Lance Tapley
Boston Review

“They beat the shit out of you,” Mike James said, hunched near the smeared plexiglass separating us. He was talking about the cell “extractions” he’d endured at the hands of the supermax-unit guards at the Maine State Prison.

“They push you, knee you, poke you,” he said, his voice faint but ardent through the speaker. “They slam your head against the wall and drop you on the floor while you’re cuffed.” He lifted his manacled hands to a scar on his chin. “They split it wide open. They’re yelling ‘Stop resisting! Stop resisting!’ when you’re not even moving.”

When you meet Mike James you notice first his deep-set eyes and the many scars on his shaved head, including a deep, horizontal gash. He got that by scraping his head on the cell door slot, which guards use to pass in food trays.

“They were messing with me,” he explained, referring to the guards who taunted him. “I couldn’t stand it no more.” He added, “I’ve knocked myself out by running full force into the wall.”

James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four years James had been in prison when I met him, he had spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” he said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at Guantánamo. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of American citizens are being held in equivalent or worse conditions in this country’s super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable units of traditional prisons. The Obama administration— somewhat unsteadily—plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to challenge the conditions of their captivity. Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.

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Stephen Lendman

December 28 was Cast Lead's second anniversary, a three week onslaught inflicting an appalling human, destructive and environmental toll. The war ended. Regular attacks continued, and Gaza remains suffocating under siege. Yet world leaders are doing nothing to end it or hold Israeli war criminals accountable.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said

"Gaza remains sealed-off from the outside world (after) the single most brutal event in" the occupation's history, and "impunity for war crimes prevails."

To date, victims' rights have been unaddressed. International law remains ignored. Indisputable war crimes were airbrushed from history. Israeli war criminals were shielded from justice. Only three lower-ranking soldier were convicted for war-related offenses. One was for credit card theft, two others for using a nine year old boy as a human shield. Israeli government officials who ordered war, generals and top commanders who planned and implemented it, and other complicit figures were uncharged and unpunished.

World leader silence condoned them. The rule of law was trashed for imperial Israel, including allowing it to slowly suffocate over 1.5 million Gazans. Moreover, a newly released WikiLeaks cable says Israel plans major wars on Gaza and Lebanon. More on them below.

Preventing Gaza's Reconstruction

On December 21, the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement asked "Who will rebuild Gaza?" Six months after Israel's cabinet decision to ease closure, a new Gisha report headlined "Reconstructing the Closure: Will recent changes to the closure policy be enough to build in Gaza," saying:

"Despite the cabinet's decision, Israel continues to ban the entrance of steel, gravel and cement, (essential) items which are not considered to be dual-use according to international standards." Narrow exceptions only were allowed with "burdensome bureaucratic strings attached."

For most items, Israel bogusly claims Hamas may use construction materials to build bunkers and "enhance its military capability" in other ways. As a result, little rebuilding progress has been made. Gaza remains in ruins, and over 1.5 million Palestinians struggle daily to cope.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

Young children attacked by Israel US assault on Gaza, Pale-
stine, 21 days Dec. 2008 - Jan. 2009. (Photo: Aztlan.net)

US diplomatic cables quoted by the Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten expose discussions between US legislators and Israeli officials on preparations for the next Middle East war.

These documents make clear both Israel’s preparations for another major war in the region and the full support of visiting members of the US Congress, Democratic and Republican, who apparently subordinated themselves to the secrecy demands of the Israeli state.

Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, reported last month that it has all 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables that were obtained by WikiLeaks and has begun publishing articles based on these documents, while not reproducing the cables themselves.

One of the cables from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to the State Department in Washington recounts a meeting between the visiting American congressional delegation headed by former Democratic Representative Ike Skelton (the head of the House Armed Services Committee, who was defeated for re-election last November) and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli chief of staff, which took place on November 15, 2009. Another details a briefing given by Israeli generals to another delegation led by US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat, New York) on September 2 and 3 of the same year.

The cables, the Norwegian paper reported, send a “clear message” that “The Israeli military preparations for a new war in the Middle East are in full swing.”

General Ashkenazi is quoted in the November 2009 cable as saying that the Israeli military is preparing to wage the next war “in the same areas where the previous wars took place, namely in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.”

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Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.

In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials concerned with the alliance, according to a U.S. military officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making process.

“NATO’s role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about Afghanistan,” the officer, who insisted on anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told IPS in an interview.

The alliance would never have been given such a prominent role in Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W. Bush administration wanted no significant U.S. military role there that could interfere with their plans to take control of Iraq.

That reality gave U.S. officials working on NATO an opening.

Gen. James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 2003 to 2005, pushed aggressively for giving NATO the primary security role in Afghanistan, according to the officer.

“Jones sold [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld on turning Afghanistan over to NATO,” said the officer, adding that he did so with the full support of Pentagon officials with responsibilities for NATO. “You have to understand that the NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon – both in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff,” said the officer.

Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with American Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid becoming irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. “NATO was in limbo for a bit,” he said.

But the 9/11 attacks had offered a new opportunity for NATO to demonstrate its relevance.

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Paul Mitchell
WSWS

John Pilger has reported on six wars, beginning in Vietnam in 1967, and produced more than 55 documentaries. His new film, The War You Don’t See, examines the media’s role in war and asks whether it has become part of the propaganda machine of the state. The documentary focuses in particular on the practice of “embedding” journalists in military units, which has helped virtually destroy independent war reporting.

The War You Don’t See opens with the sickening video clip released by WikiLeaks earlier this year, in which US troops in an Apache gunship revel in their indiscriminate slaughter of innocent bystanders in Iraq. Pilger asks,

“Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war, regardless of the lies of government, and how are crimes of war justified?”

Pilger traces the growing integration of the state and media back to World War One. In the US, the secretive Committee on Public Information was set up in 1917 by US President Woodrow Wilson to “sell the war to the masses”. One of its most influential members was public relations-propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays. “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country”, Bernays wrote. The “hide the facts and manipulate emotions to scare the hell out of people” philosophy lay behind First World War posters such as “Destroy this Mad Brute” (1917).

Pilger fast-forwards to 2003 and the Iraq war. The creation of illusions, he says, has come a long way since Bernays’s time. Today, the Pentagon spends $1 billion a year on such activities. US Assistant Secretary of Defence Bryan Whitman describes how the Iraq war introduced the practice of embedding and saw some 700 journalists attached to army units. He says it was necessary because the US was up against an enemy, Saddam Hussein, who was “masterful at misinformation…disinformation”.

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