Stephen Lendman

The 2006 Military Commissions Act authorized torture and sweeping unconstitutional powers to detain, interrogate, and prosecute alleged suspects and collaborators (including US citizens), hold them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons, and deny them habeas and other constitutional protections.

Section 1031 of the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act (MCA), listing changes that include discarding the phrase "unlawful enemy combatant" for "unprivileged enemy belligerent." Language changed but not intent or lawlessness. Obama embraces the same Bush agenda, including keeping Guantanamo open after promising to close it, and allowing torture there and abroad.

MCA grants sweeping police state powers, including that "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause for action whatsoever....relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission (including) challenges to the lawfulness of (its) procedures...."

MCA scraped habeas protection (dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215) for domestic and foreign state enemies, citizens and non-citizens alike, and says "Any person is punishable... who....aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures," and in so doing helps a foreign enemy, provide "material support" to alleged terrorist groups, engages in spying, or commits other offenses previously handled in civil courts. No evidence is needed. Those charged are guilty by accusation.

Other key provisions include:

● legalizing torture against anyone, letting the president decide what procedures can be used on his own authority;
● denying detainees international law protection, letting the executive interpret or ignore it;
● letting the president convene "military commissions" at his discretion to try anyone he designates an "unprivileged enemy belligerent," detaining them indefinitely in secret;
● denying speedy trials or any at all;
● letting torture coerced confessions be used as evidence in trial proceedings, despite US and international law prohibiting cruel and inhuman treatment at all times, under all conditions, with no allowed exceptions; also, the US Supreme Court's February 1936 Brown v. Mississippi ruling stated:

"The rack and torture chamber may not substitute for the witness stand," and an earlier November 1926 Fisher v. State decision called coerced confessions "the chief iniquity, the crowning infamy (and) the curse of all countries" using them.

● letting hearsay and secret evidence be used; and
● denying due process, destroying human dignity, mocking the rule of law, and establishing the principle of kangaroo court justice for anyone the executive targets with or without evidence.

In other words, the rule of law is null and void. Whatever the president says goes. No one any longer is safe. America is a police state, making everyone potentially vulnerable.

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Chris McGreal
Uruknet

In this handout photo provided by the Palestinian
Press Office (PPO) Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed
Qorei shakes hands with US Secretary of State Condo-
leezza Rice at the Palestinian Authority headquarters
on July 23, 2005 in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

As Palestinian negotiators named in the secret accounts of negotiations with Israel angrily dismissed them as lies, fabrications and half truths, there was an equally hostile backlash over their offer to let the Jewish state keep its settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and other concessions.

The two leading Palestinian negotiators named in the documents, Saeb Erekat and Ahmed Qureia, reacted furiously to the leaks. Erekat called them a "bunch of lies". Qureia claimed that "many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian leadership".

But a former colleague of the two men on the negotiations team, Diana Buttu, called their secret proposal in 2008 to let Israel keep all but one of the Jewish settlements within Jerusalem shocking and "out of touch" with the wishes of the Palestinian people.

She called on Erekat to resign and said that the concessions effectively mean that Israel's strategy of continuing to expand Jewish settlements is delivering it a greater share of Jerusalem.

"It is highly, highly problematic because it rewards Israel for its settlement activity," she said.

"It highlights to me that we'll never be able to get anything from negotiations. You've got one party that's incredibly powerful and another party that's incredibly weak and my own experience is that we got nowhere during negotiations.

"I've no reason to believe it's any different now, 18 years after the peace process started. The Israelis are stronger than they were 18 years ago and the Palestinians are weaker. It is clear that there is a rising level of desperation [by Palestinian negotiators] and complete lack of any connection to the reality Palestinians face."

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Stephen Lendman

An Israeli naval vessel patrols beside one of six ships bound
for Gaza. Photograph: Reuters

Last May 31, Israeli commandos attacked and murdered nine or more activists, injuring dozens in international waters on board the Mavi Marmara mother ship, one of five bringing humanitarian aid to besieged Gazans. An earlier article explained, accessed through this link.

The UK-based Stop the War Coalition called the attack "Yet another act of Israeli barbarism." Global protests erupted. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy cited Israel's "propaganda machine....reach(ing) new highs (in distributing) false information....embarrass(ing) itself by entering a futile public relations battle," filled with malicious fiction and deceit.

What happened was clear. IDF commandos planned and executed a premeditated attack against unarmed, nonviolent humanitarian activists, trying to break Israel's illegal blockade to deliver essential aid. Cold-blooded murder resulted. The entire world knows it except Israeli government and military officials, as well as its self-appointed Turkel Commission, established to whitewash, not reveal, facts.

Two earlier articles discussed it, accessed through the following links, here and here.

Commission members included:

● two voting members: former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel (its head) and Amos Horev, a retired major general; and
● two non-voting observers: (1) close Israeli ally David Trimble, a Northern Ireland unionist allied with death squads during "The Troubles;" and (2) retired Canadian general Ken Warkin, involved in the coverup of the Canadian Airborne Regiment Battle Group's early 1990s Somalia atrocities.

Like similar Israeli and Washington commissions, it was established for coverup and denial. As a result, it unanimously endorsed bald-faced lies, distortions, omissions, false conclusions, and exoneration of cold-blooded murder, as ordered by top Israeli government and military officials who'll get off as usual scot-free. The outcome was preordained as was Israel's Cast Lead whitewash.

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Stephen Lendman

Wall Street predicts blue skies. Economic recovery will continue. Stocks will deliver double-digit gains. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal's Economic Forecast Survey headlined, "Economists Optimistic on Growth," expecting in 2011:

● 3.3% GDP growth;
● unemployment declining to 8.8%;
● inflation contained at 1.9%;
● crude oil at around $90 a barrel;
● improved housing starts in a depressed market;
● on average, 180,000 monthly jobs created;
● no Fed interest rate hike until 2012 at the earliest;
● continued QE II buying of $600 - $900 billion in government bonds; and
● an overall upbeat sentiment for economic recovery and growth.

Others disagree, including long-time insider/market analyst Bob Chapman, calling current economic policy destabilizing enough to have profound future social costs. Sometime in 2011, he says conditions are "going to be nasty. The handwriting is on the wall," but no one's listening.

On January 20, the Financial Times headlined, "US States Face a Fiscal Crunch," saying:

"Undue budget tightening will jeopardize recovery whether applied at the federal level or lower down....The squeeze is not upon them; the federal stimulus is fading away, and the gimmicks are all used up. For state finances, the year of reckoning has arrived, and the timing could hardly be worse."

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Henry Porter
The Observer

A couple of weeks ago, the Canadian television presenter Richard Gizbert asked a panel at the Frontline Club in London what effect WikiLeaks' disclosure of American cables might have had during the run-up to the Iraq war. Would the kind of revelations we saw last year have made it impossible for Tony Blair and George Bush to invade Iraq on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction?

Obviously, publication would have made deceit and obfuscation vastly more difficult, because the more the public is made aware of what governments know and don't know, the more difficult it is for politicians to follow messianic crusades of their own. That is one of the crucial arguments in favour of publishing such material. Contrast the clear shafts of light that spread from publication of the cables with the interminable ramblings of John Chilcot's committee of pensionable British worthies and you find yourself regretting that the manoeuvrings of Blair and Bush were not exposed to similar scrutiny in 2002 and 2003. Is it any wonder that the internet generation largely supports the dumping of raw information by whistleblowers on the web when they see figures from the 20th-century British establishment like Chilcot forlornly apply to make public two letters from Blair to Bush, only to be refused on the grounds that prime ministers and presidents have a right to keep their correspondence private?

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