NABLUS — A 14-year-old Palestinian was hurt by Israeli forces on Tuesday during clashes with settlers in Asira Al-Qibliya village south of Nablus, witnesses and medics said.
Medics said Israeli forces shot Aref Aref in the back, during confrontations which erupted after dozens of settlers marched on the village. AFP said he was hurt by a tear-gas canister.
A journalist, Ayman An-Noubany, was also injured by a rock, medics said, adding that they were both taken to Rafedia Hospital in Nablus.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said forces used “riot dispersal means” to respond to clashes in the village. She was not aware that any teenagers were shot at, but said a Palestinian man was injured “probably by a rock hurled by an Israeli civilian.”
Palestinian fire fighters said they extinguished a blaze in the garden of a home in Asira Al-Qibiliya. The fire was believed to have been sparked by a tear gas grenade, a civil defense report said.
Volunteers from a watchdog committee set up to document settler attacks said around 40 settlers tried to raid Asira Al-Qibiliya, and that they were protected by Israeli forces.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.
The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.
NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.
The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.
This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).
Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.
Excerpts from: Gilmour, David. Lebanon, The Fractured Country. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. 1983, pages 174-176
“The following morning, at 11:30 a.m. on Friday 17 September, General Drori ordered the militiamen to stop their operation, but after a further meeting with Phalangist officers the Israelis agreed to let them remain in the camps until the following day. Hobeika was also given permission to use two battalions of fresh troops and in the afternoon another force of militiamen entered the camps where they began a new round of killing. The Israeli commander in Beirut, General Yaron, has since admitted that, in spite of the fact that Israeli officers had known for several hours that the massacres were taking place, the Phalangists were allowed to call up reinforcements and remain in the camps for a further thirty-six hours. The militiamen rampaged around Sabra and Shatila until Saturday morning killing indiscriminately: nurses were raped by the killer gangs and then shot, children were scalped, patients from two hospitals were dragged from their beds and knifed to death. The Phalangists left most of their victims where they killed them, in their homes or in the streets, but some of them borrowed Israeli bulldozers and tried to cover up their deeds by shovelling corpses into mass graves. Because some of the victims were taken away and never seen again, and because it was decided not to open up some of the graves, it will never be known how many people were butchered. But perhaps as many as 2,000 people were killed and not even Sharon can pretend that these were the ‘terrorists’ he was allegedly looking for.”
…
“On the morning of 18 September, Morris Draper, another of President Reagan’s envoys dispatched to Beirut, sent a message to Sharon alleging Israeli responsibility: ‘You must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You ought to be ashamed. They situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area, and therefore responsible for that area.’ But the responsibility was greater than Draper suggested. On 15 September Israeli troops had surrounded Sabra and Shatila. They were never more than 300 yards away from the camps and sometimes as close as 50 yards. Moreover, Israeli soldiers were on the roof of the Kuwait embassy nearby and could see what was happening in both camps. There is a mass of evidence to show that the Israelis knew that a massacre was in progress by Thursday evening but did nothing to stop it until Saturday morning.” …
“There is further evidence which indicates the extent of Israel’s complicity in the massacre. The discovery in one of the camps of an Israeli sergeant’s identity tag does not prove that he actually took part in the killing but it is significant that the Israeli army did not allow him to appear before the Israeli Commission of Enquiry. More importantly, the Israelis were prepared to assist their Phalangist allies in a number of different ways: they lent bulldozers so that the killers could bury some of the dead; they fired flares throughout the night of 16 September–at a rate of two a minute according to one Israeli soldier — so that the killers could see what they were doing; worst of all, they prevented civilians from fleeing and forced those who tried back into the camps.”
The instructions were simple. “Get up you fucking bastard”, “Get up you fucking ape” screamed the soldiers, followed by kicks and punches. Sometimes the blows came from multiple fists and boots.
Getting up meant squatting, half leaning against a wall, arms pointing straight out. This is known as a stress position.
The British army made ten Iraqi hotel workers spend days like this. Even if they stayed in position they were beaten, had urine poured over them or were forced to drink it. They had their heads covered with hoods.
It is torture and it was systematic. It is what being “questioned” by the occupying forces in Iraq really meant.
By the end of this ordeal, hotel worker Baha Mousa was dead. One soldier later remarked, “We kicked him to death”.
British soldiers inflicted “violent and cowardly” assaults on Iraqi civilians, according to a public inquiry into the killing published last week. The Gage inquiry concluded that an “appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence” by the British army killed Baha.
Baha died within 36 hours of being taken into British military custody. He received 93 external injuries, including a broken nose and also internal injuries including fractured ribs.
He died from asphyxia.
The case is an indictment of military culture. It shows the vicious treatment that the army doled out to civilians it interrogated.
Robbed
The torture of Baha Mousa began when the army raided a hotel in Basra, Iraq, on 14 September 2003. Baha had only been working at the hotel for about two weeks. It was one of three jobs that he had in order to support his family.
The army arrested ten workers in the raid—and soldiers robbed the safe. A number of those arrested were kicked and their heads were held in flushing toilets. Much worse was to come.
Soldiers took the ten away with instructions not to use hoods—because a TV crew had turned up outside. But they beat the prisoners again before reaching the detention centre. Once there, the ordeal began in earnest. Prisoners recalled being beaten to force them to dance “like Michael Jackson”.
The inquiry heard evidence that they were scalded with boiling water, urinated on, kicked, punched and sleep deprived.
One recalled how he was given a bottle in which to urinate. When he asked for a drink on the third day, the contents of this bottle were poured into his mouth.
A soldier also grabbed his face through the sandbags and tried to force his fingers into the detainee’s eyes.
Others were given scalding water to drink and cold water was poured over their heads. One heard Baha Mousa shouting and screaming, saying, “I’ll die”, “my nose”, “I’m bleeding”.
The soldiers had a competition to see who could kick a prisoner the hardest.
The report notes that one prisoner “had petrol rubbed under his nose, water poured over his head and a lighter held close to his head, with the obvious intention of causing him to think petrol was about to be ignited.”
And so it continued. “For almost the whole of the period up to Baha Mousa’s death… the detainees were kept handcuffed, hooded and in stress positions in extreme heat and conditions of some squalor,” the report said.
The inquiry was also played a video of one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, screaming at the prisoners and calling them “fucking apes”.
Payne became the first member of the armed forces to be convicted of a war crime when he pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating civilians at a court martial in 2006.
The soldiers put on a show where they made the prisoners into a “choir”—by beating them till they screamed. “Towards the end of the second day they were all in so much pain that he only had to poke them to get them to make a noise,” said former soldier Gareth Aspinall in the report evidence. “When visitors came across they also found it funny.”
On one occasion, soldiers held a “free for all” where a number of them attacked all the Iraqis at once. In between the beatings, prisoners were questioned. They had done nothing wrong.
Failed
The report names 19 soldiers as having assaulted prisoners—although the inquiry has not been able to identify several others. It says that Colonel Jorge Mendonca, the unit’s commander, “bears a heavy responsibility for these events”. Retired appeal court judge Sir William Gage accepted that Mendonca did not know that the abuse was going on.
But he said Mendonca failed by not knowing “precisely what conditioning involved”.
The report does not say that there was systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners. But it does point out that Baha’s death wasn’t a one-off incident.
Gage puts the blame at the door of individual soldiers and officers, as well as on poor internal communications. He condemns the “loss of discipline and a lack of moral courage” that meant soldiers did not report the abuse.
Soldiers repeatedly lied about what went on. Time and time again, soldiers claimed not to remember what they had seen or done.
That amnesia went right to the top.
Killing
Senior commanders were apparently ignorant of a ban imposed in 1972 on the use of five torture techniques, including hooding, stress positions and sleep deprivation.
While highly critical of the evidence of a number of soldiers, and of the lies told about the Iraqis’ detention, Gage ruled that there was no cover-up of Baha’s death.
After Baha’s killing, the government claimed that hooding of prisoners had stopped, which it hadn’t, and that it wasn’t used for interrogations, which it was.
The report says that while the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had provided inaccurate information, neither it, the civil service, nor ministers had intended to mislead. Instead the inquiry condemns the “corporate failure” of the MoD.
This included then armed forces minister Adam Ingram’s claim that he was “not aware of any incidents in which UK interrogators are alleged to have used hooding as an interrogation technique”.
But Ingram had been sent a memo explaining what had happened to Baha Mousa. Ingram claimed, “It certainly would not have been within my power to remember everything that I had been informed.”
The report also notes the memory loss of then Labour defence secretary Geoff Hoon. It says, “His answers suggested that he had not perhaps fully grasped the respect in which his response turned out to have been inaccurate.”
The report provides evidence that soldiers were trained in what are essentially torture techniques. This, combined with a culture of racism and violence, explains why torture was so commonplace.
Private Stuart MacKenzie of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment was one of those guarding Baha. Just days before the hotel raid, MacKenzie wrote in his diary, “Found 3 Ali Babas at WTP7, beat them up with sticks, filmed it. Good day so far.”
The inquiry concludes only that there should be better training for what the army calls “the harsh approach”. And it proposes the army drops teaching methods to “maintain the shock of capture” and “prolong the shock of capture”.
The government immediately rejected this, claiming that lives could be put at risk unless the army could deploy all “necessary” techniques.
The inquiry has shone a light on the brutality of the war in Iraq. But it has left the establishment untouched, the command structure and the politicians blameless. That is not justice.
An explosion at the southern French nuclear plant of Marcoule, located in the Gard department in Languedoc-Roussillon region, has killed one and injured four others.
The powerful explosion struck the area at 11:45 local time (09:45 GMT) on Monday, Associated Press reported.
French officials say the explosion was caused by a fire near a furnace in the Centraco radioactive waste storage site.
“According to initial information, the explosion happened in an oven used to melt radioactive metallic waste of little and very little radioactivity,” the French Nuclear Safety Authority said in a statement.
The agency further warned of the possibility of a radiation leak threat of an oven at the nuclear site.
The Marcoule plant is one of France’s oldest nuclear plants still operating and is located in the Gard department in Languedoc-Roussillon region.
The plant is a nuclear waste management facility that does not include any reactors. The site is partly used to produce MOX fuel that recycles plutonium from nuclear weapons.
Nuclear energy provides nearly 70 percent of France’s nuclear energy needs. France is the world’s most nuclear-reliant country with 58 nuclear reactors.
John Gross, one of the lead engineers of the NIST report is quesitoned about the existance of molten steel at the WTC building, the collapse of Building 7, and also explains how the NIST report did not do any analysis concerning the physical collapse of all three buidlings. John Gross was asked to come speak at the University of Texas at Austin by the Phil. M. Ferguson fund.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has decided to shake off allegations of systematic abuse at any cost, as hard evidence corroborates the British Army’s use of torture techniques.
The findings of an inquiry into the death of an Iraqi civilian at the hands of British soldiers has sparked widespread criticism, even condemnation, of the treatment of Iraqi detainees by British soldiers.
Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist, was detained when soldiers from the First Battalion of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in the Iraqi city of Basra raided the hotel at which he worked. Two days later, Mousa died while in British Army custody.
The MoD was optimistic about the findings of the inquiry into Mousa’s death trying to bypass any allegations of systematic torture. Nevertheless, as the MoD tries in vain to persuade the public that its detention policies have undergone systematic reforms, analysts have come up with evidence that contradicts any such claims.
A high profile British human rights lawyer, Phil Shiner, has provided several reasons supporting the systematic use of torture and abuse in the British military during the Iraq war.
First, Shiner asserts that the detention policies, which involved torture and abuse, were not restricted to just one battle group, namely 1QLR, as he states that such practices were common, at least, at 14 UK facilities over the period between March 2003 and December 2008.
Shiner asserts that the set of techniques and practices included “unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, temperature manipulation and solitary confinement for weeks.”
Second, Shiner says that the shameful techniques and practices were systematically taught, as the Joint Forward Intelligence Team was the mastermind behind the techniques used by British troops.
Furthermore, as the British Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, refused to accept a key finding of the inquiry, Shiner is of the opinion that the MoD has no intention of implementing the “73 carefully measured recommendations” made by the chairman of Mousa’s inquiry, Sir William Gage.
Shiner predicts that the MoD “will continue to hide damaging documents, mislead our courts, run unworthy legal arguments and use its mighty coercive power to keep the public in the dark, not just about Iraq but also Afghanistan.”
More importantly, Shiner argues that the MoD still approves the very same shameful techniques employed by interrogators in Iraq, though Sir William has severely criticised such practices. Forcing a person or two into a sandbag, harshing, and hooding are techniques that are still used by the MoD.
Video Report
Press TV News/Analysis on September 8, 2011
What do Baha Mousa, Ian Tomlinson, Smiley Culture and Mark Dugan have in common? They are people who have died because of tactics used by UK police and in Baha Mousa’s case, British soldiers, why are “unlawful killings” as they are called taking place in the first place? Whether inside Britain or in war zones, it has put the spotlight on UK’s disproportionate and excessive use of force, as was evident in the recent unrest in the UK.
A retired college professor who has sailed approximately 8,000 miles to the eastern Mediterranean has now arrived at his destination: the exact location where Israeli forces tried to sink a US Navy ship in 1967, killing or injuring over 200 American servicemen.
Larry Toenjes, 74 years old, is planning to hold a memorial service for those killed on board the ship, the USS Liberty. Israel shelled and torpedoed the ship, an electronics surveillance ship, in an attack that lasted as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
While Israel and its partisans have tried to claim that the attack was “a mistake,” a 2003 inquiry by an independent commission led by a retired four-star Navy Admiral, a Rear Admiral, and the highest ranking Medal of Honor recipient in the U.S., a Marine General, announced on Capitol Hill that all the evidence indicated that the attack had been intentional, had consisted of an act of war against the United States by Israel, and that a cover-up had been ordered by the White House.
In addition, the commission found that rescue flights had been recalled by President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. While almost no media covered the Capitol Hill briefing, a full record of its findings is in the Congressional Record and Stars and Stripes military newspaper. [more information on the incident]
Toenjes, who departed from Galveston, Texas, almost four months ago, is accompanied by Marine veteran Rusty Glenn, also from Texas, who joined him in Malta. While there has been concern that Israel might interfere with their voyage as it has other boats in the Mediterranean, ramming and hijacking some, so far Israel seems to be ignoring the voyage. Toenjes will remain 12 miles offshore, in international waters, where the attack took place.
In a column published by the Galveston News, Toenjes explained that he was undertaking the voyage for two primary purposes: to honor the men who died in service to their country and to try to draw attention to attempts by their surviving families and crew-mates to obtain the full government investigation that is legally required but that has been blocked by the powerful Israel Lobby.
Toenjes’ trip is being tracked on the website of the Council for the National Interest (CNI), which will stream live his memorial service later today, which will be carried by satellite phone to a radio program hosted by a Liberty survivor, Phil Tourney.
While the national media have ignored this voyage, Toenjes and Liberty survivors hope that the American public will learn about his undertaking by word of mouth, blogs, and social media.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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