Stephen Lendman

Perhaps suggesting a larger-scale planned offensive, recent violent Israeli outbreaks struck Gaza, the West Bank, and Israeli/Lebanon border, the first there since the summer 2006 war.

Like Cast Lead, it was Israeli aggression - violent, lawless and unrelenting, a scorched-earth blitzkrieg, inflicting vast destruction, causing billions in damage, killing over 1,000 Lebanese, injuring thousands more, and displacing around a million others (about one-fourth of the country's four million population), including over 300,000 children fleeing north for their lives. In the end, Hezbollah handed Israel a humiliating defeat. Perhaps revenge is planned.

On August 4, Ma'an News reported that Israeli and Lebanese troops clashed - exchanging fire, killing four Lebanese citizens, including three soldiers. One Israeli soldier was killed. Reports said violence erupted after Israeli soldiers crossed the border, then tried uprooting a tree to install a surveillance camera and equipment, a chain of events leaving five dead. An IDF spokesman said soldiers hadn't entered Lebanon, but were between the UN-administered Blue Line and Israel's border fence.

Lebanese accounts had Israeli soldiers in the area, removing trees to install surveillance equipment. Israel called it "routine maintenance." Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri condemned what he called Israeli violation of Lebanese sovereignty. Lebanon's parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, wants a complaint against Israel filed with the UN Security Council. Israel may file its own in response, its Foreign Ministry saying "Israel sees the firing on an IDF force which acted in coordination with UNIFEL (Blue Helmets) in the border region in the last hours a blunt violation of Security Resolution 1701."

Hariri wants the UN to demand Israel implement Resolution 1701, calling for demilitarization of the area within the Blue Line where UNIFEL troops are stationed. Throughout its history, Israel has spurned all UN resolutions criticizing its policies and actions.

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Stephen Lendman

The WikiLeaks "Afghan War Diaries" provided documented evidence of America's out-of-control lawlessness, including Special Forces death squads (Task Force 373) extrajudicially murdering or capturing suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda figures, many hundreds or perhaps thousands on a so-called Jpel (joint prioritized effects) list, also willfully killing civilian men, women and children, the London Times Kabul-based Jerome Starkey reporting earlier on these crimes, suppressed in US media accounts, presenting an embedded view of the war, omitting the targeting of Americans until then Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged it in February, explaining that:

CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads have been authorized to kill US citizens abroad, suspected of terrorist involvement, Blair saying:

"If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that," the criteria being "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved. We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans or has resulted in it," based on suspicions, not evidence.

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Les Visible
Reflections in a Petri Dish

"It shocks me when I look right at it. It stuns me that cooler heads do not see the position that Israel is putting the entire world into."

War is looming and might be only one week away. I say this to put it in perspective. It stands to reason that it will surely happen before the November elections, for a variety of reasons. We know its coming because the chief drumbeaters are lunatics, drunk on megalomania and other hormonally secreted drugs.

We see the image of Israel attacking Iran but I do not think we clearly see the implications of it and how it will change our lives in profound ways. The Straits of Hormuz will be shut down and the oil companies will make a large fortune from skyrocketing prices. It goes without saying that Israel will probably attack Lebanon and Syria at the same time. I get the oddest feeling that Russia, China, Turkey and Iran have been talking on the back porch. There are all kinds of interplay going on that we are not privy to. Georgia is going to get crushed if she makes the same stupid mistake again. I realize it is at the aggressor’s behest to close the tunnels.

I get the distinct feeling that if Israel could take any one thing back it would be this ruinous assault on Iran. As you can see, I am discussing it as a fait accompli but I realize nothing is certain. Like the rest of you I have a sort of world view in my head that has been formed from news reports, theories and whatever comes before my eyes. This world view is interesting because it’s not real. It’s projection. This is true for nearly all of us. I have begun to see very clearly that I have this construct in my head about how and sometimes, when; this or that is going to go down. But it’s not real. I simply do not know and I’m in the midst of clearing all of it out of my head because I am misinforming myself. I’m surprised I didn’t see it before, this big picture, like a jigsaw puzzle, imperfectly put together.

I’m noticing things inside and outside of me that I haven’t noticed before and which make up the consistency and content of my days. Digressing.

Well, that said, let me go back to what I was saying. An attack on Iran will nearly immediately become something larger than we generally imagine. All sorts of predisposed positions will come about. There will be a fury and uproar around the world as Israel, in defiance of the needs of everyone around them across the globe, reduces the world to an angst-ridden state of need and in some cases, emergency. The interruption in the flow of oil will hit on all sorts of levels besides transportation and manufacturing. In the meantime, China and Russia have huge investments in Iran so you would think it logical that they have armed Iran in certain ways that may not be a matter of public discussion.

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Denis G. Rancourt

On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism

Arguably the three most influential end-point models of political organization are best represented by Adam Smith (capitalism), Karl Marx (socialism/communism), and Mikhail Bakunin (anarchism).[2][3][4] These three men and many other persons who contributed to critiquing, perfecting and adapting or combining these end-point models were unquestionably brilliant, acute and incisive.

Problem is none of these models has ever been put into practice in a sustainable way. This is because none of these models or their adaptations and combinations can successfully be put into practice by engineering a system for people to inhabit.

For these ideal models to work they must arise from a self-organization in which every individual has both the capacity to recognize when a foundational element of the model is being corrupted by a particular practice and the capacity to intervene to prevent or correct the corruption. With capacity to intervene comes capacity to recognize.

The American libertarians understood this and inspired a revolutionary constitution that guaranteed the individual the right to intervene (bear arms, free speech, etc.). This libertarianism also nurtured a deep and healthy cultural distrust of governments, institutions, banks and corporations.

To be sustainable, the above-mentioned socio-politico-economic models and their combinations cannot be imposed and managed from the top but instead must be driven from the base; must be discovered and developed by the individual connected to his/her community and must be controlled by the individual via personal agency. As soon as the individual has little or no influence to correct the system then there is runaway hierarchical command and control and all the nasty oppressions that this necessarily implies.

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William Blum

"But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except perhaps by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration tried to do, without success, then get out, and declare "victory". Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech."

When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here's Vice-President Joe Biden:

"We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred." [1]

Here's Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC):

"This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11." [2]

Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion.

"Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from." [3]

Here's President Obama a year ago:

"But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." [4]

And here is the president, two days after the release of the Wikileaks documents, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan as

"the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned". [5]

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

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Al Mezan Center For Human Rights

UN Human Rights Committee urges Israel to ensure detainees immediate access to counsel, repeal Unlawful Combatants Law, reinstate family visits to Gaza prisoners, lift blockade on Gaza, launch independent investigations into Operation Cast Lead, end assassinations and cease collective home demolitions.

On 29 July 2010, the UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), issued its Concluding Observations on Israel. The Concluding Observations addressed many of the issues brought before the Committee by Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) and Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights in their two joint NGO reports, and in oral interventions provided by Adalah Attorney Orna Kohn and PHR-Israel’s Advocacy Director Amiram Gil during the Committee’s review sessions in Geneva. Al Mezan was unable to send a representative to the review due to complications caused by Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza.

In the Concluding Observations, the Committee found a large number of violations of Israel’s obligations under the ICCPR. It voiced concerns about Israeli laws, policies and practices that constitute violations of the rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including torture and ill-treatment. The Committee reiterated its criticism of Israel for the lack of any disaggregated information concerning its compliance with the Covenant in the OPT, a territory that is effectively under Israel’s control and occupation. It made a series of recommendations to Israel about how to ensure the protection of the rights of Palestinians being held in Israeli detention centers and prisons and of Palestinian civilians in the OPT, in line with its obligations under the ICCPR.

The Committee called on Israel, inter alia, to: incorporate the crime of torture into its domestic legislation; refrain from using administrative detention; ensure that all detainees have immediate access to a lawyer; repeal the Detention of Unlawful Combatants Law; reinstate the family visit program for prisoners from the Gaza Strip; lift its military blockade of the Gaza Strip; launch credible, independent investigations into serious violations of international law during Operation Cast Lead; end its practice of extra-judicial executions; and cease its practice of collective punitive home and property demolitions.

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