Stephen Lendman

An October B'Tselem/HaMoked, Center of the Defence of the Individual report, titled "Kept in the Dark: Treatment of Palestinian Detainees in the Petach-Tikva Interrogation Facility of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet)" is discussed below. Though, in some respects, treatment over the years has changed, it remains harsh, abusive, and in violation of international law, prohibiting all forms of torture and mistreatment at all times, under all conditions, with no allowed exceptions.

The report is based on testimonies from 121 Palestinian detainees during Q 1 and Q 4, 2009. Clear patterns of mistreatment were revealed - torture and abuse by any standard, what Israel practices as official policy.

An earlier article explained it in detail, accessed through THIS link.

Though denied, torture is official Israeli policy. The Jewish state and America are the only modern countries sanctioning it. Another link explains more:

Both countries, in fact, have laws prohibiting it, America under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause alone that automatically makes all international laws and ratified treaties the Supreme Law of the Land. In addition, War Crimes Act provisions make Geneva and Common Article 3 breaches illegal, including torture, abuse, and humiliating or degrading treatment.

Moreover, US Code, Chapter 113C: Torture states:

"Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life."

Israeli law also prohibits it under Section 277 of its Penal Law, stating:

"A public servant who does one of the following is liable to imprisonment for three years: (1) uses or directs the use of force or violence against a person for the purpose of extorting from him or from anyone in whom he is interested a confession of an offense or information relating to an offense; (2) threatens any person, or directs any person to be threatened, with injury to his person or property or to the person or property of anyone in whom he is interested for the purpose of extorting from him a confession of an offense or any information relating to an offense."

Israel is also a signatory to international laws banning torture in all forms, including the 1984 UN Convention against Torture. Yet throughout its history, Israel's military and security forces have willfully, systematically and illegally practiced torture against Palestinian detainees.

In three 1996 cases, Israel's High Court legitimized use of violent shaking, hooding, playing deafeningly loud music, sleep deprivations, and lengthy detainments to continue these abuses. A 1999 ruling addressed so-called "ticking bomb" cases, approving physical force and other abuses, short of breaking a detainee's spirit. Moreover, by allowing loopholes, torture's current legal basis was established in Public Committee against Torture in Israel et al v. the Government of Israel et al (the HCJ Torture Petition).

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Frances Stonor Saunders
The Independent

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

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Charles Hugh Smith

"Integrity has become as light as the truth itself, and both have floated away, unnoticed and unmourned."

The financialized American economy and Central State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a foul, rotten heap.

Google's famous "don't be evil" is reversed in the American Central State and financial "industry": be evil, because everyone else is evil, too. In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, mispresentation of risk, material misrepresentation of facts, the cloaking of truth with half-truths, the replacement of statements of fact with propaganda and spin: these are not the work of a scattered handful of sociopaths: they represent the very essence and heart of the entire status quo.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil to capture the essence of the Nazi regime in Germany: doing evil wasn't abnormal, it was normal. Doing evil wasn't an outlier of sociopaths, it was the everyday "job" of millions of people, Nazi Party members or not.

Not naming evil is the key to normalizing evil. Evil must first and foremost be derealized (a key concept in the Survival+ critique), detached from our realization and awareness by naming it something innocuous.

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Arthur Silber
Once Upon a Time

Depending on my mood, I am astonished, horrified, sickened and/or immensely amused when writers, on both the right and the left, who repeatedly proclaim their skepticism and distrust of government (at least of certain significant aspects of governmental activities) offer figures about employment and the economy as if those figures accurately reflected the truth. The figures such writers put forth and then amplify with learned commentary are, of course, provided by the government. One might think that fact would be regarded as of some significance by those who are often skeptical and distrustful of government. One might be mistaken! For almost everyone, trust in and obedience to authority is the automatic default position; we are trained well and thoroughly, from our earliest years. (The second part of my series on Wikileaks discusses how this training takes place, and offers links to many articles that analyze the mechanisms in detail.) There are but few exceptions; they tend to be dyspeptic, dysfunctional irritants such as your humble correspondent.

Thus, the following exercise in cooling clarity from Paul Craig Roberts could be regarded as stating the obvious -- except that for most people, none of this is obvious at all:

If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October?

Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were "phantom jobs" created by "concurrent seasonal factor adjustments." In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.

As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government. [Ditto every blogger I've read on the subject.]

Discounting the war production shutdown at the end of World War II, which was not a recession in the usual sense, Williams reports that "the current annual decline [in employment] remains the worst since the Great Depression, and should deepen further."

In short, there is no employment data, and none in the works, unless gimmicked, that supports the recovery myth. The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.

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Craig Murray
Craig Murray's Blog

British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.

A bloated state sector is abused and milked by a new class of massively overpaid public secotr managers in every area of public provision - university, school and hospital administration, all executive branches of local government, housing associations and other arms length bodies. All provide high six figure salaries to those at the top of a bloated bureaucratic establishment. The "left", insofar as it exists, represents only these state sector vested interests.

These people decide where the cuts fall, and they will not fall where they should - on them. They will fall largely on the services ordinary people need.

Meanwhile we are not all in this together. The Vodafone saga only lifts the lid for the merest peek at the way the corporate sector avoids paying its share, hiding behind Luxembourg or Cayman tax loopholes and conflicts between international jurisdictions - with which our well provided politicians are very happy. The often excellent Sunny Hundal provides a calm analysis of the Vodafone case here.

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Stephen Lendman

While slaughtering Muslims abroad, supporting Israeli's illegal occupation and genocidal Gaza siege, as well as waging domestic war on Islam, Reuters, on November 9, headlined, "Obama says US earnest, reaching out to Muslim world," saying:

From Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, "President Barack Obama said Tuesday that Washington's effort to reach out to the Muslim world was earnest and would help improve security, although he acknowledged that there was still more work to do."

At a news conference with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhovono, he said,

"With respect to outreach to the Muslim world, I think that our efforts have been earnest and sustained. We don't expect that we are going to completely eliminate some of the misunderstandings and mistrust that have developed over a long period of time, but we do think that we're on the right path."

On August 31, he wreaked of duplicitity declaring an "end to the combat mission in Iraq," saying:

"Throughout this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility."

No matter that after two decades of war, sanctions, occupation, millions of deaths and displacements, disease, and insecurity, Iraq no longer exists. Divided in three parts (the Basra south, Kurdish north, and Baghdad center), it's unsafe, corrupt, terrorized, tyrannized, contaminated, and permanently occupied like Afghanistan and wherever else America shows up, the scourge of the Muslim world.

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Fred Reed
Fred on Everything

Sen. Lindsey Graham is the one in a horizontal position...

Oh good. I see that Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack Iran. The US, he says, should "sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard."

Senator Graham has the brains of a tapeworm, making him eminently qualified for the senate. Tapeworms, I note, do not have brains. It is characteristic of warlike innocents, to include the Pentagon, to believe that if you destroy navies and air forces, you win wars. This worked well in Vietnam, you will recall, and as soon as we destroy the Taliban’s navy, Afghanistan will be a cakewalk.

Now, I understand that practicality and realism are alien concepts in American politics, to be approached with trepidation, but maybe, just once, we should think before sticking our private parts into a wood-chipper. Just once. I do not propose consistent rationality, forethought, or intelligent behavior. I profoundly respect my country’s traditions.

However, folk wisdom from West Virginia: Before you say, “I can whip any man in the bar!” it is well to scout the bar.

Note that the United States cannot defeat Iran militarily, short of using nuclear weapons. It is easy to start a war. Finishing one is harder. I could punch out Mike Tyson. Things thereafter might not go as well as hoped.

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