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Israeli Army Shuts Down “Palestine Today TV” In Ramallah, Kidnaps Three Journalists

IMEMC – March 11, 2016

Dozens of Israeli soldiers invaded the main headquarters of Palestine Today TV, in the al-Biereh city, in the Ramallah and al-Biereh District in the occupied West Bank, and shut it down on Friday at dawn. The army also kidnapped its director, a cameraman and a Technician.

Palestine Today said in a statement that the soldiers stormed and searched the home of its director, Farouq ‘Oleyyat, in Birzeit City, and kidnapped him.

The agency stated that the soldiers also confiscated equipment from ‘Oleyyat’s home, after violently searching it.

It added that dozens of soldiers also invaded Palestine Today’s headquarters, in the Tahouna area, in al-Biereh, after completely surrounding the area, and confiscated broadcast equipment.

The soldiers also invaded Transmedia Productions and News Services Company, in al-Biereh, and kidnapped a cameraman man, identified as Mohammad ‘Amro, and Broadcast Technician Shabeeb Shbeib.

Transmedia is a Media Company that provides satellite TV service to various stations, including Palestine Today.

Two nights ago, the Israeli Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held a meeting and came up with a list of punitive measures against the Palestinian people and various media agencies.

The cabinet decided to shut down many TV stations and media agencies, for what it called “broadcasting incitement materials,” referring to their covering of the Israeli assaults and violations against the Palestinian people, in occupied Palestine.

In related news, Israeli soldiers detained eight Palestinians near the Halamish illegal colony, built on Palestinian lands belonging to Nabi Saleh villagers, northwest of Ramallah on Thursday at night.

Media sources said the soldiers interrogated the eight Palestinians, from Beit Rima and Deir Ghassana towns, and detained them for several hours. The soldiers said “they were searching for knives,” no arrests were made.

March 11, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Zionist Desperation and the Coming Societal Pivot

Israel’s Attempt to Put Up a ‘Firewall’ Around Itself…

By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | March 10, 2016

We are approaching a pivotal time in America. With the aging of the older generation–that is to say those who grew up prior to the age of the Internet–the percentage of the population relying mainly upon mainstream media for its news will slowly diminish. A younger generation, consisting of those accustomed to getting most of their news and information off the Internet, will gradually begin to outnumber them.

What this means in practical terms is that Israel and its supporters will find it increasingly harder to dominate mainstream political discourse.

If we take 1990 as the base year or starting point of the information age, those who today are 26 years of age or younger will have grown up in households where computers, for the most part, are/were as commonplace as were TV sets in the 1960s.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, America’s population at the time of the last census, in 2010, stood at 308,745,538. Those aged 29 or younger comprised 125,955,404, or roughly 40.8% of the population. And that was in 2010. Today the US population is estimated at some 323,000,000–meaning those in the post-1990 age group are likely to make up an even higher percentage of the population. At some point in the near future, their numbers are going to top the 50% mark. That this has been discussed with a sense of gravity by Israeli lobbyists and strategists is almost certain.

Certainly we have seen a proliferation of disinformation websites, but truth has a way of resonating in a way that lies do not–and even when people don’t immediately recognize it as truth per se, the resonance is still there. What the Internet offers, then, is a means by which truth can be viewed on an equal footing with lies, much as it once was in the centuries before mass media began to play such a dominant role in society. And this is obviously having its impact upon the public.

According to a poll conducted last year, 70 percent of Americans disagree with the statement that the media “tries to report the news without bias.” The poll was conducted by the Newseum Institute, which found that trust in the media had dropped by 17 percentage points from a similar poll conducted just the year previous, and by 22 points since 2013. “In fact, the 24% who now say the media try to report news without bias is the lowest since we began asking this question in 2004,” the study states. Perhaps most significant of all, confidence in the media was lowest among those ages 18 to 29–only 7 percent.

A sense of desperation clearly is overtaking Israel and its supporters in the West these days. This is most visible in the multitude of attacks we have seen recently on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS movement. And there are indications now that the Jewish state may be about to carry these attacks to a higher level.

According to a report here, Israel will pour $26 million this year into covert cyber operations aimed at combating BDS, with Israeli tech companies planning to introduce, among other things, “sly algorithms to restrict these online activists circle of influence.” The initiative will be accompanied simultaneously with distribution of a flood of “content that puts a positive face on Israel,” a nonprofit called Firewall Israel being the main spearhead of this latter. Presumably Israel’s already-considerable force of paid Internet trolls is about to be increased–perhaps substantially. Firewall Israel, by the way, is sponsored by the Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute.

“The delegitimization challenge and the BDS Movement are global and require a global response,” Reut asserts on its website. The site goes on to add:

Victory will be achieved when there is a political firewall around Israel and the right of the Jewish People to self-determination, meaning that delegitimization of Israel brings with it a heavy political, societal, and personal price due to its being seen and framed as an act of prejudice and anti-Semitism. Because of its anti-Semitic foundations, delegitimization cannot be eliminated, but it can be contained and kept at bay. As mentioned, because of the network architecture of the BDS Movement, there is no silver bullet against it, and victory will be achieved incrementally through countless of small wins.

In other words, BDS will be “framed” as anti-Semitic, a tour de force that will be achieved through cyber attacks as well as mainstream media power, with BDS supporters paying a heavy “personal price” by result. The final victory, Reut believes, will be achieved not all at once but through “countless small wins” racked up by the Zionists, wins that will erect a “political firewall” around the apartheid paradise, making it immune or insulated from global criticism.

That’s the theory at any rate. How it all plays out in reality remains to be seen, but clearly new BDS battles are cropping up virtually everyday. One of these is a movement at Vassar College, whose student body association, the VSA, just this past Sunday voted to approve a resolution expressing support for the BDS movement. The resolution was accompanied by an amendment that would also have prohibited purchases from 11 companies that profit from or explicitly support the occupation. While the resolution itself passed by a wide majority, 15 to 7, the amendment, which needed a two-thirds majority to pass, failed by a vote of 12 in favor to 10 opposed. Were you to take a wild guess that the amendment’s failure was due to pressure by the college administration, you would be right.

“The VSA could stand to lose all funding if the student body votes to pass the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Amendment, the center of an ongoing campus-wide debate,” the student newspaper reported on March 5, one day before the scheduled vote.

The article reports on a meeting between the college president and the VSA’s Executive Board, with members of the latter being specifically warned of the cutoff in funding. After the meeting, the president and one of the college deans issued a joint statement clarifying their position on the matter.

“All along, we have said that the VSA has the right to endorse the BDS proposal, given our commitment to free speech.  But the college cannot use its resources in support of a boycott of companies,” they wrote. “Were the VSA to adopt the amendment currently proposing such a policy, the college would have to intervene in some way.”

Vassar College is located in Poughkeepsie, New York. Last year in June, the New York State Legislature passed an anti-BDS measure, and then in November a second measure, creating in effect a blacklist of BDS supporters, was also introduced and is now in committee. The language of the measure passed in June is Orwellian, citing BDS– rather than Israel’s occupation–as being “damaging to the causes of peace, justice, equality, democracy, and human rights for all peoples in the Middle East.” And similar measures are making their way through legislatures in other states as well.

Obviously, the Vassar College administration has seen the writing on the wall, but at the same time, Vassar faculty members are summoning the courage to push back in a show of support for the BDS movement and the vote taken by the VSA. Forty-one of them have signed onto a statement of support that reads in part, “We emphatically condemn any form of intimidation tactics from all individuals or parties who have threatened students supporting BDS or any other form of conscientious objection.”

While BDS quite obviously is high on the Zionist list of priorities, what’s also emerging now is a drive to clamp down on any criticism at all of Israel or voicing of support for Palestinian rights–and colleges and universities dependent upon wealthy private donors seem especially vulnerable to this.

A case in point is Harvard Law School, which recently saw $250,000 yanked by a funder who took exception to a panel discussion entitled “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack,” sponsored by the campus Justice for Palestine group. The program reportedly began with a “3-minute video of students and professors discussing how they were censored, punished or falsely accused of anti-Semitism for taking a principled stance for Palestinian rights.”

But it isn’t only speech that can arouse Zionist ire. The public display of a piece of art can also result in loss of funding. Such happened at York University in Toronto when Canadian TV and film  industry executive Paul Bronfman took exception to a painting hanging in the university’s student center. The painting depicts a Palestinian holding rocks in his hand as an Israeli bulldozer is about to destroy an olive tree.

The text at the bottom of the painting features the words “justice” and “peace” written in various languages. Bronfman complained about the artwork to the university’s president, and, after failing to win a commitment to have it removed, accused the school of “allowing hate propaganda to be displayed” and pulled all assistance to its Cinema and Media Arts department.

“The upshot is that if that poster is not gone by the end of day today,” fumed the media mogul, “then William F. White (Bronfman’s film company) is out of York. York is going to lose thousands of dollars of television production equipment used for emerging student filmmakers…”

But much like at Vassar, the faculty at York has come out in favor of freedom of expression, noting–in a statement signed by 91 full-time faculty and nine retired faculty–that the painting depicts “one artist’s response to the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the feeling that there is no end in sight.”

Roger Waters has also waded into the controversy with an open letter sent to the York University Graduate Students Association in which the musician accuses Bronfman of “trying to use his economic muscle” to have the painting removed. He also observes:

 The figure in the foreground appears to be a protester considering throwing a stone or stones at a bulldozer about to destroy an olive tree. The protester may be Palestinian. If the scene depicted is anywhere in the territories occupied since 1967, this person has a legal and moral right, under the terms of article 4 of the Geneva conventions to resist the occupation of his homeland.

As may be expected, a concerted effort appears underway in some media outlets to exact the aforementioned “heavy political, societal, and personal price” upon York, with the Toronto Sun, for one, publishing charges that the university “has  been infiltrated with anti-Semitism” and has become one of the “most hostile campuses” in North America.

But in the attack on academic freedom, universities aren’t the only entities being hit with smear campaigns. Individual professors are also being singled out. Attacks on professors who criticize Israel of course are not new. Steven Salaita lost his job at the University of Illinois after posting tweets against Israel’s Gaza onslaught in the summer of 2014, and other professors have faced similar repercussions over the years. But what seems to be emerging now is an intensification of the character assaults, with Jewish and mainstream media ganging up en masse on targeted academics.

One such academic is Oberlin College Professor Joy Karega, who, like Salaita, has taken heat over social media postings. But the hostilities directed at Karega have incorporated a level of volume and viciousness not formerly seen in the Salaita case. This in part is because Karega’s criticisms of Israel have been stronger. She has accused the Zionist state of being behind 9/11. She has also discussed the Rothschild banking empire, depicted ISIS as a CIA/Mossad front group, suggested the Charlie Hebdo attack was a false flag, and she has even, courageously, taken on the issue of Zionist control of the mainstream media.

But her comments on 9/11 are probably the ones that have set off the most alarm bells, or at least seem to be among the most consistently cited. Accusations that her views are “anti-Semitic and abhorrent” have been aired by the New York Times, while Fox News posted an article referring to her, in the headline no less, as a “crackpot prof.” The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, the Times of Israel, and others have also piled on.

Karega has her defenders, however, and one of them is Kevin Barrett, author of the book We Are Not Charlie Hebdo. In two articles published at Veterans Today (see here and here ) Barrett accused the Oberlin professor’s detractors of hurling ad hominem insults at her rather than “using logic and evidence.” In one article he particularly took to task the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, which published a singularly virulent attack piece entitled, “Inside the Twisted Anti-Semitic Mind of Oberlin Professor Joy Karega.” The piece quotes an Oberlin alumna who says, patronizingly, that she thought Karega had perhaps expressed her views out of “ignorance” and that maybe she was “not educated on the history of anti-Semitism.” Barrett’s response was that The Forward article itself “drips” with a certain amount of  “implicitly racist condescension toward proud African-American intellectual Joy Karega.”

The piece also accuses Karega of spreading “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” which leads us to wonder: Is it really possible The Forward’s writers haven’t heard of the 5 dancing Israelis or that their virgin eyes never saw a controlled demolition video on the Internet? Is it conceivable their suspicions were not aroused in the slightest by Larry Silverstein’s $4.5 billion pay-out bonanza on a property filled with asbestos and worth not nearly what it was insured for? If so, then the editorial staff at The Forward must surely be among the most credulously uninformed in the province of professional journalism.

Barrett also sent an email to a number of recipients at Oberlin, including the president and key faculty and administrators, defending Karega and offering to meet any one or more of her slanderers in an on-campus debate on “these critically important issues.” The email was sent February 29. Barrett says he still has not received a response. His defense of the embattled professor has, however, led to an attack–on both him and Veterans Today–in a Jewish media outlet, The Tower Magazine.

“Kevin Barrett, a writer for Veterans Today, a website that prominently features anti-Israel conspiracy theories, offered his support for Karega and her 9/11 theories last week,” Tower said in an article that makes no mention of Barrett’s debate challenge but which attempts to link him to “the neo-Nazi website Stormfront.”

And so the ad hominem attacks flow like lava down the side of a spewing volcano while the Zionist defamers and detractors don surgical masks to avoid any and all dangerous contact with “logic and evidence.” Meanwhile the societal pivot draws closer.

Creating a “firewall” around Israel in effect means a concerted assault upon free speech, or at least upon the freedom to speak freely, if we might phrase it that way. It means making sure a “heavy personal price” is paid by anyone who criticizes Israel.  As Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you’re not allowed to criticize,” and as more and more Americans learn who they’re not allowed to criticize (many of course already know), the inevitable result will be an increasing spread of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” about Jewish power.  Has the Reut Institute thought of this? Or was that maybe the general ideal all along?

At any rate, by publicly aligning themselves with politicians widely viewed as corrupt, Israel is probably speeding up the process of its own “delegitimization.” What after all is the net effect when Americans watch their Congress members routinely expressing their fervent support for Israel, extolling its putative “shared democratic values”–the same Congress members who day after day go on capitulating to Wall Street and other big-moneyed interests? Does this result in Israel’s gaining support among the public… or losing it? I would say probably more of the latter. And the fact that the very same state–which people like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton voice their adoration for–engages in relentless war crimes and extrajudicial executions while spitting on international law with impunity only serves to aggravate the situation even further.

Yet in spite of all this, Israeli strategists somehow believe, or at least are hoping against hope, they can put a “firewall” around the Jewish state by attacking BDS, flooding the Internet with “content that puts a positive face on Israel,” and exacting a “heavy personal price” from outspoken critics like Karega. It is either, a) a naive hope, or, b) a vastly overblown confidence in the extent and reach of their own power.

Or maybe it’s a little of both. Yes, they may achieve some “small wins” in the short term. But one fact cannot be hidden, no matter how much hasbara you try to bury it under, and that is that Israel stole the land upon which its state was founded in 1948. And not only did it not pay reparations to the land’s rightful owners, but it has gone on stealing more and more from them, bit by bit, piece by piece, settlement by settlement, up until this very day. And if support for Palestine is growing, it probably, at least in part, has to do with the fact that most of us have little trouble imagining a scenario in which we, ourselves, could be forced out of our homes and end up in the streets homeless.

As for the allegations about 9/11, the evidence that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, and that one of them never was even hit by an airplane, is irrefutable, and the more people become aware of this (which is happening because of the Internet), the harder it’s going to be for Israel to keep the lid on everything. And the more stridently and vociferously the media gang up to attack scholars and academics for simply talking about the matter, the more  it’s ultimately going to serve only to raise public consciousness even further.

Perhaps it’s time for Israel’s supporters to take some anti-anxiety medication and to start looking at reality. And maybe, too, they should keep in mind the words of P.T. Barnum: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”

March 10, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Britain sets ‘bad example’ on surveillance, says UN privacy rapporteur

RT | March 10, 2016

Britain is setting a bad example by legitimizing rather than outlawing mass surveillance, according to the UN’s privacy rapporteur, Joseph Cannataci.

The criticism comes in a report to the UN Human Rights Council examining mass surveillance around the world.

Britain is singled out as setting a bad example because of the government’s attempt to bring into law a number of new spying measures.

Cannataci claims the Investigatory Powers Bill, which will be debated for a second time in parliament next week, legitimizes mass surveillance when bulk collection should in fact be outlawed.

He argues the British security state should stop “setting a bad example to other states” by pursuing measures like “bulk interception and bulk hacking.”

He said that enshrining such surveillance into law undermined “the spirit of the very right to privacy.”

Cannataci has been an outspoken critic of UK surveillance measures for some time. In 2015 he called for a Geneva Convention for the internet, while arguing UK oversight was “a joke.”

On the lack of proper scrutiny on intelligence agencies, he told the Guardian: “That is precisely one of the problems we have to tackle. That if your oversight mechanism’s a joke, and a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense, for how long can you laugh it off as a joke?”

The Investigatory Powers Bill was partially informed by the revelations of mass surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In his 2015 interview, Cannataci put aside the hero/traitor debate on the former contractor, telling the paper “his revelations confirmed to many of us who have been working in this field for a long time what has been going on, and the extent to which it has gone out of control.”

Cannataci’s concerns are shared by some civil liberties groups.
Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group, said the report showed that the “bill does not comply with recent human rights rulings” and that the negative impact of the legislation would “be felt around the world, and copied by other countries.”

March 10, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

G4S says it will exit Israeli market, following high-profile BDS campaign

is-checkpoints

MEMO – March 10, 2016

British private security giant G4S has announced plans to sell its entire Israeli business within the next 12 to 24 months. The news has been welcomed by activists in the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, for whom G4S has been a long-standing target.

The decision to leave Israel was revealed in the company’s full-year results released Wednesday, when the company reported a 40 per cent fall in its pre-tax profits.

The company said its plans to exit Israel were part of a “continuing portfolio management programme” designed to “materially improve our strategic focus.” The Israeli business employs 8,000 people with a turnover of £100 million.

According to the Financial Times, G4S “is extracting itself from reputationally damaging work, including its entire Israeli business”, noting that human rights campaigners and BDS activists “have repeatedly attacked G4S’s work in [Israel].”

G4S provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons and detention centres, in which thousands of Palestinian prisoners are tortured and held – including without charge or trial. Israel also violates international law by jailing Palestinians outside of the occupied territory.

The company also has contracts with the Israeli authorities to provide equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the Occupied West Bank that form part of illegal Apartheid Wall.

In 2012, Palestinian groups “called for action to hold G4S accountable for its role in Israel’s prisons”, and since then, the campaign has inflicted growing economic and PR damage on the company. Activists say that G4S has since lost contracts worth millions of dollars around the world, with lost clients including private businesses, universities, trade unions, and United Nations bodies.

In 2014, the Bill Gates Foundation divested its $170m stake in the company following international protests. In the UK, at least five student unions voted to cancel contracts with G4S, and students successfully pressured two other universities not to renew contracts with the company.

The United Methodist Church, the largest protestant church in the USA, divested from G4S after coalition campaigning brought the issue to a vote. Just recently, as reported by Middle East Monitor, G4S lost a major contract in Colombia and a contract with UNICEF in Jordan, in both cases following campaigns by BDS activists.

Responding to the news of G4S’s planned withdrawal from Israel, Palestinian BDS National Committee spokesperson Mahmoud Nawajaa compared the pressure being felt by Israel to the boycott of Apartheid South Africa, and stated that BDS “is making some of the world’s largest corporations realize that profiting from Israeli apartheid and colonialism is bad for business.”

He added: “investment fund managers are increasingly recognizing that their fiduciary responsibility obliges them to divest from Israeli banks and companies that are implicated in Israel’s serious human rights violations, such as G4S and HP, because of the high risk entailed. We are starting to notice a domino effect.”

Nawajaa said the BNC was grateful “to all of the dedicated grassroots organizers around the world who are working in solidarity with Palestinians seeking freedom, justice, and equality”, but noted that the boycott of G4S “will remain among the BDS movement’s top priorities until we actually see its back out of the door of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”

The caution is well-founded; G4S announced in 2013 that it would end its role in illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and one Israeli prison by 2015, but did not follow through. In 2014, G4S announced it “did not intend to renew” its contract with the Israeli Prison Service when it expired in 2017 but is yet to implement that decision.

In addition, Nawajaa claimed that owing to G4S’s involvement in the “racist mass incarceration business” in countries such as South Africa, UK, and USA, the BNC is “determined to work closely with partners to hold G4S to account for its participation in human rights abuses.”

In the last eight months, French multinationals Veolia and Orange and CRH, Ireland’s biggest company, have all exited the Israeli market. In January, the United Methodist Church put five Israeli banks from Israel on a “blacklist” due to their complicity in human rights violations, including the financing of illegal Israeli settlements.

Nawajaa said Israel is unable to “stop the impressive growth of BDS”, despite its efforts “to smear and delegitimize our nonviolent movement, including with anti-democratic laws in Europe and the US aimed at silencing dissent and suppressing our freedom of speech.”

“We believe strongly that our ethical approach and just cause will prevail, as this latest G4S announcement shows.”

March 10, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Docs reveal Obama regime tried to ‘kill transparency’ – advocacy group

RT | March 10, 2016

President Barack Obama has touted his administration as the “most transparent ever,” but the Freedom of the Press Foundation says documents released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show an effort to “kill transparency.”

The non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) for documents detailing its correspondence with Congress regarding the reform of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that failed to pass Congress last year despite strong support from legislators. The lawsuit itself was filed in compliance with the FOIA, a law enacted to improve openness in government.

In 2014, the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (FOIA Act) sought to make receiving information faster and easier. The FOIA Act breezed through the House of Representatives with unanimous support, and a similar bill, The Freedom of Information Improvements Act, was passed by the Senate. However, the legislation failed in Congress after members failed to reconcile the differences between the two bills.

With both bills receiving bipartisan support, it seemed odd for them to die on the vine. The Senate version was modeled after the DOJ’s own policy of transparency set in 2009 by a memo from Attorney General Eric Holder.

“[T]he Department of Justice will defend a denial of a FOIA request only if (1) the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or (2) disclosure is prohibited by law,” the 2009 Holder memo read.

However, the Freedom of the Press Foundation published a memo from the DOJ showing that it had lobbied against almost all aspects of the bills – despite the fact that its own guidelines were the basis for one. The DOJ, speaking on behalf of the entire Obama administration, wrote “The Administration strongly opposes passage of [the FOIA Act].”

Specifically, the DOJ’s talking points against similar provisions in the FOIA reform bills run counter to the part of Holder’s 2009 memo stating that when “disclosure would [do] harm,” the DOJ would defend its decision to deny a FOIA request in court.

In the 2014 memo from the DOJ, the first major concern surrounds “foreseeable harm,” but the concern this time was that the language had been included in the legislation at all, because it opened up the DOJ to more potential lawsuits, in which the “foreseeable harm” case would have to be made to a judge.

“This addition would vastly increase FOIA litigation and would undermine the policy behind each of the existing exemptions,” the 2014 memo read.

Ironically, this memo was only released following three months of lawsuits from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The 2014 memo goes on to say that including foreseeable harm would “require judges to determine, on a document-by-document basis, whether disclosure of a record protected by an exemption would cause ‘identifiable harm,’” meaning, a judge would determine whether or not the administration’s claims of foreseeable harm were true – much like what a judge does in any other case.

Efforts to expedite requests through a singular website were also met with resistance from the DOJ, despite the fact that “the Administration believes that it is beneficial to study the feasibility of establishing a single website for the making of FOIA requests… and has already committed to doing so.”

Despite the administration’s stated intention to create such a site, the memo concluded that it “would be counterproductive to mandate establishment of a pilot program, with required participation by multiple agencies.”

Obama started off his presidency by instructing all federal agencies to operate under the “presumption of openness,” but five years later, his administration lobbied to keep the public in the dark.

March 10, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Democrats cover up role of Obama administration in Flint water crisis

By James Brewer | WSWS | March 9, 2016

Democratic Party politicians and operatives descended on Flint before Tuesday’s Michigan primary hoping to exploit public anger over the water crisis to boost their electoral chances. The selection of the city as the venue for the March 6 debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was designed to give the appearance that the Democrats were concerned with, and would seriously address, the disaster inflicted on the people of Flint over the last two years.

Both candidates sought to lay blame solely on the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, while concealing the role of state and local Democrats, including the state treasurer, the mayor, the emergency manager and the city council. They also said nothing about federal officials from Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who knowingly concealed the fact that the city was not treating its water supply with anti-corrosive agents and that lead levels in the water had made it toxic.

While making various demagogic statements, neither candidate offers any serious proposal to provide relief to the beleaguered residents. During the debate, LeeAnne Walters from Flint asked both candidates if they would require public water systems to replace lead pipes throughout the US if they were elected. Neither candidate would give a direct answer to the question.

Clinton replied, “We will commit to a priority to change the water systems and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere,” referring to all lead sources, including paint and dust.

Walters, a key figure in exposing the consistent cover-up by water quality officials, told the Huffington Post on Monday, “I hated Clinton’s answer. To tell a Flint resident that we’ll handle this in five years is no different than what the city was telling us and what the state was telling us.”

The Flint mother noted that federal agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have been downplaying the importance of lead in drinking water for decades, focusing almost exclusively on lead in paint and dust. This attitude toward public water systems was a significant factor in the lead poisoning of Washington, DC from 2001 to 2005 and contributed to the culture within agencies tasked to protect drinking water safety that has been exposed in the Flint events.

“If you look at the numbers, most of the grants and funding go to lead paint, so to lump it all together is unacceptable,” Walters said.

Walters said Sanders’ response to her question—that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under his administration would monitor water safety—was “lame,” adding that this is what the EPA is already supposed to do.

Thousands of emails have emerged exposing the role of top employees at Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) in covering up the lack of proper treatment in Flint’s water leading to the spike in lead levels. A spate of resignations and firings in the department have occurred as a result.

While the Democrats denounced the Snyder administration, they have consistently given a pass to the EPA, with US Congressman Dan Kildee from Flint, for example, saying that claims that the EPA is equally as responsible as the MDEQ is a “false equivalency.”

In fact, the EPA played a key role in aiding and abetting the efforts by MDEQ and the Snyder administration to conceal the danger to the public. A March 5 article in the Detroit Free Press examines emails between MDEQ and EPA officials from February 25, 2015 through the end of 2015. The emails reveal that the EPA was well informed that Flint was in violation of federal safe drinking water regulations, and that the MDEQ was not only aware, but itself instigating Flint officials to falsify water testing.

The article dates exchanges starting on February 25, when LeeAnne Walters’ home tap water tested at 104 parts per billion (ppb)—7 times more than the EPA action level of 15 ppb. Her child developed skin rashes. The next day, EPA program manager for Region 5 (the Midwest region), Jennifer Crooks, relates this to MDEQ’s Lansing District Coordinator for Drinking Water, Steve Busch, and Mike Prysby, MDEQ district engineer, with a note that says: “WOW!!!! Did he find the LEAD! 104 ppb. She has 2 children under the age of 3… Big worries here.”

This message was forwarded to EPA Region 5 Ground Water and Drinking Water Branch Chief Tom Poy, and Regulations Manager Miguel Del Toral, who is a leading expert on lead in water.

Del Toral, alarmed by the test results followed up with visits to Walters’ home to do further testing. Further emails corroborated Walters’ testimony at the February 3 US Congressional hearing, where she described Del Toral’s work in Flint, which culminated in a June memorandum to the EPA and the MDEQ, after which he was silenced by the federal agency.

Walters testified that she had made that report public. “So when he called me and asked me if he could use my information for this report, I said yes, and I asked for a copy. When I saw it in black and white—there is a difference living it and seeing it in black and white—that is why it was given to the ACLU and made public, because people did have a right to know. From that point, he was then no longer allowed to have association with me or anybody else in Flint. By the EPA.”

Del Toral and Walters had uncovered that there had been no corrosion control treatment of the water in Flint since the water source was switched to the Flint River in April 2014. For decades, the water supplied to Flint from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s treatment plant near Lake Huron had been treated for corrosives, in line with federal law, in order to prevent lead and other chemicals from leaching from Flint’s pipelines into its drinking water.

The long-mothballed Flint treatment plant neither had the technical capacity or the manpower to treat the water, but this did not stop state and local officials from both parties from approving the switch. The officials essentially rolled the dice hoping there would be no public outcry until a new pipeline that would connect Flint directly to Lake Huron was completed.

In his June memorandum, Del Toral also revealed that sampling of the water in Flint homes was done improperly, making the high lead levels less like to be revealed.

EPA Region 5 head, Susan Hedman, since resigned, told Flint’s Mayor Dayne Walling and others who raised concerns about the Del Toral memo, that she wished it had never been produced and that after she edited and vetted it, it would tell a different story—that Flint’s water was in compliance with lead and copper standards established by the federal government.

In early July, Walling asked Hedman to make a public statement to the ACLU to justify the city’s actions and she replied, “I’m not inclined to have any further communications with the ACLU representative.”

Dr. Marc Edwards, the leader of the Virginia Tech University team that performed an extensive testing of Flint’s water in August, told the February 3 Congressional hearing. “I did not know what happened for quite some time until MDEQ bragged to Ms. Walters and laughed at her and she reported back to me that ‘Mr. Del Toral had been handled’ and it was very clear that an agreement had been reached of some sort between EPA and MDEQ that would let MDEQ have their way with Flint’s children.

“That they were not going to install corrosion control. They had no intention to do it. There’s many emails that show that they were waiting for this new pipeline to come on next year and they thought it was a waste of time to do anything to treat the water. When we got involved, in August as a matter of fact, an MDEQ email said ‘Shouldn’t someone tell those folks from Virginia Tech that we’re switching to the pipeline next year so they don’t bother wasting their time on this issue?’”

National EPA Director Gina McCarthy, an Obama appointee, appeared for the first time in Flint at a February 2 EPA press conference. When a World Socialist Web Site reporter asked her directly about the quashing of the Del Toral memo, she lied, insisting the lead-in-water expert had not been silenced.

The significance of the cover-up for the EPA by the Democratic Party establishment is vast. Over the last weeks, it has emerged that lead poisoning of the population through the water systems is not isolated to Flint, but is a national phenomenon. In the state of Ohio, lead levels in the blood of children are high in many areas of the state. In the village of Sebring, Ohio, near the deindustrialized city of Youngstown, it has recently been made public that state water quality officials kept quiet for months when they knew that residents had lead-tainted water flowing through their taps.

lead-levels+map

Map showing recorded blood-lead levels in the US

The map above shows the extent to which children’s blood levels exceed the 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL) level considered high by the CDC across the country in 2014. Even more disturbing is the number of states that are not required to submit those levels to the federal government.

Food and Water Watch, the Washington DC-based advocate for public water, reports that federal water infrastructure spending has been cut by 74 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1977. Obama’s latest budget calls for another 11 percent cut.

Neither Democratic Party candidate has any intention of investing in desperately needed infrastructure. They dare not cut across the agenda of the financial elite to amass greater and greater profits at the expense of the working class, and to dedicate obscene sums to the endless pursuit of technology and weapons for war.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Women’s Day: High Profile Activist, Mother of 6, Kidnapped by Israeli Forces

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IMEMC News & Agencies – March 9, 2016

Israeli forces, on Tuesday night, have kidnapped iconic activist against the apartheid wall and settlements, and mother of six, Manal Tamimi, aged 43, from her home in Al-Nabi Saleh village, near Ramallah.

On International Women’s Day, 8th of March, at 1:30 AM, dozens of soldiers stormed Manal’s home, raided it and detained her family in one room, while female Israeli soldiers have taken Manal to another room in the house, thoroughly inspected her, then abducted her.

Manal’s husband, Bilal Tamimi, 50, said that, a few hours following the arrest, the family knew that Manal was taken to Benyamin Israeli police center near Ramallah, calling it “the Israeli gift to the Palestinian women on women’s day.”

Manal’s lawyer, Gabi Lasky, said, according to the PNN, that Tamimi underwent interrogation at the police center, and he has asked for a hearing session to take place as soon as possible, to know the charges held against her.

Manal and her family have maintained a high-profile in nonviolent popular resistance.

She was also part of Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, which presents community-based resistance rooted in a belief in the power of nonviolent struggle, taking various forms, such as strikes, protests, and legal campaigns, as well as supporting the call to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), Munther Amira strongly denounced the kidnapping, calling it a new Israeli crime against women, especially taking place on international women’s day.

Amira said that this act displays the Israeli brutality against all values of freedom and democracy, and against all women, and Palestinian women in particular.

PSCC demanded all women’s associations and human rights organizations to expose Israeli crimes against women and focus on Manal’s case, at the moment.

Two close relatives from the family, Ahed and Wa’ad Al-Tamimi have repeatedly stood up for Israeli soldiers during demonstrations.

In September of 2015, a story about an Israeli soldier that attacked Mohammad Tamimi, brother of Ahed and Wa’ad, while his arm was broken and in a cast, went viral. Manal’s close relative, Nariman, and her daughters saved the child from the soldier and defended him.

For the past six years, the village of Al-Nabi Saleh held a peaceful demonstration every week, against the Israeli wall and settlements that are engorging the village.

Bilal Tamimi said that Manal was unable to participate in the demonstrations during the past three weeks, because she developed a bad allergy towards teargas, which was fired intensely during protests.

Manal was shot and injured in her legs twice before, in 2013 and 2015.

Women in Struggle: Manal Tamimi – Nabi Saleh

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli Officer killed in ‘Friendly Fire’ During Invasion of Gaza

By Celine Hagbard | IMEMC News | March 9, 2016

An Israeli intelligence officer with the Shin Bet covert intelligence service of the Israeli armed forces was killed on Tuesday by other Israeli troops while carrying out an operation in the Gaza Strip.

The man was apparently ‘undercover’ and pretending to be a Palestinian when his fellow soldiers saw him near the border fence and opened fire on him.

Israeli authorities report that the incident is under investigation, but have not released any details, including the name of the officer who was killed.

Israeli forces stationed on the Gaza border are instructed by their superior officers to fire live ammunition at any person they see near the border fence. Israel has established a ‘kill zone’ of hundreds of meters along the fence, effectively seizing that land from the Palestinians who owned it and ‘shooting to kill’ anyone who enters the zone.

It is not yet known what Israeli Shin Bet agents were doing in Gaza, and what kind of ‘operation’ they were attempting to carry out.

The agency has faced international condemnation in recent months when surveillance videos showed Shin Bet officers infiltrating hospitals disguised as patients – even one dressed as a pregnant Palestinian woman – in order to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian hospital patients, in direct contravention of international law.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Half of Jews in Israel are in favour of expelling Arabs

MEMO | March 9, 2016

2-armed-settlerOver half the Jews in Israel support the expulsion of Arabs from the country, a new survey has revealed.

Conducted by the Pew Research Centre between October 2014 and May 2015, the study included 5,601 Israeli citizens, including Arabs, and showed that 48 per cent of Jews and 71 per cent of religious Jews support the expulsion of Arabs from the country. With regards to secular Jews, 58 per cent opposed the idea of expelling Arabs, with one-third in favour of the idea.

Seventy-nine per cent of Arabs asserted that there is “a lot of discrimination in Israeli society”, while 74 per cent of Jews claimed that they do not see such discrimination.

The vast majority of Jews said they saw Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state, while 89 per cent of secular Jews said that there should be a preference for democratic principles over religious laws. But 89 per cent of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews believe religious laws should take precedence.

The majority of secular Jews said that they identify as Israelis first and as Jews second, while Haredi and religious people identify thought the opposite.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

How Most Aid to the Palestinians Ends up in Israel’s Coffers

By Jonathan Cook | CounterPunch | March 9, 2016

Diplomats may have a reputation for grayness, obfuscation, even hypocrisy, but few have found themselves compared to a serial killer, let alone one who devours human flesh.

That honour befell Laars Faaborg-Andersen, the European Union’s ambassador to Israel, last week when Jewish settlers launched a social media campaign casting him as Hannibal Lecter, the terrifying character from the film Silence of the Lambs.

An image of the Danish diplomat wearing Lecter’s prison face-mask was supposed to suggest that Europe needs similar muzzling.

The settlers’ grievance relates to European aid, which has provided temporary shelter to Palestinian Bedouin families after the Israeli army demolished their homes in the occupied territories near Jerusalem. The emergency housing has helped them remain on land coveted by Israel and the settlers.

European officials, outraged by the Lecter comparison, have reminded Tel Aviv that, were it to abide by international law, Israel – not the EU – would be taking responsibility for these families’ welfare.

While Europe may think of itself as part of an enlightened West, using aid to defend Palestinians’ rights, the reality is less reassuring. The aid may actually be making things significantly worse.

Shir Hever, an Israeli economist who has spent years piecing together the murky economics of the occupation, recently published a report that makes shocking reading.

Like others, he believes international aid has allowed Israel to avoid footing the bill for its decades-old occupation. But he goes further.

His astonishing conclusion – one that may surprise Israel’s settlers – is that at least 78 per cent of humanitarian aid intended for Palestinians ends up in Israel’s coffers.

The sums involved are huge. The Palestinians under occupation are among the most aid-dependent in the world, receiving more than $2bn from the international community a year. According to Hever, donors could be directly subsidising up to a third of the occupation’s costs.

Other forms of Israeli profiteering have been identified in previous studies.

In 2013 the World Bank very conservatively estimated that the Palestinians lose at least $3.4bn a year in resources plundered by Israel.

Further, Israel’s refusal to make peace with the Palestinians, and as a consequence the rest of the region, is used to justify Washington’s annual $3bn in military aid.

Israel also uses the occupied territories as laboratories for testing weapons and surveillance systems on Palestinians – and then exports its expertise. Israel’s military and cyber industries are hugely profitable, generating many billions of dollars of income each year.

A survey published last week found tiny Israel to be the eighth most powerful country in the world.

But whereas these income streams are a recognisable, if troubling, windfall from Israel’s occupation, western humanitarian aid to the Palestinians is clearly intended for the victims, not the victors.

So how is Israel creaming off so much?

The problem, says Hever, is Israel’s self-imposed role as mediator. To reach the Palestinians, donors have no choice but to go through Israel. This provides ripe opportunities for what he terms “aid subversion” and “aid diversion”.

The first results from the Palestinians being a captive market. They have access to few goods and services that are not Israeli.

Who Profits?, an Israeli organisation monitoring the economic benefits for Israel in the occupation, assesses that dairy firm Tnuva enjoys a monopoly in the West Bank worth $60 million annually.

Aid diversion, meanwhile, occurs because Israel controls all movement of people and goods. Israeli restrictions mean it gets to charge for transportation and storage, and levy “security” fees.

Other studies have identified additional profits from “aid destruction”. When Israel wrecks foreign-funded aid projects, Palestinians lose – but Israel often benefits.

Cement-maker Nesher, for example, is reported to control 85 per cent of all construction by Israelis and Palestinians, including the supplies for rebuilding efforts in Gaza after Israel’s repeated rampages.

Significant segments of Israeli society, aside from those in the security industries, are lining their pockets from the occupation. Paradoxically, the label “the most aid-dependent people in the world” – usually affixed to the Palestinians – might be better used to describe Israelis.

What can be done? International law expert Richard Falk notes that Israel is exploiting an aid oversight vacuum: there are no requirements on donors to ensure their money reaches the intended recipients.

What the international community has done over the past 20 years of the Oslo process – inadvertently or otherwise – is offer Israel financial incentives to stabilise and entrench its rule over the Palestinians. It can do so relatively cost-free.

While Europe and Washington have tried to beat Israel with a small diplomatic stick to release its hold on the occupied territories, at the same time they dangle juicy financial carrots to encourage Israel to tighten its grip.

There is a small ray of hope. Western aid policy does not have to be self-sabotaging. Hever’s study indicates that Israel has grown as reliant on Palestinian aid as the Palestinians themselves.

The EU noted last week that Israel not Brussels should be caring for the Bedouin it has left homeless. Europe could take its own advice to heart and start shifting the true costs of the occupation back on to Israel.

That may happen soon enough whatever the west decides, if – as even Israel is predicting will occur soon – the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas collapses.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

US Claims 150 ‘Fighters’ Killed in Somalia Airstrike, Nobody Believes Them

Deadliest strike in America’s drone war calls into question how US defines “combatants”

Sputnik – 09.03.2016

US airstrikes targeting what the Pentagon is calling an al-Shabaab training facility in Somalia killed over 150 people on Saturday. In an announcement Monday, the Pentagon classified the dead as “militant fighters” who were allegedly preparing a large-scale attack against US and African diplomatic personnel.

International human rights groups quickly contested the Pentagon’s official narrative, however, asking how a strike killing in excess of 150 people could be anything but the product of widespread collateral damage.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism scoffed at US assertions calling the death toll from the strike “unprecedented.” The Saturday strike was the deadliest single US counterterrorism action since the group began monitoring drone strike reports in 2010.

The Pentagon countered that not only were the dead only al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, but also that the “fighters” were scheduled to carry out an imminent attack against US interests.

Controversial drone program likely resulting in massive, unreported civilian deaths

The US drone program, a lynchpin in America’s global war on terrorism, has faced widening condemnation by the international community in recent years. Legal experts argue that the strikes cannot be legal without a proper congressional war authorization or the presence of ongoing hostilities, or a “hot war,” within the targeted territories.

More concerning to human rights advocates, however, are reports in recent years that many of those killed in drone strikes are civilians, who are then reported by White House officials as having been combatants. One report on Nevada-based drone operators observed that they “often do not know who they are killing, they are making a guess.”

Furthermore, investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other advocacy groups, who are backtracking news reports on drone strikes to the locations, indicated they have found startlingly different results than those suggested by the White House.

Repeatedly, when traced to the scene of strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya, family members and witnesses on the ground decry the attacks as collateral damage, and claim that their slain family members were civilians.

Washington defines away collateral damage by use of “kill-boxes”

The death misreporting may be legal sleight-of-hand, as anyone who is present in a so-called “kill-box” is a legitimate target. Kill boxes are areas defined as small geographic spaces of hostility in which those present are automatically defined as a combatant.

This notion of a kill box made sense in conventional wars – civilians had notice and would stay away from battlefields. Today, however, a kill zone is defined as a perimeter around a high-level target or targets that actually moves with the target. In effect, US lawyers have simply defined away collateral damage.

Obama’s pledge of more transparency over legally dubious drone wars not likely to pan out

News of the attack comes as the White House announced Monday that it will disclose the death count of its controversial drone operations under President Barack Obama.

Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters that the death count will be released “in the coming weeks” as part of the administration’s transparency commitment. In subsequent years, the US is scheduled to report death counts associated with drone warfare annually.

The report is limited to only Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, but will not include death totals for strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria where hot wars continue.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest stated, “There will obviously be some limitations on where we can be transparent, given a variety of sensitivities – including diplomatic.”

Nonetheless, the increased reporting by the Obama Administration is welcomed by the human rights community and will include both official combatant and civilian death totals. It is all too likely, however, that official combatants are unofficial civilians, as America’s deadly game of international domination is sanitized with legal jargon.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gulf states to take legal action against Hezbollah affiliated TV channels

MEMO | March 9, 2016

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) information ministers agreed on Tuesday to take legal action against TV channels affiliated to Hezbollah, Anadolu reported.

This decision came as part of the conclusion statement of the 24th meeting of the GCC information ministers, which was held in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

“The legal measures stipulated in the decision will apply to all production companies, producers and all matters related to media,” the statement said.

“They are based on the GCC laws and on international laws related to the fight against terrorism,” it said, noting that Hezbollah is considered a terrorist entity.

According to the statement, the GCC described Hezbollah as a group that “incited hatred, chaos and violence” in “blatant violation of the sovereignty, security and stability of GCC and Arab countries”.

On 2 March, the GCC and the council of Arab interior ministers designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation.

March 9, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

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