Richard Falk
Global Research

Israel is gearing up for another major offensive into Gaza, yet the world community still remains bafflingly silent.

It is dismaying that during this dark anniversary period two years after the launch of the deadly attacks on the people of Gaza - code-named Operation Cast Lead by the Israelis - that there should be warnings of a new massive attack on the beleaguered people of Gaza.

The influential Israeli journalist, Ron Ren-Yishai, writes on December 29, 2010, of the likely prospect of a new major IDF attack, quoting senior Israeli military officers as saying "It's not a question of if, but rather of when," a view that that is shared, according to Ren-Yishai, by "government ministers, Knesset members and municipal heads in the Gaza region".

The bloody-minded Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi, reinforces this expectation by his recent assertion that, "as long as Gilad Shalit is still in captivity, the mission is not complete". He adds with unconscious irony, "we have not lost our right of self-defence".

More accurate would be the assertion, "we have not given up our right to wage aggressive war or to commit crimes against humanity".

And what of the more than 10,000 Palestinians, including children under the age of 10, being held in Israeli prisons throughout occupied Palestine?

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Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it's sometimes easy to lose perspective of just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are. One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary. Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security's practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products -- laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like -- copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it. Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It's completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There's no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse -- not even to have their property returned to them.

When you really think about it, it's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this. Seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable. A laptop and its equivalents reveal whom you talk to, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you view, what you think, and virtually everything else about your life. It can -- and often does -- contain not only the most private and intimate information about you, but also information which the government is legally barred from accessing (attorney/client or clergy/penitent communications, private medical and psychiatric information and the like). But these border seizures result in all of that being limitlessly invaded. This is infinitely more invasive than the TSA patdowns that caused so much controversy just two months ago. What kind of society allows government agents -- without any cause -- to seize all of that whenever they want, without limits on whom they can do this to, what they access, how they can use it: even without anyone knowing what they're doing?

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Stephen Lendman

Oscar Lopez Rivera & Mohammad Khawaja

Earlier articles addressed them, accessed through the following links, here & here.

Pakistani Canadians Mahboob Khawaja, his son Momin, and family were wrongfully targeted for alleged involvement in terrorism. Mahboob is an "academic specializing in Strategic Studies with special interests in Western-Islamic Civilizations, Change and Conflict Resolution."

While working in Saudi Arabia, dozens of Royal Canadian Mounted police arrested his family at gunpoint in Ottawa. They blew open his door, then searched his home lawlessly with no warrant and found nothing. At the same time, Mahboob was arrested in Saudi Arabia, jailed for two weeks, then released. The affair ruined his academic career as a professor of global politics, and Momin's as a software developer and free man.

In March 2004, he was bogusly accused of a UK bomb plot, becoming the first person charged under Canada's 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act. Though acquitted on that charge, he was held without trial for over four years, then convicted on October 29, 2008, and sentenced on March 12, 2009, after a bench trial, to ten and a half years (above time already served) for allegedly:

● donating $859 to an Afghan refugee charity; in fact, he gave $25;
● making a device, readily available at retail, to jam cell phone signals and emails, specifically ones relating to Western imperialism;
● providing material support to Afghan resistance fighters, called terrorists; and
● attending an unknown camp during a Pakistan visit.

Appealing before Ontario's Higher Court from May 18 - 20, 2010, prosecutors restated all trial court charges, including the bogus UK bomb plot. The Lawrence Greenspon-led defense team argued for acquittal on time served.

On December 17, Momin was sentenced to life plus 24 years to be served concurrently, though innocent of all charges. The harsh Appeals Court ruling stressed "the unique nature of terrorism-related offenses," though none whatsoever were committed.

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Stephen Lendman

The Banco Central de Venezuela's web site (Venezuela's Central Bank) relates BCV history from its September 8, 1939 inception. At the time, conservative forces feared monetary instability under uncontrolled Central Bank spending. As a result, opponents (unsuccessfully) said giving it exclusive money creation power was unconstitutional.

Thereafter BCV reforms occurred in 1943, 1960, 1974, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1992, 2001, and most recently making banking a "public service" in 2010. More on that below.

In 1992, legislation established "administrative autonomy," in part transforming the bank into a "public legal entity. Until then, (it was solely) corporate in nature." Thereafter, Venezuela's president appointed "a collegiate body of seven members, a president and six directors," requiring two-thirds Senate approval for a six-year term. Its mandate is "monetary stability, economic balance and well-ordered economic development."

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Thomas H. Douglass

An international team of scientists made headlines at the end of last year when they used genetic evidence to show that an ancient people, once living in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, were distant cousins of the Neanderthals and contributed to the modern human genome before their extinction.

The discovery is a triumph of modern genomics and decades of publicly funded science research in the United States and elsewhere, which has led to the sequencing of the human genome and promises to revolutionize our understanding of evolution, disease, and global genetic diversity.

While geneticists and paleontologists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, at Harvard and at MIT spearheaded the work, there were also substantial contributions by scientists throughout the United States, Spain, Canada, Russia, and China. Ancient DNA specialist Svaante Pääbo, alongside evolutionary biologists and geneticists David Reich, Richard Green and Johannes Krause, were among the researchers leading the work.

Denisova cave is located in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, and has been an important site of human occupation for over 250,000 years. Early humans often sought out caves as sources of shelter and protection as they dispersed, repeatedly, from Africa into Eurasia and beyond. Like a number of other sites, Denisova cave is important because stone tool technology suggests that different peoples occupied the site at different times toward the end of the Pleistocene age (2.6 million to 10,000 years ago), as modern Homo sapiens began to disperse from Africa and generally replace other, older populations.

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Sholto Byrnes
NewStatesman

Does Saudi Arabia deserve thanks for taking in dictators such as Tunisia's ousted president?

Having fled from the country he ruled for 23 years, ex-President Zine el-Abidin Ben Ali has landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the government has "welcomed" him "due to the current extraordinary circumstances" in Tunisia. He has had an entirely different reception from bloggers in the kingdom and the region, however, varying from calls for demonstrations outside Saudi embassies in Arab countries by those who want Ben Ali swiftly brought to justice, to those noting that Jeddah has of late "been plagued by torrential rain, overflowing sewage, insects and now the Tunisian ex-president".

In some ways it is not the most obvious refuge for Ben Ali. He may have been a brother Arab leader, but he will be expected to take a very different attitude to the religion of which he is nominally a member in his new home. The Financial Times reports that "Saudi Islamists pointed to Mr Ben Ali's secular policies which they said marginalised Islam. One said on his Twitter feed that the harshest punishment against Ben Ali, who banned "the call for prayer, Koran, and the veil is to be surrounded by veiled and munaqabat [face-covered] women and the sound of recital of Koran."

However, after several other countries including France refused to take him in, Ben Ali may have had little choice. The Arab Network for Human Rights Information now warns that Saudi Arabia is becoming a "refuge for dictators", having granted entry to Uganda's Idi Amin and Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif in the past.

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