John Chan
WSWS

In a calculated and reckless provocation directed in the first instance against North Korea, the Obama administration has encouraged South Korea to hold live-fire drills in the vicinity of Yeonpyeong Island. The highly sensitive island was the site of artillery exchanges on November 23 between South and North Korea.

South Korea has ignored North Korea’s threat of retaliation and calls by China and Russia for calm and restraint. The live fire exercise not only has the potential to provoke a military confrontation between the two Koreas, but carries the danger of a broader conflict involving the major powers.

US is backing the South Korean exercise not just as a means for exerting pressure on North Korea, but also on China. In recent months, the Obama administration has waged an aggressive campaign throughout the region aimed at undercutting China’s growing influence. Washington has repeatedly blamed China for not doing enough to “rein in” North Korea and rebuffed every effort by Beijing to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

South Korea has announced that the artillery drill will proceed today. The announcement came within hours of the breakdown of an emergency session of the UN Security Council called by Russia, with China’s support. According to a Reuters report, Russia circulated a draft statement to Security Council members that called for “maximum restraint” and urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to send an envoy to Seoul and Pyongyang to prevent the crisis spiralling out of control.

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Stephen Lendman

Lynn Stewart and Ralph Poynter: Stalwart Cohorts
in the People's Struggle

"She's a heroic role model deserving support at her time of need, facing nine more years unless granted redress at a very tough time when prosecutors demand cruel and unusual punishment, not mitigation. Silence, timidity, and inaction are no options against it."

Seven previous articles discussed her case and status, explaining the gross injustice against a heroic human rights lawyer who devoted her career to defending society's poor, unwanted, and unfairly persecuted - defendants deprived of due process without an advocate like her.

She knew the risks, yet took them courageously, until prosecutorial injustice convicted and imprisoned her for doing her job - defending an unpopular client too vigorously.

Interned on November 19, 2009 at MCC-NY, she remained there until transferred. Her family and attorneys requested FCI Danbury, CT close to home, a facility for low security female prisoners with a satellite camp for minimum security ones. No matter. She was denied the logical choice for a more punitive one.

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Stephen Lendman

Disappearing citizenship...

Numerous previous articles exposed it, highlighting policies affording rights solely to Jews, including a January 2010 Israeli Democracy or Hypocrisy one accessed through this link.

It cited a same titled October 2007 Haaretz editorial, calling for "debate about Israel's control over the lives of Palestinians deprived of civil rights," saying its democracy is flawed for denying Arab Israelis equality with Jews.

In his December 10 op-ed titled titled, "The farce of a secular and democratic Jewish state," Haaretz writer Gideon Levy was equally critical, saying:

"The debate over the conversion bill is deceptive." The IDF bill aims to prevent municipal marriage clerks from refusing to register marriages of people converted during military service. An estimated 2,500 occur annually, mostly among former Soviet Union immigrants. Orthodox parties, like Shas, want the Sephardic chief rabbi to have sole conversion authority. Secular ones want bill's language left unchanged.

Levy believes the debate masks greater issues, fundamental ones

"that define our society and state." Whether military or civilian rabbis decide who is Jewish is a distraction. "Ten times more significant is....whether (we're) living in the only country on earth where clerics determine the right to citizenship. No less important (is the illusion that Israel) is a secular and democratic state."

Imagine debates over whether to rent apartments to Arabs. What about equal rights, democratic freedoms, civil liberties and justice. Choosing who's superior, who's inferior, who gets rights and who doesn't exposes Israel's real agenda, a theocratic-run Jewish state under religious law, deciding who belongs and who doesn't, enforced by hardline officials and MKs.

"It's time to admit that this approach can only be called racist," based on "the blood flowing through (one's) veins....determin(ing) your status....Sixty-two years after (Israel's) establishment, (it's time to) change this reality." It's time for "normalcy, for joining the enlightened world, (and changing) distorted reality." Otherwise, it's ludicrous calling Israel "a liberal and modern state" when growing despotism better defines it. Non-Jews have experienced it for decades, under a repressive occupation, and Israeli Arabs treated like second class citizens.

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Naomi Spencer
WSWS

Army Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement by the military for more than seven months.

Manning, who has not been convicted of a crime, has been imprisoned since May at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prior to that the 22-year-old intelligence specialist was held in a military prison in Kuwait, where he was also kept in solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement is widely acknowledged to be a form of torture. Severe isolation leads to psychological trauma, despair and mental illness. While routinely employed in the US prison system, the treatment is banned as a cruel and unusual punishment in many countries.

By all indications, the Obama administration and the military are subjecting Manning to this treatment in the hope that, after being incapacitated and made pliant, he will accept a plea deal in exchange for implicating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange so that the US can prosecute the latter on conspiracy charges.

On Friday, the British Independent reported that the US Justice Department has offered Manning a plea bargain, which would involve him being transferred to civilian custody, in return for him naming Assange as an active collaborator in obtaining the leaked files.

Manning was detained after WikiLeaks released the “Collateral Murder” video last April. The video contains footage shot by a US attack helicopter of a massacre of civilians and journalists carried out in Baghdad in 2007. The Army private is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents and other material that show the massive scale of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, expose corruption and lies, and document war crimes.

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Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

Oh! spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead. ~ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, Act III

"He will not be going back to that cell once occupied by Oscar Wilde."

Eventually he didn't. But little did Mark Stephens, one of Julian Assange's lawyers, know that it would still take over three twisting-and-turning hours for his client to finally exit the Royal Courts of Justice in central London a free man.

It's as if WikiLeaks founder Assange, emerging from the silence of the shadows to the proverbially frantic media scrum, already knew that the real war starts now - and has nothing to do with jealous groupies, broken condoms and "sex by surprise".

This was the key passage of Assange's brief statement, read immediately after he was able to breathe the air of London again. He said, "During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison, I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support."

As in: pay excruciatingly close attention to what the US government is doing to Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of cables to WikiLeaks. Manning has been held in solitary confinement at the US Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, for five months now. He has not been convicted of any crime. In a devastating Salon article, Glenn Greenwald has stressed that Manning is "under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture".

So that was Assange's terse way of saying to the world: Big Brother is watching you. And what they're doing to Manning they want to do to me, to you, and metaphorically to anyone who believes in freedom of information.

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Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

In this essay I would reflect on why as an exiled Palestinian, I do not believe that putting an end to Zionism would solve Palestine's problem ("Israel").

Supporting "equal rights", supporting “one person, one vote”, constitutes support for the occupiers' illegitimate privilege to impose their presence in a land they conquered by war and terrorism, looted and destroyed, holding on the estate of -survivors forced into exiled -“absentees”.

“Equal rights” and the deceptive expression “one person, one vote” would finalize the conquest of Palestine. This finalization of the theft of a foreign land, would be a grave violation of the fundamentals of ethics regulating human interaction.

Worse, it would be an irreversible step backwards into the dark ages, insofar that it would constitute the first jurisprudential invalidation of most fundamentals of International Law pertaining to sovereignty and wars of aggression and conquest. Centuries of modest, painstaking progress, would be thrown out the window. The Thirteenth Century's Magna Carta, the Seventeenth Century's Treaty of Westphalia and the Twentieth Century's Nuremberg Principles are the cornerstones of International Law, prohibiting Wars of Aggression, and regulating occupation.

“Equal rights”, and “one person one vote” would send the clear message to bullies, criminals, thieves, that they get away with MURDER. -Literally! It is a carte blanche for bullies and aggressors to do whatever they like, steal, kill, colonize, rape, oppress, torture...

And that is one of the reasons why any future decision on the status of ILLEGAL COLONIZERS in Palestine should be a PALESTINIAN DECISION; they, and ONLY they, can choose whether or not, to allow some of their tormentors to stay, or not, and in which legal parameter this can happen.

The term “negotiation table” has been abused to be merely the place where the Palestinians gradually and systematically loose everything there is to loose, and they just keep on participating and giving.

This moral and legal masquerade of “Equal Rights” and “One person, one vote” is not, and never will constitute a solid basis for a lasting peace. Peace existed before the arrival of the Jewish Zionist invasion, and will exist after they leave. Palestine's sovereignty is not on the negotiation table.

Rather naively, some believe that the only solution for the Palestinian tragedy would be to de-zionise "israel". I could not disagree more.

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Stephen Lendman

Three earlier articles addressed the issue, the most recent accessed through this link.

Net Neutrality is a defining issue of our time. It's essential to keep the Internet free and open, letting users access all content without restrictions, limitations, or discrimination, maintaining an online level playing field for everyone.

It's the essence of democratic free speech. Without it, the Internet will resemble cable TV, letting corporate predators game the system, deciding what web sites, content and applications are available at what price and speed.

Giant cable and telecom companies are lobbying Congress and the FCC furiously for that right. A leaked September 2010 House Energy and Commerce Committee draft bill, if enacted, will let them establish higher-priced premium lanes (two Internets), effectively destroying Net Neutrality, compromising the last free and open space. New FCC provisions may do the same. More on that below.

An October 2007 global measure, overriding national sovereignty, also threatens Net Neutrality, consumer privacy, and civil liberties. Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), secret negotiations seek to subvert them, ostensibly to protect copyrighted intellectual property, including films, photos, and songs. ACTA remains a work in progress, but developments going forward bear watching, especially if a global agreement is reached.

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John Goetz and Matthias Gebauer
Der Spiegel

The terra-cotta colored stucco villa, surrounded by lavender, fig
trees and 10 hectares of vinyards, is expected to be auctioned by
the government in order to cover some of the legal expenses in the
trial. The CIA hasn't even provided Lady with a lawyer and it is
acting as if the case in Italy doesn't even exist.

The only consequence is that Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, had to change his plans for his retirement. He can no longer travel to the wonderful property that he bought for himself in Tuscany.

The CIA rendition of cleric Abu Omar in 2003 turned into a headache for Washington when a Milan court indicted the agents involved. Secret dispatches now show how the US threatened the Italian government in an attempt to influence the case. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was apparently happy to help.

In 2007, a court in Milan started trying several CIA agents in absentia for their roles in the 2003 kidnapping of Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric who had been living in the northern Italian city. When the indictments first came down, the US government tried to intervene -- first in Milan and then in Rome -- so as to influence the investigations of the public prosecutor's office.

At first, the efforts were conducted via diplomatic channels. But, later, they also took place during top-level talks with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. American diplomats and even the US secretary of defense were assured that the Italian government "was working hard to resolve the situation." And they also got to hear Berlusconi vent his rage at his own country's judicial system.

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Stephen Lendman

In his book "Freedom Next Time," John Pilger used CIA Vietnam terminology calling Afghanistan "the grand illusion of the American cause," describing long-suffering Afghans victimized by conflict, violence, occupation, extreme deprivation and genocide.

A December 15 ICRC press release expressed deep concern about how dire conditions have gotten, their worst ever since America's illegal war of aggression began in October 2001.

Headlined, "Afghanistan: a people trapped between sides," it cited "civilian casualties, internal displacement, and insufficient access to medical care, all of which are occurring against the background of a proliferation of armed groups."

Its head of Afghanistan operations, Reto Stocker, said:

"The sheer fact the ICRC has organized a press conference is an expression of us being extremely concerned of yet another year of fighting with dramatic consequences for an ever growing number of people in by now almost the entire country."

By every measure ICRC uses, its account presents an appalling picture, the worst ever in its 30 year history of providing Afghans aid. As a result:

"Many people are fleeing as their only solution and many end up in camps for the displaced or with relatives in neighboring districts."

The best estimates show the numbers of internally displaced (minimally) rose 25% compared with last year. The ICRC acknowledged a likely undercount because too many parts of the country aren't safe to access.

In fact, however, safety is virtually nonexistent throughout the country. As conflict escalated and spread, civilian casualties soared. America's "grand illusion" indeed.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The Obama administration’s review of its strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan produced the predictable conclusion that the war and occupation will go on indefinitely, despite mass opposition from the American people. That is the core message of the perfunctory five-page statement that was presented Thursday.

Obama delivered brief remarks in the White House briefing room, appearing at the podium flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Presenting what purports to be a progress report on the military “surge” that he launched a year ago, with the order to send another 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan, Obama said that, while the war was “a very difficult endeavor,” Washington was “on track to achieve our goals.”

In reporting Obama’s remarks, the White House web site asserted that “from the outset of his discussion of the report, he leveled with the American people.”

What nonsense! From start to finish, Obama’s brief presentation was a compendium of deceptions and outright lies designed to package and sell a militarist policy determined by the Pentagon brass and dutifully accepted by his administration.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

The double suicide bombing which took place in south-eastern Iran a couple of days ago was a nefarious act by every standard of imagination. It was a pornographic bloodshed, motivated by a corrupt ideology, latent hatreds, and a decidedly criminal distortion of Islam itself.

The criminal act, which killed 38 innocent people and maimed many others, was a New Hijri year present to Israel and Zionist circles which are awaiting the opportune time to hit Iran for the purpose of preserving the Zionist entity's hegemony and supremacy in this part of the world.

It is also a present to the enemies of Islam everywhere who seek to besmirch its image and create a violent implosion within Muslim communities all over the world.

The mayhem in Chahbahar, near the Pakistan borders, constitutes an obscene contradiction of everything or anything Islamic. This is so because there is no sin in Islam graver than killing an innocent person.

So, one wonders what type of Quran these criminal terrorists and cutthroats are reading from, or what type of obscurant fatwas or edicts they are acting on.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

In the ongoing campaign of persecution against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, the New York Times, the principal voice of American liberalism, has played a particularly filthy role.

Since the initial release of US State Department documents late last month, the Times has sought to downplay the significance of the revelations. It has largely ceased publication of new articles on the cables, confining those that it does produce to its inside pages. From the start, it has tailored its coverage to bolster US interests. The more significant exposures of US criminality are ignored.

As for the escalating international campaign targeting Assange, the Times has maintained a deliberate silence. It has not published a single editorial on Assange’s arrest or the calls from sections of the US political and media establishment for him to be killed and for WikiLeaks to be branded a terrorist organization. This is tantamount to tacit support for this campaign.

The role of the Times as an adjunct of the state was brazenly proclaimed by Executive Editor Bill Keller in extraordinary comments posted November 29 in response to a series of letters arguing that the Times has no right to report on the classified documents.

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Patrick Mac Manus
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

A Congolese rape victim, left, at the Heal Africa clinic
in Goma on August 8, 2009.

Violence against women, especially rape, has added its own brand of shame to recent wars. From conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Peru to Rwanda, girls and women have been singled out for rape, imprisonment, torture and execution.

Rape, identified by psychologists as the most intrusive of traumatic events, has been documented in many armed conflicts including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.

Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in ‘ethnic cleansing’.

More than 20,000 Muslim girls and women have been raped in Bosnia since fighting began in April 1992, according to a European Community fact-finding team. Teenage girls have been a particular target in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, according to the State of the World’s Children 1996 report. The report also says that impregnated girls have been forced to bear ‘the enemy’s’ child.

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Stephen Lendman

The Matrix of Control -Angela Goldstein from Israeli Com-
mittee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) explaining
about the various settlements in East Jerusalem. (HGL)

A November 10 Qatar News Agency article headlined, "Israel Plans to Rebuild Old Jerusalem - Palestinian Official," saying:

Attorney Ahmed Al-Ruwaidi, "responsible for the Jerusalem unit in the Palestinian Authority (PA), said Israel plan(s) to build new settlement homes in old Jerusalem where the ancient walls of the city will be overshadowed by modern bridges, synagogues and gardens spreading from the Arab neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah to Wdi Al Joze and Suwaneh."

The scheme involves home demolitions, dispossessions, and new settlement construction to solidify

"the capital and spiritual center of Israel and the Jewish people (by creating) a world city which attracts the souls of millions of believers across the globe."

Projects completed so far are part of the plan, to completely transform Jerusalem's Old City, Al-Ruwaidi adding:

"All the settlement projects in Jerusalem during the past three years, some of which have been practically implemented, fall under the (plan's) framework, including a decision to erect a thousand new settlement units in Jebel Abu Ghunaim aimed at completing the isolation of the city with a wall of settlements."

"Israel announced previously it will build 50,000 new units in the city. The implementation of 20,000 of (them) has been initiated practically under projects that have been approved from time to time for political objectives linked to political and international action."

So far, 20,000 Palestinian housing units face demolition, to accommodate new settlements, Old City excavation projects, and other Jews only development. As a result, Palestinians will be dispossessed and excluded.

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Stephen Lendman

Before dying, Richard Holbrooke admitted it, saying "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." The Washington Post reinterpreted it, saying:

"Holbrooke's death is the latest complication in an effort plagued by unreliable partners, reluctant allies and an increasingly skeptical American public."

They're not alone. Include noted analysts, administration officials, the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Pentagon top brass. An earlier article discussed it, accessed through this link.

A recent article remembered Chalmers Johnson, best known for calling America's global wars and imperialism a "suicide option" unless reversed. Access it through this link.

Naming us our own enemy, he called our policies

"arrogant and misguided," America's condition dire, and it's "too late for mere scattered reforms." We can choose democracy to survive or perish under current policies.

He said America is plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, what he called:

"isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy," combined with authoritarian rule and loss of personal freedom.

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