in the Sahel region.

Some even fear that the ground is being prepared for the establishment of a NATO base on Libyan territory under the pretext of fighting ‘terrorism’ in North Africa.

To this end, a number of intelligence reports have been circulated in Western media about the disappearance of large quantities of dangerous weapons and anti-aircraft missiles from Libyan army ammunition stores. The reports suggested that they may have fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda groups operating in Mali, Algeria, and Niger.

Last Wednesday, at a meeting in Algeria of the Working Group of Capacity-Building in the Sahel, US counter-terrorism coordinator Ambassador Daniel Benjamin said, “the terrorist threat is becoming more and more complex with some of the changes that the region is witnessing. This is particularly the case in the neighboring country of Libya.”

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika addressed these concerns in Doha last week in a meeting with TNC Chairman Mustapha Abdul Jalil. Both leaders are worried that the missing weapons issue might be exploited by the West to establish a long-term military base in Libya.

November 20, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

There’s a Tax on Band-Aids, Why not on Credit Default Swaps?

The Washington Stakeout | November 6, 2011

Two House budget committee members — Rep. Heath Shuler, (D-N.C.), and Rep. Mike Simpson, (R- Idaho) — have been making the media rounds as the new faces of establishment bipartisanship in favor of a letter 100 congress people signed on to stating “all options for mandatory” — presumably including Social Security, which adds nothing to the deficit — “and discretionary spending and revenue must be on the table.”

Sam Husseini questioned them as they left the Fox studios on Sunday morning.

Husseini: Most Americans want to see an increase in taxes on the wealthy and corporations, ending the wars, and Congress doesn’t do that. Is that because Congress is basically bought and paid for?

Shuler: “I think the thing that you look at: here’s an opportunity that we can do so much because once the Supercommittee releases its finding and that becomes a bill, and it’s put on the House floor, there’s no amendments to it, it can’t be altered or changed when it goes from the House to the Senate. So that gives us an opportunity to have a clean slate to be able to put everything on the bill, to increase the revenue. The problem is, you don’t find this very often when you have members of the different political parties working together and acting. It’s much easier to split the screen and let us debate and argue something. But we’re united. We’re together. Now we have 100 members in the House and counting, with the 45 members in the Senate. That is the best, most newsworthy thing we can provide for you under the most difficult situations that we have. And to be able to come up with the cuts that’s necessary and the revenue that’s necessary to put us on a more sustainable path.”

Shuler and Simpson’s handlers begin shouting to try to stop the questioning.

Husseini: “Why aren’t you united to tax the rich and the corporations and end the wars? Why aren’t you united for something that is actually popular rather than pursues monied interests?”

Simpson: “We’ve ought to be looking at everything.”

Husseini [holding up box of Band-Aids just off camera]: “Let me ask you this: yesterday I went to a pharmacy and there’s a tax on Band-Aids. Why isn’t there a tax on financial transactions? I had to pay a 6 percent tax on Band-Aids that people need.”

Simpson: “Probably a state sales tax, right?” [Actually, it’s D.C. and D.C. is not a state, with many of its laws set by a Congress that D.C. residents have no real voice in and which Simpson and Shuler are members of.]

Husseini: “What’s your position on financial transaction tax?”

Simpson: “You’d have to look it up.”

Husseini: “Why can’t JP Morgan pay its transaction tax on their dealings [like ordinary people have to pay on necessities like Band-Aids]?”

Shuler and Simpson walk away.

Special thanks to Chris Belcher (video), Sam McCanne (transcription), Jonathan Schwarz, Matthew Bradley, David Swanson, Wendy Mink, Thomas Ferguson and Elisa Salasin for helping.

November 19, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Egyptian Taekwondo Player Refuses to Compete with Israeli

PNN | 17.11.11

Egyptian Taekwondo champion Rawan Ali refused on Wednesday to play against her Israeli counterpart Sevan Fenster in the quartet final of the Croatian Open Taekwondo open tournament in the 47kg category, according to the Israeli website SPORT 1.

The website reported that when Ali was informed of her match again Fenster, she refused to compete and quit the tournament. The rules of the game give players the right to withdraw from the bout without having to provide any justification.

This is not the first time someone has refused to play against an Israeli. A match between an Iranian player and Israel’s Lern Melakhy also did not take place.

Palestinian civil society’s Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) believes that the promotion of Israel as a “fair player” through its participation in sporting teams and individual and international sporting events legitimizes the actions of Israel and the occupation of Palestine.

Over the last few months, Algerian and Tunisian players have also refused to compete with their Israeli opponents. On October 4, Algerian judoka Mariam Moussa refused to compete against Israel’s Shahar Levi in the knockout round of the Judo World Cup, compromising her chances for qualification for the 2012 London Olympics.

Last month, Tunisian fencer Besbas Azzah refused to face her Israeli counterpart Naomi Mills in the final match of the World Fencing Championships, citing her support for the Palestinian cause. Tunisia suspended relations with Israel in 2000 and Algeria has never recognized the country.

November 19, 2011 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

NPR story on Dead Sea Scrolls makes listener feel like a goose being force-fed Israel propaganda

By Philip Weiss on November 19, 2011

NPR did a breathless story Thursday on an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a space called Discovery Times Square– an exhibit mounted in partnership with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, an Israeli governmental authority. But reporter Margot Adler didn’t tell you that.

Adler: … you can roam past artifacts from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, some never shown before. Statues, pottery, jewelry, Roman Hellenistic and objects from ancient Israel, the first and second temple periods.

I don’t know that that’s properly described as “ancient Israel.” These artifacts are from all over lands ruled by many different kingdoms. Qumram, the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, is today in the Occupied West Bank, what we now call Palestine.

Adler: [Curator] Risa Levitt Kohn says there are 350 active excavations going on in Israel at any time

Again, I don’t think these excavations are going on in Israel. The Israeli Antiquities Authority — with whom Levitt Kohn works closely — lists many excavations underway in occupied territories, including the Golan, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

Adler: and one purpose of the exhibit is to help people appreciate the ancient world.

Huh. Is that really the purpose of the exhibit? Somehow I doubt it.

November 19, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

John Laughland’s prescience on the Arab Spring ‘revolutions’ and the ongoing co-option of the anti-war left

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | November 19, 2011

Back in 2005, British journalist John Laughland wrote two excellent op-ed pieces for the Guardian. In “The mythology of people power,” Laughland commented on the recently deposed President of Kyrgyzstan’s reference to the role of a criminal “third force” in the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew him:

Originally used as a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa, before being adopted by the US-backed “pro-democracy” movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which details how western-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third “people power” revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year – after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas – means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country’s control over the western hemisphere.

Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: “supporting democracy”.

But for some reason, many on the left seem not to have noticed this continuity. Perhaps this is because these events are being energetically presented as radical and leftwing even by commentators and political activists on the right, for whom revolutionary violence is now cool.

As protesters ransacked the presidential palace in Bishkek last week (unimpeded by the police who were under strict instructions not to use violence), a Times correspondent enthused about how the scenes reminded him of Bolshevik propaganda films about the 1917 revolution. The Daily Telegraph extolled “power to the people”, while the Financial Times welcomed Kyrgyzstan’s “long march” to freedom.

This myth of the masses spontaneously rising up against an authoritarian regime now exerts such a grip over the collective imagination that it persists despite being obviously false: try to imagine the American police allowing demonstrators to ransack the White House, and you will immediately understand that these “dictatorships” in the former USSR are in reality among the most fragile, indulgent and weak regimes in the world.

In “Enemies bought, friends sold,” Laughland noted the similar failure to understand the subsequent upheaval in neighbouring Uzbekistan:

The twist this time is that President Karimov of Uzbekistan is presented as a pro-US tyrant rather than a Soviet-era throwback – so anti-war left and liberal commentators have been co-opted into baying for his blood. Yet their support for the latest “people power” movement to shake a former Soviet republic is naive. They seem not to have noticed that Uzbekistan is home to precisely the same network of US-funded non-governmental organisations, human rights activists and media outlets that helped to engineer pro-US “revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Take the source of Friday’s atrocity reports from Andijan: one “opposition journalist” from the website ferghana.ru, which seems to be a shop window for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. IWPR, which has since provided the bulk of reports in the western press, is overwhelmingly funded by western governments and private foundations close to them: the US state department, USAid, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Institute for Peace, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the British Foreign Office, the European commission, the OSCE, Unesco, and other European governments, among others.

People who reason that the US supports President Karimov, and will therefore turn a blind eye to his alleged excesses, do not understand the thrust of current American policy, which is to try to support and control all sides in any political equation. As in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan under former President Akayev, Uzbekistan is home to scores of western-backed NGOs that agitate politically for the opposition. For instance, Freedom House – a notorious CIA front and the main architect of the orange revolution in Ukraine – has an office in Tashkent.

If Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak had read the conclusion to Laughland’s April 1 piece, they could have been forgiven for thinking it was intended as an April Fool’s joke:

But perhaps the clearest message sent by Akayev’s overthrow is this: in the new world order the sudden replacement of party cadres hangs as a permanent threat – or incentive – over even the most compliant apparatchik.

Now, they know better. But most anti-war left and liberal commentators remain as clueless as ever.

November 19, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Dubious IAEA ‘intelligence’ used as pretext for tougher sanctions

The Real News | November 12, 2011

November 19, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Indigenous Guarani chief killed in Brazil

Press TV – November 19, 2011

Masked armed men have burst into a Guarani Indian camp in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul and killed the local chief.

According to the government agency for Indigenous people (FUNAI, 42 heavily armed men attacked the Kaiowa Guarani community in the village of Amambai, near the border with Paraguay, and shot the 59-year-old indigenous chief, Nisio Gomes, in the head, chest, arms, and legs early on Friday morning, AFP reported.

Gomes’ body was then driven away. He is believed to have been the main target of the attack.

FUNAI said other indigenous people from the tribe might also have been killed or kidnapped.

“They came to kill our chief,” said one Indian who witnessed the attack and requested anonymity for security reasons.

Most of the community’s 60 residents fled the camp and sought refuge in the forest during the attack.

Members of the community say this is not the first time they have been attacked since their return.

Gomes was the leader of a group of Guarani Indians, 60 of whom returned to part of their ancestral land in Mato Grosso do Sul in early November, after being evicted by cattle ranchers.

The tribe has seen virtually all its land stolen in recent decades by farmers and cattle ranchers.

One Guarani Indian said, “We’ll stay on the camp. We’ll all die here. We will not leave our ancestral land.”

The incident was the latest outbreak of violence linked to land disputes in Brazil, where one percent of the population controls 46 percent of the cultivated land.

The Guarani have been trying to recover a small portion of their original territories but face violent resistance from wealthy ranchers and soya and sugar cane plantation owners.

November 18, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Tested on Palestinians, Perfected on #OWS Protesters: Introducing the LRAD Sound Cannon

By Max Blumenthal | Al-Ahkbar | 2011-11-18

Yesterday, the New York Police Department deployed a strange new weapon against the tens of thousands of demonstrators who converged downtown for the largest protest in Occupy Wall Street’s two month history: the LRAD sound cannon. NYPD officers reportedly blasted Occupy protesters with rays from the LRAD cannon while they sang the American national anthem near Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park (photos here), establishing an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that lasted throughout the evening.

Designed and manufactured by the San Diego-based LRAD Corporation, which was formerly known as the American Technology Corporation, the Long Range Acoustic Device sound weapon is the latest innovation in crowd suppression technology. It is portable and powerful, capable of transmitting a focused ray of 140 decibels of sound at a crowd of people, generating painful cranial vibrations so profound ear plugs become useless. According to LRAD promotional material, the sonic weapon “provides military personnel with a powerful, penetrating warning tone that can be followed by clear voice broadcasts in host nation languages to warn and shape the behavior of potential threats.”

In June, LRAD sold $293,000 worth of its 100X and 500X sound canon systems to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The contract was part of Israeli Army Commander Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi’s investment in $35 million in suppression systems in anticipation of widespread unrest in the occupied West Bank that would supposedly be prompted by the Palestinian Authority’s statehood bid at the United Nations.

The Israeli Army has refined the use of LRAD systems on the civilian population of Palestinian villages engaged in the unarmed popular struggle against Israel’s illegal military occupation. Demonstrators in the village of Beit Ummar have been repeatedly assaulted by Israeli forces armed with LRAD systems, including on October 7, when the Israeli army used the LRAD to attack unarmed demonstrators protesting against the abuse and isolation of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

I first visited the Beit Ummar area in the spring of 2009, joining a group of international and Israeli activists as they protected the village’s farmers from fanatical Jewish settlers from the colony of Bat Ayn, who had repeatedly assaulted them as they attempted to work their fields. As soon as I arrived I witnessed a group of Jewish children from Bat Ayn charge down a hill while chanting, “Death to Arabs!” at the farmers.

In January 2011, settlers shot a Beit Ummar resident, 17-year-old Yousef Fakhri Ikhlayl in the head, leaving him brain dead. The settlers could not carry out their deadly violence without the protection of the Israeli Army, which invariably defends them while crushing unarmed protests in Beit Ummar with disproportionate force.

Beit Ummar has carried on its unarmed popular resistance struggle against impossible odds. The village has been severed in half by a settler bypass road, Highway 60, which occupied Palestinians are forbidden from traveling on. Numerous graves in the village cemetery were desecrated in order to build the Israelis-only highway. Not only are village residents surrounded by army pillboxes and preyed on by extremist settlers, they have been transformed into experimental gerbils in the global pacification industry’s laboratory of doom.

Having been tested on a defenseless, occupied population in Palestine, the LRAD made its grand debut in New York City yesterday, where local police forces targeted American citizens peacefully protesting against economic exploitation. The peculiar weapon system symbolizes the creeping Israelification of America’s local police forces and the Palestinianization of all who challenge the predations of a zero tolerant 1 percent master class.

As the blogger Ayesha Kazmi recently wrote to Occupy movement participants, “So welcome to the War on Terror. Your first lesson, if your views happen to counter the established narrative, expect to be dehumanised, then treated like a terrorist.”

November 18, 2011 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Iran raps IAEA for divulging names

Press TV – November 18, 2011

The Iranian envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has denounced the nuclear supervisory body for publicizing the names of Iran’s nuclear scientists, Press TV reports.

“The release of the names of the Iranian nuclear scientists by the agency has made them targets for assassination by terrorist groups as well as the Israeli regime and the US intelligence services,” Ali Asghar Soltaniyeh said in a letter to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano.

Soltaniyeh argued that disclosing the names of Iranian experts is a violation of the agency’s statute and the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement.

Iran’s IAEA ambassador also described the agency’s report as politically-motivated and noted that Tehran reserves the right to seek consequential damages for any possible harm inflicted upon persons or property.

On November 8, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano released a report claiming that Iran had engaged in activities related to developing nuclear weapons before 2003, adding that these activities “may still be ongoing.”

Iran has dismissed Amano’s latest report on its nuclear program as “unbalanced, unprofessional and prepared with political motivation and under political pressure by mostly the United States.”

Several Iranian scientists have been assassinated since 2007, including Massoud Ali-Mohammadi and Majid Shahriari.

Professor Ali-Mohammadi, a lecturer at Tehran University, was killed by a booby-trapped motorbike in the Iranian capital in January 2010. The bombing took place near the professor’s home in the Qeytariyeh neighborhood of northern Tehran.

On November 29, 2010, unidentified terrorists attached bombs to the vehicles of Iranian university professors Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi and detonated them. Professor Shahriari was killed immediately, but Dr. Abbasi and his wife sustained minor injuries and were rushed to hospital.

On December 2, 2010, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry announced that the Mossad, the CIA, and the MI6 all played a role in those attacks.

November 18, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Eyes Strong Ties with East African States

Al-Manar | November 18, 2011

Israel is looking at Africa’s east as an important strategic interest, and trying to step up ties with nations in the region under the name of “controlling the spread of Islamic extremists”.

The Associated Press reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted the leaders of Uganda and Kenya earlier this week.

The Kenyan leader has said that the Zionist entity has promised to provide ‘security assistance’ to his country to help protect its borders.

Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has said Netanyahu promised to help build “a coalition against fundamentalism,” bringing together the countries Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Tanzania. The African country also has said Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has told him Israel is ready to make “everything available to Kenya” for internal security.

For the Israeli part, Netanyahu’s office refuses to comment on Odinga’s claims, while Peres’ office suggests the Kenyan leader has gone too far.

An official in the Peres’ office says he has boasted that Israel is one of the most advanced countries in the world regarding homeland security and would be happy to share its expertise with any country fighting “global terror.” But the official, speaking on condition of anonymity says no specifics have been discussed.

Another Israeli official says an alliance with Kenya and other eastern African countries is natural.

An agency quotes Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev as saying: “We have joint interests and we believe that mutual cooperation can be beneficial to us all”.

Uganda and Kenya have been battling al-Shabab, a Somalia-based ‘al-Qaeda’ linked group.

According to AP, the Zionist entity also has intentions to build strong ties with the newly liberated South Sudan whose president has held a meeting with Netanyahu at the United Nations in September.

In Israel’s eyes, eastern Africa poses a potential hinterland where ‘al-Qaeda’ and other militants can potentially forge ties with similarly minded groups just to the north in Egypt and Gaza. Israeli officials already believe that Sudan is a pathway for smugglers providing weapons to militants in Gaza and the Sinai, and that ‘al-Qaeda’ linked groups in Egypt have been behind a deadly cross-border raid in August that killed eight Israelis.

The Zionist entity already has military ties with several African countries, including Nigeria, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast.

Relations with Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan have not yet reached that stage, though Israel’s “Defense” Ministry has given clearance for private Israeli security firms to operate in those nations, including some arms sales. Israeli defense officials say intelligence sharing is limited to a few close allies at this stage.

“The Ministry of Defense has excellent relations with a number of friendly nations in Africa, especially internal security and counterterrorism,” an official said, refusing to elaborate. He was not allowed to be identified under ministry regulations.

Israel has a long history of involvement in Africa, sending experts in agriculture and development, as well as military advisers and mercenaries, over the years.

November 18, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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