Israel has never been interested in peace with its Palestinian neighbors, nor can it even seriously be considered a humane government when it comes to its relations with other countries. The story of the Dignity, a boat which set sail from Cyprus with relief supplies for Gaza is one more recent example which highlights Israel’s genocidal nature. Only 66 feet long and packed with supplies the Israelis had denied Gaza’s citizens for the last six months, the boat’s cargo was checked by Cyprian authorities before it set sail for Gaza and no doubt it’s movements were monitored by all concerned since it set sail. So why have the Israelis attacked the boat and denied it entry to Gaza’s ports?
Israeli crimes on the high seas date back to the 1967 war when its forces attacked the USS Liberty which killed scores of American personnel and parallels can certainly be drawn with this latest attack. Both attacks occurred at a time when Isarel was fighting a war of aggression and which they wanted no witnesses to their brutality. Both attacks happened over an extended period of time and drove the vessel from the area it was to another more distant destination, but one interesting feature of this recent attack is the Dignity has a history with Israeli officials of bringing relief aid to Gaza without any problems before. Why when following “standard operating procedures” to assuage Israeli concerns would the Israelis deny them entry for a relief mission? All the talk about concern for civilian lives and minimizing civilian casualties, in the light of this latest development, can only mean the attacks on Gaza by Israeli forces are meant to terrorize all the inhabitants of Gaza, to frighten and humiliate them and to make it more internationally acceptable to do so.
Sometimes I wonder if people are really this dumb! An employee noted on a receipt the reason why a customer returned a product as being a “dumb nigger”. First of all the employee entered a racially charged and offensive term on a piece of paper and then gave that paper to a customer,which had identifying information of the employee for all to see. Is that professional suicide or what!? Perhaps this was termination by idiocy, the poor clerk no longer wanted a job but couldn’t quit because doing so would mean they couldn’t qualify for unemployment. I don’t really know why anyone would be so stupid, but it happened, and the customer has the paper to prove it.
Moving beyond that however, it appears the offended party is handling this better than the general public. Talk of boycotts are in this observer’s opinion completely unnecessary and inflammatory. The store has fired the employee and issued an apology, and even the idiotic employee gave the customer what he went there for, albeit more than he wanted, so the Justice Department’s weighing in (just like big government, trolling for an excuse to be intrusive in everyday life) and “community activists” calling for boycotts of the store are more examples of how issues of race are used and exploited sometimes for less than the public good.
I salute the Slater family who seem to be handling themselves well and I salute the store owners who have dealt with the matter at hand judiciously. Now everyone else should leave them all alone.
Check out the local news’ take on this from Youtube.
Life in Gaza has always been tough for Palestinians. For some, death may be a relief from their everyday misery. Here is a five part series on Youtube, I strongly urge you check out.
The assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation – it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another. – Tom Segev
Now that the Gazan offensive is in full swing and the killing and murder are at a fever pitch, look for the Israeli government to bring out their apologists who will be able to convince you and me that things are not what they seem and it’s the Palestinians’ fault.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday instructed the Foreign Ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel’s international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip.
Livni instructed ministry officials currently on vacation in Israel to return immediately to their posts abroad, and to immediately mount public relations campaigns in their station countries, focusing on local media and public officials.
The Foreign Ministry is also looking to recruit speakers of foreign languages, in particular Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and German, in order to expand Israel’s public relations campaign with the representatives of foreign media outlets currently in Israel.
If you think there will be relief from Israeli spin on the Internet think again. Israelis have always been afraid of unfettered access to information and so they’ve managed to wrap that loose end up as well.
The Anti-Defamation League announced Sunday its recent expansion into the world of YouTube, the on-line video-sharing site.
The US-based advocacy group has officially partnered with the digital media powerhouse in an effort to combat hate speech and other forms of abuse.
YouTube’s community guidelines define hate speech as “content that promotes hatred against members of a protected group” – a religious or ethnic minority, for example – without discussing the question of intent.
It is not clear what role, if any, the ADL will have in reshaping YouTube policy in this regard. As of now, the ADL appears merely to be supplementing YouTube’s current abuse-protection measures.
The media blitz of the Israeli machine is now in full swing and every excuse will be made for the aggressive and brutal attacks against Gaza’s population, especially when the ground invasion begins. Grab as many sources of information as you can, while you still can. It could very well be that an incident like this will be the catalyst for censoring news and keeping people in the dark.
Tit for tat? (On the left an Israeli building hit by Palestinians “rockets”; on the right a Palestinian building hit by Israeli fire.) The Israeli government launched an attack during the Christmas season which was designed to insure there would be no peace on earth, or goodwill towards Palestinians. Using the false pretense that the Palestinian firing of rockets was unprovoked and therefore an Israeli response was necessary, the bombardment of the Gaza strip is no less than genocide against a defenseless civilian population.
What else can you expect from a government whose leaders had publicly made such statements as Gazans should not be allowed to “live normal lives (Ehud Olmert) or that punishment should be inflicted “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians” (Avi Dichter) or that Israel should “decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it” (Meir Sheetrit) the intent of this latest act of murder is to inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible. Some bloggers have even gone on to suggest that the lifting of the embargo by the Israelis was designed to offer them a window to kill the most number of civilians gathered to collect foodstuffs denied them by the Israelis for so long, but whatever the motive, the means were the use of the best military weaponry the state of Israel can finagle from America in their extermination of Palestinians.
Israel decided on a collective punishment policy after the Hamas electoral victory in ’07, and part of that punishment was in the form of the blockade which denied the Gaza Strip even the barest of essentials, electricity and food. They did so while thumbing their noses at an international community which sought to chronicle Israel’s abuses. The flagrant and exaggerated expulsion of Richard Falk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories is just one example among many where the Israelis have ignored the “rule of law” and internationally recognized conventions while continuing to oppress the Palestinian civilian population.
As always, the Israelis blame their victim for Israeli transgressions, saying that recent rocket attacks at the end of the ceasefire are responsible for this latest Israeli slaughter. And while large numbers of rocket attacks are thrown at the public in order to justify Israeli aggression, lost in the argument is that these Palestinian “rockets” are ineffective, inaccurate (only one Israeli casualty since Palestinians started firing the rockets after the ceasefire) and essentially home-made munitions. What the Israelis have done however to get around the disproportionate nature of their aggression is to return to collectivism of the Palestinian population, equating all within the borders of Gaza as terrorist and therefore subject to elimination, no questions asked.
This latest Israeli atrocity occurs in plain sight before the world stage and yet Hamas and by extension the Palestinians are responsible. In the light of such global response the likelihood Israel will stop such unparalleled genocide is nil. Countless deaths will be exacted before the Israelis stop this latest slaughter and resume their obfuscation of Palestinian statehood and peace in the Middle East. By accepting their line of reasoning, the US is also a willing and active participant in this bloodshed. One can now see the reason behind the Bush Administration’s abandonment of international law in its treatment of people captured during the phony WOT; accepting the link between themselves and their ally Israel means the only way to escape international illegality is to propose it doesn’t accept the terms of what’s legal and illegal. Therefore it’s necessary to call such actions as the Israeli attack on Gaza bestial, inhumane, psychopathic, sociopathic, murderous, because in a nation where laws are no longer adhered to, legal and illegal have no meaning. That seems to be acceptable to the Israeli government and the rest of the world.
UPDATE I
Not even Israelis seem to take the firing of rockets by Palestinians seriously. Take the tone of this article (Latest Gaza Rockets Injure More Arab Children than Jews) which appears in an Israeli newspaper. It refers to the rockets used by the Palestinians as ‘locally produced rockets’, meaning internal, meaning made in Gaza, meaning at the very most, crude, (We’ve spoken of the ineffective nature of such munitions.) yet in the Israeli scheme of looking at things they justify the killing of scores of people; a culture of death brought to us by the party of death.
UPDATE II
Not that there’s anything new about this, but assertions by the Israelis that their attack was in response to alleged ceasefire breakdowns, or violations on the part of Hamas to the expired ceasefire are not true, according to this piece from Haaretz.
Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public – all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces “Cast Lead” operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning.
Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas…..
The expression in the above link to “misleading of the public” is ironic and a common feature of the Israeli government.
Bush’s $1 Trillion war on terror: even costlier than expected
I don’t know why that should come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed this Administration’s handling of the WOT. If anything I think the figure is more than that!! From the very first days after September 11,2001 the Bush Administration has been playing fast and loose with the facts and figures they used to convince the American people of the need to fight this war. From the civilain Pentagon’s wish to keep American forces to a bare minimum, even in the face of senior military officers who told them it wouldn’t work, to the administration of Iraq first with the CPA and its adjuncts to the existing Iraqi government, the public was always given a rosier picture than the Administration knew it could deliver in order to gain the support of the American people.
Shortly before the Iraq war began, White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey earned a rebuke from within the Administration when he said the war could cost as much as $200 billion. “It’s not knowable what a war or conflict like that would cost,” Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld said. “You don’t know if it’s going to last two days or two weeks or two months. It certainly isn’t going to last two years.”
That was Rumsfeld then, but the reality is much more different. Now, it’s finally reaching back to bite us in the rear.
A trio of recent reports – none by the Bush Administration – suggests that sometime early in the Obama presidency, spending on the wars started since 9/11 will pass the trillion-dollar mark. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s four times more than America spent fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991’s Persian Gulf War (90 percent of which was paid for by U.S. allies). The war on terror looks set to surpass the cost the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, to be topped only by World War II‘s price tag of $3.5 trillion.
*snip*
According to the CSBA study, the Administration has fudged the war’s true costs in two ways: Borrowing money to fund the wars is one way of conducting it on the cheap, at least in the short term. But just as pernicious has been the Administration’s novel way of budgeting for them. Previous wars were funded through the annual appropriations process, with emergency spending – which gets far less congressional scrutiny – only used for the initial stages of a conflict. But the Bush Administration relied on such supplemental appropriations to fund the wars until 2008, seven years after invading Afghanistan and five years after storming Iraq.
This boondoggle coupled with the economic bailout means one’s great grandchildren will be paying for the misadventures of George Bush….and that will be his legacy!
Check out this video that claims since the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, drug smuggling between the two countries has increased, and we’re not just talking about smuggling viagra.
America declared a war on drugs more than thirty years ago, and from the looks of things it hasn’t succeeded in that effort, while its war on terror seems to provide the necessary ingredients for both to remain thorns in the US’ side, which it appears is just what authorities want. How else can you explain the expansion of drug dealing in countries with heavy American military presence?
The CIA has been accused of introducing drugs into societies before, but this story is an interesting twist to that association.
The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.
For some U.S. operatives in Afghanistan, Western drugs such as Viagra were just part of a long list of enticements available for use in special cases. Two veteran officers familiar with such practices said Viagra was offered rarely, and only to older tribal officials for whom the drug would hold special appeal. While such sexual performance drugs are generally unavailable in the remote areas where the agency’s teams operated, they have been sold in some Kabul street markets since at least 2003 and were known by reputation elsewhere.
I wonder whether Ecstasy is included in the “Western” drugs given to Afghans and whether trade between such traditional drugs from the west are bartered for the cash crop of Afghanistan, opium? In any event we have another example of CIA involvement in “pharmaceuticals”….something to note before it gets lost in the memory hole of the past.
An in your face moment brought to you by the Israeli government. I wonder what text books taught that young man that Jews killed Jesus and that they should be proud?
Some Jewish leaders are a little concerned the fraud and resulting news about Bernard Madoff will spur some anti-semitism among the masses. Inflaming passions based on innuendo is something they are used to doing.
I am always amazed at the lengths the Bush administration will go to beat up on the dispossessed! I’ve blogged about this before, but mention it again here because these Chinese Muslims are caught between the rock and hard place of the US and their own country.
China said Tuesday it wants 17 Muslim Chinese terror suspects returned if the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is closed by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama.
Although the U.S. military no longer considers the 17 Chinese Uighurs “enemy combatants,” they have remained at Guantanamo because the United States has been unable to find a country willing to take them.
In 2006, the United States allowed five Chinese Muslims released from Guantanamo to go to Albania. The U.S. government has said it cannot return the Uighurs to China because they would face persecution there.
The Obama camp has not made clear what it would do with the Uighurs. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration understood China’s point of view but needed to “assure ourselves that if people are transferred out of Guantanamo under whatever status that they are not going to be mistreated in any way, shape or form.
We can’t turn them over to China because they won’t be persecuted as well as they currently are under US control in Guantanamo seems to be the message authorities are sending. As for finding a country for the Uighurs, many relief groups in the US have stepped forward to claim responsibility for them which the government has refused. Go figure.
No strollers near the Capitol. No tents on the National Mall. None of that Silly String on the parade route….The tightest rules are reserved for the lucky 240,000 ticket-holders, who get to sit closest to the Jan. 20 swearing-in ceremony on the West Front of the Capitol. There are understandable prohibitions on weapons and pepper spray. But you also can’t carry an umbrella. And don’t think about holding up any “Yes We Did” signs – posters also are not allowed.
It could get tricky as people congregate along the parade route, where many items allowed on the Mall will be off-limits. That list includes bicycles, backpacks, aerosols (which could include Silly String), coolers, thermal containers and chairs.
Signs or placards can be brought to the parade – but only if they’re made of cardboard, poster board or cloth and are not more than 3 feet by 20 feet.
….some people are worried about packed Metro trains now that officials are sounding warnings. Metro has said its bathrooms will be closed for security.
The rules aren’t so strict on the National Mall, where most people will end up because tickets aren’t required. Officials have said everyone will be checked, but they haven’t said what that will entail.
People won’t be able to see much, except what’s on Jumbotrons, but they can bring all sorts of stuff. Besides the obvious no-nos – firearms, explosives, fireworks – the only bans are on alcohol, tents and glass bottles.
“The more you bring, the more difficult it’s going to make your movement,” said Sgt. Robert LaChance, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, which patrols the Mall.
Authorities say expect to go through some type of security screening. If you have an item prohibited for a certain area, they will confiscate it. When asked if specific items such as canes, walkers, lighters, matches and diaper bags would be prohibited from the parade route and the Capitol, authorities said they didn’t know yet.
So if what you plan to take or do during the inauguration isn’t clear you’d better ask somebody!
Take a number, because you’re not the only one. The Congress was stupid enough, lame enough, scared enough, bullied enough, inebriated enough, you choose the adjective, not to insist on over sight of its/our money and it’s really too late to ask questions now.
……….the nation’s largest banks say they can’t track exactly how they’re spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.
“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,'” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”
*snip*
Pressured by the Bush administration to approve the money quickly, Congress attached nearly no strings on the $700 billion bailout in October. And the Treasury Department, which doles out the money, never asked banks how it would be spent.
We have managed to learn this much, despite the banking industry’s arrogance.
* The average paid to each of the banks’ top executives was $2.6 million in salary, bonuses and benefits.
* Lloyd Blankfein, president and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, took home nearly $54 million in compensation last year. The company’s top five executives received a total of $242 million.
The New York-based company on Dec. 16 reported its first quarterly loss since it went public in 1999. It received $10 billion in taxpayer money Oct. 28.
This year, Goldman will forgo cash and stock bonuses for its seven top-paid executives. They will work for their base salaries of $600,000, the company said.
* Even where banks cut back on pay, some executives were left with seven- or eight-figure compensation that most people can only dream about. Richard D. Fairbank, the chairman of Capital One Financial Corp., took a $1 million hit in compensation after his company had a disappointing year but still got $17 million in stock options. The McLean, Va.-based company received $3.56 billion in bailout money on Nov. 14.
* John A. Thain, chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, topped all corporate bank bosses, with $83 million in earnings last year. Thain, a former chief operating officer for Goldman Sachs, took the reins of the company in December 2007, avoiding the blame for a year in which Merrill lost $7.8 billion. Since he began work late in the year, he earned $57,692 in salary, a $15 million signing bonus and an additional $68 million in stock options.
For an industry that just a few months ago came to the federal government with their hat in their hands asking for public assistance, their ‘we’re not going to disclose that’ attitude gives meaning to the word chutzpah. No wonder the New York Mellon Corp. spokesman who said he wouldn’t share spending specifics, added: “I just would prefer if you wouldn’t say that we’re not going to discuss those details.”
The brutality and torture many prisoners at Guantanamo faced was both physical and psychological. It was aimed to hurt them as well as humiliate them and in most cases it was aimed at their religion, Islam. US authorities seized on the animosity generated by 911 and perceptions that Muslims were either responsible to that atrocity or indifferent about it to allow a floodgate of abuse to be directed towards inmates as Muslims and their faith. This was done through the abuse of Islamic symbols, sexual abuse and intimidation, as well as physical distraction and torture. Overt attempts at proselytizing of Muslim inmates that had nothing at all to do with their incarceration and or military personnel, were even employed to intimidate and stir religious passions. There should be no doubt such tactics were at the very least approved at the highest levels of the command structure in the military if not designed and implemented by them. It is another dark strain on the American conscience left by the Bush administration.
….desecration of the Qur’an is alleged to have taken many other forms in U.S. detention facilities. Former detainees say it has been handled with disrespect by guards and interrogators—written in, ripped or cut with scissors, squatted over, trampled, kicked, urinated and defecated on, picked up by a dog, tossed around like a ball, used to clean soldiers’ boots, and thrown in a bucket of excrement. A Russian ex-detainee, Timur Ishmuratov, remembers how it would be laid on the back of a handcuffed, bent-over prisoner, so that it would fall to the ground if he stood up. With just a Qur’an and a pair of handcuffs, a Muslim detainee could in this way be made to torture himself.
*snip*
In A Question of Torture, historian Alfred McCoy has chronicled how such “no-touch torture” techniques have been rigorously developed by U.S. interrogators, especially in the CIA. The power to torment Muslims by abusing the Qur’an was not discovered accidentally by Gen. Miller or a clumsy guard at Guantánamo. Bill Dedman of MSNBC has reported how the Qur’an has been used by the U.S. Army as a tool for intelligence gathering. When asked about an “interrogation scenario” called “Fear Up,” one intelligence officer offered Dedman this example of the technique: “Disrespect for the Qur’an.”
*snip*
At Gen. Miller’s Guantánamo, expressions of disrespect for religious practices grew into a kind of regimen. To interrupt prayers, guards made noise by striking things against the holding cages or playing loud rock music. Every morning and evening, just as the detainees were being called to pray, “The Star-Spangled Banner” blared over the loud speaker.
*snip*
In addition to mockery and systematic distraction, professional interrogators used grotesque methods of sexual harassment to impede religious observances. For Muslims, impurity prevents prayer. In Inside the Wire, former Army translator Erik Saar recounts a shocking exploitation of Islamic rules about ritual impurity. Saar was translating for a female Army interrogator who was having trouble getting information out of a young Saudi detainee named Fareek. She told Saar that she wanted to break the strength of Fareek’s relationship with God: “I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can’t go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and his God.” So she did a striptease. When Fareek wouldn’t look at her, she walked behind him and “began rubbing her breasts against his back.” According to Saar, she told Fareek that his sexual arousal offended God. Then she told him that she was having her period, and showed him her hand covered in what he thought was menstrual blood (it was red ink). She cursed him and wiped it on his face. As she and Saar left the room, she informed Fareek that the water to his cell would be shut off that night. Even if he managed to calm himself down, he would be too defiled to pray. As for Saar himself, he writes that “there wasn’t enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean.”
That episode is not the only documented example of such torture. The Bahraini detainee Jumah al-Dossari suffered a darker, more explicitly religious adaptation of the method in late 2002, according to a legal motion filed in U.S. District Court (District of Columbia) by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan and others on his behalf. During al-Dossari’s torture, a female interrogator had his clothing cut off, then removed her own and stood over him. Just before wiping what she said was menstrual blood on his face, she kissed the crucifix on her necklace and said, “This is a gift from Christ for you Muslims.”
Many detainees perceived their incarceration as a general attack on Islam….During the trial of Abu Ghraib’s Specialist Charles Graner, ex-detainee Amin al-Sheikh reported that he had been compelled to eat pork and curse Allah. A Guantánamo detainee informed Capt. Yee that a group of prisoners had been forced to “bow down and prostrate” themselves inside a makeshift “satanic” shrine, where interrogators made them repeat that Satan, not Allah, was their God. Others told of being draped in Israeli flags during interrogation, a claim corroborated by the FBI, while one interrogator explicitly told al-Dossari that “a holy war was occurring, between the Cross and the Star of David on the one hand, and the Crescent on the other.”
Bush has decided the only way to solve America’s problems is through military force. I’m a proponent of an adequate defense, and I as an individual citizen, practice it regularly but not all problems are solved with force and certainly not with the American military. I am glad to see there are others who feel the same way.
The California Highway Patrol in the High Desert and the Twentynine Palms Marine Base are receiving dozens of calls complaining about a controversial DUI checkpoint. Military Police joined the CHP for a recent checkpoint in Yucca Valley.
The Friday night checkpoint was in front of the Yucca Valley Home Depot on Highway 62. What has High Desert residents confused is that they are not used to military police so far from the Marine Base.
From the local radio to internet blogs, residents were concerned the Military Police presence violated federal law.
The original California Highway Patrol news release mentioned the military presence. One released shortly later doesn’t mention the military, arising community suspicion of a cover-up.
Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than a hundred years ago forbidding the military from enforcing civilian law such as traffic stops.
Marine Lt. Thomas Beck tells News Channel 3 the Military Police were not arresting people. They were just watching the checkpoint to see how they should do it on base.
“We were not actively participating in enforcing any laws. We were there to observe and observe only, ” said Lt. Beck.
The California Highway Patrol says they invited the Marines to tag along.
“We had the DUI checkpoint and invited the Marine Corps in a show of good relations between our two departments,” said CHP Officer Rob McLoud.
A recent KCDZ 107.7 FM broadcast out of Joshua Tree stated, “By law, to avoid entrapment, the CHP is requested to provide the location of the checkpoint to the media at least two hours prior. They did provide Z 107.7 with a phone number to call at 7 PM to get a location, but – defense lawyers take notice – no one ever answered the phone.”
They will fly combat air patrols and man air defenses, organize large scale medical support, and help local law enforcement provide security in the capital, said General Gene Renuart, head of the US Northern Command.
“(It’s) not because we see a specific threat, but because for an event this visible, this important and this historic, we ought to be prepared to respond if something does happen,” he told reporters.
Renuart said some 7,500 active duty troops and 4,000 national guard troops will take part in the operations in support of the inauguration of the 44th US president on January 20.
Overall responsibility for security during the inauguration falls to the Secret Service.
Local and federal law enforcement agencies post 911 have huge, hefty budgets to increase security and allay citizen concerns and no doubt most have seen their local swat, set teams at work with dangerous criminals. One of the biggest complaints I have about the post 911 attitude of people is that government is supposed to protect them in every nook and cranny and this notion is fostered by a government that wants people to rely on it. Instead, government should disabuse people of this reliance and arm them with a more martial spirit whereby they are more self reliant and proactive about their and indeed the nation’s self defense. I don’t think, however that will be as popular an idea with big government.
There’s no mistake that America had every reason to be angry at what happened on September 11, 2001, but that tragedy was used by some to take out centuries old grudges against people in the Middle East and steer America on a course which has led it to become a violator of international treaties and agreements unparalleled in our nation’s history. Nowhere is that exemplified more than with Guantanamo Bay where scores of Muslim men were snatched up from all over the world and placed in an isolated military camp where they were tortured for no apparent reason.
An Algerian man who spent nearly seven years in Guantanamo Bay says his U.S. interrogators never questioned him on the main terrorism allegation against him.
Mustafa Ait Idir, who was freed this week and returned to his adopted homeland of Bosnia, was accused of planning to go to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces.
“They’ve never asked anything about charges which were brought against us. They’ve never asked about Afghanistan,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Ait wasn’t captured on some battlefield endangering the lives of US servicemen and women, rather he was taken from his country, Bosnia and imprisoned in Gitmo Bay after his own country’s court had determined he was innocent of the charges for which the US government picked him up. It seems however that US authorities were interested in Islamic relief organizations working in Bosnia, which appears to be even the focus of officials even here in America. (The Holy Land Foundation trial recently concluded in Texas is an example where relief efforts particularly for Palestinians suffering under the worse case of state sponsored terrorism were shut down under flimsily constructed charges.)
The charge for which the US picked up Ait, conspiring to attack the US embassy in Sarajevo, was dropped by authorities while he was in Gitmo and a US federal judge ordered and government officials acceded to the order that he be released from his unlawful imprisonment, but why was he picked up in the first place?
From this observer’s perspective it appears America has given into its dark side, filled with sadism and masochistic fantacies played out in our artistic and entertainment culture which could be acted out in reality against an enemy we were told only responded to such brutality. The Bush administration was/is not the least bit interested in fighting its true enemies it merely wanted bodies, the 21st century version of the body count notion that came out of the Vietnam war, to fill up Guantanamo and justify its existence.
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
“He said that we’re not getting anything, and his thought was that we’re not getting anything because there might not be anything to get,” said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the time.
*snip*
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn’t belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst’s findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the “War Council” devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected “enemy combatants” indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
This attitude that the executive could unilaterally re-write or even ignore existing law is a theme that has been consistently explored during the Bush administration and found expression in a doctrine known as “unilateral executive”. With this gloves off approach, people in the field were allowed to do whatever they wanted; there were no limits to the power or the abuse they could reap on people under their control and consequentially torture and physical abuse were more normal than not.
(Ait) said he was kept for four months, lightly dressed, in a very cold refrigerated container. For short periods of the day he was taken outside, where it was very hot. Other prisoners were subjected to long periods in total darkness or very bright light, he said.
“There was torture every minute,” Ait Idir said. “It did not matter to them if we were terrorists or not.“
Israel has never been interested in peace with its Palestinian neighbors, nor can it even seriously be considered a humane government when it comes to its relations with other countries. The story of the Dignity, a boat which set sail from Cyprus with relief supplies for Gaza is one more recent example which highlights Israel’s genocidal nature. Only 66 feet long and packed with supplies the Israelis had denied Gaza’s citizens for the last six months, the boat’s cargo was checked by Cyprian authorities before it set sail for Gaza and no doubt it’s movements were monitored by all concerned since it set sail. So why have the Israelis attacked the boat and denied it entry to Gaza’s ports?
Tit for tat? (On the left an Israeli building hit by Palestinians “rockets”; on the right a Palestinian building hit by Israeli fire.) The Israeli government launched an attack during the Christmas season which was designed to insure there would be no peace on earth, or goodwill towards Palestinians. Using the false pretense that the Palestinian firing of rockets was unprovoked and therefore an Israeli response was necessary, the bombardment of the Gaza strip is no less than genocide against a defenseless civilian population.
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