Stephen Lendman

Indian policemen watch security and forensic officials
examine a car belonging to the Israel Embassy after an
explosion in New Delhi on Monday. (Mustafa Quraishi)

Last October, Iran was falsely charged with a fake terror plot that didn't pass the smell test. At best, it resembled a bad film script too implausible to believe.

Tehran was bogusly blamed for plotting to kill Saudi Arabia's US ambassador. According to spurious accusations, an Iranian/American used car salesman and Mexican drug cartel hired assassin were involved.

You can't make this stuff up, but major media scoundrels headlined it for days. They regurgitated a scheme too implausible to believe.

Official lies substituted for proof. They're repeated to incite fear and justify retaliatory measures with public support. They include belligerence if ordered.

Unasked always is cui bono. Clearly, Iran is only harmed by alleged terrorist attacks against America, NATO partners, Israel, or their allies. In contrast, Washington and Tel Aviv benefit greatly. As a result, new charges follow old ones.

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Stephen Lendman

■ Murdering Khader Adnan
■ Khader Adnan's Heroic Struggle for Justice
■ Khader Adnan: Israeli Prisoner of Conscience
■ Israeli Political Prisoner Khader Adnan Near Death

On Monday, military Judge Moshe Tirosh rejected Adnan's appeal as expected. Israel wants him dead. In his 59th day without food, his life hangs by a thread.

Tirosh called his decision "balanced." He claimed secret evidence justified him. He also called him an Islamic Jihad party political leader. Doing so effectively designated him a terrorist unjustly.

He ignored legal arguments, including no evidence warranting detention.

At one demonstration, Israeli security forces viciously attacked protesters, injuring 23 and making arrests. It's standard official thuggishness against Palestinians expressing their views nonviolently.

Following Tirosh's decision, 600 Gilboa Prison detainees hunger struck in solidarity. Other West Bank demonstrations were held. Israeli forces confronted them violently. Islamic Jihad promises "painful revenge" if Adnan dies.

The Addameer prisoner support group calls administrative detention use arbitrary. It also affirmed everyone's free expression, assembly and association rights, regardless of political affiliation.

Tirosh downplayed accusations about Adnan's torture, inhuman and degrading treatment. He said they're inflated and magnified. He accused Adnan of exaggerating what happened. He called his life-threatening condition his own fault. His deteriorating health didn't influence his ruling. He got orders and followed them.

Tirosh showed appalling contempt for human life. He decision condemned Adnan to death.

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Patrick Martin

The budget for fiscal year 2013 proposed by the Obama White House Monday is a thoroughly cynical exercise. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending cuts, further devastating public services and the living standards of working people.

This is combined with populist demagogy about taxing the rich, although the administration knows full well that no such measures will pass either the Republican-controlled House of Representatives or the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The budget incorporates $1 trillion over ten years in cuts to domestic social spending already agreed on with congressional Republicans in last year’s negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling. To these cuts will be added a total of $638 billion in social spending cuts.

Relatively few details leaked out over the weekend, and a preview document issued by the White House Friday listed only the programs that would receive spending increases, not those being slashed, for which only vague generalities were available.

The largest cutback will be $360 billion over ten years from Medicare and Medicaid, mainly through reducing payments to health care providers, which will have the effect of further reducing the number of hospitals and doctors willing to treat patients on either government program. This cut is particularly pernicious because the Obama healthcare reform program calls for extending Medicaid to tens of millions of additional people in 2014, which will require more and not less funding to cover the cost.

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Chris Floyd

["Fascism dies tonight..."]

If you want to know what is happening in Greece -- and what the powers that be have in mind for your country as well -- see this remarkable story by Mike Whitney at Counterpunch.

What are seeing in Greece is not an" economic" program; it is -- most openly and brazenly -- a political program: a savagely destructive extremist ideology being imposed on ordinary people by force. In its all-pervasive brutality and tyrannical control of every aspect of life, it makes the "Shariah law" bogeyman of right-wing nightmares look like an anarchists' picnic.

And make no mistake: the extremist doctrine being forced on Greece is, in every particular, the ruling ideology of the United States, Great Britain, and all the "great democracies" of the West. The aim of the doctrine is the "final solution" of the "problem" of democracy: i.e., the fact that the rabble keep seeking a decent life for themselves and trying to order their own affairs instead of staying in harness to enrich an all-powerful elite.

There is black irony in the fact that these elites are literally strangling Western democracy in its cradle. But it is also apt; for as Whitney points out, one of the specific points of the new bailout "agreement" for Greece is, incredibly, "lifting constraints [i.e., safety regulations] on restricted product categories such as baby food." As Whitney puts it:

That’s right; according to the authors of this fuliginous memo, the only way Greece is going to be able to lift itself out of the doldrums is by poisoning its kids with banned baby food.

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