Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Revealed: Almost 3 Million Faces Stored On Met Police Database

RINF – June 24, 2015

As the result of a Freedom of Information request it has emerged that the London Met Police are compiling a database of almost 3 million people. To put this into perspective, there are currently 8 million people living in the capital.

The database, a bespoke system call the “Facial Recognition System (FRS)” began gathering images in 2009. The Met also acknowledges that they have never conducted a privacy impact assessment on the system.

It even stores pictures of those who have not been charged or found guilty of a crime, and they state:

“All custody images are kept indefinitely unless they are removed under the Early Deletion process.”

This follows on from the revelation in early 2015 that police had secretly built a massive national database that contains the faces of over 18 million people, without the approval of the Home Office or independent watchdogs.

June 25, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon rewrites ‘Law of War’ declaring ‘belligerent’ journalists as legitimate targets

RT | June 24, 2015

The Pentagon has released a book of instructions on the “law of war,” detailing acceptable ways of killing the enemy. The manual also states that journalists can be labeled “unprivileged belligerents,” an obscure term that replaced “enemy combatant.”

The 1,176-page “Department of Defense Law of War Manual” explains that shooting, exploding, bombing, stabbing, or cutting the enemy are acceptable ways of getting the job done, but the use of poison or asphyxiating gases is not allowed.

Surprise attacks and killing retreating troops have also been given the green light.

But the lengthy manual doesn’t only talk about protocol for those on the frontline. It also has an extensive section on journalists – including the fact that they can be labeled terrorists.

“In general, journalists are civilians. However, journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents,” the manual states.

The term “unprivileged belligerents” replaces the Bush-era term “unlawful enemy combatant.”

When asked what this means, professor of Journalism at Georgetown Chris Chambers told RT that he doesn’t know, “because the Geneva Convention, other tenets of international law, and even United States law – federal courts have spoken on this – doesn’t have this thing on ‘unprivileged belligerents’.”

This means that embedded journalists, who are officially sanctioned by the military and attached to a unit, will be favored by an even greater degree than before. “It gives them license to attack or even murder journalists that they don’t particularly like but aren’t on the other side,” Chambers said.

Even the Obama Administration’s definition of “enemy combatant” was vague enough, basically meaning any male of a military age who “happens to be there,” Chambers added.

The manual also deals with drones, stating that there is “no prohibition in the law of war on the use of remotely piloted aircraft (also called “unmanned aerial vehicles”).” Such weapons may offer certain advantages over the weapons systems. It states that drones can be designated as military aircraft if used by a country’s military.

The book includes a foreword from the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Stephen Preston, who states that “the law of war is part of who we are.” He goes on to say that the manual will “help us remember the hard-learned lessons from the past.”

The manual is the Pentagon’s first all-in-one legal guide for the four military branches. Previously, each sector was tasked with writing their own guidelines for engagement, which presumably did not list journalists as potential traitors.

The Pentagon did not specify the exact circumstances under which a journalist might be declared an unprivileged belligerent, but Chambers says he is sure “their legal department is going over it, as is the National Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists.”

June 24, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

New documents yet more evidence of UK & European role in US drone strikes

Reprieve | June 24, 2015

The Guardian and the New York Times have today revealed the existence of documents showing the contribution made by UK intelligence agency GCHQ to US drone strikes in Yemen.

The British Government has to date refused to comment on its role in such strikes, describing them consistently as “a matter for the Yemeni and US Governments.”

However, legal charity Reprieve has previously raised concerns over European complicity in covert drone strikes – considered by many experts to be in violation of international law – through the sharing of intelligence and the provision of infrastructure.

In Germany, Reprieve has helped civilian drone strike victim Faisal bin ali Jaber to bring a case against the Government over the role played in Yemen strikes by the military base at Ramstein.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Reprieve unearthed a contract showing that a high-tech data link had been provided between RAF Croughton – a base leased by the US in Lincolnshire – and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, from where US strikes against Yemen have reportedly been launched.

Commenting, Reprieve legal director Kat Craig said: “This is yet more damning evidence of the key role played by the UK in the illegal US drone war. This campaign has taken place in the shadows, killing hundreds of civilians while leaving their families with no access to justice. President Obama won’t even confirm it is taking place; while the UK and Germany follow his lead by stonewalling questions on the part they play. It is time Europe came clean on the support it provides to this misguided campaign, which the evidence suggests is making the world a more dangerous place for all of us.”

June 24, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Egypt to burn all books by Brotherhood scholars

MEMO | June 23, 2015

The head of the religious sector at Egypt’s Ministry of Endowments, Mohamed Abdel Razek, has announced that the ministry will burn all books and exegeses written by Muslim Brotherhood scholars.

In a press statement released on Monday, Abdel-Razek said that his ministry plans to burn the “poisonous books” written by Sheikh Hassan Al-Banna, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Sayyid Qutb and other Brotherhood leaders, as well as books written by other Islamist groups.

The Minister of Endowments Mohammad Mukhtar Juma on Saturday issued a decision to examine and conduct an inventory of the books at religious and public libraries across the country so as to “cleanse” them of books considered to contradict the tolerant nature of Islam.

June 24, 2015 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Israel backs bill to allow secret police interrogations to continue

MEMO | June 24, 2015

The Israeli Knesset is to extend a temporary bill that permits police interrogators not to use audio or video recordings to document interrogations of people suspected of security offences, Arab48.com reported yesterday.

The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) condemned the measure and sent a letter to the Israeli Public Prosecutor and the government’s Judicial Advisor demanding they appeal against the bill.

“This amounts to severe violation of basic prisoners’ rights, including the legal right to remain dignified and have just judicial measures,” Adalah said. “Extending this bill clearly undermines any opportunity to monitor the legality of interrogation measures and confessions raised to the court.”

The Israeli Knesset approved a bill in 2002 demanding security services document the questioning of any prisoner who may get more than ten years in prison for his crimes. The bill included an article which made such documentation unnecessary in cases of security-related offences.

According to Adalah, this article was a temporary measure agreed to remain in place for six years. In 2008, the Knesset extended it until 2012 and then it was extended to 2015. Adalah said Palestinian prisoners are affected most by this article.

June 24, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel issues 30 administrative detention orders during June

Palestine Information Center – June 24, 2015

9c9350ee-bac7-4b6b-be4e-00270b836e3bAL-KHALIL – Israeli courts issued, since the beginning of June, 30 administrative detention orders against Palestinian prisoners from al-Khalil, Prisoners Media Center said.

The center stated that 43% of administrative detainees held currently without charge or trial in Israeli jails are from al-Khalil.

As a whole, there are 450 administrative detainees in Israeli jails including four MPs.

The center pointed out that Israeli administrative detention policy mainly targets youth activists, students, MPs, and prisoners’ defenders as an attempt to prevent them from exposing the reported Israeli human rights violations.

June 24, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Charleston and Gun Rights

By Sheldon Richmann | Free Association | June 23, 2015

Dylann Roof’s racially motivated murders of nine black churchgoers have brought predictable calls for new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms.

How ironic this is we shall soon see.

Advocates of gun rights argue that the best way to prevent such atrocities is for would-be victims to arm themselves; killers will break gun laws without hesitation (though Roof obtained his .45-caliber handgun legally), so legal obstacles to gun ownership only impede the innocent. Relying on the police for defense is futile — or worse.

This argument persuades few who are committed to “gun control” (a misnomer because law-abiding people, not guns, are subject to control). But those who demand it while grieving over the racist massacre at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., ought to understand that “time and again, guns have proven pivotal to the African American quest for freedom.”

That sentence is found in Charles E. Cobb Jr.’s important book That Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

Guns made the civil rights movement possible? What about the philosophy of nonviolence embraced by most prominent civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr.?

As Cobb, a journalist and veteran civil rights activist, explains, for many civil rights activists in the South, nonviolence did not rule out “armed self-defense,” which meant keeping firearms. “In these communities, where the law was generally weighted against them, armed self-defense was a natural response to white terror,” he writes.

True, many activists believed in a turn-the-other-cheek strategy. But others rejected strict passivism. “Whether the question was one of picking up a gun in response to attack by night riders,” Cobb writes, “or of curling one’s body tightly and protectively while being assaulted by a mob during a lunch-counter sit-in, or of shielding an elderly person under attack for trying to register to vote, the decision of what to do centered not on the choice between nonviolence and violence but on the question of what response was best in each situation.” As one Mississippi activist and farmer, Hartman Turnbow, put it after scaring off night riders with his gun, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent; I was just protecting my family.”

Guns of course pervaded the South before the civil rights movement, and this was true of black culture too. Moreover, many black war veterans came home with guns, determined to win their freedom. As the black freedom movement emerged after World War II and the Korean War, it was only natural for guns to be seen as important in the defense against the daily threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Cobb’s book is filled with accounts of incidents in which brutal racists were persuaded to retreat by black men armed and ready to defend themselves and their families. For example, “There is … no shortage of examples of black resistance to the vicious and violent white supremacy that continued to prevail in Louisiana as CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] organizers began their work.” Guns were no guarantee against white aggression, but Cobb’s message is that more blacks would have been killed had they been unarmed.

This book taught me, among other things, that 1) Martin Luther King’s home in the 1950s was “an arsenal” and was always guarded by armed men, 2) that King in 1956 applied for a concealed-carry permit (and was turned down), 3) that Daisy Bates, who advised the Little Rock Nine, carried a .32-caliber handgun in her purse, 4) and that Medgar Evers always was armed. (Evers of course was murdered; guns are no panacea.)

Cobb understands that “America’s first gun control laws … were designed to prevent the possession of weapons by black people,” and he writes that “it can easily be argued that today’s controversial Stand Your Ground right of self-defense first took root in black communities.” (Whites expected blacks to “back down or submit — never to stand up for themselves.”)

He concludes, “There was a time when people on both sides of America’s racial divide embraced their right to self-protection, and when rights were won because of it. We would do well to remember that fact today.”

June 23, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Tory crackdown on Freedom of Information sparks transparency fears

RT | June 22, 2015

Conservative ministers are plotting a clampdown on Britain’s Freedom of Information (FoI) laws, a move that observers warn could signal the death knell for Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to cultivate a new wave of transparency in Westminster.

Justice Secretary Michael Gove is attempting to make it considerably more difficult for citizens to seek information from state bodies, the Financial Times revealed Monday.

Sources told the newspaper that a number of proposals have been floated and Gove is currently considering how they might be implemented.

Giving ministers the power to veto the publication of certain documents has been tabled, as was attempted when Prince Charles’ notorious “black spider” letters were recently published.

Altering government officials’ method of calculating the cost of sourcing government data has also been proposed. Both measures could seriously impact on Britons’ right to know, bolstering state secrecy in the process, critics warn.

These legal changes will also serve to create “think time” and redaction costs that will considerably drive up the cost of FoI requests. Transparency advocates warn they will leave government data inaccessible for many.

The planned crackdown on citizens’ right to know contrasts starkly with Cameron’s transparency rhetoric four years ago. Writing in the Telegraph, the PM promised the electorate a far-reaching “revolution in [government] transparency.”

“Information is power,” he wrote in 2011.

“It lets people hold the powerful to account, giving them the tools they need to take on politicians and bureaucrats.”

The state’s FoI Act was implemented in 2005, under Tony Blair’s Labour government. Current plans to reform the legislation will likely receive strong opposition from Labour Party and Scottish Nationalist Party MPs.

Critics maintain Westminster’s quiet assault on Britons’ right to access government data has already begun.

A number of Downing Street practices have recently surfaced, which reduce Whitehall’s ability to uphold the public interest.

On Tuesday, it emerged that emails sent from computers in 10 Downing Street are deleted within three months as a rule. The practice was leaked to the FT by a number of ex-Downing Street employees. It was reportedly put in place 10 years ago under Blair’s government.

One former Number 10 worker told the FT the system breeds dysfunctionality in Whitehall.

Speaking to the newspaper, director of Britain’s Campaign for Freedom of Information said citizens’ right to access information freely is under threat.

He warned many of the proposals being discussed by Tory ministers “could have had severe consequences for the right to know.”

The campaign called upon Labour MPs Jenny Chapman, Dan Jarvis, and Stephen Twigg to challenge Gove’s transparency crackdown plans in parliament on Tuesday.

June 22, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Over 10,000 Soldiers Desert Ukrainian Army

Sputnik – 21.06.2015

More than 10,000 cases of desertion have been registered in the Ukrainian Army since the outbreak of the Donbass war in April 2014, Ukrainian Vesti reported.

In 2014 the army suffered heavy desertion and nearly 30 percent of the servicemen called up in the first wave of mobilization (March 17) abandoned their positions, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

Ukrainian parliament Verkhovna Rada has announced six waves of mobilization so far. By the end of 2014 the strength of Ukrainian Armed Forces grew from 130,000 to 232,000.Ukrainians have been protesting against the mobilization. They travel to work abroad or simply reside at their relatives’ in other countries. Almost 1,3 million Ukrainian draftees live in Russia.

Since April 7, 2014 the Kiev authorities have been waging war against Donbass self-defense forces who rejected the legitimacy of the coup-imposed Ukrainian government and declared the independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Official figures estimate the number of victims to near 6,500. But the German intelligence reported of 50,000 victims in February 2015.

June 21, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

By Definition, An Aggressor Cannot Act in Defense

By Robert Barsocchini | Empire Slayer | June 17, 2015

The statement that Israel has the right to defend itself against Palestine is similar to the statement that if, say, the US annexed, occupied, and started building illegal settlements in Cuba (the parts the US isn’t already illegally occupying and using as a torture camp, Guantanamo), then the US would have the right to “defend” itself against Cubans acting in retaliation to US aggression.

Everyone aside from blind fundamentalists and/or the hopelessly corrupt would laugh at the notion that in such a situation, US action against resistant Cubans would be “defense”. Likewise, the world laughs at the idea that Israel can “defend” itself against the vastly more outgunned Palestinians resisting Israeli aggression.

International law reflects the common sense dynamics of this situation, which any child could easily understand and naturally grasp.

Georgetown International Law professor Noura Erakat explains the relevant rules:

… where an occupation already is in place, the right to initiate militarized force in response to an armed attack, as opposed to police force to restore order, is not a remedy available to the occupying state.

… the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population.

An occupying power cannot justify military force as self-defense in territory for which it is responsible as the occupant.

However, people exploiting weaker groups try to deny elementary common sense and rewrite rules to defend what they are doing, and/or make themselves feel better about their awful acts. For example, the Spanish inquisition made little rules for itself regarding its torture subjects, such as that they were not supposed to bleed. Thus, the Inquisition, instead of say using thumbscrews (a Euro favorite), would burn people alive, as this, they ludicrously argued, did not make people bleed and thus made the Inquisition perpetrators moral and law-abiding, at least in their warped and self-serving minds. (Also, they would make people bleed through various torture methods, anyway, and just ignore their own rules.)

Naturally, this is what Israel, the US, and all corrupt, nasty power-centers do. Erakat explains how Israel plays these games with International Law:

[Israel tries to get around International Law by saying it does] not occupy [the Palestinian territories] within the meaning of international law. The UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, as well as the Israeli High Court of Justice have roundly rejected the Israeli government’s position. 

In its 2012 session, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination described current conditions following decades of occupation and attendant repression as tantamount to Apartheid.

[The International Court of Justice rules that “Article 51 of the Charter [the right to self defense] has no relevance” to Israel’s assaults and massacres against the territories it illegally occupies and colonizes.]

… Israel is distorting/reinterpreting international law to justify its use of militarized force in order to protect its colonial authority…

In doing this, Israel:

… forces the people of the Gaza Strip to face one of the most powerful militaries in the world without the benefit either of its own military, or of any realistic means to acquire the means todefend itself.

If Israel were concerned about small matters like honor, it would help or allow Gazans to acquire guided weapons for self-defense. However, the Israeli state prefers to use its civilian population as a human shield (a tactic constantly used by Israel) to absorb the few unguided rockets that make it into populated Israeli areas, rather than have guided rockets hit designated Israeli military installations, which are enmeshed throughout Israeli civilian society.

Erakat concludes that, since the Israeli state’s behavior is an “affront to the international humanitarian legal order”, “the onus to resist this shift and to preserve protection for civilians rests upon the shoulders of citizens, organizations, and mass movements who can influence their governments enforce international law. There is no alternative to political mobilization to shape state behavior.”

…

The next question is whether the Palestinians have the right to use arms to resist illegal Israeli occupation, annexation, settlement, and aggression.

If we return to our US-occupying-Cuba metaphor, the common sense/fairness answer is obviously yes, of course. And again, the only reason many US citizens do not answer yes immediately to the question of whether Palestinians are allowed to use force to defend themselves against Israel’s armed aggression is that US citizens utterly lack exposure to information representative of common sense and world opinion. What they are exposed to represents opinion and “reporting” heavily biased in favor of the US-backed aggressors, in ways that range from obvious to subtle and subconscious, from natural ethnocentrism to intentional insidiousness.

But again, international law, when we look at it, represents the common-sense interpretation of the situation at which any child would arrive.

Middle East scholars LeVine and Hajjar explain that Palestinians are not prohibited:

… from taking up arms to resist occupation.

Additional Protocol I established people’s right to use armed force to resist foreign occupation as well as colonial domination and to fight against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination. This Protocol was promulgated for the purpose of injecting IHL standards into asymmetric wars (between states and non-state groups).

Israel has refused to sign this Protocol (as has the US) and does not recognise the right of non-state groups to fight for those specified causes, even if they were to abide by the laws of war. Nevertheless, the lawfulness of the use of armed force is not contingent on the status of the adversaries but rather on whether those who fight do so in accordance with the principles of IHL (International Humanitarian Law) enumerated above [and, as Dr. Norman Finkelstein and others note, on whether a group under attack has the option or ability to retaliate within the technical bounds of IHL – ie, do Palestinians have guided, and thus legal, projectiles to use as a deterrent? They do not. Do they therefore lack the right to retaliate in the most effective ways they can?].

Further, as I have noted, the mostly symbolic and ineffective Palestinian projectile attacks – which have killed about 30 people in their entire history – are not only launched under illegal Israeli occupation, but also mainly “in retaliation for prior indiscriminate Israeli killings of Gazan civilians“, doubling both the illegality of Israeli action and the right to self defense of the Palestinians.

Examples of Israeli double-war crimes (occupation combined with further military assault/aggression) that have elicited defensive retaliation from Palestine include:

… the November 5 [2012] killing of a 23-year-old mentally disabled man who strayed too close to the border fence, and at least one boy killed while playing football five days later. Two other Palestinians who rushed to the latter scene to help the victims were themselves immediately killed by three more shells fired by Israeli forces [in 2012, and similar attacks by the Israeli occupier in 2014 that spurred retaliatory rocket firing, as Israel concedes.]

[In 2012, for example, Israeli] attacks prompted a retaliatory strike by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which launched an anti-tank missile at an army jeep near the border, wounding four soldiers. That attack by a group not under the operational control of Hamas in turn triggered the targeting of Jabari and the all-out assault on Gaza by Israel.

The second factor that undercuts the self-defence rationale is that Jabari was involved in negotiating an Egyptian-brokered comprehensive, long-term cease-fire with Israel when he was assassinated. In a November 17 New York Times op-ed, Israeli academic Gershon Baskin (who was a mediator in these negotiations) declared that Jabari had been given a near-final version of the agreement hours before he was killed.

… the immediate causes of the most violent wave of rocket fire were precisely the indiscriminate killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces and the assassination of the official who was engaged in negotiations to permanently curtail such rocket attacks. Moreover, Israeli officials had to know and anticipate that killing Jabari would precipitate a violent Palestinian response, raising serious questions about their moral and political responsibility for the ensuing violence.

The circumstances noted above are exactly similar to Israel’s 2014 massacre in Israeli-occupied Gaza, which began with Israeli killings of Gazans, including killing children on video, against the background of an imminent agreement between Hamas and the West Bank leadership, with US and EU approval.  This enraged Israel due to the prospect of another “Palestinian peace offensive”, which might mitigate Israel’s ability to continue illegally colonizing territory outside its legal and internationally recognized borders.

Indeed, Israel’s assaults on occupied refugee camps such as Gaza, “must be judged against a reality which, although vehemently rejected by Israeli officials … enjoys an overwhelming international consensus: Namely, that the entirety of the territories captured by Israel in 1967 remain occupied according to international law.”

The professors sum up:

Put simply, an occupying state has no legal right to wage a full-scale military war against an occupied population. Rather, the occupying state is legally obligated to protect the rights and prioritise the interests of this population, something Israel has manifestly not done in any part of the Occupied Territories.

The occupying power has rights, too, including the right to maintain order and to take steps to ensure for its own security. But in a context of occupation, these options are limited to police actions and at most use of small arms to address an immediate threat, not full-scale war.

Israel practices “continual deployment of large-scale, indiscriminate force against people and space of Gaza – and, equally important, the West Bank as well…”

These acts constitute “not merely the context for war crimes but for crimes against humanity and, because of their clearly aggressive nature, a crime against peace.”

Like all aggressive criminal actors, Israel would prefer to meet no resistance, and thus naturally insists that the Palestinians do not have “any right to use force, even in self-defence”.  Such desperate claims give “important insight into how Israel interprets the law to project the legality of policies and practices it wishes to pursue.”

…

Recognized as the most important and authoritative moral voice on the issue of resistance to tyranny, Mahatma Gandhi spoke specifically on the issue of Israeli tyranny against Palestine, and said,

[Israelis] can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs … nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Also see: The Hateful Likud [Israeli ruling organization] Charter Calls for the Destruction of Any Palestine State 

@_DirtyTruths

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Bush-era officials can be sued for abuse of 9/11 detainees – court

RT | June 18, 2015

A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit against former Justice Department and law enforcement officials for violating the rights of men perceived as Arab or Muslim who were rounded up after 9/11 and held for months, sometimes in solitary confinement.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Bush-era heads of the Department of Justice, FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), can be sued for violating the constitutional rights of 762 men, described as “out-of-status aliens” because they either overstayed their visas or worked without permits.

The case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft, was filed in 2002 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). It names as defendants the former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller and former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service James Ziglar. The CCR is also suing the officials in charge of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, and the Passaic County Jail in Paterson, New Jersey, where the plaintiffs were being held for anywhere from three to eight months.

A federal court dismissed the case in 2013, after concluding there was no evidence the officials had any “intent to punish” the plaintiffs. However, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the Justice Department officials were not entitled to “qualified immunity,” and that the confinement conditions of the immigrants were actually established with “punitive intent.”

“We believe, then, that the challenged conditions—keeping detainees in their cells for twenty‐three hours a day, constructively denying them recreation and exposing them to the elements, strip searching them whenever they were removed from or returned to their cells, denying them sleep by bright lights—were not reasonably related to a legitimate goal, but rather were punitive and unconstitutional,” judges Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley wrote in the majority opinion.

Pooler and Wesley said the government officials presumed that “all out‐of‐status Arabs or Muslims were potential terrorists until proven otherwise,” and justified the detentions on national security grounds.

The lawsuit claims the mass detentions were part of the FBI’s “hold-until-cleared policy,” holding the men described as “potential recruits” for Al-Qaeda solely because of their Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian origin. Of the eight current plaintiffs, six are Muslim, one is Hindu, and one is Buddhist.

“It might well be that national security concerns motivated the defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision,” the two judges wrote.

“We are thrilled with the court’s ruling,” said CCR attorney Rachel Meeropol. “The court took this opportunity to remind the nation that the rule of law and the rights of human beings, whether citizens or not, must not be sacrificed in the face of national security hysteria.”

Benamar Benatta, one of the plaintiffs, said he was “delighted” by the ruling. Cleared for release on November 14, 2001, Benatta remained in solitary confinement until April 30 the following year. … Full article

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-Israeli foreign minister avoids Gaza war crimes arrest thanks to UK diplomatic immunity

RT | June 18, 2015

Former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni was granted diplomatic immunity by the British government during a visit to the UK this week to avoid possible arrest over alleged war crimes.

The Zionist Union politician was attending the Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, where she spoke on the Israeli political climate and the future of Israel and Palestine.

Livni was able to qualify for legal immunity by arranging meetings with British officials, exploiting a legal loophole that protects Israelis on official visits to the UK.

She has had to use the loophole since pro-Palestine activists successfully petitioned a British court to issue an arrest warrant in her name ahead of a visit in December 2009.

As Israeli Foreign Minister during the 2008-09 Gaza War, Livni was involved in the decision to take military action in response to rocket fire coming from the Gaza Strip. The rocket fire itself was in response to a November 4, 2008 incident, when IDF soldiers killed several Hamas fighters in a military incursion.

Livni told reporters at the time: “We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation. Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing.”

A UN investigation found Israel had used excessive force which unfairly impacted on civilians, as well as using Palestinians as human shields by forcing them to enter houses which might be booby trapped.

Some 926 Palestinian civilians were killed in the conflict, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The report concluded Israel had violated articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Palestine supporters hold Livni accountable for these war crimes.

Livni, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, abandoned her trip to the UK in 2009. Then-Foreign Secretary David Miliband subsequently issued Livni a personal apology.

The British government is theoretically able to prosecute Livni on suspicion of war crimes.

By using “universal jurisdiction,” UK law permits British courts to cover serious offenses such as war crimes, torture and hostage-taking, regardless of where they were committed.

However, the British government amended the law in September 2011 to avoid further diplomatic incidents.

Parliament changed the legislation so that the head of public prosecutions must give approval to a request for arrest warrants under universal jurisdiction.

The UK government has also granted automatic immunity to all Israelis on official visits to Britain, according to the Times of Israel.

As a result, British courts rejected a request for a new arrest warrant against Livni ahead of this week’s visit.

The Zionist Union member exploited the legal loophole to attend the Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit, according to the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

During her London visit, she met with Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood MP to present a copy of Israel’s 275-page report on Operation Protective Edge, last summer’s deadly assault by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) against Gaza.

The report places blame for the war’s casualties on Hamas in Gaza and declares Israel’s attack to be “lawful” and “legitimate.”

More than 2,000 Palestinians died in the conflict, the majority of them civilians. Some 73 Israelis were killed, all but six of whom were soldiers.

Livni told Ellwood: “It is important that the British government have an accurate picture of the factual, ethical, and legal reality, because the UN report is expected to be so twisted and anti-Israel.”

During her visit, a BBC Newsnight interviewer challenged Livni over her parents’ involvement in Irgun, a paramilitary organization that used violence against the British in its struggle for an independent Israel. Livni was asked if she would describe her parents as terrorists.

The former Israeli foreign minister denied there was any comparison between Hamas and Irgun.

She told BBC journalist Evan Davis: “There is a huge difference between those fighting an army, the British Army, and between all those terrorist organizations in our region that are looking for civilians to kill.”

Read more
Israeli soldiers who beat handcuffed Palestinian get suspended sentences
Missile killing of 4 Gaza boys not a crime, Israel rules
‘Outrageous’: Saudi diplomat who kept workers in ‘slavery’ immune from law

June 18, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »