Stephen Lendman

On September 10, Israel's YnetNews.com headlined, "IDF sexually abused Palestinian children," headlining:

"Damning (September 9) CNN report cites uncorroborated sexual abuse charges of Palestinian children detained by IDF." Military officials refused to "respond to abuse charges as no details (were) provided," a spokesman saying "We cannot address general claims on the subject in the absence of a specific complaint."

CNN's report "featured an unidentified Palestinian boy claiming that IDF forces attempted to insert an object into his rectum," and that dozens of officers present stood around laughing while it happened.

The network cited Defence of Children International (DCI) as its source, an independent NGO involved in promoting and protecting children's rights globally for over 30 years, founded on the date the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) passed 10 years later.

In May 2010, it asked the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to investigate 14 cases of sexual assault or threatened assault it uncovered - committed by Israeli soldiers, interrogators, and police from January 2009 - April 2010. The abused children were from 13 - 16 years old, detained for offenses like stone-throwing harming no one.

DCI-Palestine expressed alarm about sworn affidavits children provided, explaining instances of sexual assault or threatened assault to obtain confessions. In 2009 alone, DCI reviewed 100 sworn affidavits attesting to the following:

● 97% of children said their hands were tied during interrogations;
● 92% said they were blindfolded or hooded;
● 81% said forced confessions were made;
● 69% said they were beaten or kicked;
● 65% said they were arrested from midnight to 4AM;
● 50% said they were verbally abused;
● 49% cited threats or inducements;
● 32% were forced to sign confessions in Hebrew they didn't understand;
● 26% cited painful position abuse;
● 14% were in solitary confinement;
● 12% were threatened with sexual assault; and
● 4%, in fact, were sexually assaulted.

It included grabbing boys by the testicles until they confessed, and threatening others as young as 13 with rape unless they admitted to "throwing stones at Israeli settler vehicles in the occupied West Bank."

Read more »

Denis G. Rancourt
Activist Teacher Blog

Especially left and liberal professionals and service intellectuals but also right-wing members of the intelligentsia vehemently attack and ridicule “conspiracy theories” such as the present 911 Truth movement.

Why?

It’s as though power did not covertly orchestrate its predation of us? Is that not the modus operandi of power?

Is it so difficult to believe that the complex and highly successful military attack on US soil that was 911 (levelling three gigantic sky scrapers, blasting a hole into the Pentagon, and destroying four commercial jets and their passengers) was not orchestrated by a religious zealot from a cave in Afghanistan and executed by failed Cessna pilot trainees with box cutters? Or that those who measurably benefited in the trillions had nothing to do with it?

What the hell? Not even (admittedly rare) authoritative mainstream reports seem to matter [1].

What ever happened to “war is a racket” and “follow the money”?

In rigorous compliance with the true meanings of "academic freedom" [2] and "freedom of the press" virtually no academics or mainstream journalists have made it their research to find truth or to radically (at the root) question the establishment version.

Indeed, all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the finance-corporate-military complex.

What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean attempts to cross that line? [3]

Read more »

Steven Harkins
Pulse Media

Conspiracy theories exist in ‘the realm of myth’, where ‘imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored’ [i]. This is according to a website created by the US State Department to debunk a range of outlandish conspiracy theories.

Among the theories criticized on the website are conspiracies regarding the assassination of JFK, the moon landings, and the September 11th attacks [ii]. Alongside these well-known sources of wild speculation is the subject of depleted uranium (DU). The website states:

Uranium evokes very powerful fears. It is associated with atomic weapons, mass annihilation, radiation sickness, cancer and birth defects. Depleted uranium evokes these same fears, despite the fact that it has been depleted of much of its radioactivity. Fear-based associations can be more powerful than logic and facts. Compare how you feel about tungsten to how you feel about depleted uranium. Both are heavy metals, but “depleted uranium” might sound scarier to you [iii].

So the US State Department argue that when it comes to conspiracy theories ‘evidence is ignored’ and that it is ‘fear-based associations’ and not ‘logic and facts’ that have caused people to make a connection between birth defects, cancer and depleted uranium.

Read more »

Uri Avnery

"Again it was proven that the media – and, indeed, the entire state – is controlled by the army."

IF GOD wills, even a broomstick can shoot – so I wrote after the appointment of the Turkel commission. I was quoting the Jewish saying in the hope that in spite of everything, something would come out of it.

The commission was born in sin. Those who appointed it were not interested in discovering the truth but in preventing the setting up of an international inquiry commission or an Israeli State Board of Inquiry. The “terms of reference” that were dictated to the commission were extremely narrow. At the beginning, the commission was not even empowered to compel witnesses to testify.

In short: a commission without wings, a broomstick without the brush.

I hoped that the members of the commission would not agree to dance to the government’s tune. Today it is still too early to judge whether they have passed this test, but it can already be said: they have broken their chains.

AFTER THE testimony of the three central witnesses this week – Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Gabi Ashkenazi – one can already draw the first conclusion: the commission is ignoring the terms of reference that were imposed on it. The terms have disappeared. The commission hardly mentioned the subject it was charged with exploring - international law – and instead took up all the rest.

That was not difficult, because all three witnesses disregarded the terms of reference they themselves had framed. Each of them was so eager to show how right and wise he was, that the official subject of the investigation was well-nigh forgotten.

Thus a fait accompli was established: the commission is not fettered anymore by its terms of reference, but is dealing with all the aspects of the failed operation. (The terms of reference may however pop up again when the time comes to draw up their findings.)

Read more »