Stephen Lendman

Israeli Political Prisoner Khader Adnan Near Death

In 1948, brute force established Israel. In 1967, militarized occupation of one-fifth of former Palestine followed.

An entire people suffer. Collective punishment is official policy. So are torture, violence, land theft, apartheid, injustice, and other forms of state-sponsored terror.

They include imprisoning Palestinians for wanting to live free on their own land in their own country. As a result, since June 1967, over 750,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned.

Arrests occur regularly. Middle-of-the-night raids terrorize nonviolent men, women and children. Alleged "ticking bomb" ones are held in the name of "security." So are various other type political prisoners. Denied all rights, they're brutalized for praying to the wrong God.

They face torture and horrific prison conditions. International and Israeli laws are spurned.

Doing so constitutes blatant civil/human rights violations. B'Tselem said if Likud (and other) party members were held to the same standard, at least half their members would be administratively detained.

Lawless military tribunal trials follow. Those charged are guilty by accusation. Children fare no better. Some young as six are held for allegedly throwing stones. It's a catchall charge (like many others) to arrest anyone for any reason.

Once in custody, horrific mistreatment follows. Permanent scars remain. Entire families are traumatized. At issue always is who's next, for what reasons, and for how long.

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Adnan Al-Daini

The optimism generated by the Arab spring is now giving way to anxieties about where these changes are taking Arab societies.  The idealism of the young in their millions for a dignified life where human rights are respected, where the rulers serve the people instead of enslaving them, is being sorely tested by the emergence of destructive sectarianism and ethnic tensions.  Imperial powers, assorted kings and despots play their power games by stoking up fear and divisions among the populace. “You don’t want another Iraq, do you?” dictators cry.

Aljazeera (Arabic) reported on a conference of Arab thinkers and commentators entitled “The Arab Revolution and Democracy – The roots of sectarianism and how to combat it” organized by the Arabic Centre for the study and research in political thought. It warns that “sectarian and ethnic tensions and divisions are complicating and impeding the birth of democracy in the region.”

These obstacles and problems on the road to true democracy should come as no surprise to any objective observer of events.   Those with vested interests in the old despotic regimes are not going to relinquish their power and wealth so easily. Driving the revolution into the destructive blind alley of sectarianism and ethnicity is their way of countering the glorious revolution of the young.  Azmi Bishara, head of the Centre, opined that these sectarian tensions should have been expected and “it is wrong and naïve to sweep them under the carpet of unity”.

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James Petras

Photo: Beverly Eckert was an activist and advocate for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. She was one of the members of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission. Eckert's husband, Sean Rooney, died aged 50 in the attacks of September 11, 2001. She pushed for a commission to investigate 9/11 and to establish a memorial. She was killed on February 12, 2009 in the crash of Continental flight 3407 outside of Buffalo, New York. [Mossad involvement was suspected but not proven.]

The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination.

In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad’s criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.

Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.

Good news, right?

Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.

What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.

Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.

And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.

When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.

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