Paul Craig Roberts

Farzana, 8 months, is held by her grandmother in a crowded
refugee camp on February 10, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Having lost part of her arm during a recent US attack in
Helmand, Farzana and her family now live at the refugee
camp, displaced by the violence in Afghanistan.

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination. One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights. Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

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Stephen Lendman

Adnan Moussa holds a picture of his son Khader Adnan,
a senior member of Islamic Jihad jailed in Israel and who
has been on hunger strike for nearly two months, during
a protest in the West Bank city of Jenin on 13 February,
2012 in solidarity with his action and to demand the re-
lease of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

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

Israeli state terror matches the world's worst. With Washington and Britain, they're axis of evil partners. Torturing Adnan to death shows it. His martyrdom won't go unnoticed.

On February 15, Palestinian faction leaders began supportive hunger strikes. Gazans erected a sit-in tent near ICRC's Gaza City offices.

Islamic Jihad leaders Sheikh Nafth Azzam, Ahmad Al-Mudallal, Dawood Shihab and Khader Habit joined with others and civil society organization members.

Al-Mudallal said striking "support(s) the battle of dignity of Sheikh Khader Adnan. This is the least we can do (for) this legendary symbol."

Palestinian Authority civil affairs minister Hussein al-Sheikh said PA officials were trying to free him and hold Israel responsible for his well-being.

Palestinian prisoner affairs minister Issa Qaraqa called for demonstrations, protest marches, and solidarity fasts throughout the Territories.

Hundreds of Palestinians began supportive hunger strikes. Many rallied in Gaza and West Bank towns. Ofer Prison detainees joined them. Israeli security forces attacked protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian National Initiative head Mustafa Barghouti was wounded in his foot.

Adnan's a political prisoner, detained since mid-December but not charged. On his 60th day without food, a mass call for action urged support to help free him. He symbolizes Israeli brutality, injustice and lawlessness. He inspired others saying:

"For every gram you lose from your weight, we gain a thousand grams in our dignity."

Many support him globally and responded. He hasn't yet slipped into coma, but remains perilously close to death.

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Andy Worthington

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and as this year progresses it is appropriate to remember that there will be other grim 10-year anniversaries to note.

This week, one of those 10-year anniversaries passed almost unnoticed. On February 7, 2002, as Andrew Cohen noted in the Atlantic, in the only article marking the anniversary,

President George W. Bush signed a brief memorandum titled “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees” (PDF). The caption was a cruel irony, an Orwellian bit of business, because what the memo authorized and directed was the formal abandonment of America’s commitment to key provisions of the Geneva Convention. This was the day, a milestone on the road to Abu Ghraib: that marked our descent into torture — the day, many would still say, that we lost part of our soul.

That is no exaggeration. Depriving prisoners seized in wartime of the protections of the Geneva Conventions was a huge and unprecedented step, and thoroughly alarming. And yet, despite criticism from Secretary of State Colin Powell (PDF), the administration pushed forward remorselessly towards the creation of an America that practiced arbitrary detention and torture.

Powell had been included in the paper trail that led to Bush’s memorandum of February 7, 2002, and he was particularly upset by a memo on January 25, 2002 (PDF), signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, but written by Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington, which claimed that the “new paradigm” that the “war on terror” presented “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

In his memorandum, just two weeks later, Bush declared that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere through the world, because, among other reasons, al-Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva.” He added, “I determine that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva. I note that, because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

Perhaps future historians will conclude that democracy once served the interests of money in order to break free of the power of kings, aristocracy, and government predations, but as money established control over governments, democracy became a liability. Historians will speak of the transition from the divine right of kings to the divine right of money.

The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a democracy?

Skeptics point out that President George W. Bush was put in office by the Supreme Court and that a number of other elections have been decided by electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail. Others note that elected officials represent the special interests that fund their campaigns and not the voters. The bailout of the banks arranged by Bush’s Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson, and Washington’s failure to indict any banksters for the fraud that contributed to the financial crisis, are evidence in support of the view that the US government represents money and not the voters.

Recent events in Greece and Italy have created more skepticism of the West’s claim to be democratic. Two elected European prime ministers, George Papandreou of Greece and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, were forced to resign over the sovereign debt issue. Not even Berlusconi, a billionaire who continues to lead the largest Italian political party, could stand up to the pressure brought by private bankers and unelected European Union officials.

Papandreou lasted only 10 days after announcing on October 31, 2011, that he would let the Greek voters decide in a referendum whether or not to accept the austerity being imposed on the Greek people from the outside. Austerity is the price charged by the EU for lending the Greek government the money to pay to the banks. In other words, the question was austerity or default. However, the question was decided without the participation of the Greek people.

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