Craig Murray

"But what kind of mutual support organisation is NATO when members must make decades long commitments, at huge expense and some loss of life, to support the Unted States, but cannot make even a gesture to support Turkey when Turkey is attacked by a non-member?"

I was in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for over 20 years and a member of its senior management structure for six years, I served in five countries and took part in 13 formal international negotiations, including the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and a whole series of maritime boundary treaties. I headed the FCO section of a multidepartmental organisation monitoring the arms embargo on Iraq.

I am an instinctively friendly, open but unassuming person who always found it easy to get on with people, I think because I make fun of myself a lot. I have in consequence a great many friends among ex-colleagues in both British and foregin diplomatic services, security services and militaries.

I lost very few friends when I left the FCO over torture and rendition. In fact I seemed to gain several degrees of warmth with a great many acquantances still on the inside. And I have become known as a reliable outlet for grumbles, who as an ex-insider knows how to handle a discreet and unintercepted conversation.

What I was being told last night was very interesting indeed. NATO HQ in Brussels is today a very unhappy place.

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Stephen Lendman

Forced To Live In The Street - Maan Images

Founded in 1972, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is the country's leading human and civil rights organization through litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach. In May 2009, it published "The State of Human Rights in East Jerusalem: Fact and Figures," then a follow-up June report titled, "Life in the Garbage: A Status Report of Sanitation Services in East Jerusalem." Both reports are reviewed below.

East Jerusalem by the Numbers

● based on 2007 data, the Palestinian population numbered 260.5 thousand;
● 66.8% of families are impoverished, including 74% of children; over 94,000 "live in a perpetual state of poverty;"
● since occupying the city, Israel expropriated over one-third of its Arab-owned land;
● by yearend 2007, over 50,000 exclusively Jewish housing units were built on expropriated land, none for Palestinians;
● during the first half of 2009, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished 21 Palestinian homes, a process that continues relentlessly;
● in Arab areas, the city lacks 70 km of sewage lines;
● about 160,000 Palestinians lack water system connections;
● Palestinian areas lack 1,500 classrooms; the shortage shows up in the 50% dropout rate; and
● about 9,000 Palestinians are deprived of school.

Illegally annexed in June 1967, Jerusalem is Israel's largest city. Today, the Separation Wall completely severs the Arab East from the surrounding area, severely impacting its residents' economy, culture political viability, and future.

As an occupier, Israel is responsible for the population's welfare and basic rights under international humanitarian law - an obligation it's defied for 43 years by failing to budget minimal resources needed to fulfill it.

Instead, it's practiced willful neglect by discriminating in planning, construction, land expropriation, and investment in physical infrastructure, government, and municipal services. As a result, East Jerusalem residents suffer worsening conditions of distress under Israel's plan to dispossess Palestinian residents to make the entire city exclusively Jewish.

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Chris Hedges

U.S. Navy / MC2 Justin Stumberg

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

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Stephen Lendman

[This article follows from this writer's Monday one, accessed through this link.]

On May 31, under cover of darkness, Israeli commandos conducted a premeditated act of state terrorism against civilian aid activists trying to deliver thousands of tons of essential to life aid to besieged Gazans. Israeli radio reported that 19 were slaughtered, dozens more injured, and according to Earth Times.org:

"About 480 foreign activists who were stopped by Israel on the high seas while sailing to Gaza were transfered overnight to a prison in the southern city of Beersheba, Israeli Radio reported (June 1)." About 48 others were deported. Other reports had over 600 arrested and an Israeli-imposed news blackout.

Those held now face grueling interrogations, followed either by deportation or detainment ahead of prosecution, Israel's customary practice - blaming victims, absolving state terrorism, repeatedly committed, claiming it's to safeguard national security.

Or by Israeli logic, its attack was self-defense. Linked to "global Jihad, Al Qaeda and Hamas," humanitarian activists were an "armada of hate and violence (engaging in a) premeditated and outrageous provocation," according to Israel's deputy defense minister, Danny Ayalon.

Not according to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Canceling scheduled military exercises with Israel and recalling his ambassador, Oguz Celikkol, he said:

"It is no longer possible to cover up or ignore Israel's lawlessness....This action, totally contrary to the principles of international law, is inhumane state terrorism. Nobody should think we will keep quiet in the face of this."

Nor should anyone let Israel get away with a crime this grave, its latest example of lawlessness, this time in international waters in violation of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas and 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

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