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Live ammunition used at Nabi Saleh demonstration

International Solidarity Movement | January 16, 2015 

Nabi Saleh, Occupied Palestine – For five years now, residents of Nabi Saleh have been denied access to their spring. A source of irrigation for their crops, as well as a place for recreation: al-Qaws spring was the heart of this farming community.

The illegal settlement of Halamish was established on the land of Nabi Saleh, and the neighbouring village of Deir Nidham in 1977; since then, and particularly in recent years, the settlement has been growing, stealing more land, and finally denying the villagers access to their spring.

The illegal settlement (photo by ISM).

For five years, every Friday, residents of Nabi Saleh gather with local supporters, Israeli and international activists, to protest against the theft of their land and the denial of access to the spring. Sometimes, with bravery and determination alone, these villagers have managed to reach the spring, stealing a few precious moments before the arrests and reprisals reach their climax.  Most of the time, the repression from the Israeli Occupation Forces is too great to get anywhere close.

Today in Nabi Saleh the villagers gathered at the petrol station on the edge of the village; undeterred by the rain, they were ready for the weekly demonstration. The weekly show of strength and determination to fight for what is rightfully theirs.

We walked down the road, men, women, and children chanting in Arabic and English, voicing our common determination to end this occupation. The Israeli military were waiting at the bottom of the road, blockading the access to the village. As soon as we were in range the tear gas started. A peaceful march met with poisonous tear gas from the very beginning. Many attempted to throw and kick the smoking toxic canisters away, but the sheer quantity meant we had to retreat quickly.

As the smoke cleared, we tried to walk forwards once more. But then the unmistakable crack of live ammunition. We ran back. Without provocation, live ammunition was aimed at a group of peaceful protestors. Fortunately this time the bullet didn’t find a body, but the Israeli Occupation Forces lack of respect for human life is truly frightening.

Two months ago four protestors were injured at this peaceful demonstration, adding to a long list of villagers who have been hurt or killed by Israeli military bullets whilst trying to fight for their rights. The army have been using live ammunition at this group of families and demonstrators more and more frequently during the last year. So the villagers’ weekly demonstration to struggle for their most basic rights – land and water – has been reduced to a short walk to become the target of bullets. Each week villagers risk their lives because they will never accept the theft of their land. Each week they are shot at because they want access to the spring which has been the source of life for their community for generations.

January 16, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Is Charlie Hebdo OK, But Not Dieudonne? FRENCH HYPOCRISY

January 16, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

New evidence shows CIA held prisoners in Lithuania

Reprieve | January 16, 2015

New analysis and previously unpublished documents released by legal charity Reprieve show that the CIA held prisoners in Lithuania in 2005 and 2006, contrary to official denials.

In a dossier and briefing submitted to the Lithuanian Prosecutor today, Reprieve reveals how the newly declassified US Senate Report on CIA detention correlates with flight data and contracting documents; and demonstrates that prisoners were moved into Lithuania in February and October 2005, and out of Lithuania to Afghanistan in March 2006.

A previous investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors, shelved in 2011, concluded that the CIA built a facility in a converted stable outside Vilnius, but argued there was no evidence that prisoners were ever held in it.

Reprieve’s analysis, combined with material in the declassified report, now shows that several prisoners were held in the site – called “Violet” in the Senate report – before it was closed down on 25 March 2006.

Flights through Lithuania were organised by Computer Sciences Corporation working alongside several operating companies under the auspices of a series of contracts first set up in 2002. The companies used multiple techniques to disguise their routes, and border guards were prevented from checking their cargo. Partial and incorrect routes for the planes were recorded by a Lithuanian inquiry. Reprieve determined the correct routes of the aircraft by cross-referencing a broader range of data sources and matched their dates to disclosures in the Senate report.

Reprieve investigator Crofton Black said: “The Lithuanian authorities have long hidden behind a smokescreen of increasingly implausible deniability. This new dossier shows beyond reasonable doubt that CIA prisoners were held incommunicado in Lithuania, contrary to European and domestic law. Reprieve looks forward to assisting the Lithuanian prosecutor in his further investigations.”

January 16, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘CIA killed prisoners, made it look like suicide’ – Guantanamo guard

RT | January 15, 2015

A former Guantanamo Bay prison guard and Marine has spoken to the press for the first time about what he claims were the CIA murders of three problematic detainees, covered up as a triple suicide.

Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman was on duty at the notorious prison camp when the three men died, and insists the official version of events is “impossible,” he told Vice News.

The three men were Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, 37, from Yemen, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, 30, from Saudi Arabia, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, 22, also from Saudi Arabia. None of them had been charged with any crime.

He explained in an incendiary interview with Vice News that the three men would have had to have committed suicide at exactly the same time in a cellblock where guards check on detainees every four minutes.

“They would have had to all three tie their hands and feet together, shove rags down their throats, put a mask over their face, made a noose, hung it from the ceiling on the side of the cellblock, jumped into the noose and hung themselves simultaneously,” he said.

Hickman added that an inspection of the detainees’ cells just a few hours before they supposedly killed themselves revealed nothing that they might have used to kill themselves – such as nooses, rags, or shoelaces.

The former Marine, who first joined up in 1985 and for a while was in a unit attached to the NSA, has been trying to put the nightmare of working at Camp Delta behind him. But when he saw on TV that another inmate had hung himself, he decided to face up to what he had witnessed. He has written a book, ‘Murder at Camp Delta,’ which he hopes will eventually lead to the truth.

Hickman was careful not to name any of the alleged murderers by name in the book, but he still hopes it may trigger a proper investigation into what really happened that night.

“I can’t name names. I keep it vague at the end for that reason. I say it was murder, this is the reason why,” he said.

On June 9, 2006, Hickman was on guard duty at Camp Delta when he saw a paddy wagon arrive at the high security Alpha Block three times – each time picking up a prisoner and taking them out of the camp.

He saw the police wagon turn left at checkpoint ACP Roosevelt onto a road which only leads to two places – the beach or a CIA holding center, which Hickman and his colleagues nicknamed ‘Camp No.’

After this, between 11:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., the paddy wagon came back to Camp Delta – but instead of going to Camp I, it went straight to the medical detainee clinic.

“About 10 minutes later, all the lights come on, like a stadium, and sirens are going off — it’s chaos,” he said.

All three detainees were dead.

Hickman believes he knows why the authorities at Guantanamo would have wanted to get rid of the three men.

The three men were regular hunger strikers who incited other detainees to do the same – and when prisoners were on hunger strike, camp policy said they couldn’t be interrogated.

“They had a policy that if a detainee is hunger-striking, he cannot be interrogated. In 2006, they were doing roughly 200 interrogations a week, so any massive hunger-strike would, what they consider, cripple the intelligence value. I believe the number-one mission in JTF-GTMO (Joint Task Force Guantanamo) at the time was, stop the hunger strikes at all costs,” said Hickman.

The ex-sergeant said that after the deaths, there were no hunger strikes for a long time.

Hickman first approached the US Department of Justice in 2009. His claims and those of others at the camp were reported in Harper’s magazine in 2010. The authorities issued a hasty denial, claiming that Hickman was stationed outside the perimeter and wouldn’t have been able to see the entrance to Alpha Block.

But Hickman says that half of his duties were inside the perimeter and half were outside, and that “both positions give me a pretty good view of what happened.”

Since then, the truth of what went on at Guantanamo has begun to trickle out. A recent Senate report – which the CIA tried to repress – found that the CIA regularly used torture, violence, and degrading treatment in its interrogation techniques. The report also claims those tactics rarely produced any decent intelligence.

But just after the supposed triple suicide, Rear Admiral Harry Harris attacked the three detainees for daring to take their own lives.

“They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Democracy Now quoted him as saying.

Hickman’s interview comes just days after Republican senators proposed that a moratorium should be placed on the release of all medium- and high-risk detainees, citing danger to the US and its allies, adding that any transfers to Yemen should be barred for two years.

January 15, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Those who aren’t Charlie

By Richard Seymour | Lenin’s Tomb | January 15, 2015

Unfortunately, there are a few troublemakers in our midst, people who aren’t Charlie, who need to be rooted out and dealt with.  As explained by Nathalie Saint-Cricq, chief political editor of France 2 (state-owned TV channel):

« C’est justement ceux qui ne sont pas “Charlie” qu’il faut repérer, ceux qui, dans certains établissements scolaires ont refusé la minute de silence, ceux qui “balancent” sur les réseaux sociaux et ceux qui ne voient pas en quoi ce combat est le leur. Eh bien ce sont eux que nous devons repérer, traiter, intégrer ou réintégrer dans la communauté nationale. Et là, l’école et les politiques ont une lourde responsabilité. »

“It is those indeed who are not “Charlie” who must be identified; those who in certain schools refused to observe the minute’s silence, those who “spout off” on social networks, and those who don’t  see that this struggle is theirs. Well, they are the ones that we have to identify and treat, integrate or reintegrate into the national community. Schools and the politicians bear a heavy responsibility in this regard.”

In fact (a correspondent tells me, referring to this article), the provisions of recent legislation (13.11.2014) on the monitoring and reporting of school pupils’ speech and behaviour appear to have been put into effect for the first time as the names of children who failed to observe the minute’s silence were reported by teachers or supervisors to the head, then to the rectorat – the regional education administration – and on to the police and prosecuting authorities, to be analysed by the intelligence services, who decide whether the facts in question are serious enough to warrant formal investigation of the pupil and his/her family and social network.

More widely, there are a series of arrests and sentences being handed down for “justification/glorification of terrorism”, including that of a 28 year old man diagnosed with learning disabilities.

If you are not Charlie, would you please speak up so that we can have you arrested and flung in jail, or re-educated?

January 15, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Charlie Hebdo: “Je Suis White People”

By Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report | January 14, 2015

Don’t kill white people. After all is said and done, the Charlie Hebdo outrage, the hashtags, and the million person marches amount to that simple but very powerful dictum. In the eyes of the governments that do most of the killing on the planet and the corporate media who act as their scribes, there is nothing worse than targeting even a handful of white people for death.

Charlie Hebdo is a supposedly satirical magazine published in Paris, France. It was little known to Americans until January 7, 2015 when two gunmen attacked its offices and killed twelve staff members. Charlie Hebdo was well known for intentionally violating the Islamic prohibition of depicting the prophet. According to survivors, the killers announced themselves as members of al-Qaeda and said they were avenging the prophet Muhammad. A policewoman and four more people were killed the following day when another gunman took hostages in a kosher supermarket.

One look at Charlie Hebdo cartoons shows that the word satire is being used very loosely. The depictions of cabinet minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey, and the kidnapped Nigerian school girls as pregnant welfare recipients make a mockery of the world satirical. Regardless of how many French politicians are skewered in its pages, it must be pointed out that Charlie Hebdo indulges in racist hate speech.

Their reputation for insult and offense was quickly forgotten and the call to unquestioningly identify with the victims was immediate. Within a few days, #Jesuischarlie was tweeted more than one million times. The propaganda onslaught created an awkward example of hypocrisy for world leaders who are always the worst killers of all.

Barack Obama trotted out tired denunciations, calling the attacks “cowardly” as he claimed to stand up for the rights of a free press. These were strange words coming from a man who on seven occasions has used the discredited Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to the media.

Americans were not alone in hypocritically condemning murder. The convenient selective amnesia of the French people is as stunning as their sense of feeling more aggrieved than anyone else in the world.

France was a party to every atrocity and genocide committed by Europeans in history. France played a major role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, kidnapping approximately 1,250,000 Africans and sending them to work under barbaric conditions in their American territories.

After being forced out of Haiti by the world’s most successful slave rebellion, France then held that nation hostage under threat of re-enslavement and demanded a payment of $60 million francs which were paid from 1838 to 1947. Haiti remains poverty stricken to this day as a result.

France was at the table during the 1884 Berlin Conference which chopped Africa up into European spheres of influence. France engaged in mass slaughter again and again as it attempted to prevent colonies such as Vietnam and Algeria from gaining independence.

After NATO murdered Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, French president Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Libya to personally gloat over the country he helped to destroy. He was joined by UK prime minister David Cameron, who was also among the killers-in-chief who arrived in Paris looking solemn. France and the UK are part of the NATO effort to destroy Syria and turn it into a chaotic ruin as they have done to Libya.

The corporate media determines who is and who isn’t a worthy victim and people with dark skin rarely make the cut. The thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza included members of the press. Seventeen journalists were killed in Gaza in 2014 alone, yet Israeli president Netanyahu was allowed to join the “unity march” in Paris as if he too were an innocent.

There is enough horror in the world to cause outrage but the level of outrage seems to depend on who is being treated horribly and who is carrying out the atrocity. The worst acts of terror are committed by heads of state who don’t kill seventeen people as these attackers did in Paris. They kill in the thousands yet are still treated with respect.

It doesn’t say much for the state of human advancement that killings committed by individuals still create so much more concern than those committed by governments. They get away with mass murder because the same corporate media which saturated coverage of Charlie Hebdo say little or nothing about Gaza or Libya or Somalia or Syria or Iraq or Haiti. Instead of pointing out that Barack Obama is a killer too, the pundits criticize him for not being among the sanctimonious liars who gathered in Paris. The group photo should have been a perp walk to the Hague instead of a photo opportunity for the seriously blood thirsty.

Murder is wrong when committed by individual gunmen with grudges and it is still wrong when it comes from a drone strike. A unity march should denounce human rights abuses, of which warfare is the worst. The next time 1 million gather to denounce terror, the anger should be directed at those people who carry it out the most.

January 15, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Persecuted French revisionist scholar: Charlie Hebdo Before and After

On the Contrary | January 14, 2015

Dr. Robert Faurisson, the courageous octogenarian dean of European revisionists who has been repeatedly beaten, prosecuted, jailed and heavily fined in France for publishing doubts about the authenticity of the sacred relics of Holocaustianity, offers his insights into the situation in France in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris.

_________________________________________________________________________________

To Michael Hoffman:

These killings in Paris, at the office of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere – with 20 dead in all, among whom five were Jews – rightly arouse widespread indignation but Jewish organizations have immediately exploited this indignation for their benefit. They forget that, in large part, it’s been under the pressure of international and French-Jewish groups that France has hastily engaged in all sorts of military expeditions causing so many deaths in the Arab-Muslim world. They forget this country’s responsibility for the creation of the bogus “State of Israel” – soon afterwards arming it with nuclear weapons – and in the appalling fate of the Palestinian people since at least 1948; as well as the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu at Sunday’s rally in Paris which was an affront to an entire Arab-Muslim world. Jewish organizations in France live in anger and war; that being the case, how can they be surprised if their adversaries live in anger and war as well?

Such killings may bring to mind a number of murders committed by Jews who subsequently became “heroes” of Jewish history. On February 25, 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army physician armed with an assault rifle, shot dead 24 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron before being subdued and killed there himself. Goldstein’s nearby tomb is a pilgrimage site for many Jews.

The hysteria we are witnessing now in France, in this month of January 2015, has a precedent: that of May 1990 and the “profanation of the Carpentras cemetery” when Judaic graves were said to have been vandalized. It was the exploitation of that event that made it possible to intimidate the French parliament into enacting a law called “The Fabius-Gayssot Act” of July 13, 1990 — punishing by a term of imprisonment of from one month to one year and a fine of up to 300,000 francs (45,000 euros), along with several other sanctions — those who dispute “the existence of crimes against humanity” (that is, essentially, crimes against Jews), as defined and punished in 1945-1946 by a body that the winners of the recent war had dared to name the “International Military Tribunal” (three lies in three words) of Nuremberg. This law, totally contrary to the French constitution, came into effect by appearing in the Journal Officiel de la République Française of July 14, 1990, anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

It was due to a fabrication on the part of the Socialist president of the French parliament, Jewish millionaire Laurent Fabius, which he conveyed to a national television audience, alleging that a Jewish cadaver in the Carpentras cemetery had been taken out of its grave and impaled through the rectum with a pole —  that the French were stampeded into outrage and indignation which was cleverly exploited: Catholic authorities rang the great bell of Notre-Dame in Paris as a sign of an extraordinary sacrilege having occurred. The Socialist French President François Mitterrand led a march through the center of Paris at the head of the vast crowd of demonstrators. We have now, on January 11, 2015, seen the same scenario repeated in the same place: the Catholic Archbishop having taken the initiative of ringing the Notre-Dame’s bells, and Laurent Fabius, architect of the suppression of the rights of freedom of expression of revisionists in France, in the front rank of the “protesting” dignitaries marching through the streets — our Socialist President François Hollande  together with Netanyahu — all supposedly in the cause of freedom of expression.

Moreover, those Jewish organizations pose as being in support of freedom of opinion and expression but, in reality, what they are demanding is increased repression against “Holocaust denial.” Revisionism has made significant progress in recent years here in France, thanks especially to the Internet. Certain Jewish organizations therefore, are working for laws aimed at the censorship of the Internet, of the Ferench-African comedian Dieudonné (who has some 80 legal proceedings pending against him), of the revisionists and of a number of other unbowed men and women.

In conclusion and for want of time, I shall allow myself just three remarks in response to the questions which you sent by e-mail: 1) the name Charlie-Hebdo has, apparently, nothing to do with Charles de Gaulle; it comes, I believe, from the Peanuts character Charlie Brown.

2) Gayssot is the surname of a former Communist MP and government minister, and the Fabius-Gayssot Act is sometimes called the “Faurisson Law” or “Lex Faurissoniana”; I have lost count of the times I’ve been ordered to pay fines or damages on the grounds of this law; other revisionists have been thrown into prison or, like Vincent Reynouard, a father of nine, will be returning to prison. For my part, I’ve endured ten physical assaults – of which eight took place in France. French police have carried out numerous searches and seizures, or attempted seizures, at my home. These police have often refused to protect me in the presence of threats and danger.

3)  I hope to be able, before long, to send you an English version of my nine-page article (with illustrations) which I wrote on December 31, 2014. It is entitled: In 70 years, no forensic study proving the existence and operation of the “Nazi gas chambers”! 

I dedicated this study to Professor Ben Zion Dinur (1884-1973), founder of Yad Vashem in 1953, who was forced to resign in 1959 for having preferred scientific history to Judaic memory.

http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.fr/2009/03/memoire-juive-contre-histoire-ou.html

I thank you, dear Michael, and congratulate you on the work you have done over so many years, and in such difficult conditions, for the just cause of historical revisionism.

Robert Faurisson, January 13, 2015

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

How U.S. Prison Officials Rubberstamped a CIA Torture Chamber

By Carl Takei | ACLU | January 13, 2015

The CIA’s chief interrogator called it “the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon.”

At the agency’s COBALT detention site in Afghanistan – also known as the “Salt Pit” – detainees were kept in total darkness, shackled to the floors or walls of their cells, and given buckets to dispose of their own waste. One senior interrogator later told the CIA’s inspector general that a detainee “could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him.” Studies have concluded that such isolation has profound psychological impacts. It’s no surprise the interrogator said detainees “cowered” whenever their cell doors were opened. Even though the Salt Pit was closed in 2004, the horrors that took place there stand as examples of the CIA program’s inhumanity.

In a little-noticed section of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released in December, Senate investigators described how the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the federal prison system, gave a green light to this dungeon.

In November 2002, just a few months after it opened, the CIA invited a BOP inspection team to assess the facility. During one of the multiple days of the BOP’s inspection, a CIA officer ordered that detainee Gul Rahman be partially stripped, then shackled overnight to the concrete floor of his cell. Left naked except for a sweatshirt, Rahman died of apparent hypothermia at the end of the BOP’s visit, though it is unclear whether anyone from the team actually saw him. After the inspection, the BOP team commented that they were “WOW’ed” and had “never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived.”

Despite seeing the conditions that led to Rahman’s death, BOP apparently never urged the CIA to make the Salt Pit less like a medieval torture chamber. Instead, the BOP inspectors gave the prison their blessing, concluding that “the detainees were not being treated in humanely [sic]” and the “staff did not mistreat the detainee[s].” In the years that followed, more than half of the 119 victims of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program who were named in the Senate torture report spent time in the Salt Pit.

The BOP’s rubberstamping of the Salt Pit is perhaps the most shocking example of how a domestic prison agency helped foster U.S. torture abroad. But it is hardly the only one.

From solitary confinement to sexual abuse, the routine inhumanity of U.S. prisons can enable and normalize the use of torture abroad. Indeed, Charles Graner, ringleader of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, worked as a prison guard in Pennsylvania before joining his now-infamous Army Reserve unit. According to a 2004 Washington Post profile of Graner, the prison where he worked was rife with accusations that other guards engaged in brutal abuse: beating prisoners, spitting in their food, using racial epithets, and using one beaten prisoner’s blood to write the letters “KKK.” It was here, just south of Pittsburgh, where Graner first lost his moral compass. By the time he shipped out to Abu Ghraib, Graner was so entrenched in these daily realities that he reportedly whistled, laughed, and sang while abusing those in his custody.

Some international human rights bodies see the connection. In a recent review of U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture, for example, the United Nations simultaneously condemned both the U.S.’s failure to hold anyone responsible for CIA torture and the widespread use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.

Today the ACLU is submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to BOP to find out more about the agency’s 2002 inspection of the Salt Pit. In the meantime, BOP officials – perhaps some of the same ones who signed off on the Salt Pit – march on with their own plans for a massive new prison that thumbs its nose at the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture report. The next federal prison to open will be ADX/USP Thomson in Northwestern, Illinois: A 1,600-cell Supermax prison devoted entirely to solitary confinement.

The resulting inhumanity will be all too predictable, even if BOP officials choose not to see it.

Get Involved

Accountability for torture today is critical for stopping it tomorrow

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Islamic Human Rights Commission cuts ties with ‘Orwellian’ British government

RT | January 14, 2015

One of the UK’s biggest Islamic organizations has refused to participate in future government talks on anti-terror legislation, claiming their contributions to policy are being overlooked.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit campaign, research and advocacy organization,” said the British government has been “uncompromising” in its efforts to “legislate away fundamental freedoms in order to tackle terrorism over the last 18 years.”

In a statement released late Tuesday, an IHRC spokesperson said: “Such input perversely allows the government to claim that it has carefully considered the views of civil society organizations, when in fact the final policies were always a foregone conclusion.”

The statement comes at a time when a number of British Islamic organizations feel marginalized by the government, and in some cases have been accused of being linked to terrorist activities overseas.

In November, the Claystone think tank said “more than a quarter” of British charities under investigation by the charity commission were working on Muslim-related issues, and criticized the government for “excessive” surveillance of Islamic charitable groups.

Analysis conducted by the think tank found that out of 76 charities currently being investigated, 20 were led by Muslims, including the civil liberties organization CAGE.

In December, the Demos think tank also said British charities working in conflict zones in the Middle East were being cut off from “millions” of pounds in funding due to counter-terrorism legislation, with some having their private bank accounts closed down completely due to “credit risk.”

Tom Keatingue, a director at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and author of the report, said that the lack of financial access meant that charities were unable to carry out some medical projects overseas, or deliver adequate resources to vulnerable refugees.

The IHRC also hit out at the government’s Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, which is currently being debated in parliament, which the organization called “Orwellian.”

“The bill will introduce a raft of new measures to deal with terrorism and extremism in the UK. It is IHRC’s view that the current proposals are far and away the most Orwellian to date; they will erode civil liberties and turn the UK into a police state.

“Alongside the raft of new laws, we have also seen the government introduce and broaden its PREVENT program, which is aimed at both gathering intelligence on the Muslim community using public sector workers such as teachers and doctors and trying to socially engineer a more compliant Muslim community by legally defining the range of beliefs/views its members are allowed to hold.”

IHRC spokesperson Arzu Merali claimed the government’s ramping up of anti-terror measures were marginalizing British Muslims, and risked turning the UK into a “police state.”

“The anti-terrorism laws have served only to create a sub-par legal regime without due process that targets Muslims. It also demonizes Muslims further, causing backlash and discrimination. Off the back of these processes, we find the UK turning into a police state with little protest. We must stop this slide into authoritarianism,” she said.

Last month, two well-known British Muslim charities, the Muslim Charities Forum and the Birmingham based Islamic Help lost their government grants after being accused by the Department for Communities and Local Government of being linked to terrorist groups.

Both organizations say they were “surprised, dismayed and angered” by DCLG’s decision, which they insisted were based on “unfounded allegations.”

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Islamophobia | , | Leave a comment

‘Snoopers’ Charter’ essential to counter terror threat – Home Secretary

RT | January 14, 2015

UK Home Secretary Theresa May has given her full support to the Communications Data Bill, colloquially known by its critics as the Snoopers’ Charter. She claims without it security agencies are unable to fully protect the public from terrorist attacks.

Giving her response to the Paris attacks in the House of Commons on Wednesday, May said it was imperative that surveillance agencies were able to intercept communications “where it is necessary and proportionate to do so” to monitor terrorist activity.

She also outlined further security measures put in place prior to and following the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

May acknowledged that during the time of the attack the government was reviewing the bill, and said that without the immediate implementation of the bill the security forces’ power was diminishing.

“Every day that passes without the proposals in the Communications Data Bill, the capabilities of the people who keep us safe diminishes,” she said.

“This important legislation will strengthen our powers to disrupt the ability of people to travel abroad to fight, and control their ability to return here … In particular, it will allow the relocation of people subject to Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures to other parts of the country.”

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg reaffirmed his party’s opposition to the bill on Tuesday. He claims the powers in the bill would “cross a line” and said privacy was a “qualified right.”

The LibDems made a move to block the bill in 2012, with Clegg saying no government would be able to store people’s personal correspondence while he was in power.

May used her speech in the Commons to reinforce the importance of the measures, saying the lack of cross-party consensus was hindering the implementation of the bill.

She further said its label as a “snoopers’ charter” was a misnomer.

“This is not – as I have heard it said – ‘letting the government snoop on your emails.’ It is allowing the police and the security services, under a tightly regulated and controlled regime to find out the who, where, when and how of a communication but not its content, so they can prove and disprove alibis, identify associations between suspects, and tie suspects and victims to specific locations,” she said.

She added that “it was likely” that such data was used during the Paris shooting, and said it was entirely necessary that UK security organizations have access to this data to prevent similar attacks.

During her speech, the Home Secretary reiterated points made previously by Prime Minister David Cameron and other senior figures in the wake of the Paris attacks.

She said the UK’s terrorist threat level would remain “severe,” meaning a terrorist organization “could attack at any point… without warning.”

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

ACLU Challenges Law that Outlaws Speech Causing “Mental Anguish”

By Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley | AllGov | January 14, 2015

A new Pennsylvania law has been challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for trying to stifle the speech of those who cause “mental anguish” with their remarks.

Lawmakers adopted the Revictimization Relief Act (pdf) after Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, delivered a recorded commencement address to students at Goddard College in Vermont, where he had attended college. Faulkner’s widow said at the time that the speech was an “outrage,” but there was no evidence she attended the address, nor was there any mention of the murder or Faulker’s widow in the speech. Nonetheless, Republican state rep. Mike Vereb, a former police officer, proposed the legislation last Oct. 2, saying Abu-Jamal was continuing to traumatize Faulkner’s widow. Gov. Tom Corbett (R), who lost a re-election bid a couple weeks later in a landslide, signed the bill an extraordinarily short amount of time later, on Oct. 21.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania contends the law amounts to a “Silencing Act” on free speech. “Laws designed to silence anyone, even people society may find disagreeable, are unconstitutional and bad for democracy,” Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “This law reaches broadly, and could prevent innocent prisoners from seeking clemency, journalists from using sources to expose prison abuse and formerly incarcerated persons from speaking publicly.”

The ACLU was joined in the suit by journalists, news outlets and advocacy organizations, as well as four former convicts who fear the law will stifle their ability to speak publicly.

Abu-Jamal has become a cause célèbre for the right. President Barack Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile to be head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was blocked at least in part because Adegbile helped represent Abu-Jamal during his appeal.

To Learn More:

ACLU Lawsuit: PA Law To Silence Offenders’ Speech Violates First Amendment (by Andrew Staub, Pennsylvania Independent )

ACLU Calls PA ‘Silencing Law’ Prior Restraint (by Andrew Thompson, Courthouse News Service )

Civil Cover Sheet

Goddard Commencement (pdf)

If It’s Okay that John Roberts Defended a Mass Murderer, Why was Debo Adegbile Rejected by the Senate for Defending a Cop Killer? (by Steve Straehley, AllGov )

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

A checkpoint in Hebron

International Solidarity Movement | January 14, 2015

Hebron, Occupied Palestine – Checkpoints are numerous and inescapable in the H2 area of al-Khalil (Hebron), where thousands of soldiers guard around 600 Israeli Zionist settlers occupying heavily militarised settlement enclaves in the heart of the most populous Palestinian city in the West Bank. The Israeli military imposes numerous restrictions on the freedom of movement of Palestinians in the neighbourhoods of H2, affecting people as they attempt to live, work, study, and travel through their city. Shuhada checkpoint, leading from the H2 neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida into Palestinian-administered H1, is one of the larger and more heavily manned checkpoints.

Photo by ISM

One Israeli soldier looked through the purse of a young Palestinian woman as her daughter looked on. Even Palestinian children too young to carry bags for a soldier to search are subjected to the everyday sight of their older relatives being stopped, searched, questioned and detained by Israeli forces. Over a period of a couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon, an ISM activist witnessed Israeli soldiers stop and search around fifty Palestinian children, women, and men.

Photo by ISM

Barbed wire and fences frame the entry way into Shuhada checkpoint, as Israeli soldiers patrol the heavily militarised passage between the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Tel Rumeida and Bab el-Zawiye.

Photo by iSM

A very young Palestinian girl took a moment to look up at the heavily armed Israeli soldiers standing in her path. Armed with enormous rifles, chests strapped with body armour complete with pockets full of stun grenades and tear gas, the soldiers looked incongruous on the otherwise quiet, sunny street.

Photo by ISM

“I don’t understand why people think we want war, we just want peace,” one Israeli soldier told an ISM activist. The absurdity of his statement, as he stood with his rifle beside the checkpoint, seemed entirely lost on him. Deploying eighteen-year-olds with M16s to search kids’ shopping bags and their mothers’ purses, giving them control over the lives of Palestinians trying to keep surviving in the neighbourhoods of H2 in al-Khalil, creates a situation which, though it may sometimes seem quiet, is anything but peaceful. The soldiers stop whole families at the checkpoint: mothers, grandfathers, sisters laden with shopping bags. This young girl stood waiting off to the side as the Israeli military checked to make sure her relatives did not pose a “threat.”

Photo by ISM

Photo credits – ISM

January 14, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment