Stephen Lendman

Even America's major media can't duck a crime this grave - attacking and slaughtering up to 20 Gaza Freedom Flotilla activists and injuring dozens more.

New York Times writer Isabel Kershner headlined "At Least 10 Killed as Israel Intercepts Aid Flotilla, saying:

"The Israeli Navy raided a flotilla carrying thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza in international waters on Monday morning....The incident drew widespread international condemnation, with Israeli envoys summoned to explain their country's actions in several European countries....The killings also coincided with preparations for a planned visit to Washington on Tuesday (June 1) by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

Late word is it's postponed.

The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times carried similar reports, trying, but hardly able to downplay a major crime.

The UK-based Stop the War Coalition called it "Yet another act of Israeli barbarism" in announcing an "emergency demonstration" at 2:00PM near the prime minister's Downing Street residence, saying spread the word and come.

In Gaza, thousands protested, expressing anger, outrage and sympathy, carrying banners condemning willful crimes, and calling for Arab solidarity. Similar demonstrations turned out in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Ankara, Istanbul, Beirut and other regional cities.

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Gilad Atzmon

"The massacre that took place yesterday was a premeditated Israeli operation. Israel wanted blood because it believes that its ‘power of deterrence’ expands with the more dead it leaves behind."

As I write this piece the scale of the Israeli lethal slaughter at sea is yet to be clear. However we already know that at around 4am Gaza time, hundreds of IDF commandos stormed the Free Gaza international humanitarian fleet. We learn from the Arab press that at least 16 peace activists have been murdered and more than 50 were injured. Once again it is devastatingly obvious that Israel is not trying to hide its true nature: an inhuman murderous collective fuelled by a psychosis and driven by paranoia.

For days the Israeli government prepared the Israeli society for the massacre at sea. It said that the Flotilla carried weapons, it had ‘terrorists’ on board. Only yesterday evening it occurred to me that this Israeli malicious media spin was there to prepare the Israeli public for a full scale Israeli deadly military operation in international waters. Make no mistake. If I knew exactly where Israel was heading and the possible consequences, the Israeli cabinet and military elite were fully aware of it all the way along. What happened yesterday wasn’t just a pirate terrorist attack. It was actually murder in broad day light even though it happened in the dark.

Yesterday at 10 pm I contacted Free Gaza and shared with them everything I knew. I obviously grasped that hundreds of peace activists most of them elders, had very little chance against the Israeli killing machine. I was praying all night for our brothers and sisters. At 5am GMT the news broke to the world. In international waters Israel raided an innocent international convoy of boats carrying cement, paper and medical aid to the besieged Gazans. The Israelis were using live ammunition murdering and injuring everything around them.

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Seyyed Mohieddin Sajedi

Israel cannot live without creating crises. Tel Aviv's strategy is to respond to a crisis by creating another one. This policy helps the Zionist regime to buy time by cashing in on the new crisis, and forget the previous one or seek to tackle it with the help of its allies.

Attacking the aid flotilla for Gaza is part of the same strategy. Israel knows well that if the boats make it into Gaza, the next convoys will be on the way, shattering Israel's hope of maintaining a full blockade on 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. Killing is the first option considered by the Israeli regime and army to settle an issue. Israel is no stranger to murder, even before it was founded. Over 60 years on since the Zionist regime proclaimed its establishment, not even one day has passed without news of an individual or individuals being killed by Israeli forces.

The Israeli raid on the Gaza peace convoy is not justifiable, whatsoever. To justify the brutal attack, however, certain Western media and governments announced, as usual, that Israeli troops had opened fire in self-defense. This comes as the authority in charge of Israeli prisons had already said it was preparing to take peace activists into custody, just in case. Israeli official circles had even announced earlier that the Israeli regime itself would take charge of delivering the international aid supplies to Gaza, and that the boats crewed by peace activists had no right to enter Gaza port. To avoid any operational problems, Israel once again bombarded Gaza's already-demolished airport. Everything had been pre-planned for killing.

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Stephen Lendman

This writer's earlier article exposed how Israel restricted free expression protests to suppress opposition to its Gaza war. It covered efforts by the police, State Prosecutor's Office, General Security Services (GSS), the courts, and academic institutions to support arrests and imprisonments of Israeli Arabs and Jewish protestors, to keep nonviolent resistance from spreading.

See the complete article HERE.

A mid-April article stayed on the theme in discussing state persecution of Israeli journalists, Anat Kam and Uri Blau.

For the complete article, go HERE.

On April 28, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) covered more recent abuses by Israel's West Bank proxy, Fatah's General Intelligence Service (GIS) against Muhannad Salahat, a writer and human rights activist. Also, writer Walid al-Hodali's Preventive Security Service (PSS) arrest, confiscation of his personal computer, and refusal to return it after his release. These actions violate international human rights standards, the Palestinian Basic Law, and other relevant PA ones.

Salahat was arrested, prevented from traveling, and summoned to appear before GIS interrogators. He explained what happened as follows:

On March 28 at 10PM, he was arrested at the Jericho Palestinian Crossing and Search Center, interrogated several times, and not at first given reasons. He was then asked about his writings and documentary films for Al-Jazeera television - "crimes and grave errors that he committed against the Palestinian national project, represented by the Palestinian Authority."

During detention and interrogation, he was mistreated and forced to let GIS read his incoming emails. After release on April 12, GIS kept his laptop, camera, and external hard drive containing documentary film footage. They also required him to call "all his friends and ask them to end the media campaign that they had launched against the Palestinian Authority."

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Jeff Gates

The U.S.-Israeli relationship has long been America’s Achilles heel. Our first president warned against “entangled alliances” particularly when, as here, there’s a “passionate attachment.”

Our “special relationship” with this rogue state has placed the U.S. outside the same system of international law that we now seek to impose on others, including Iran.

Our handling of the current crisis on the Korean peninsula could restore our tattered reputation.

What’s the first issue that needs to be addressed?

Here’s where you the reader may well ask: “Do you mean the issue concerning the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center?” No, but nor is that question irrelevant to this latest crisis.

Here’s the second issue that must be addressed: to which nations has Israel transferred nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons technology? Is North Korea on the list?

That issue became relevant with the release of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Archival research by author Sasha Polakowsky-Suransky uncovered “top secret” minutes of a military agreement signed in April 1975 between Shimon Peres, now president of Israel, and South Africa’s defense minister P.W. Botha.

Though Israel denies the conclusions reached by reporters for The Guardian (U.K.), the agreement suggests an offer of nuclear weapons while its Apartheid regime was under international sanctions.

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Khalid Amayreh

As I write these words, around Sunday’s midnight, 30 May, 2010, some of the most noble men and women under the sun are sailing toward Gaza in rough seas in a gesture of hope and selfless love that is meant to say to the people of Gaza “You are not alone.”

Needless to say, these brave men and women, these known and unknown soldiers deserve our utmost admiration and appreciation. They are acting on behalf of humanity, a humanity that has nearly succumbed to callous apathy and criminal indifference toward its weak and its poor.

After all, Gaza today is very much like Ghetto Warsaw of 1943. The comparison might raise some eyebrows here and there, but the truth, in case people still care about it, is that Gazans are completely dependent on the good will of the peoples of the world for their very survival.

If they approach the wall of death on the Israeli side, they are summarily killed by indifferent bullets fired by an Israeli soldier who is likely to have been taught in his neighborhood synagogue or local yeshiva (Talmudic School) that non-Jews are virtual animals whose lives have no sanctity whatsoever.

And if they seek life westward, e.g. through the tunnels, they are gassed or killed by the criminal hands of a depraved regime that has demonstrated more skills in groveling, like a meek dog, before Zionism than in providing bread to its own citizens.

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Stephen Lendman

Barack Obama is a liar, warlord, and corporate shill. -It shouldn't surprise because no one gets the top job or any government position of power unless they're safe, yet, naively, most people thought Obama was different. Many still do.

As a candidate, he promised change, a new course, sweeping government reforms, addressing people needs, and "ensur(ing) that the hopes and concerns of average Americans speak louder in Washington than the hallway whispers of high-priced lobbyists" - the same ones who bought and now own him.

He promised peace and delivered war; real health and financial reform, not same old, same old; help for millions losing jobs, homes, hope and futures, not handouts to Wall Street and other industry favorites; regulatory oversight, not the usual incestuous government-industry ties, making disasters like in the Gulf possible, and when they happen conspiring with offenders in coverup, distortion, lies, and a total disregard for the environment, wildlife, and way of life for thousands - let alone permanent damage to a vital ecosystem.

At the same time, Big Oil gets billions in subsidies, special tax breaks and other financial benefits, besides operating in a regulatory-free environment.

The 1995 Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act (DWRRA - courtesy of Bill Clinton) exempted royalties on defined amounts of deep water production. After its 2000 expiration, the law was redefined and extended to promote further deep water drilling.

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Khalid Amayreh

There are as many as half a million Jewish settlers enjoying constant army protection in the West Bank. The vast majority of these are indoctrinated in an extreme right-wing ideology that views non-Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories as "lesser human beings".

Some of the religious mentors of these settlers openly teach that non-Jews living under Jewish rule -- i.e. Palestinians -- should be enslaved, expelled or annihilated. When challenged, these rabbis and mentors readily quote from the Old Testament and Talmud to corroborate their oft-genocidal viewpoints.

The settlers are vehemently against the concept of peace with the Palestinians. They claim that retaining "the land of Israel" is far more important than making peace with the Arabs. Their most common slogan is "Arabs to the desert". The more fanatical settlers, such as those of Hebron, have been heard to say "Arabs to the gas chambers". Signs bearing such slogans are prominently featured in the small Jewish enclave in the occupied Palestinian town.

This week, the Palestinian Authority (PA) began implementing a widespread campaign to boycott products manufactured in Jewish settlements and agricultural produce grown in as many as 100 Jewish colonies in the West Bank, many established on land seized by force from Palestinian landowners.

The boycott, backed by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, is viewed as a rare and effective Palestinian initiative to show Israel that the occupation doesn't pay off and that the Palestinian people will not allow themselves to finance Israeli oppression and repression.

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Michael Rectenwald & Lori Price

In our encounters on various social networking sites and political blogs, we consistently encounter the faithful remnants of the “hope-and-change” believers. To combat the onslaught of evidence and opinion that leads one to the conclusion that Obama is a fraud at best and represents a hoax at worst, they point to lists of his accomplishments and the ways he has delivered on his campaign promises. Such lists, we believe, are generally misrepresentations and fail to rise to the level of credibility. They are misleading because they represent minor deeds that might very well have been accomplished otherwise. We have characterized them as delivering on promises to “sharpen the pencils in the White House --mission accomplished.” There are some notable changes, but are they commensurate with Obama’s euphuistic campaign rhetoric? We think not. We believe that Obama’s rhetoric was a complete fabrication aimed at diverting real energy for change into a cul de sac of Democratic apologetics. It was, in short, a hoax.

By “hoax” we mean that it represents a corporate takeover the dissent that bubbled up in the country against the Bush administration, including his economic but mostly his imperialist agenda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presenting Obama as a candidate of amorphous “hope-and-change,” the corporate sponsors of Obama intended to divert this dissent into acceptable (Democratic) channels. Some if not most of it had, indeed, arisen from Democratic channels, but the meaning of this dissent far exceeded anything that the Democratic Party represented either in its stated platform, or its actual practices, especially the consistent and over-riding support of the wars. The corporate and military backers of Obama bet on Obama’s oratorical skill and civil-rights-sounding rhetoric to effect a prestidigitation of incredible proportions. The intention of the magic was to fool tens of millions of voters, small-scale individual contributors, and campaigners into believing that Obama was the genuine article, that he represented change from the very policies and practices that had made Bush so virulently despised and vehemently opposed. These policies include first and foremost the war.

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Matt Taibbi

It's early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.

The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as "716." This section of an amendment would force America's banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve's discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they've been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street's most lucrative profit centers: Five of America's biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan's trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.

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Stephen Lendman

This photo is from LA VOZ DE AZTLAN. More photos HERE.

Professor Jeremy Salt teaches political science at Ankara, Turkey's Bilkent University. He's also the author of "The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands." On January 9, 2009, during Israel's war on Gaza, he wrote "A Message to the brave Israeli Airmen," asking:

● "What's it like, firing missiles at people you can't see?
● Does that help, that you cannot see who you are killing?
● Does it ease your conscience that you are not deliberately targeting civilians," when, in fact, you are under Israel's Dahiya Doctrine to use enough "disproportionate force (to inflict) damage and met(e) out punishment" against civilian infrastructure, "economic interests and the centers of civilian power," willfully slaughtering noncombatant men, women and children;
● "How does this sit on your conscience?
● Do you sleep well at night or do you have nightmares of the women and children you killed in their homes, in their beds, in their kitchens and living rooms, in their schools and mosques?"
●Do you really believe they threaten your security - farmers in their fields, mothers with their children, teachers in classrooms, imams in mosques, children at play, the elderly, frail or disabled?
● Do you ever question what you've done and why? Have you no shame, no sense of decency, no idea of the difference between right and wrong? Will you follow orders blindly and do it again and again, mindless about crimes of war and against humanity you, your superiors, and government officials are accountable for under fundamental international law?

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Kurt Nimmo
InfoWars

In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Gerald Rivera talks with an occupation soldier about U.S. support of the opium trade in Afghanistan. The soldier tells Rivera he does not like supporting Afghan opium production. The U.S., he insists, has turned a blind eye to the cultivation because it is a cultural thing. He’d rather the Afghans grow watermelons.

Is it possible the U.S. will tell the brother of Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed ruler he should get in the watermelon business?

It was reported a few months ago that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll and intimately involved in the opium trade Fox News and the rest of the corporate media tell us is run by the evil Taliban.

Fox News did not report that before everything changed on September 11, 2001, and before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had imposed a ban on opium production. This resulted in opium production collapsing by more than 90 per cent. It was the U.S. supported Northern Alliance that came to the rescue and began protecting the production of raw opium.

“CIA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the Northern Alliance] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society,” William Blum writes in The Real Drug Lords.

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David Lindorff

Even as BP’s blown well a mile beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush forth an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea, and the fragile wetlands along the Gulf begin to get coated with crude, which is also headed into the Gulf Stream for a trip past the Everglades and on up the East Coast, the company is demanding that Canada lift its tight rules for drilling in the icy Beaufort Sea portion of the Arctic Ocean.

In an incredible display of corporate arrogance, BP is claiming that a current safety requirement that undersea wells drilled during the newly ice-free summer must also include a side relief well, so as to have a preventive measure in place that could shut down a blown well, is “too expensive” and should be eliminated.

Yet clearly, if the US had had such a provision in place, the Deepwater Horizon blowout could have been shut down right almost immediately after it blew out, just by turning of a valve or two, and then sealing off the blown wellhead.

A relief well is ”too expensive”?

The current Gulf blowout has already cost BP over half a billion dollars, according to the company’s own information. That doesn’t count the cost of mobilizing the Coast Guard, the Navy, and untold state and county resources, and it sure doesn’t count the cost of the damage to the Gulf Coast economy, or the cost of restoration of damaged wetlands. We’re talking at least $10s of billions, and maybe eventually $100s of billions. Weigh that against the cost of drilling a relief well, which BP claims will run about $100 million. The cost of such a well in the Arctic, where the sea is much shallower, would likely be a good deal less.

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Kenneth J. Theisen

On Friday, May 21, 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Obama administration, holding that three prisoners who are being held by the U. S. at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts.[Emphasis added]

This is a victory for reaction, essentially denying prisoners of the U.S. war of terror held at Bagram the right to habeas corpus.

The denial of this basic right means that these prisoners have no right to a hearing in which a judge would review the evidence against them and could potentially order their release. This is “justice” in Obama’s America. The Obama administration has once again advanced the political and legal agenda begun by the Bush regime. If this ruling is not overturned, many prisoners of the U.S. war of terror could be held indefinitely.

The cases decided on Friday were brought by the International Justice Network, the organization coordinating Bagram habeas litigation. The cases involve a Tunisian man captured in Pakistan, a Yemeni man captured in Thailand, and another Yemeni man who says he was captured somewhere else outside of Afghanistan that has not been disclosed. They have been held at this hellhole U.S.-run prison for more than seven years without access to a court or counsel. [Emphasis added]

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Khalid Amayreh

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has been making impossible conditions he says Palestinians must meet in order for peace to be possible.

In a press interview released Thursday, 27 May, the characteristically arrogant and self-absorbed Zionist prime minister said the two most important conditions for peace in the Middle East were a Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish identity and Palestinian acceptance of the 1948 ethnic cleansing as an irreversible historical fact.

In other words, for peace to take place, Palestinians must be prepared to come to terms with Israel’s Judeo-Nazi nature, a nature that precludes all human rights and civil liberties for non-Jews living in the hateful entity known as Israel.

“Jewish state,” for those who still don’t understand, means one thing: It means that the estimated 1.7 million Palestinians, whose forefathers and foremothers were not expelled when the evil state of Israel was misbegotten more than 62 years ago, would have to be expelled sooner or later on the ground that Israel is a Jewish state and they are not Jewish.

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