Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)

On Monday 26 April 2010, Israeli occupation forces killed a Palestinian man, Ali Isma'el Ali Swaiti, 45, in Beit 'Awwa in the West Bank district of Hebron, after demolishing a house while he was inside. Israeli occupation forces claim that Ali Swaiti had been wanted for several years. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns this crime – which constitutes an extrajudicial execution – and calls upon the international community to work towards bringing to trial those Israeli politicians and commanders suspected of committing war crimes.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR and eyewitness testimony, Israeli occupation forces entered Beit 'Awwa town in the far south of Hebron at approximately 3:00 on Monday 26 April 2010, supported by military armored vehicles, a bulldozer and a Caterpillar digging vehicle. Israeli forces surrounded the house in which Ali Swaiti was located, using sound bombs. The home belongs to Mahmoud Abdul Aziz Swaiti and is located in Khellet el-Foulah, in the north of the town. During the operation, Israeli soldiers broke into numerous other houses in the area and turned them into observation points and firing posts.

After some minutes, Israeli occupation forces evacuated at gunpoint the family living in the targeted one-storey house as well as a family living in another two-storey house, which belongs to the family of Ahmed Abdul Aziz Swaiti. The two families were detained outdoors for some time before they were taken to an adjacent house belonging to Abdul Jalil Swaiti. They were detained there with other families, all of whom were interrogated regarding the whereabouts of the targeted person. At approximately 5:40, an Israeli bulldozer began to destroy the fences surrounding the targeted house.

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Jeff Gates

From left to right: Ms Clinton, shill for Israel, Mr. Martin Indyk Jewish
agent of influence for Israel and Mr. Thomas Friedman Jewish agent of
influence for Israel. All three of them want the US to fight and die for
Israel and they want you to pay for it all. -Are you happy with that?

Jeff Gates looks at how the dual loyalists at the heart of the US government – Israel’s stooges in the Congress and elsewhere in the US government – are preparing to hoodwink the American public into another war on Israel’s behalf and against the interests of the United States.

Israel has long been waging war on the US by way of deception. To date, its operatives have worked from the shadows, hoping not to be detected. Their duplicity typically includes the displacement of facts with what the American public can be deceived to believe.

Thus, the need to create a widely held belief around Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi ties to Al-Qaeda, Iraqi meetings in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Though all five “facts” were false, only the last claim was conceded as phony prior to inducing our invasion of Iraq.

There lies our national security challenge as the groundwork is being laid for another 911.

The same fact-displacing modus operandi is again at work. In the parlance of national security analysts, psy-ops specialists are “preparing the mind” to accept another generally accepted truth at odds with the facts. This time the objective is Iran. -Or Pakistan.

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Robert Maier
KabulPress.org

Letter from Karzai’s Telecommunications Ministry orders blocking of news sites that "criticize Afghan government"

Karzai is buying the hardware and expertise for Internet filtering from Iran, who are experts in electronic censorship. This equipment can block nearly 100% of any Internet traffic that displeases them. Will jamming of BBC and Voice of America radio be next? Iran can sell Karzai that technology too."— Kamran Mir Hazar, editor-in-chief, Kabulpress.org

Kabulpress.org today received a copy of an official letter from the Afghanistan Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (ATRA) to the Ariana Network Service Company (ANSC) ordering it to block Kabulpress.org’s website on its servers in Afghanistan. ANSC is one of Afghanistan’s largest Internet service providers and a branch of the large Afghan/American tele-communications company, TSI, based in Ft. Lee, New Jersey that includes the Afghanistan-based Ariana Television Network, Ariana FM Radio, and the Afghan Wireless cell phone network.

The letter, dated January 7, 2010, and signed by Engineer Khair Mohammad Faizi, Executive Board Member and Chairman of the Presidential ATRA instructs ANSC to immediately block www.kabulpress.org and another Afghan news website for “publishing articles in opposition to prominent political figures and senior government officials.”

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William Rivers Pitt

"6 miles from Kuwait border", a frame from ITN Report with
Jeremy Thompson

A good friend noted recently how little we hear of Iraq and Afghanistan in the news anymore, and further noted the deafening silence regarding those ongoing wars from what he described as "dishwater left-leaning political activists" whose disengagement from the issue, according to him, makes them full of something I can't repeat in print. That bogus disengagement, he asserts, stems from the fact that Obama is in office now, so everything must be OK. It isn't, of course, but it is hard to miss the fact that we haven't heard much about the wars, or the protesters, since a couple of Januarys ago.

It's hard to argue against his point, and worse, the sense of being made of dishwater myself is difficult to avoid. I've written about the deadly messes in Iraq and Afghanistan several times in the last year or so, but it is nothing compared to the focus I had on those two conflicts going back to 2002. Back then, and until 2009, I wrote three books on those two wars, discussed them in detail in this space on a weekly basis, joined political campaigns based solely on the candidate's stance on those conflicts, and went to dozens of public protests all over the country.

Why did my coverage of these conflicts get dialed back? There are several reasons, most of which sound like excuses. Obama's new administration brought forth a torrent of issues that also deserved coverage - the Sotomayor nomination, the retirement of Justice Stevens, the rescue of Detroit's auto industry, health care reform, and the eruption of right-wing insanity both in Congress and out in the streets, to name only a few - but in the end, my own attention has most definitely wandered from two wars that deserve much more attention.

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Anne Look

Middle-aged European women go to Senegal's
beaches to find romance with young men like these
two who are playing beach football in the capital
Dakar, May 24, 2005. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)

Female sex tourism: for love or money? In a series of stories, GlobalPost looks at the women of means who find "romance" on vacation from Jamaica to Jordan to West Africa.

DAKAR, Senegal — Women — often white, European and "of a certain age" — flock solo to Senegal's shores year-round for what one hotel manager called "the three 'S's: sun, sea and sex."

The growth of Senegal's female sex tourism has its roots in poverty and the lack of jobs for the country's young men. Senegal's unemployment for youths is estimated at 30 percent, according to the International Labor Organization, and the average person in Senegal earns about $3 a day, according to the World Bank.

“It’s a question of survival. Life is hard. If I didn’t have these women, I’d be struggling," said Moussa, a 31-year-old dreadlocked drum player who has been "dating" female tourists since 2003.

“The women come here alone. They hit on you, and you go with it,” Moussa said. “They like men with rastas who play the djembes [drums]. It’s part of the ambiance.”

"Besides," he added with a sly smile, "they know men who play the drums are powerful in bed."

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Mike Whitney

On Friday, two patrol cars were ambushed by armed gunman in downtown Ciudad Juarez. In the ensuing firefight, seven policemen were killed as well as a 17-year old boy who was caught in the crossfire. All of the assailants escaped uninjured fleeing the crime-scene in three SUVs. The bold attack was executed in broad daylight in one of the busiest areas of the city. According to the Associated Press:

"Hours after the attack, a painted message directed to top federal police commanders and claiming responsibility for the attack appeared on a wall in downtown Ciudad Juarez. It was apparently signed by La Linea gang, the enforcement arm of the Juarez drug cartel. The Juarez cartel has been locked in a bloody turf battle with the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

"This will happen to you ... for being with El Chapo Guzman and to all the dirtbags who support him. Sincerely, La Linea," the message read." ("7 Mexican police officers killed in Ciudad Juarez", Olivia Torres, AP)

The massacre in downtown Juarez is just the latest incident in Mexico's bloody drug war. Between 5 to 6 more people will be killed on Saturday, and on every day thereafter with no end in sight. It's a war that cannot be won, but that hasn't stopped the Mexican government from sticking to its basic game-plan.

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Stephen Lendman

Since established in 1970, NPR ignored its public trust in favor of privilege, corporatism, militarism, imperial wars, and Israel's vilest crimes, including collective punishment, illegal occupation, targeted killings, land theft, dispossessions, home demolitions, crop destruction, mass incarcerations, torture, violence, and the 2008 - 09 Gaza war inflicting mass deaths, permanent injuries, vast devastation, and human misery against defenseless civilians, imprisoned under siege since June 2007, and afflicted by a dire humanitarian crisis as a result - exacerbated by conflict and intermittent attacks, issues NPR ignores or understates.

It's notorious for its biased, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, creeping commercialism, distracting non-news, and deceiving listeners it's public, non-profit, and impartial. Savvy media consumers know better and tune them out for delivering the same slanted coverage found on major networks and in broadsheets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and others - grossly favoring power, and when it comes to Israel it's interests matter. Palestinian ones don't, so news is carefully filtered to distort facts, and report lies that when repeated enough become truths.

In its May/June 2004 issue, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) asked "How Public Is Public Radio?" in examining its guest list choices - on all issues (including Israel), mostly government officials, corporate think tank representatives, professionals representing their interests, and other elite sources, the public comprising a tiny 7%.

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Jeff Gates

Four-fifths of the U.S. House and Senate recently declared in correspondence to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the U.S. must reaffirm its “unbreakable bond” with Israel. What persuaded our Congress to proclaim their loyalty to Israel while our military is waging war in the Middle East based on fabricated intelligence?

Any sober assessment of this bond must concede a need to reappraise its cost in blood and treasure. Yet the Congress—our Congress—opposed that reassessment even as our commander-in-chief seeks to end a brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine that has provoked worldwide outrage for more than six decades.

The Congress and the president are sworn to the same oath of office. That oath obliges them to protect the U.S. from all threats, both foreign and domestic. The facts confirm a common pro-Israeli source of the phony intelligence that took our military to war in Iraq. All the evidence points to Israel or its surrogates, including those in the Congress. Is that why the Israel lobby pressed the Congress for a pledge of allegiance to Israel?

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William A. Cook

1948 - May 14th, David Ben Gurion reads the declaration of
Israel's independence.

As Israel attempts today to gloss over the reality of its birth 62 years ago with a sweeping public relations campaign extolling the miraculous "resurrection" of ancient Zion in contemporary times, a new nation seeking only peace with its neighbors, it might be enlightening and valuable to examine the truth.

On May 14, 1948 President Harry S. Truman received a letter from the Jewish Agency for Palestine announcing the impending proclamation of the independent republic of Israel.[1] That date marks not only the beginning of the State of Israel but, sub missa voce, the assumption by the State of Israel of the calculated, systematic and determined ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of the land of Palestine that had been the business of "The Consultancy" and its agents before May 14, as identified by Dr. Ilan Pappe in his monumental The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.[2]

The letter notes that the republic has been established within "frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947, and that a provisional government has been charged to assume the rights and duties of government for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel, for defending the state against external aggression, and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law." The letter was signed by Eliahu Epstein, Agent, Provisional Government of Israel. The letter is notable not for what it announces, but for what it does not reveal.

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Chris Floyd

There was a striking story in the papers on Friday: "Congress OKs Surge in Undeclared War against Iran!"

Well, that wasn't exactly the headline – but it was the truth behind the reports about the vote in the House of Representatives to tighten the ligature of sanctions around the neck of Iran, as Antiwar.com reports. In accordance with the "diplomacy" of the Peace Laureate in the Oval Office, the House wants to "cripple" the Iranian economy by starving the human beings who live there of gasoline and other vital goods necessary to maintain a modicum of ordinary life.

In other words, the popularly elected leaders of the world's greatest democracy – champions of liberty, justice and human rights – want to stop ambulances from transporting sick and dying children to the hospital. They want whole families to burn to death, whole city blocks to go up in flames while fuelless fire trucks stand idle. They want deliveries of food and medicine to grind to a halt, setting off spirals of starvation, disease, chaos and vast suffering. They want to see tens of millions of innocent human beings driven into a low and brutal level of subsistence, to languish, diminish – and die – in deprivation and misery. This is what they want to see happen. This is the clear intent of their "diplomatic" strategy.

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Joanne Nova

Dr Andrew Glikson says the right motherhood lines [see: Case for Climate Change]: he talks about empirical evidence, and wants evidence based policies. All this is good, yet he sidesteps the main point — what exactly is the evidence for the theory of man-made global warming? It’s the only point that matters, yet when he presents evidence it’s either not empirical, not up to date, or not relevant. Why?

By hitting all the right key phrases a reader might accidentally think that Glikson is presenting key evidence and good reasoning. Take this for example: Glikson fears we’re turning away from evidence-based policies. (Me too!) But to complete the sentence he lists all the committees who predict bad weather 90 years from now. It makes for good PR, but is not scientific evidence.

Committee reports count as “evidence” in a court of law, but in science, certificates, declarations, contracts, commission hearings, or 3000 page reports don’t mean anything. Clouds don’t give a toss about what committees predict.

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Stephen Lendman

Tina Fey: the 30 Rock writer and star pickets NBC HQ in
New York as part of the Writers Guild of America strike.
Photograph: AP

The Pew Research Center (PRC) for the People & the Press is "an independent, non-partisan public opinion research organization that studies attitudes toward politics, the press and public policy issues."

On April 18, it published a report titled, "Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor," saying:

"By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days." A new PRC survey confirms it, and why not under a "perfect storm of conditions" - a wrecked economy for millions fueling distrust and an "epic discontent with Congress and elected officials" who betrayed them.

People want help, by a reformed, not activist government, and Republicans as well as Democrats draw ire. Growing numbers want less government, except for regulating Wall Street, and "ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows while opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all-time high, continues to climb."

For its part, though small, the Tea Party is a potential wild card, its sympathizers inclined to support Republicans, yet Republican-leaning independents say the movement represents their point of view better than the GOP.

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Jonathan Cook

Israel occupatiion soldiers walk next to the Israeli apartheid
barrier separating the people who they have stolen the land
from, at the Qalandiya check-point near the West Bank city
of Ramallah, February 10, 2007. Funding by the US taxpayers
for the enslavement of the Palestinians people continues to
increase, year by year. (The WE!)

Jonathan Cook analyses the pillars that prop up Israeli apartheid in pre- and post-1967 Palestine, from the unique and racist nature of Israeli citizenship law, to Jewish control of land, to defining Israeli Arabs as a security threat.

In a talk delivered to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on 21 April, he argues that the fight against Israeli apartheid wherever it is found – in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin – is integral to the struggle for justice for the Palestinians.

Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state.

That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable – if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.

I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews – another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.

So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.

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James Cogan

An Afghan boy killed by the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan. A family
wiped out in its sleep. (Photo: AFP/Massoud Hossaini, The WE!)

"The real motive for New York Times article is to introduce the audience of the Times and broader public opinion to the reality of the dirty war that the Obama administration is presiding over in Afghanistan. Assassination, or alternatively, detention without trial under the harshest conditions, is the preferred method of the US military to suppress resistance to the neo-colonial agenda of US imperialism."

The New York Times reported Sunday that American special forces units are operating in and around the Afghan city of Kandahar, assassinating or capturing alleged leaders and militants of the Taliban resistance ahead of the major US-NATO offensive scheduled for June.

Suggestive of the sinister and murderous character of such operations, the Times noted that the “opening salvos of the offensive are being carried out in the shadows”. It reported that “elite” units had been “picking up or picking off insurgent leaders” for the past several weeks.

A “senior American military officer” boasted that “large numbers of [the] insurgent leadership based in and around Kandahar have been captured or killed”, but that it was “still a contested battle space.”

The Times reported that “more than a dozen military and civilian officials directly involved in the Kandahar offensive” had agreed to speak about the special forces’ activities because it would help “scare off insurgents” before the bulk of American troops move into Taliban-held areas of the city. This claim is either patent nonsense or deliberate deception. The Taliban do not require an article in the American media to inform them that “large numbers” of their fighters are being killed or captured.

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Ray McGovern

With all the current hype about the "threat" from Iran, it is time to review the record – and especially the significant bits and pieces that find neither ink nor air in our Israel-friendly Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

First, on the chance you missed it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said publicly that Iran "doesn’t directly threaten the United States." Her momentary lapse came while answering a question at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 14.

Fortunately for her, most of her FCM fellow travelers must have been either jet-lagged or sunning themselves poolside when she made her unusual admission. And those who were present did Clinton the favor of disappearing her gaffe and ignoring its significance. (All one happy traveling family, you know.)

But she said it. It’s on the State Department Web site. Those who had been poolside could have read the text after showering. They might have recognized a real story there. Granted, the substance was so off-message that it would probably not have been welcomed by editors back home.

In a rambling comment, Clinton had charged (incorrectly) that, despite President Barack Obama’s reaching out to the Iranian leaders, he had elicited no sign they were willing to engage:

"Part of the goal – not the only goal, but part of the goal – that we were pursuing was to try to influence the Iranian decision regarding whether or not to pursue a nuclear weapon. And, as I said in my speech, you know, the evidence is accumulating that that [pursuing a nuclear weapon] is exactly what they are trying to do, which is deeply concerning, because it doesn’t directly threaten the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies, and partners here in this region and beyond." (Emphasis added.)

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