Stephen Lendman

A July 2008 Fact Sheet Series titled, "Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons" was jointly prepared by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC), and Mandela Institute. Along with background information, it covered Israel's obligations under international law, prison conditions where they're held, medical neglect, and their educational rights restricted or denied.

Relevant International Laws Protecting Prisoners and Civilians in Times of Conflict, Including Women

The 1949 Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war, replacing the 1929 Prisoners of War Convention. It broadened the categories of persons entitled to prisoner of war status and precisely defined the conditions and places of their captivity - especially with regard to allowed labor, financial resources, required treatment, and rules of judicial proceedings.

It specifically prohibited acts of:

-- "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
-- Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;" and
-- judicial guarantees "recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

The 1955 UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners requires "no discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

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Joshua Kors

On Honor: To the people of our Nation, particularly our elected officials and VA bureaucrats: We, your Military Veterans, ask that you honor neither our service nor our sacrifice. We ask only that you honor your promise to us as we have honored ours to you. ~ Disposable Warriors

The mortar shell that wrecked Chuck Luther's life exploded at the base of the guard tower. Luther heard the brief whistling, followed by a flash of fire, a plume of smoke and a deafening bang that shook the tower and threw him to the floor. The Army sergeant's head slammed against the concrete, and he lay there in the Iraqi heat, his nose leaking clear fluid.

"I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at," he says. "I was nauseous. My teeth hurt. My shoulder hurt. And my right ear was killing me." Luther picked himself up and finished his shift, then took some ibuprofen to dull the pain. The sergeant was seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, in the volatile Sunni Triangle, twenty miles north of Baghdad. He was determined, he says, to complete his mission. But the short, muscular frame that had guided him to twenty-two honors--including three Army Achievement Medals and a Combat Action Badge--was basically broken. The shoulder pain persisted, and the hearing in his right ear, which evaporated on impact, never returned, replaced by the maddening hum of tinnitus.

Then came the headaches. "They'd start with a speckling in the corner of my vision, then grow worse and worse until finally the right eye would just shut down and go blank," he says. "The left one felt like someone was stabbing me over and over in the eye."

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Chris Floyd

Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac.

As always with Silber, you must read the whole piece (and follow the links) to get the full force of the argument, which is nuanced, multifarious and deeply considered, but here is just the briefest excerpt to send you on your way:

I repeat a few words I first wrote at the beginning of 2009...:

For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required ... More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I repeat the fundamental point to make certain there is no misunderstanding as to where I stand on this question: as a political entity, the United States is an endlessly destructive monstrosity. The overwhelming majority of people -- including, I regret to say, even many of those who are severely critical of the United States government -- fail to understand this point in anything close to the thorough and consistent manner required. This failure is the result of an earlier one: an inability to grasp fully what it means to revere the sacred value of a single human life.

There is more, much more in the original post -- "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"; excerpting it actually does it an injustice. So go there now and read it.

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Thomas Elholm, Juridisk Institut, Syddansk Universitet
(Innsendt av Patrick Mac Manus / Foreningen Oprør )

Er de senere års nye regler unødigt vidtgående indgreb i borgernes retsstilling?

Virkning af sortlistning

En dag i 2002 opdagede Hr. Sison pludselig, at alle hans finansielle midler var blevet indefrosset. Han opdagede det ved, at købmandsregningen ikke var blevet betalt som normalt via banken. Banken forklarede, at staten havde krævet alle hans finansielle midler indefrosset pga. mistanke om forbindelse til terrorisme. Sison var derfor frataget enhver råderet over sine bankkonti og alle øvrige finansielle midler, inklusive den månedlige socialhjælp på ca. 200 euro. Senere blev han – ligeledes på grund af sortlistningen – bedt om at fraflytte lejligheden, som han havde fået tildelt af kommunen. Familien fik dog lov til at blive.

Sidenhen har Sison flere gange fået EF-domstolenes ord for, at sortlistningen af ham strider mod grundlæggende retsgarantier, senest ved dom af 30. september 2009 (sag T-341/07). I dag – 7 år efter sortlistningen – har Sison stadig ikke fået en tilstrækkelig begrundelse for, hvorfor han optræder på listen. Retten i Første Instans finder ikke, at de beviser, som ligger til grund for sortlistningen, knytter Sison til terror. Derfor er det heller ikke godtgjort, at EU-rettens betingelser for at sortliste Sison, er opfyldt.

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Stephen M. Walt

Back when I started writing this blog, I More hype about warned that the idea of preventive war against Iran wasn't going to go away just because Barack Obama was president. The topic got another little burst of oxygen over the past few days, in response to what seems to have been an over-hyped memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and some remarks by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, following a speech at Columbia University. In particular, Mullen noted that military action against Iran could "go a long way" toward delaying Iran's acquisition of a weapons capability, though he also noted this could only be a "last resort" and made it clear it was not an option he favored.

One of the more remarkable features about the endless drumbeat of alarm about Iran is that it pays virtually no attention to Iran's actual capabilities, and rests on all sorts of worst case assumptions about Iranian behavior. Consider the following facts, most of them courtesy of the 2010 edition of The Military Balance, published annually by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London:

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