Patrick Martin
WSWS

Military documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union after a lengthy lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act provide important new evidence of American war crimes. The documents include autopsy reports and investigative reports on the deaths of 190 prisoners held by the US military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The more than 2,600 pages of documents were turned over to the ACLU on January 14 and made public on the organization’s web site five days later.

An ACLU statement said that 25 to 30 cases were “unjustified homicides.” US military investigators themselves identified many of the deaths as homicides, although there were very few trials or convictions of the soldiers involved.

The ACLU issued a statement declaring: “So far, the documents released by the government raise more questions than they answer, but they do confirm one troubling fact: that no senior officials have been held to account for the widespread abuse of detainees. Without real accountability for these abuses, we risk inviting more abuse in the future.”

Some of the deaths are well known cases of atrocities committed by American soldiers, such as the killing of four prisoners who were shot and then thrown into a Baghdad canal in 2007. Others are previously unknown or not widely reported. The autopsy reports make for gruesome reading.

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Ellen Brown

Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.

The bills, House Bill 1320 and Senate Bill 5238, propose creation of a Washington Investment Trust (WIT) to “promote agriculture, education, community development, economic development, housing, and industry” by using “the resources of the people of Washington State within the state.”

Currently, all the state’s funds are deposited with Bank of America. HB 1320 proposes that, in the future, “all state funds be deposited in the Washington Investment Trust and be guaranteed by the state and used to promote the common good and public benefit of all the people and their businesses within [the] state.”

The legislation is similar to that now being studied or proposed in states including Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, California and others.

The effort in Washington state draws heavily on the success of the 92-year-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the only state-wide publicly owned U.S. bank. The BND has helped North Dakota escape the looming budgetary disaster facing other states. In 2009, North Dakota sported the largest budget surplus it had ever had.

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Stephen Lendman

The Palestine Papers reveal the offer of concessions by
Palestinian peace negotiators on areas such as the Haram
al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem. Photo:
Awad Awad/AFP/Getty Images

"Achieving those objectives won't come easily or soon, but what's more important than seizing a rare opportunity for change. Tunisian winds are spreading regionally. Thousands are demonstrating in Tunis, other Tunisian cities, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and may erupt anywhere from Morocco to Egypt to Occupied Palestine.

Sustained grassroots anger brings change, and what better reasons than poverty, unemployment, repression, occupation, and suffocating conditions under siege. Maybe exposed PA treachery [has] created a rare chance seldom possible. Now's the time to seize it."

On January 23, Al Jazeera released breaking news on its extensive "Palestine Papers" coverage, introducing them, saying it

"obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," writer Gregg Carlstrom explaining that:

"Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." They include "nearly 1,700 files, (and) thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of" peace process negotiations. Included (from 1999 - 2010) were "emails, maps, minutes of private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations...."

Releasing them from January 23 - 26, they reveal information about:

● the PA's willingness to concede all East Jerusalem settlements except one;
● PA "creativ(ity)" about Islam's third holiest site, Haram al-Sharif (Nobel Sanctuary), what Jews call the Temple Mount;
● compromise on the right of return, suggesting abandonment beyond token amounts;
● numerous details of PA-Israeli "cooperation," suggesting complicity and unconditional surrender to Israeli demands; and
● private late 2009 PA-US negotiator exchanges when Goldstone Report discussions were ongoing at the UN.

Because of obvious sensitivity, Al Jazeera will keep source information confidential as well as how documents were obtained.

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Kourosh Ziabari

As the Western governments add fuel to the fire of Islamophobic sentiments in their societies with inflammatory and rabble-rousing actions and statements, the Western media mischievously try their best to portray a lopsided, biased and prejudiced image of Muslims in an attempt which should be interpreted as an incontestable crusade against more than 25% of the world population.

Although it is arguable that the 9/11 attacks played in the hands of the United States and its European cronies to spread an all-encompassing wave of Islamophobic sentiments in the world and introduce the Muslims as the number one threat to the global peace and security, one should bear in mind that Muslims have been conventionally considered as the villains of the fables of the Western governments for a long time already and despite their unquestionable and treasured services to the world, they never did receive a fair, justifiable and humane treatment by the superpowers, be it from the deceitful, fraudulent and warmongering Russia that massacred some 50,000 innocent Muslims in Chechnya, or from the arrogant, bullying United States that incarcerated scores of innocent Muslims in its illegal, underground detention centers in Guantanamo bay and Abu Ghraib following the 9/11 attacks.

The corporate mainstream media is the most effective spearhead of the Western governments in their crusade against the Muslims and the Islamic world. When it was needed to conceal the most conspicuous realities which would attest to the righteousness of the Muslims, the mainstream media did their best: Marwa El-Sherbini was flagrantly murdered in a courtroom in Germany, and the Western media outlets unanimously kept silent, turning a blind eye against one of the most heartrending instances of the violation of human rights before the eyes of a judge and his colleagues. When it was needed to sabotage a truer perception of the facts, Western media went into high gear: the Freedom Flotilla was brutally attacked by the commandos of Israel Defense Forces and 9 of its passengers were massacred viciously -but the media justified the massacre as an act of self defense. Nobody asked the Western media how it could justify the killing of defenseless civilians as an act of self defense when the civilians lacked even a single knife with which to defend themselves against the rifles of the Israeli commandos. When it was needed to suppress the stark realities Gaza, the mainstream media scored its best ever: 1,500 innocent people in Gaza were massacred in a few days (less than 3 weeks), and the Western media acted so indifferently, that one might have felt as if nothing had really taken place at all!

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