Stephen Lendman

Like most in Congress, he serves wealth and power alone. People needs don't matter. Rule of law principles are spurned. Peace is deplored. War is official policy. So are other duplicitous foreign policies for unchallenged global dominance. Imagine what's ahead in a second term, regardless of which party controls Congress. Both are in lockstep on issues mattering most. They include pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran.

At the same time, Obama delivers mixed messages on Iran. Conciliatory comments follow baseless accusations and hawkishness, then more threats. In late March, he appealed directly to Iranians, saying there's "no reason for the United States and Iran to be divided from one another."

America seeks dialogue, not confrontation, he suggested, or did he? At the same time, he added:

"Increasingly, the Iranian people are denied the basic freedom to access the information that they want."

"Instead, the Iranian government jams satellite signals to shut down television and radio broadcasts. It censors the Internet to control what the Iranian people can see and say. The regime monitors computers and cell phones for the sole purpose of protecting its own power."

In fact, Iranians have legitimate news, information, and analysis media like Press TV. It shames Western scoundrel alternatives, including BBC, and major US print and broadcast services.

In addition, Obama and Congress support bills targeting Internet freedom. Something this year will pass. Net Neutrality will be compromised, perhaps en route to destroying it altogether and remaining First Amendment rights with it.

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John Pilger

A woman mourns the death of her husband, a Timorese policeman who
was killed by renegade members of East Timor's army. (Dili, ET, 2006)

Small, impoverished countries can often present the greatest threat to predatory power, because if they cannot be intimidated and controlled, who can?

Milan Kundera's truism, "the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I went to Stanfords map shop in London's Covent Garden. "Timor?" said a hesitant sales assistant. We stood staring at shelves marked South East Asia. "Forgive me, where exactly is it?"

After a search he came up with an old aeronautical map with blank areas stamped, "Relief Data Incomplete." He had never been asked for East Timor, which is just north of Australia. Such was the silence that enveloped the Portuguese colony following its invasion and occupation by Indonesia in 1975. Yet, not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator Suharto killed or starved in East Timor.

In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a piratical treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor. Beneath them are valleys etched with black crosses where British and American-supplied fighter aircraft have blown people to bits. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that "at least 200,000", a third of the population, had perished under Suharto. Thanks largely to Evans, Australia was the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The murderous Indonesian special forces known as Kopassus were trained in Australia. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Unlike Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, Suharto died peacefully in 2008 surrounded by the best medical help his billions could buy. He was never at risk of prosecution by the "international community". Margaret Thatcher told him, "You are one of our very best and most valuable friends." The Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating regarded him as a father figure. A group of Australian newspaper editors, led by Rupert Murdoch's veteran retainer, Paul Kelly, flew to Jakarta to pay their tribute to the dictator; there is a picture of one of them bowing.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo: [This photo] clearly illustrates the utterly shameless brutality with which Zionist police and military met the peaceful Land Day protests in Occupied Palestine. The Palestinian man is injured and bleeding, firmly restrained by two burly soldiers, and being pepper-sprayed in the face at a range of about two inches. - The Possumhole

Gaza's attacked regularly. Dozens of West Bank incursions occur weekly. Police state harshness and arrests follow.

In the week ending April 5, one Palestinian was killed and dozens injured, including 18 children. They were nonviolently commemorating Land Day.

Many others, including an international human rights defender, were wounded during a peaceful anti-Separation Wall demonstration. Dozens more suffered from tear gas inhalation.

From March 29 through April 5, Israeli soldiers conducted 77 West Bank community incursions - on average, 11 per day. Gazans experienced three others. Affected Palestinians faced police state harshness. Twenty-eight arrests were made, including five children and a journalist doing his job.

Daily reality in Occupied Palestine includes much more. Harshness is a way of life. One crisis follows another. Gaza remains suffocating under siege. Everything's in short supply or not available, including medical necessities, fuel and electricity.

West Bank and East Jerusalem conditions aren't much better. On April 5, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) released data showing 70.5% of Palestinians aged 60 or over suffered from at least one chronic disease in 2010. Many are serious and life-threatening.

The percentage rose from 45.5% in 2000. It's likely higher now and worsening annually. Nearly 19% of Palestinians aged 18 or older are affected compared to 11.5% in 2000. Birth rates are down, from 5.9 per woman in 2000 to 4.1 in 2010.

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Johannes Stern

In recent days, the Western powers have stepped up efforts to foment civil war in Syria and prepare for imperialist intervention in this strategically important country. Media reports indicate increased fighting between Western-backed armed groups and the Syrian army, accompanied by terrorist attacks on government forces and civilians.

Heavy fighting has taken place in the Aleppo Governorate in northern Syria. The province has a 200-kilometer border with Turkey, where the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is based. According to the news agency AFP, “rebel” forces attacked military intelligence headquarters in Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria, and the FSA launched a dawn assault on the nearby Minakh Air Base.

In another attack at Hreitan, an officer of the Syrian army and two security personnel were killed early Saturday. In Idlib province, one of the FSA’s main strongholds near the Turkish border, Syrian forces shelled an area held by the FSA.

Clashes and terrorist attacks have also taken place in central Syria. In several districts in the city of Hama, fighting was reported between armed groups and the regular Syrian army. The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that 5 explosive devices planted by terrorist groups were dismantled in Homs. Over 100 people have reportedly been killed over the weekend, and thousands have fled over the Turkish border in recent days.

The US and its main NATO allies—France, Great Britain, Germany and Turkey—are leading the campaign to destabilize Syria. Together with the reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies, Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, they are funding and arming the so called “rebels.” During the April 1 “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul, the Saudi and Qatari regimes officially announced they would put the Syrian “rebels” on their payroll, thus formalizing their status as a mercenary force of imperialism’s regional proxies.

The current offensive by the “rebels” and the reactions of their Western backers expose the fraudulent character of the six-point peace plan that former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan negotiated with the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The imperialist powers never intended to find a political settlement to the conflict, as they claimed, but sought instead to create a pretext for further provocations against Syria, hoping to organize a Libyan-style overthrow of the regime.

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