Israel’s War on Innocence: Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Courts
By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | August 7, 2019
On July 29, 4-year-old Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan was reportedly summoned for interrogation by the Israeli police in occupied Jerusalem. The news, originally reported by the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA, was later denied by the Israeli police, more than likely in an attempt to lessen the impact of the PR disaster that followed.
The Israelis are not denying the story in its entirety, but are rather arguing that it was not the boy, Muhammad, who was summoned, but his father. It was Rabi’ Elayyan, they claim, who was called into the Israeli police station in Salah Eddin Street in Jerusalem to be questioned regarding his son’s actions.
The child was accused of hurling a stone at Israeli occupation soldiers in the Issawiyeh neighborhood, which is a constant target for Israeli violence. The neighborhood has also been the tragic location of house demolitions under the pretext that Palestinians there are building without permits. Of course, the vast majority of Palestinian applications for such permits to build in Issawiyeh, or anywhere else in Jerusalem, are denied routinely, while Jewish settlers are allowed to build on stolen Palestinian land unhindered.
As such, Issawiyeh is no stranger to the ridiculous and unlawful behavior of the Israeli army. On July 6, for example, a mother from the beleaguered neighborhood was arrested in order to put pressure on her teenage son, Mahmoud Ebeid, to turn himself in. The mother “was taken by Israeli police as a bargaining chip,” Mondoweiss reported, quoting the Jerusalem-based Wadi Hileh Information Centre.
The Israeli authorities are justified in feeling embarrassed by the whole episode concerning the 4-year-old boy, thus the attempt to poke holes in the story. The fact is, though, that WAFA’s correspondent in Jerusalem had, indeed, verified that the warrant was in Muhammad’s, not Rabi’s, name.
While some news sources bought into the Israeli propaganda and readily conveyed the cries of “fake news”, one must bear in mind that this was hardly a one-off incident. For Palestinians, such news about the detention, beating, and killing of their children has been one of the most consistent features of the Israeli occupation since 1967.
Just one day after Muhammad was summoned, the Israeli authorities also interrogated the father of a 6-year-old child, Qais Firas Obaid, from the same neighborhood of Issawiyeh. This particular boy was accused of throwing a juice carton at Israeli soldiers.
“According to local sources in Issawiyeh the [Israeli] military sent Qais’s family an official summons to come to the interrogation center in Jerusalem on Wednesday [July 31] at 8 am,” reported the International Middle East Media Centre (IMEMC). In one photo, the little boy is holding the Israeli military order written in Hebrew up to the camera.
The stories of Muhammad and Qais are the norm, not the exception. According to the prisoners’ advocacy group, Addameer, there are currently 250 Palestinian children being held in Israel’s prisons. Approximately 700 Palestinian children are taken through the Israeli military court system every single year.
“The most common charge levied against children is throwing stones,” reports Addameer, “a crime that is punishable under military law by up to 20 years in prison.”
That is why Israel has every right to be embarrassed. Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, some 12,000 Palestinian children have been detained and interrogated by the Israeli army.
Moreover, it is not only children and their families who are targeted by the Israeli military but also those who advocate on their behalf. Just last week, on July 30, Palestinian lawyer Tariq Barghouth was sentenced to 13 years in prison by an Israeli military court for “firing at Israeli buses and at security forces on a number of occasions.”
As unlikely as the accusation of a well-known lawyer firing at “buses” may sound, it is important to note that Barghouth is well-regarded for his defense of Palestinian children in court. He has also been a headache for the Israeli military court system for his strong defense of Ahmad Manasra.
The then 13-year-old boy was tried and indicted in Israeli military court for allegedly stabbing and wounding two Israelis near the illegal Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev in Occupied Jerusalem in 2015. Manasra’s cousin, Hassan, 15, was killed on the spot, while the wounded Ahmad was tried in court as an adult. It was Barghouth who challenged and denounced the Israeli court for the harsh interrogation and for secretly filming the wounded child as he was tied to his hospital bed.
On August 2, 2016, Israel passed a law that allows the authorities to “imprison a minor convicted of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder or manslaughter even if he or she is under the age of 14.” The law was crafted conveniently to deal with cases like that of Ahmad Manasra, who was sentenced on November 7, the same year, three months after the law was approved, to 12 years in prison.
Manasra’s case, the leaked videos of his abuse by Israeli interrogators and his harsh sentence placed more international focus on the plight of Palestinian children in the Israeli military court system. “Israeli interrogators are seen relying on verbal abuse, intimidation and threats to apparently inflict mental suffering for the purpose of obtaining a confession,” attorney and international advocacy officer at Defence for Children — Palestine, Brad Parker, said at the time.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Israel has been a signatory since 1991, “prohibits torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Yet, explains Parker, “Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children arrested by Israeli military and police is widespread and systematic.”
So systematic, in fact, that videos and reports of arresting very young Palestinian children are almost a staple on social media platforms concerned with Palestine and Palestinian rights.
The sad reality is that Muhammad Elayyan, 4, and Qais Obaid, 6, and many children like them, have become a target of Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This horrendous reality must not be tolerated by the international community.
Israeli crimes against Palestinian children must be confronted effectively for the simple reason that Israel, its inhumane laws and iniquitous military courts must not be allowed to continue their uncontested brutalization of those who are, at the end of the day, children. Israel’s war on their innocence must be stopped.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London).
Did Bill Barr Call His Shot? Unanswered Questions about FBI’s Foreknowledge of the El Paso Shooting
William Barr’s warning that a “major incident” could occur “at any time” and “galvanize public opinion” around the unpopular encryption back-door policy he has been seeking seems to have come true in the weeks since the attorney general made those statements.
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | August 7, 2019
As a series of recent mass shootings have brought renewed demands for the U.S. government to do something to address the spike in “lone wolf” violence, the Trump administration’s decision to blame internet privacy, controversial websites like 8chan, and social media for the shootings has raised eyebrows from across the political spectrum, particularly in light of claims that Trump’s recent rhetoric about immigrants may have incited some of the shooters.
During a press conference on Monday, Trump blamed the internet for the three most recent mass shooting events:
We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts. We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start…. The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored, and they will not be ignored… We cannot allow ourselves to feel powerless. We can and will stop this evil contagion.”
Yet, not long before the recent spate of mass shootings began, U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave a speech on July 23 in which he spoke of the need for all consumer electronic devices and encrypted software to have a backdoor for the government to bypass encryption, essentially calling for many of the same measures that Trump has proposed following the recent shootings.
Notably, Barr concluded his speech by stating that he anticipated “a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.” In other words, just a few days prior to the recent spate of mass shootings, William Barr stated that he anticipated a public safety crisis that “may well occur at any time” and would reduce public resistance to the further erosion of civil liberties that he was advocating for in his speech.
Furthermore, the FBI, which operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice and reports directly to William Barr, has now stated that it was aware of the El Paso shooter’s plan to murder civilians via a post made on 8chan at least two hours before the shooting took place. 8chan — a controversial website that the FBI is known to have used to incite violence as part of its controversial terrorist entrapment strategy — has since been banned in the shooting’s aftermath. In addition, less than two months ago, the FBI obtained a warrant for 8chan’s host — Ch.net — in which the Bureau demanded access to the entire contents of the accounts that were of interest in that specific investigation, suggesting that the FBI had increased access to information of hundreds of 8chan accounts in the lead-up to the recent shootings.
The overlap between Barr’s recent speech and Trump’s proposed solution to the massacres, as well as the FBI’s unusual recent relationship with 8chan, has led some to suggest that the Trump administration is taking advantage of the tragedy at El Paso and of other recent mass shootings to impose unpopular restrictions on civil liberties and increase the mass surveillance of innocent Americans.
An uncanny prediction
On Tuesday, July 23, Attorney General William Barr gave the keynote address at the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) at Fordham University. The focus of Barr’s speech was the need for consumer electronic products and applications that use encryption to offer a “backdoor” for the government, specifically law enforcement, to obtain access to encrypted communications as a matter of public safety.
Early in his speech, Barr stated:
Service providers, device manufacturers and application developers are developing and deploying encryption that can only be decrypted by the end user or customer, and they are refusing to provide technology that allows for lawful access by law enforcement agencies in appropriate circumstances….
While encryption protects against cyberattacks, deploying it in warrant-proof form jeopardizes public safety more generally. The net effect is to reduce the overall security of society.”
Barr went onto say that “warrant-proof encryption is also seriously impairing our ability to monitor and combat domestic and foreign terrorists.” Barr stated that “smaller terrorist groups and ‘lone wolf’ actors” — such as those involved in the series of mass shootings in California, Texas and Ohio that would occur in the weeks after his speech — “have turned increasingly to encryption.” Barr later notes that he is specifically referencing encryption used by “consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, email, and voice and data applications.”
Barr then laid out his vision of what the solution to this challenge posed by “warrant-proof encryption” would look like:
We believe that when technology providers deploy encryption in their products, services, and platforms they need to maintain an appropriate mechanism for lawful access. This means a way for government entities, when they have appropriate legal authority, to access data securely, promptly, and in an intelligible format, whether it is stored on a device or in transmission.
We do not seek to prescribe any particular solution. Our private-sector technology providers have immensely talented engineers who have built the very products and services that we are talking about. They are in the best position to determine what methods of lawful access work best for their technology.”
After laying out his vision, Barr stated that, while he would like to give private companies time to willingly cooperate and comply with his suggested solution to “warrant-proof encryption,” “the time to achieve that [government back-doors into electronic consumer apps and products] may be limited.”
To overcome the resistance by some private companies — who do not want to renege on their right to privacy by giving the government back-door access to their devices — and American consumers, Barr tellingly anticipates that a “major incident” will soon take place that will mold public opinion in favor of his proposed solution.
Barr concluded his speech by stating:
I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.
As this debate has dragged on, and deployment of warrant-proof encryption has accelerated, our ability to protect the public from criminal threats is rapidly deteriorating. The status quo is exceptionally dangerous, unacceptable, and only getting worse.
The rest of the world has woken up to this threat. It is time for the United States to stop debating whether to address it, and start talking about how to address it.” (emphases added)
On Thursday, July 25, the last day of the ICCS conference, FBI Director Christopher Wray also echoed Barr’s call for government back-doors into encrypted software and apps, stating in his speech:
Cybersecurity is a central part of the FBI’s mission. But as the attorney general discussed earlier this week, our request for lawful access cannot be considered in a vacuum. It’s got to be viewed more broadly, taking into account the American public’s interest in the security and safety of our society, and our way of life. That’s important because this is an issue that’s getting worse and worse all the time.
There’s one thing I know for sure: It cannot be a sustainable end state for us to be creating an unfettered space that’s beyond lawful access for terrorists, hackers and child predators to hide. But that’s the path we’re on now, if we don’t come together to solve this problem.”
A new phase of an old campaign
The speeches given by Barr and Wray are the most recent iterations of the Department of Justice’s years-long effort to evade and weaken the encryption used by certain electronic products and applications, particularly encrypted messaging apps. Indeed, the DOJ was particularly active in late 2017 in pushing for back-doors into encrypted software, citing the encrypted devices of past perpetrators of mass shootings as proving the need for federal law enforcement to easily and quickly bypass encryption in criminal investigations.
However, Barr’s and Wray’s speeches mark a new phase of this government campaign targeting encryption, a campaign that has picked up in the past two weeks just as a series of mass shootings in the United States have led to widespread calls for the government to do something to prevent further massacres.
At a Monday press conference, President Donald Trump gave his official response to the most recent shootings in Ohio and Texas, tragedies that he largely blamed on the internet and its “dark recesses” that are inaccessible to the government. “We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” Trump stated, before adding: “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”
“The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored and they will not be ignored,” the president emphasized.
One of the main solutions Trump offered to what he alleged caused the recent shootings was to mandate the DOJ “to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies as well as social media companies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.” Some interpreted this statement as suggesting the more widespread implementation of “pre-crime” software, such as Palantir, which was co-founded by billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel, who is also on Facebook’s board.
Conveniently for William Barr, Facebook announced in May that the company is already developing just the “backdoor” that the attorney general has sought. This new initiative would implement AI-powered surveillance measures onto consumer devices, which would bypass end-to-end encryption on both the recently encrypted Facebook Messenger and the popular encrypted messaging app WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook in 2014. Though the measure was announced in May, it has received media attention only in the last week, following Barr’s speech at the 2019 ICCS.
Following Trump’s proposal for social media and the Barr-led DOJ to work together to monitor encrypted messages, it seems that Facebook will be one of the first major tech companies to offer its ready-made solution to the U.S. government. It is also worth considering the possibility that Barr may use the threat of his Silicon Valley antitrust probe to potentially strong-arm tech companies that would otherwise be unwilling to create a government back-door in their software or products. That probe was announced the same day that Barr spoke about anti-encryption measures at the 2019 ICCS.
In addition, between Barr’s July 23 speech and Trump’s August 5 press conference, there has been a concerted push from not only the DOJ but also the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, of which the U.S. is part, to weaken encryption or give governments access to encrypted applications.
On the heels of the 2019 ICCS, at which Barr and Wray spoke, there was a related cyber security summit in London — called the Five Country Ministerial — where “senior ministers from the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States … reaffirmed their commitment to work together with industry to tackle a range of security threats.”
According to the U.K. government’s press release on the summit, which took place from July 29 to 30, the ministers in attendance “stressed that law enforcement agencies’ efforts to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes would be hampered if the industry carries out plans to implement end-to-end encryption, without the necessary safeguards.” William Barr attended that summit, representing the U.S., and echoed his speech given a week prior, stating:
We must ensure that we do not stand by as advances in technology create spaces where criminal activity of the most heinous kind can go undetected and unpunished.”
Notably, Australia last year implemented a law similar to that which Barr is seeking to enact in the United States. It has since been lampooned by expert cryptographers for its ineffectiveness and has caused damage to Australia’s tech industry. According to the Guardian, Microsoft revealed in March that companies and governments it works with say they “are no longer comfortable about storing their data in Australia as a result of the encryption legislation.” Perhaps predictably, what has happened since Australia’s enactment of this controversial encryption legislation is the Australian government’s use of its new “back-doors” to widely surveil its civilians without a warrant.
Barr’s Orwellian bent
Barr’s outsized involvement in this recent push for a government back-door into all encryption apps is notable given his past. For instance, prior to becoming attorney general under Trump, Barr worked at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, a firm that “represent[s] clients on matters relating to data and network security.” Kirkland & Ellis, in describing its own services, notes:
These matters are increasingly important to national security and international trade concerns such as government surveillance issues, state-sponsored cyber-attacks and espionage, and legal limitations on cross-border data transfers. The Firm represents clients in navigating these legal matters, including with respect to investigating security incidents/breaches and handling resulting litigation or government relations aspects of such incidents.”
Furthermore, Barr’s previous stint as attorney general, during the administration of George H.W. Bush, saw him push for increasing mass surveillance of innocent Americans. According to USA Today, in 1992, while serving as Attorney General under Bush Sr., Barr “launched a vast surveillance program that gathered records of innocent Americans’ international phone calls without first conducting a review of whether it was legal.” The program “ultimately gathered billions of records of nearly all phone calls from the United States to 116 countries, with little oversight from Congress or the courts” and also “provided a blueprint for far broader phone-data surveillance the government launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” The program was partially carried out by the then-head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Barr’s history of pushing for reducing privacy for citizens is troubling considering that, earlier in his career, he pushed for increased government secrecy while he was employed by the CIA in the late 1970s. For instance, while working at the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council, Barr attempted to circumvent the moratorium placed on the CIA that prevented it from destroying records and also stonewalled the Church Committee’s investigation into CIA abuses. Thus, Barr’s push for reduced privacy for citizens but increased privacy for the government bodes poorly for those who see government transparency and citizen privacy as important to keeping government overreach in check.
FBI foreknowledge
In the hours before the shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — and less than two weeks after Barr warned of an imminent “major incident” that would “galvanize public opinion” in favor of ending encryption free from a government back-door — the FBI was made aware of a manifesto published on the controversial website 8chan that is alleged to have been authored by the shooter, Patrick Crusius.
According to NBC News, the FBI was aware of the document prior to the shooting, but was unable to act quickly enough to prevent the attack. There have, however, been conflicting reports about exactly how long the FBI was aware of the alleged manifesto prior to the shooting.
For instance, soon after the shooting, CNN stated that three different sources had told the outlet that the manifesto had been “posted days before the shootings.” However, the FBI later stated less than a half hour before the shooting, while separate law enforcement sources told reporters that it was actually two hours before the shooting.
There is also a discrepancy regarding whether the manifesto was originally posted on 8chan and whether the shooter himself even posted it. Jim Watkins, who owns the 8chan message boards and has alerted federal authorities previously when past shooting manifestos were published at the site, stated:
First of all, the El Paso shooter posted on Instagram, not 8chan… Later, someone uploaded the manifesto. However, that manifesto was not uploaded by the Walmart shooter. I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but it was not uploaded by the murderer; that is clear.”
Facebook, which owns Instagram, said that it had disabled an Instagram account that belonged to Crusius and also noted that that account had been inactive for over a year.
In the past, 8chan administrators had deleted manifestos minutes after they were posted and warned federal authorities that the documents had been published. In the case of the El Paso shooting, Watkins claimed that the site had informed federal authorities as soon as they were aware that the manifesto had been uploaded to its page.
The facts that the FBI knew in advance of the manifesto, that the manifesto may not have been uploaded by the shooter, and that the FBI was quick to link that document to the shooting event soon after it took place have led to speculation about how the FBI was able to make that connection so quickly. For instance, lawyer Robert Barnes stated the following on Twitter:
How did [the] FBI identify the shooter before he began his attack from a post on an anonymous chat board? Usually, this means the shooter tipped them off either directly or indirectly (informant). Misuse of informants (including encouraging violence) is an underexplored problem.”
In addition, journalist Rachel Blevins posed a similar question on social media following the revelations, writing:
It took just hours for the FBI to both identify the suspect in the El Paso shooting and connect him to a manifesto posted on 8chan, which raises the question… was the suspect included in the FBI’s surveillance, and were their agents in contact with him before the shooting?”
This possibility is worth considering, given the well-documented history of the FBI’s policy of manufacturing domestic terror plots within the United States, most of which are ultimately foiled at the last minute by the Bureau. In many of those cases, many alleged terrorists would not have planned or attempted those attacks without goading and support from the FBI, leading critics to accuse the FBI of deliberately using entrapment. For instance, a 2014 study by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that “many of these people [in the cases examined in the study] would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts,” according to the study’s co-author Andrea Prasow.
There are several instances where the FBI sought out mentally handicapped and unstable individuals with no resources of their own, giving them incentives, fake weapons and even driving them to the scene of the planned fake terror attack. Two high-profile domestic terror cases have also had hints of FBI involvement — including the Pulse nightclub shooting, where the shooter’s father was later revealed to be a FBI informant and the FBI had attempted to goad the Pulse shooter into committing a terror attack years prior to the Pulse shooting. In addition, the family of the Boston Marathon bombers claimed that the FBI regularly visited their family home and had cultivated a close relationship with one of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, prior to the bombing.
Since late 2016, the FBI’s controversial policy of inducting individuals to commit acts of terror in the United States has expanded after a federal appeals court ruling in December of that year said that federal agents were allowed to target a person’s religious affiliation in order to “probe the attitudes” of an individual who may want to “do something to America” by entrapping them in fake terror act schemes. The ruling also permitted federal agents to create false friendships, referred to in the ruling as the “illusory cultivation of emotional intimacy,” as a means of manipulating individuals to commit acts of terrorism — as well as providing these unstable individuals with money, vehicles, businesses and even vacations to get them to agree to participate in fake attacks.
As a result of this troubling trend, and given the FBI’s foreknowledge of the manifesto and its ease in connecting that document to the shooter, it becomes important to ask whether the FBI had more foreknowledge of the situation than it has publicly let on.
Though history indicates that FBI foreknowledge of the shooter is definitely plausible, 8chan has been a recent focus of the FBI in recent months. For instance, after the alleged manifesto of the shooter responsible for the massacre at the Poway Synagogue earlier this year was published on 8chan, the FBI issued a warrant for hundreds of 8chan user accounts that had commented on the Poway Synagogue shooter’s thread, including both users that supported his statement of intent and those who were appalled by it.
According to the Bureau’s application for a search warrant, the FBI was seeking the “IP address and metadata information about [Poway shooter John] Earnest’s original posting and the postings of all of the individuals who responded to the subject posting and/or commented about it.” The FBI further instructed Ch.net, which hosts 8chan, “to make a digital copy of the entire contents of the accounts subject to seizure.”
It goes without saying that with the information on hundreds of 8chan users, the FBI would have had access to potential future informants and potential targets to be “groomed” by the FBI for a future domestic terrorism entrapment case. This is especially likely given that the FBI’s reasoning for obtaining this large amount of information in the warrant was to identify “individuals who are inspired by the subject posting [i.e., the Poway shooter manifesto].” One 8chan user who was contacted by the FBI after this search warrant and filmed the encounter, was asked by federal agents to help them with information-gathering on other 8chan users.
This possibility is further supported by the fact that the FBI agent who filed the search warrant application, FBI Special Agent Michael Rod, revealed that he had been active on 8chan and (perhaps inadvertently) revealed his user name on 8chan to be user “8f4812.” An archive of the Poway shooter’s 8chan thread, available here, reveals that Rod stated in that 8chan thread that Russia was to blame for the Poway shooting and Rod also claimed that he knew of the Poway shooting 15 minutes before it happened but was unable to warn the authorities because he “was shit posting and got tied up.”
In the wake of the recent shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, 8chan was taken offline after internet infrastructure company Cloudflare declined to continue supporting the website.
A tragedy foretold and exploited
William Barr’s warning that a “major incident” could occur “at any time” and “galvanize public opinion” around the unpopular encryption back-door policy he has been seeking seems to have come true in the weeks since the attorney general made those statements. Given Barr’s influence over the FBI, which operates under his jurisdiction, it is important to scrutinize the evidence that the FBI had apparent foreknowledge of at least one of these recent shootings, and consider that the Bureau may have failed to act to prevent the tragedy, allowing Barr’s prediction just weeks earlier to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Trump’s proposed solution to the recent spate of mass shootings is focused on giving Barr a mandate to work with social media and tech companies to prevent another mass shooting before it occurs. It seems evident that this solution is set to involve surveilling encrypted communications to ostensibly prevent another shooting while also providing Barr, and the DOJ at large, the back-door into encrypted apps and consumer products that they have long sought but have been unable to sell to either the public or those same tech companies.
Now, a public safety crisis has emerged in the wake of Barr’s recent speech, tipping the scales — as Barr had predicted — so the public would favor further reductions to their civil liberties and right to privacy so that the federal government could provide increased public safety through increased surveillance. Yet, taking this alongside the well-documented fact that the FBI regularly manufactures domestic terror plots, it is worth asking whether some of these recent shootings were allowed to happen and whether public officials like William Barr are manipulating the public’s reaction to these tragedies to advance their own political agendas and further the build-up of state power.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
We’re All Enemies of the State: Draconian Laws, Precrime & the Surveillance State
By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Foundation | August 6, 2019
We’ve been down this road many times before.
If the government is consistent about any one thing, it is this: it has an unnerving tendency to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security.
Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.
It’s all part of the grand plan for total control.
The government’s proposed response to the latest round of mass shootings—red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement—is just more of the same.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
For instance, in his remarks on the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism.
Let that sink in a moment.
In a post-9/11 America, Trump’s promise bodes ill for whatever remnants of freedom we have left. With that promise, flippantly delivered without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach, the president has given the FBI the green light to violate Americans’ civil liberties in every which way.
This is how the Emergency State works, after all.
So what does the government’s carefully calibrated response to this current crisis mean for freedom as we know it? Compliance and control.
For starters, consider Trump’s embrace of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will only add to the government’s power.
Be warned: these laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Seventeen states, plus the District of Columbia, now have red flag laws on their books. That number is growing.
In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings, these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.
With these red flag gun laws, the intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally, especially when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
After all, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
According to the FBI’s latest report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers which will attempt to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
See how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat, including those who challenge its authority?
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
Bars & Nightclubs Use A Secret Biometric Blacklist To Ban Customers
credit: PatronScan
MassPrivateI | June 4, 2019
Have you ever had too much to drink at a bar or nightclub and been asked to leave? Have you or your friends ever mouthed off to the staff or been hit on by a bartender? Have you ever Yelped or Tweeted about bad food or service?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you will be mortified to learn that Big Brother knows exactly who you are.
According to an article in OneZero, the service industry has been quietly using PatronScan to scan the IDs and faces of 500,000+ bargoers.
“PatronScan collected and retained information on over 10,000 patrons in Sacramento in a single day. Within a five month period, that added up to information on over 500,000 bargoers.”
PatronScan otherwise known as Servall Biometrics Inc. is first and foremost a biometrics company that makes its money collecting biometric data of service industry patrons.
Bars, nightclubs and pubs have used PatronScan to create a blacklist of 40,000+ customers. Who are, on average banned for 19 years from local establishments!
“Using PatronScan, our venues have placed over 40,000 people on our shared Banned Patron list.”
According to PatronScan’s Privacy Policy, the only way a person can be removed from their secret banned (blacklist) list is to contact the manager or head of security first; then and only then will PatronScan open up their own investigation.
PatronScan has such a cozy relationship with law enforcement that they warn customers, “their personal information may also be provided to us from a law enforcement agency.”
Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and snugly, knowing your local bar or club could be working with law enforcement?
Bars and nightclubs share blacklist of customers
According to OneZero,
“PatronScan logs where customers live, the household demographics for that area, how far each customer travelled to a bar, and how many different bars they had visited. OneZero readily shares the information it collects on patrons, both banned and not, at the request of police.”
Being banned from one bar in a city or town means you are banned (blacklisted) from other participating establishments.
To make matters worse, law enforcement has also created a national database, masquerading as a non-profit that tracks every alcoholic purchase you have made.
The database is called the National Liquor Law Enforcement Association or “Place of Last Drink.”
“NLLEA President Justin Nordhorn, said the NLLEA received federal money to develop a nationwide database that will allow law enforcement officers to input information about where an intoxicated person was drinking before a crime, incident or alcohol-related crash.”
With PatronScan, police will know who you are and which bars or clubs you frequent. With the NLLEA they will know what you had to drink. How is that for Orwellian?
Service industry is being turned into min-surveillance centers
When is the last time you entered a restaurant, bar or nightclub and asked the manager about their surveillance cameras? When is the last time you asked a doorman or the manager about what they do with your personal information?
OneZero’s article warns,
“Many bars also have internal surveillance systems, which track customer trends and catalog granular data on purchasing habits. Those tools are growing increasingly sophisticated, with obvious benefits to venue owners and law enforcement.”
NBC 6 warned that letting bars scan your drivers license puts all your personal information at risk.
“With just a swipe of your ID, computers can pull your personal information from it giving it to the companies and facilities you visit, including your date of birth, address, height and weight.”
According to the ACLU, drivers licenses contain much more information than you are being told.
Drivers license barcodes, “contain your name, address, date of birth, hair color, eye color, height, weight, gender, license expiration date, organ donor status, driver’s license number, fingerprint, medical information, and driver classification code.” (To see a detailed list of what drivers license barcodes contain, click here.)
The privacy implications for allowing your ID to be scanned by a bar or nightclub are clearly not worth the risks.
As NBC 6 warned, “the security experts we spoke to recommend you ask security to write down your information or take a photo of your ID instead of swiping it.”
Matt Cagle, a technology and civil liberties attorney with the ACLU of Northern California said, “When you create a confidential ban list, that’s an invitation for businesses to pretextually exclude people because of who they are.”
And that is the problem with companies like PatronScan, Suspect Technologies and law enforcement watchlists. Businesses and police do not need a reason to place someone on a banned list or watchlist and that should scare the hell out of everyone.
If Big Brother has its way — and it certainly appears like it does — Americans will soon find themselves living in a mirror-image of China where everything we do and everywhere we go is scrutinized.
A.I. “RoboCops” Continue Rolling Out Across U.S. Collecting Biometrics and Creating Blacklists
By Nicholas West | Activist Post | August 6, 2019
The move toward using robots in law enforcement, private security, and even to scare away the homeless, has been a decade-long trend that is now becoming much more prevalent in everyday life.
“RoboCops” have now been launched coast to coast in 16 states. Last year, it was security robots deployed in New York City. As Aaron Kesel reported:
The robots are able to scan anyone walking on the sidewalks, record license plates, use infrared vision, and one of the scariest uses of this technology is the capability to detect cellphone serial numbers within a designated patrolling area.
Huntington Park, CA now has its own version that’s been added to the police force, the “HP RoboCop.” MassPrivateI sent out an alert a couple months ago that this particular model would be rolled out. At the time, we received the usual promotional statement from police advertising the many benefits that citizens would received. This inspired Muckrock to file a records request from the HPPD to see what details might have been omitted from the original reporting. Last week, Muckrock received a cache of documents that they are now releasing to the public.
Muckrock highlights the added surveillance of the citizenry that they have the pleasure of funding with their own tax money to the tune of $8,000 per month, per robot, to operate. Once again the technology is being supplied by Knightscope, a leader in the field for supplying both governments and private security:
According to released marketing materials, HP RoboCop is a K5 model security robot produced by the Silicon Valley-based manufacturer Knightscope, Inc. […]
Interestingly enough, the HPPD goes further, and makes the claim that the K5 is a “fully autonomous security data machine” that can actually “differentiate between a harmless passer-by and potential criminal.”
As for how the K5 does that, the HPPD points to the robot’s many, many sensors, which are apparently capable of detecting faces, license plates, and even smartphones. Said faces, license plates, and smartphones can then be run against a “blacklist,” which would send an alert to the HPPD.
Here are some other bullet points that show the widespread applications for the new security robots:
Muckrock notes that the program is up for review after one year, which is about the only encouraging detail that is offered in Muckrock‘s extensive report.
The level of data collection, analytics and reporting smacks of yet more pre-crime efforts driven by artificial intelligence algorithms. As I’ve been reporting, these programs are coming under much greater scrutiny after other police departments have recorded failures across all three aforementioned parameters. The threat to privacy and overall liberty has become so grave that even the top university A.I. experts in the world have signed-off on a warning of “Technical Flaws” In Pre-Crime Police Systems. Other experts have said that A.I. police systems are “no better than a crystal ball” in predicting crime.
Now would be the time for residents of Huntington Park to get informed and begin asking serious questions about this new program during this one-year review period before more of their money is wasted on the pseudo-science of predictive policing.
Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Ministers Taken into Custody as India Scraps State’s Special Status
Sputnik – 05.08.2019
New Delhi – Former Chief Ministers of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti are among several prominent leaders who have been reportedly taken into custody by the authorities.
The move came after the Indian parliament’s Upper House passed a Bill on Monday to split the State into two separate territories. Earlier, the Indian government had revoked the state’s special constitutional status under Article 370.
“Taking into consideration the current situation in Kashmir and strong security concerns, it has become imperative to take measures to prevent the law and order situation in Kashmir from deteriorating any further,” the Office of the Executive Magistrate in Srinagar said in an order addressed to Mehbooba Mufti.
On Sunday evening, both Mufti – the leader of People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Omar Abdullah- Vice President of National Conference (NC) were placed under house arrest.
Mufti, the last serving Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 2016 to 2018, was taken from her home in the state capital of Srinagar to a nearby government guest house.
Revocation of Article 370
Article 370 provided Jammu and Kashmir with an autonomous constitution as well as key decision-making rights. But earlier in the day, the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said that the law was an impediment to the state’s growth, hampering the development of democracy and healthcare in the region, while fostering poverty and entrenching corruption in the state.
Relations between India and Pakistan have long been tense over competing claims to parts of the Kashmir region since the countries gained independence from Britain in 1947.
Abbas’s la-la land and the evolution of the American love affair with Israel
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | August 5, 2019
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is ready to “go to the White House and continue what [he] started with [US President] Donald Trump.” With this and other confusing statements, Abbas tried to articulate the new Palestinian political agenda to foreign reporters in Ramallah last month.
According to Abbas, the PA is ready to return to negotiations with Israel if two conditions are met: Washington is to reverse its stance on East Jerusalem, thus recognising it as an occupied Palestinian city; and there is a renewed commitment to the so-called two-state solution. “I will not accept a one-state solution because one state will be an apartheid state,” Abbas insisted.
Aside from the Palestinian leader’s insubstantial logic, the official Palestinian discourse emanating from Ramallah these days seems oblivious to the massively changing political reality in Washington over the past two years or so. Remarks by Abbas, his recently-appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh or other PA officials are apparently based on the logic of a bygone era, one in which the US claimed, however falsely, to be an honest broker for peace; a period that lasted for nearly 25 years and during which PA officials benefited from the massive “peace process” racket, bankrolled by the US and other countries.
However, the jig is up. The PA has ceased to serve any useful purpose for the Israelis and their American benefactors, apart from the continued and shameful “security coordination” aimed largely at suppressing any Palestinian resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation.
Everyone seems to acknowledge this seismic change, except the PA. While failing to understand the nature of the new challenge and redeem its past mistakes, the PA insists on remaining a major stumbling block to a new Palestinian strategy, one that should counter relentless US-Israeli efforts aimed at circumventing international law and, as a result, dismissing all Palestinian rights entirely.
Listening to PA officials speak makes one wonder if they are truly aware that the language coming out of Washington has shifted unmistakably, not only in its degree of bias towards Israel, but also in its complete adoption of the Israeli narrative in terms of nuances, religious fervour and political priorities. US officials now speak as one with members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist coalition. The following examples illustrate the new US rhetoric that requires a complete Palestinian departure from their tired and clichéd language of the past.
On 6 December, 2017, Donald Trump said in a White House statement: “Jerusalem is not just the heart of three great religions, but it is now also the heart of one of the most successful democracies in the world. Over the past seven decades, the Israeli people have built a country where Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and people of all faiths are free to live and worship according to their conscience and according to their beliefs. But today, we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. This is nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do.”
Trump’s infatuation with Israel is paralleled by complete disrespect and disregard for Palestinians. On 2 January 2018, he tweeted: “We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”
US Vice President Mike Pence concurs. On 15 May last year, Pence said in celebration of Israel’s independence that Trump had done more to bring the US and Israel “closer together in a year than any president in the past 70 years.” He referred to him as “the greatest defender the Jewish state has ever had.” According to Pence, “President Trump made history now.”
For her part, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley played a major role in trying to marginalise Palestinians on the international stage. On 6 October last year she insisted that, “The Palestinians are not a UN Member State or any state at all. The United States will continually point that out in our remarks at UN events led by the Palestinians.”
US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, meanwhile, has the perfect blend of Pence’s religious fanaticism and Haley’s political opportunism. In an interview with the New York Times published on 8 June, he said that, “Under certain circumstances, I think Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.”
Friedman’s open support for Israeli colonialism was matched by comments made by US Middle East “peace” envoy Jason Greenblatt two weeks later: “We might get there [to a peace deal] if people stop pretending settlements, or what I prefer to call ‘neighbourhoods and cities’, are the reason for the lack of peace.” He brushed aside the fact that all of Israel’s colonial-settlements are illegal under international law since they have been built on Palestinian land under Israeli military occupation since 1967.
When the PA dared to protest against such political bullying, Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner lashed out on 3 July at the “hysterical and erratic” Palestinian leadership. “The door is always open for the Palestinian leadership… If they stop saying crazy things,” he added.
According to the new American political lexicon, Palestinians have absolutely no rights; international law has no relevance; and supposedly democratic Israel is a model state incapable of erring. In Washington’s la-la land, there can be no room or tolerance for discussions about military occupation, illegal settlements, genocidal wars, sieges and apartheid if they involve even the slightest criticism of Israel.
Considering America’s complete and unconditional adoption of the Israeli agenda, Abbas should stop talking about negotiations and conditions. Instead, he should revitalise and unite the Palestinian front to counter the US-Israeli menace and its political lackeys across the Middle East.
UK teen claims forced to retract rape accusation against Israelis
MEMO | August 5, 2019
A 19-year-old British teen who was allegedly gang raped by 12 Israelis at a resort town in Cyprus has claimed she was forced to retract her accusation under pressure from local police.
Last month, 12 Israelis aged 15 to 18 were arrested on suspicion of raping a British teen in their hotel room in the popular tourist resort of Aya Napa, Cyprus. However, little over a week later all 12 teenagers were released and allowed to return to Israel after the British woman admitted to having fabricated her accusations against them.
The teen confessed that she had engaged in consensual sex with several of the Israelis but was filmed by them in the process, making her feel “angry and insulted” enough to file the rape accusation. She was subsequently arrested and could face up to a year in prison for misleading local authorities.
However, the unnamed British teen has now claimed that she was forced to retract her initial accusation against the Israelis under duress, arguing she was denied access to a lawyer and that Cypriot police threatened to arrest her friends if she did not recant her testimony.
According to an exclusive yesterday by British newspaper the Sun, the teen “says she was denied a lawyer and then pressurised to withdraw her complaint by [Cypriot] detectives, who threatened to arrest her friends for ‘conspiracy’ if she did not comply”.
“The teenager claims officers then dictated a statement in which she admitted faking allegations,” the British daily added, “and she reluctantly signed only because she was exhausted after eight hours at the police station.”
The British teen’s lawyer, Michael Polak, argued that “[the girl’s] confession was obtained under oppression given the threats made. She was not cautioned and was not given access to a lawyer as was her right under the European Convention on Human Rights.”
“It is also understood that unfortunately none of the proceedings at the Cypriot police station were recorded,” Polak added.
The Sun also claims to have seen police reports of the incident, including medical examinations of two Israelis which found “suspicious scratches” and “bruises on their backs and chests, as if they had been in a struggle”.
The newspaper added that the Israeli teens then “told detectives they had been attacked at the hotel by the girl’s friends,” but added that “the hotel’s manager insisted no such fight took place”.
The girl’s allegations add yet another element to an incident fraught with discrepancies and conflicting narratives, which has raised questions about the Cypriot authorities’ handling of the case and the early release of the Israeli teens.
Last week, seven of the accused teens returned to Israel, being greeted by fanfare and celebration at the country’s Ben Gurion Airport. As Israeli daily the Times of Israel reported at the time, the “teens were jubilant when they were greeted by their cheering families” and “loudly celebrated their release by opening champagne bottles, chanting ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ [the people of Israel live] along with ‘the Brit is a whore’.”
The teens did not express any regret about the incident, with one telling Hebrew-language media: “I feel great. The truth came out and I am happy.” Another teen called his release “a miracle from God” and vowed to sue the British teen for libel.
Meanwhile Israeli journalists, social media activists and onlookers criticised the boys’ “hero’s welcome”, pointing out that had the alleged incident taken place in Israel, the teens would have faced criminal charges for filming the sex act, which was made illegal in Israel in 2014.
It is not yet clear whether there is now any recourse to re-investigate the Israelis should the British teen’s accusations against the Cypriot police be proven. She currently remains in custody and is slated to appear in court on Wednesday, though could wait several months until being brought to trial.
India Responded To Trump’s Mediation Proposal By Killing More Kashmiris
By Andrew Korybko | EurasiaFuture | 2019-08-05
India defiantly responded to Trump’s mediation proposal by killing more Kashmiris and concocting yet another “politically convenient” conspiracy theory about so-called “Pakistani-backed terrorists” there in order to distract the world from its plan to unleash a wave of “Weapons of Mass Migration” that might forever change the demographic balance of this disputed territory to its long-term favor.
Modi’s Response To Trump
The situation in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and along the Line of Control (LoC) is almost worse than it’s ever been before after New Delhi’s latest aggressive actions there that can be interpreted as an asymmetrical response to Trump’s recent mediation proposal. The US’ new military-strategic ally rejected the President’s earlier claims that Modi requested his assistance in mediating an end to the decades-long Kashmir Conflict, which coincided with increased shelling along the LoC that started during Pakistani Prime Minister Khan’s very successful visit to Washington last month and continues to this day. These provocations were shortly thereafter followed by the concocting of a “politically convenient” conspiracy theory about so-called “Pakistani-backed terrorists” there in order to distract the world from India’s egregious human rights abuses against the people of Kashmir and its illegal use of cluster bombs in targeting civilians on the Pakistani side of the LoC.
“Weapons Of Mass Migration”
While all of this might seem like a random flare-up of violence to the unaware observer, there’s actually a method behind the madness in that India is preparing to unleash a wave of “Weapons of Mass Migration” that might forever change the demographic balance of this disputed territory to its long-term favor. There were suspicions that the recent dispatch of over 20,000 more paramilitary forces to IOK wasn’t just to “protect Hindu pilgrims” like the Indian media alleged, but to reinforce the over half a million forces that are already there ahead of what turned out to be the repealing of constitutional clauses that guarantee a relative degree of “autonomy” for the region and prevented non-residents from purchasing property there. The implications of doing away with this special policy are enormous because they could lead to the large-scale influx of foreigners that would almost certainly provoke another wave of armed resistance from the desperate locals.
Machiavellian Perception Management
Anticipating this, India knew that it would inevitably have to dispatch more military forces to IOK, but it wanted to do so under the cover of a “publicly plausible” pretext in order to avoid international criticism, ergo the excuse of the latest reinforcement measures being due to what it claimed was the threat posed by “Pakistani-backed terrorists” to Hindu pilgrims. It then initiated a new round of shelling across the LoC, using cluster bombs in order to guarantee a response that it could then decontextualize and deceptively misportray as “Pakistani aggression”. This in turn led to New Delhi ordering non-Muslims to leave the region “in the interests of (their) safety and security” when the real reason that all of this is happening is so that they’re not caught up in the impending wave of violence that might soon be unleashed after the authorities revoked Kashmir’s “autonomous” status a little more than a week before India’s independence day later this month.
Exposing The Plot
This Machiavellian plot might very well backfire, though, because Pakistan is already preemptively exposing it in the international informational sphere and proving that there’s a reason why India can be regarded as a rogue state nowadays. Prime Minister Khan even tweeted about it too, thereby ensuring that the rest of the world pays more attention to Pakistan’s serious concerns about the deteriorating security situation along the LoC and the ever-worsening humanitarian one in IOK. In addition, India’s regional aggression is a personal affront to Trump’s peacemaking efforts, which might trigger him to double down on the game of “hardball” that he’s playing with it lately. The Democrats could also sense a self-interested political opportunity to put pressure on his administration by demanding that they cease further security cooperation with India until it stops its human rights violations in Kashmir, just as they’ve tried to do vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and Yemen earlier this year.
Self-Inflicted Damage
Whichever way one looks at it, India’s recent aggression is counterproductive to its own interests. The country’s carefully crafted international image of supposedly being the peaceful land of Bollywood and yoga is shattered, and any revocation of Kashmir’s “autonomy” will return the region to being a global flash point, to say nothing of making it even more difficult for the military to indefinitely perpetuate its occupation in the face of heightened resistance from the locals. India had the chance to change history by admitting that it asked Trump to mediate in Kashmir and then taking his public disclosure of this secret as a signal to start that process, but it instead tried to make a fool out of him by pretending that no such request was ever made. Such strategic missteps as that one and the aforementioned risk isolating India even more in the international community and could even endanger its very existence in the event that they eventually lead to a hot war with Pakistan.
India strips Kashmir of autonomous status; Pakistan warns of ‘all options’
Press TV – August 5, 2019
The Indian government has scrapped the special autonomy status for the disputed region of Kashmir as part of attempts to fully integrate the Muslim-majority region with the rest of the country.
The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs announced on Monday that India’s President Ram Nath Kovind had signed a decree abolishing Article 370 of the constitution that grants a measure of autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, including the right to draft its own laws.
The decree declared the measure came into force “at once.”
The president also moved a bill proposing that the Indian-administered part of Kashmir be divided into two regions directly ruled by New Delhi.
The government in New Delhi lifted a ban on property purchases by people from outside Jammu and Kashmir, opening the way for Indians to invest and settle in the disputed region like any other part of India, a measure likely to provoke a backlash in the territory.
The controversial move came after large parts of the Muslim-majority territory was placed under lockdown, with mobile networks, internet services and telephone landline services having been cut.
Moreover, prominent political leaders in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir were placed under house arrest and the Indian paramilitary forces deployed thousands of extra troops across the region, raising fears of a crackdown.
Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, had earlier pushed for radical political changes in Jammu and Kashmir even before he won a re-election in May.
Modi said the old laws had hindered Kashmir’s integration with the rest of India.
Pakistan slams ‘illegal’ India move in Kashmir
The Indian government’s move on Monday to strip Kashmir of the special autonomy it has had for seven decades prompted a furious response from nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry denounced the move as “illegal” in a statement, saying, “as the party to this international dispute, Pakistan will exercise all possible options to counter the illegal steps.”
Meanwhile, a senior Pakistani security source said that a meeting of the Pakistani military’s top commanders had been called for Tuesday.
Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since it was partitioned in 1947. Both countries claim all of Kashmir and have fought three wars over the territory.
Indian troops are in constant clashes with armed groups seeking Kashmir’s independence or its merger with Pakistan. India regularly accuses Pakistan of arming and training militants and allowing them across the restive frontier in an attempt to launch attacks. Pakistan strongly denies the allegation.
In recent years, southern Kashmir has seen intense fighting between Indian forces and armed Kashmiri fighters, who are demanding independence for the Himalayan region.
The conflict has left tens of thousands dead, mostly civilians.
Palestine’s UN Delegation Criticizes Secretary-General for Not Including Israel on ‘List of Shame’
By Ali Salam | IMEMC | August 4, 2019
To the dismay of Palestine’s delegation to the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres did not include Israel in his new “list of shame”, which includes states committing grave violations against children, despite the figures and statistics in the report about serious violation of rights of children in Palestine, said Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s permanent representative to the UN.
The UN Security Council held in New York yesterday an open debate on the annual UN report on situation of children in times of conflict, which Guterres released on Wednesday.
According to the report, the number of Palestinian children killed or injured reached its highest level in 2018 since 2014. It said 59 were killed in 2018, 56 of them by the Israelis army, nearly a four-fold increase over 2017. In the West Bank, Israeli forces injured 1,398 children in 2018, while in Gaza they injured 1,335 children. The Injuries included permanent disabilities and limb amputations.
It also said 203 children are held in Israeli prisons, most of them in administrative detention, without charge or trial. By the end of December 2018, 87 children were sentenced to serve time in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation, said the report, and these children are subjected to harsh conditions of detention and ill-treatment.
“The UN secretary-general should include Israel in the ‘list of shame’ and add it to the countries that commit horrendous acts, especially against children,” said Mansour before the start of the session.
He said that not including Israel on the list undercuts efforts to put an end to criminal violations against children around the world and questions the credibility of the list while making it open for criticism and endangers the lives of Palestinian children due to the lack of any kind of accountability to Israel.
Gutierrez instructed his personal representative, Virginia Gamba, to visit the region and occupied Palestine to further investigate what came in the report regarding the injuries and maiming of Palestinian children.
The Palestinian delegation called on Guterres to take into account that the Israeli violations in Palestine were caused by the military occupation, which should be mentioned in the section on Palestine in the report, and to make sure that Israeli practices amount to collective punishment, particularly the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006.
They also said that since 2000, Israel, the occupying Power, had arrested 10,000 Palestinian children.
“We call on the international community to save an entire generation. The difficult circumstances, humiliation, panic and trauma caused by the detention of the Palestinian child are impeding society and aim at weakening it,” said the delegation.
It attributed Israel’s persistence in its inhuman practices to its enjoyment of international impunity, which protects it from sanctions and accountability.
Human Rights Watch has also criticized the UN secretary-general for not including Israel in the list.
“The UN secretary-general simply refuses to hold to account all warring parties that have inflicted tremendous suffering on children,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “By listing selected violators but not others, Secretary-General Guterres is ignoring the UN’s own evidence and undermining efforts to protect children in conflict.”
Guterres failed to list the Israeli army in the new report as responsible for grave violations against children, including killing and maiming, despite considerable evidence of violations by these parties, said HRW in a press release issued last week.
“Previous reports have also found the Israel Defense Forces responsible for killing and maiming Palestinian children, but the secretary-general has yet to include the Israeli forces in his list of abusers,” it said.
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Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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