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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Stephen Lendman

"Expect parliamentary consultations delayed so Washington and France can apply intense pressure, intimidation and coercion to force enough Jumblatt bloc member backing for Hariri, letting his March 14 coalition retain its majority."

Two recent articles discussed Lebanon's present turmoil in detail, accessed through the following links, here and here.

Conditions there remain fluid. Key was a Washington/French pressured UN-backed Special Tribunal's sealed January 17 indictment of those allegedly responsible for former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's February 14, 2005 killing, preceded by Hezbollah's January 12 pulling out of Lebanon's coalition government causing it to collapse. The above linked articles explain both events in detail, including who, in fact, likely killed Hariri, and implications going forward.

Two blocks comprised Lebanon's misnamed "national unity" government:

● the opposition March 8 alliance, including (Shia) Hezbollah, (Shia) Amals, and (secular, mainly Maronite Christian) Free Patriotic Movement and with 57 seats; and
● the majority March 14 Sunni/Phalangist Christian coalition (including independents, lead by now caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri) with 60.

Walid Jumblatt's secular, officially non-sectarian Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) 11 seat bloc holds decisive balance of power in Lebanon's 128 seat parliament. On January 21, he chose sides, Al Jazeera headlining, "Lebanon's Jumblatt backs Hezbollah," saying:

His decision "could give (Hezbollah) and its allies a veto over who becomes the country's next prime minister," Jumblatt saying he wished only to preserve Lebanon's stability, adding:

nouncing the right political stand....by assuring the steadfastness of the (PSP) alongside Syria and the resistance (Hezbollah)."

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Stephen Lendman

A previous article addressed Lebanon's turmoil, accessed through this link.

It discussed Israel's history of terrorizing Lebanon through decades of belligerent interventions as early as 1954, as well as thousands of terrorist acts against a nonviolent state whose misfortune is being Israel's neighbor. It also discussed false accusations against Hezbollah, a legitimate part of Lebanon's government, not a terrorist organization as Israel and America claim.

Targeted Killings, An Israeli Speciality

Not covered was Israel's history of targeted assassinations, way predating its founding during the Mandatory Palestine period when Jewish terror groups targeted Jews, Brits and Arabs. Involved were paramilitary Hagana members, Irgun headed by future prime minister Menachem Begin, and Lehi (also called the Stern Gang) led by another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, rogue killers before entering politics.

In November 1944, Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, Britain's Middle East minister of state, near his home in Cairo. In September 1948, it also killed UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem, five months after Israel was established. Yitzhak Shamir personally approved of shooting him to death.

In July 1946, Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, massacring 92 Brits, Arabs and Jews, wounding 58 others, an operation future prime minister David Ben-Gurion approved as head of the Jewish Agency at the time.

Before and after May 1948, many thousands of targeted killings occurred or were attempted, most little remembered today except to relatives and their descendants. Little wonder Israel's history is so bloodstained, involving individual and mass killings.

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F. William Engdahl

● President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.
● A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
● Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

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Jonathan Cook
The National

NAZARETH // It is called Spot & Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick. The aim: to kill. Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army. Spot & Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people - Palestinians in Gaza - who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza. The system is one of the latest "remote killing" devices developed by Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice president, remote-controlled military hardware such as Spot & Shoot is the face of the future. He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned. The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a population less ready to risk death in combat.

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Stephen Lendman

Three previous articles relate to this one, accessed through the following links, here, here and here.

On January 20, Al Jazeera headlined, "Baby Doc wants Haiti presidency," saying:

Despite his 15-year reign of terror and current corruption, embezzlement, money laundering, and perhaps assassination charges, he "retains ambitions of returning to the presidency," according to one of his lawyers, Reynold George saying:

political man. Every political man has political ambitions." Asked if he wishes to return to power, George replied, "That is right. Because under this new constitution, and let me tell you I am one of the persons who wrote that constitution, he has the right to do so (under) two mandates. Two!"

When asked about charges against Duvalier, George cited the statute of limitations expiring in 2006, saying:

"I am a lawyer, not a racketeer. I have to go by the law. And I have just told you what the law says about accusations. You have to make them in due time. After ten years? Shut up!"

He added that Duvalier

"has no intention of leaving Haiti. We want to answer all the requisitions of justice because we want to be cleared."

On January 20, Gervais Charles, another Duvalier lawyer, told Radio Canada that charges of crimes against humanity were invalid because "it is a principle that does not exist" in Haitian law. He also stressed that in 25 years of exile, no complaints were lodged against him.

Asked about Duvalier's arrest, Master Ronald Charles, Dean of the Bar of Jacmel, said doing so is illegal and arbitrary. Legal procedures weren't followed. "(G)overnment commissioner of Port-au-Prince, Master Augustus Aristides, after all the tests, had to issue a warrant before his arrest," adding that Haiti's 1987 Constitution doesn't recognize Duvalier's exile.

If so, it's also true for Aristide, but Charles stopped short of explaining. However, he said it's possible for Haitian authorities to issue proper complaints.

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Stephen Lendman

On February 29, 2004, US marines abducted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at gunpoint, airlifting him forcibly to the Central Africa Republic. It was one of Haiti's darkest moments, losing its beloved leader, reelected President in 2000 with 92% of the vote. For over six years, he's been exiled in South Africa, wants to return, and on January 19, wrote an open letter, thanking his host country and their people for welcoming him hospitably, saying:

Since forcibly abducted, "the people of Haiti have never stopped calling for my return....Despite the enormous (post-quake) challenges that they face....their determination to make the return happen has increased."

"As far as I am concerned, I am ready....today, tomorrow, at any time. The purpose is very clear: To contribute to serving my Haitian sisters and brothers as a simple citizen in the field of education."

Returning is also vital "for medical reasons: It is strongly recommended that I not spend the coming winter in South Africa because in 6 years I have undergone 6 eye surgeries. The surgeons are excellent and very well skilled, but the unbearable pain experienced in the winter must be avoided in order to reduce any risk of further complications and blindness."

Aristide is ready to come any time, and hopes Haitian and South African officials let him. Of course, Washington controls all Haitian affairs. The Bush administration ousted him in 2004, militarily occupied the country with proxy Blue Helmet paramilitaries, banished him abroad, and thus far Obama won't let him back. One word from him changes everything. So far it's not forthcoming.

He's been treated maliciously, victimized by Washington's intolerance to democracy, abroad and at home. It's time public outrage demanded better, including in Haiti, the region's poorest, most oppressed nation, the rights of their people entirely denied, including having their beloved leader back home with them.

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Khalid Amayreh
Al-Ahram Weekly

In a dramatic though not entirely unexpected step, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, leader of the Israeli Labour Party, decided this week to leave the party, along with three others of his colleagues, effectively condemning the party to irrelevance.

The socialist-Zionist party that ruled Israel, especially during its formative years up until 1977, had been in a state of disarray for a long time, with several key party leaders accusing Barak of destroying the party by succumbing to the rightwing agenda of the current Israeli government.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seemed quite pleased with the rupture, saying it ensured that his government would live for a long time to come.

Barak's decision to leave the Labour Party and set up his own faction leaves the embattled party with only eight seats in the Knesset. Three cabinet ministers affiliated with Labour quit their portfolios, saying they will devote themselves "to rebuilding the party and restoring its former glory".

Barak had been facing significant challenges from members demanding his ouster, citing "his absolute humiliating subservience" to the rightwing government. Hence Barak's departure can be viewed as a sort of pre-emptive action against his critics -- an action that critics say contains clear elements of conspiracy and vindictiveness.

His former colleagues in the party accused Barak of betraying the Labour movement, of self-centeredness, and spitefulness. "Barak brought tragedy to the Labour Party, sullied it and broke it apart," said Labour MK Shelly Yachimovich, lambasting Barak for the "corrupt and opportunist" way in which he chose to split from the party.

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David Halpin
Gloabal Resesarch

Introduction

The deliberate injury of the limbs of 23 boys by high velocity weapons has been logged and described by Defence for Children International – Palestine Branch (DCI-P) since March 2010. (1) Some of the facts have been published in national newspapers. These barbarous acts contravene international and national law but there are no judicial responses. The caring professions see the physical and mental pain of those who suffer and they should be in the vanguard in calling for this great cruelty to cease forthwith. Political leaders have failed to act. The Geneva Conventions Act 1957, which is of central importance in holding war criminals to account in the jurisdiction of the UK, is being emasculated.

Context

Most of the 1.5 million population of the Gaza strip is impoverished. Half are refugees from Mandate Palestine or their stock. About 50% of the male population is without work. It has been isolated and occupied for decades. A commercial port was being built in 2000 but that was bombed by Israel. The isolation and the hobbling of its commerce was increased by a siege which was started in March 2006 in response to the election of a majority of Hamas members to the legislature. It was further tightened in June 2007 after the Hamas government pre-empted a coup by the Fatah faction that was led in Gaza by Mohammad Dahlan.

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Stephen Lendman

During Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit, a US - China Joint Statement said:

"The United States stressed that the promotion of human rights and democracy is an important part of its foreign policy. China stressed that there should be no interference in any country's internal affairs."

Washington often chides other nations about their abuses and injustices at home and abroad. In fact, no other nation matches America's disdain for human and civil rights, yet as Washington Post writers John Pomfret and Scott Wilson said in their January 20 article headlined, "Obama hosts Hu Jintao on state visit, presses China on human rights:"

"President Obama used his summit Wednesday with Chinese President Hu Jintao to place human rights front and center in the US relationship with the world's preeminent ascending power."

New York Times writers Helene Cooper and Mark Landler stressed the same theme in their January 19 article headlined, "Obama Pushes Hu on Rights but Stresses Ties to China," stating:

Obama "prodded China to make progress on human rights,' quoting him saying they're a:

of tension between our two governments. (Americans) have some core views....about the universality of certain rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly....(T)he world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all people are upheld, including the universal rights of every human being," ones Washington flaunts globally while pointing fingers at others.

A previous article addressed China's documentation of US human rights abuses, accessed through this link.

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Vera Macht
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

Vera Macht Reporting From Gaza

It took eight days. Eight days since the last innocent was killed. You watch people die here one after another, getting killed one by one, without consequences, without justice, without an outcry in the media. Innocent people who have never done anything wrong in their lives other than try to make a living from something amidst the stifling four year siege. Civilians. Palestinian civilians, whose life doesn’t seem to be worth more than an entry in the statistics. And you feel like your hands are tied. “So that’s what I can do: register it in my notebook. It is registered, and there is an empty line after Shaban’s name. That is for those who they kill tomorrow”, wrote the American writer Max Ajl after the farmer Shaban Karmout was killed. It took eight days, and the place was filled. Amjad ElZaaneen, was 17 years when he was killed today. Too young, too early, too meaningless, too many names in all of our laptops.

Amjad collected stones that morning, on the 01/18/2011, as on every morning, with his three cousins and his brother, the youngest of whom was eleven. Five boys, children, with a horse and a cart full of stones, about 300m from the border with Israel, and near to the village of Bait Hanoun. They had just loaded their cart full as they saw Israeli tanks and bulldozers coming to invade the land, why, who knows. A group of resistance fighters approached the area, including fighters from PFLP, the Communist Party, to fight them out again, to prevent them from again uprooting the land. A more symbolic act, the country was destroyed hundreds of times before, by tanks and bulldozers, one more time, what difference does it make. Amjad and the others ran for their lives, successfully, they arrived safely at home.

But the horse was still there, after all, and all the stones they had collected with difficulty, for which they had risked their lives to have some income that day, and for the next one maybe, who knows whether the situation then wouldn’t be even more dangerous. So they returned, as they thought the situation had calmed down, and the tanks and bulldozers had withdrawn from Gaza's land, after they had flattened it one more time, why, who knows. But when they arrived at their horse, and just wanted to take it back home, Israeli soldiers fired a shell at them, and Sharaf Raafat Shada, 19, was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the chest. Amjad, the oldest, tried to pull him away, to lay him on the cart to somehow take him to the hospital, but Sharaf was too heavy for him. So Amjad made the decision to try to reach Bait Hanoun in order to get help. He hadn’t gone far when a shell directly hit him into his belly, leaving a wound so large that he bled to death within minutes.

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