Finian Cunningham

The violation of children’s rights by the Israeli and Bahraini regimes is more than mere coincidence. It is indicative of a much broader strategic alignment that has emerged between the Zionist regime and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies.

The use of state terrorism against children by Israeli military and Bahrain regime forces is not some random, isolated aberration. The scale and systematic pattern of the violations strongly suggests that the regimes are collaborating closely in methods of counter-insurgency.

In Bahrain, it is exclusively the majority Shia communities that are targeted by regime forces of the Saudi-backed Al Khalifa monarchy.

In recent months, hundreds of children, under the age of 18 and some as young as five years-old, have been arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial in both the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and in Bahrain. Over the past four months, up to 100 children have been snatched from their homes without warrants, detained indefinitely, interrogated and even tortured, according to Bahraini human rights sources. Some of the children have been convicted of terrorism on the basis of forced confessions and given jail sentences of up to 15 years.

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Andrew Gavin Marshall

This article is from April, 2008. It is still an interesting read. - Editor

Summary: This report is about American and British involvement in the Afghan drug trade in opium, focusing on the history of such involvement, and the nature of the drug trade since the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan supplies “more than 90 per cent of the world's illicit opium, from which heroin is made,”[1] so who’s profiting from the trade?

The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban

The CIA Creates Al-Qaeda

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, said in an interview with a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war did not begin in the 1980s, but that, “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which precipitated the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan.[2] From the Soviet invasion, a bloody ten-year war followed.

Amazingly, “Before 1979 Pakistan and Afghanistan exported very little heroin to the West,”[3] but by 1981, “trucks from the Pakistan army’s National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin – protected by ISI [Pakistan’s internal security service] papers freeing them from police search.”[4] This change occurred in 1981 when then CIA Director William Casey, Prince Turki bin Faisal of Saudi intelligence and the ISI worked together to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992 in camps overseen by the CIA and [British] MI6. The SAS [British special forces] trained future Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts" while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.[5] Further, “CIA aid was funneled through [Pakistani President] General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[6]

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Medea Benjamin

Faisal bin Ali Gaber is a soft-spoken engineer from Yemen. After he lost his cousin and brother-in-law in a drone strike in August 2012, he published an open letter to President Obama and Yemeni President Hadi. He said his brother-in-law was an imam who had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qaeda, and that his young cousin was a policeman. “Our town was no battlefield. We had no warning. Our local police were never asked to make any arrest,” he wrote to the presidents. “Your silence in the face of these injustices only makes matters worse. If the strike was a mistake, the family — like all wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war — deserve a formal apology.”

Now Faisal Gaber will get a chance to appeal directly to the American people. This weekend for the first time ever, a Yemeni delegation of drone strike victims’ family members, human rights experts and grassroots leaders will be visiting Washington as part of the Global Drone Summit–– You can watch the Summit live all weekend on the CODEPINK livestream channel.

While the CIA and US military have been using lethal drones for over a decade, this will be only the second time that drone victims have gotten visas to come to the United States to tell their stories. The first visit was just a few weeks ago when, on October 29, the Rehman family — a father with his two children — came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. The hearing, convened by Congressman Alan Grayson, had the congressman, the translator and the public in tears. The Rehman family’s story is documented in the new film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation, which was released at the time of their visit.

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Yolanda Vestal

Dear President Obama, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all you have done and are doing. You see I am a single Mom located in the very small town of Palmer, Texas. I live in a small rental house with my two children. I drive an older car that I pray daily runs just a little longer. I work at a mediocre job bringing home a much lower paycheck than you or your wife could even imagine living on. I have a lot of concerns about the new “Obamacare” along with the taxes being forced on us Americans and debts you are adding to our country. I have a few questions for you Mr. President. Have you ever struggled to pay your bills? I have. Have you ever sat and watched your children eat and you eat what was left on their plates when they were done, because there wasn’t enough for you to eat to? I have. Have you ever had to rob Peter to pay Paul, and it still not be enough? I have. Have you ever been so sick that you needed to see a doctor and get medicine, but had no health insurance because it was too expensive? I have. Have you ever had to tell your children no, when they asked for something they needed? I have.

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Stephen Lendman

Call it the curse of Zionism. Traditional Jews deplore it. True Torah Jews Against Zionism (TTAZ) say it:

● advocates "a political and military end to the Jewish exile;"
● fosters "pseudo-Judaism" based on secular nationalism;
● coercively seeks "armed materialism" in place of "a Divine and Torah centered understanding;"
● endangers all Jews worldwide;
● wants to disassociate Jews and traditional Judaism from ideological Zionism; and
● calls Israel a "Zionist State," not a Jewish one.

Jews and Arabs once coexisted peacefully. Zionism changed things. Believing it protects Jews is "probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the Jewish people," TTAZ says. "(H)atred of Jews and (claimed unique) Jewish suffering is the oxygen of the Zionist movement."

It needs hatred. It manufactures it. Inciting it is longstanding policy. So is manipulating it advantageously. It's to justify Zionism's existence. It's the enemy of Jews and non-Jews alike. It's a curse. It's a hugely destructive cancer system.

It perpetuates myths. Calling Palestine "a land without people for a people without land" is a longstanding Big Lie. It's right out of a PR wizzard's playbook.

Other notions turn truth on its head. Israel didn't make the desert bloom. It's not a democracy. It's militantly polar opposite. It's worse than apartheid South Africa. Regional Arab states aren't hostile. Israel's only enemies are ones it invents. It needs pretexts to justify over-the-top viciousness. It blames Palestinians and other victims for its crimes. It deplores peace. It thrives on violence and conflict. Reality exposes its dark side.

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Stephen Lendman

War without end rages. Human needs go begging. Wherever America shows up, death and destruction follow. So does unrelieved dystopian harshness. No end in sight looms.

US drones murder Afghan civilian men, women and children. American grounds forces do it up close and personal. US inflicted death, torture and other atrocities reflect daily life. Ordinary Afghans suffer most. They struggle to survive. American aggression is one of history's greatest crimes.

War criminals remain unpunished. Accountability is denied. Conflict persists. It's Washington's longest war. It's longer than WW I and II combined. It shows no signs of ending.

Trillions of dollars go mass slaughter and destruction. They're spent for unchallenged global dominance. Vital homeland needs go begging. Targeted countries are ravaged and destroyed. Imperial lawlessness operates this way.

Its appetite is insatiable. It ignores rule of law principles. It does whatever it wants. It does it where, when, by what means, and under whatever pretexts it contrives. It does so unapologetically. It targets one country at a time or in multiples. It wages direct and proxy wars. It does so without justification. It lies claiming otherwise.

All US wars are dirty. Atrocities are virtually de rigueur. In March 2012, 20 US forces murdered 16 Afghan men, women, and nine children aged two to 12. Children were massacred while they slept. Two women were raped before soldiers killed them. Pentagon officials and media scoundrels whitewashed what happened.

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Paul Craig Roberts

In my last column I emphasized that it was important for American citizens to demand to know what the real agendas are behind the wars of choice by the Bush and Obama regimes. These are major long term wars each lasting two to three times as long as World War II.

Forbes reports that one million US soldiers have been injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. RT reports that the cost of keeping each US soldier in Afghanistan has risen from $1.3 million per soldier to$2.1 million per soldier.

Matthew J. Nasuti reports in the Kabul Press that it cost US taxpayers $50 million to kill one Taliban soldier. That means it cost $1 billion to kill 20 Taliban fighters.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have estimated that the current out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars is at least $6 trillion.

In other words, it is the cost of these two wars that explain the explosion of the US public debt and the economic and political problems associated with this large debt. What has America gained in return for $6 trillion and one million injured soldiers, many very severely? — This is a war that can be won only at the cost of the total bankruptcy of the United States.

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John W. Whitehead

“It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn’t even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!” — Sgt. Swales, reflecting on a firefight in Iraq

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is responsible for the growing spate of police shootings, brutality and overreach that have come to dominate the news lately, whether it’s due to militarized police, the growing presence of military veterans in law enforcement, the fact that we are a society predisposed to warfare, indoctrinated through video games, reality TV shows, violent action movies and a series of endless wars that have, for younger generations, become life as they know it—or all of the above.

Whatever the reason, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by militarized police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve.

The latest comes out of New Mexico, where cops pulled David Eckert over for allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Suspecting that Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together,” the officers forced Eckert to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy. No drugs were found.

In Iowa, police shot a teenager who had stolen his father’s work truck in a fit of anger and led cops on a wild car chase that ended on a college campus. When 19-year-old Tyler Comstock refused orders to turn off the car despite having stopped, revving the engine instead, police officer Adam McPherson fired six shots into the truck, two of which hit Comstock. Members of the community are demanding to know why less lethal force was not used, especially after a police dispatcher suggested the officers call off the chase.

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Carl Herman

As US “leaders” threaten more unlawful war on Iran, the following three points document that the ongoing “reasons” to war-murder Iranians are known lies as they are being told. In context, we know now from official US government reports that all “reasons” for war on Iraq were known to be lies as they were told:

(Clockwise from top left) French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius,
US Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

1. President Obama lied to Israeli media a week before his March 2013 visit: “We think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” This repeated claim is a lie because it opposes all 16 US intelligence agencies’ most current official National Intelligence Estimate (NIE – these are updated when intelligence suggests status change), all IAEA official reports from their full-time monitoring of all Iran’s nuclear material and plants, and several definitive official US reports, all while Mr. Obama and other war-mongering liars provide zero evidence to support this claim. This follows a long history of such lies. When a person makes a claim in defiance of all known objective evidence, and without any evidence of his own, any rational person conservatively concludes the claim is a known lie.

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Gilad Atzmon

Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is a good read: A personal journey of a young American righteous Jew who finds plenty of faults in other Jews in general and in The Jewish State in particular.

Blumenthal is a very good writer, his flow is fantastic. His delivery is overwhelmingly juicy on the verge of gossipy. He doesn’t pretend to be objective, precise or accurate. In the Kindle version I couldn’t find a single reference for any of the many quotes in the book. But who cares - precision and accuracy are not well appreciated within the contemporary progressive milieu. But this lack is far from posing a problem. It actually contributes to chronicle the journalistic account of contemporary Israel.

Blumenthal’s book is a powerful expose of Israeli exceptionalism, deep and sinister Goy hatred, Judeo-centric bigotry, supremacy and a vast collective lack of ethical awareness. But Blumenthal fails to ask the most important question: why is the Jewish State so bad? Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel suffers from an acute deficiency of theoretical and ideological depth or understanding. Through the entire book Blumenthal fails to present a single valid argument that explains why the Jewish State is such a horrid place. And if Zionism and the Jewish State are as bad as Blumenthal suggests, how is it possible that Zionism has become the political voice for the vast majority of world Jewry?

Blumenthal is entrenched within a restricted cliched progressive terminological trap. His universe is split by a set of binary oppositions: Zionist is bad / the ‘anti’ is good, ‘Right’ is vile / ‘Left’ is kosher. Colonialism is there to tag everything in a horrid light. When he runs out of superlatives, he pulls ‘Fascism’ out of the box.

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Ellen Brown

In Costa Rica, publicly-owned banks have been available for so long and work so well that people take for granted that any country that knows how to run an economy has a public banking option. Costa Ricans are amazed to hear there is only one public depository bank in the United States (the Bank of North Dakota), and few people have private access to it. - So says political activist Scott Bidstrup, who writes:

For the last decade, I have resided in Costa Rica, where we have had a “Public Option” for the last 64 years.

There are 29 licensed banks, mutual associations and credit unions in Costa Rica, of which four were established as national, publicly-owned banks in 1949. They have remained open and in public hands ever since—in spite of enormous pressure by the I.M.F. [International Monetary Fund] and the U.S. to privatize them along with other public assets. The Costa Ricans have resisted that pressure—because the value of a public banking option has become abundantly clear to everyone in this country.

During the last three decades, countless private banks, mutual associations (a kind of Savings and Loan) and credit unions have come and gone, and depositors in them have inevitably lost most of the value of their accounts.

But the four state banks, which compete fiercely with each other, just go on and on. Because they are stable and none have failed in 31 years, most Costa Ricans have moved the bulk of their money into them. Those four banks now account for fully 80% of all retail deposits in Costa Rica, and the 25 private institutions share among themselves the rest.


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Stephen Lendman

Washington abhors it. So does Israel. Policies assure measures to advance it fail. So-called Israeli/Palestinian peace talks are dead on arrival. They continue despite no chance for success. Washington's war on Syria rages out-of-control. So-called US peace overtures ring hollow. American arms and munitions flow freely to insurgent invaders. Efforts to normalize relations with Iran are rigged. They're manipulated to fail. Previous articles explained.

Iran's nuclear program is entirely legitimate. It has no military component. It's red herring cover for longstanding US/Israeli regime change plans. If Iran had no nuclear program, another pretext would be used.

France played bad cop in Geneva. Washington, Israel, its lobby, and overall Zionist influence bear full responsibility. America wants unchallenged global dominance. It wants all independent governments eliminated. Israel's regional agenda is longstanding.

In 1982, Oded Yinon prepared "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East." The Association of Arab-American University Graduates called it "the most explicit, detailed and unambiguous statement to date of the Zionist strategy in the Middle East." "Its importance...lies not in its historical value but in the nightmare which it represents." [Israel Shahak]

It states for Israel to survive, it must dominate the region. It must become a world power. Doing so requires balkanizing Arab nations along ethnic and sectarian lines. It involves making them Israeli satellites. It's modeled after the Ottoman Empire's Millet system. Local authorities governed confessional communities with separate ethnic identities. Israel wants all regional states weakened, fragmented, and reconfigured.

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Wayne Madsen

For the Western media, Africa is always a mere footnote, a continent that is generally forgotten in matters of espionage and electronic surveillance. However, as leaders in Europe, Latin America, and Asia bemoan the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Africa has also been a victim of overarching communications surveillance by the United States…

Although Africa trailed the rest of the world in adopting enhanced information technology, it has not been ignored by the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agencies of the Five Eyes countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) or one of the Nine Eyes SIGINT alliance nations, France. Satellite communications, undersea fiber optic cables, cell phones, and Internet are all subjected to the same level of surveillance by NSA, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), and Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate as is directed against targeted countries in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and eastern Europe.

In fact, African nations have long worried about the susceptibility of their Internet communications to eavesdropping by the West. In an article written by this author for the May 1, 1990, edition of the computer magazine Datamation, titled «African Nations Emphasizing Security,» it was pointed out that the African countries taking a lead over twenty years ago to protect their sensitive data from surveillance included South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, Senegal, Tanzania, Botswana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, and Namibia.

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Vladimir Odintsov

Sirte all but flattened. Thousands killed. - What's so humanitarian
about that? Wasn't the UN Resolution 1973 (2011) about "the
protection of civilians" and the Security Council's "strong commit-
ment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and
national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya"? Did the UN do
anything whatever to stop the vicious US-NATO attack on Libya?

Britain’s Foreign Office Reports on Human Rights Violations in Libya and Iraq. - No one has confered such authority to the Foreign Office.

The remarkable aspiration of the British Foreign Office to only accuse the administrations of Libya and Iraq for the current state of events there, concealing their initial cause, consisting in initiation by the West and Great Britain in the first place of the recent military intervention in these states in breaking the international law.

On September 30 the British Foreign Office published updates for the annual report on the human rights in the “countries of concern”, which critically stated that “progress in abidance of human rights Libya and Iraq continues being very slow”.

According to British diplomats, such state of affairs in Libya is determined by the “volatile political situation, Libyan government’s ongoing difficulties in exerting full control over security, lack of government capacity, an under-developed judicial system, and limited understanding across the country of the practical application of human rights”. Serious problems are outlined in treatment of the prisoners, claims are made for the appropriate execution of rights of the convicts. In the case of Iraq, British analysts attribute the major problem in the sphere of human rights to “deteriorating security situation in Iraq” and mass executions of convicted accused of terrorism.

These updates of the Foreign Office cannot be overlooked. - Not only because of the topics touched by the British experts and complexity of the inner-political processes, occurring in these recently influential and successful Arab states but because they are the latest efforts to put a spin on the ravages wrought by Western empires.

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Jim W. Dean

The history of America's involvement with Israel has been an ongoing tragedy. The Palestinians have of course suffered the most, having been invaded by legions of atheist and communist Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe. And yes, they claim 'God gave us the land'.

They teamed up with the 5th column Zionists already there who had been carefully and methodically laying plans for taking over the land and doing to the Palestinians what they claimed the Nazis had done to them--killing and kicking the Palestinians out to make more Lebensraum (growing space) for more Jews.

Generations of Israeli Lobby fellow travelers have worn the sordid mantle of 'Palestinian holocaust Deniers', to coin a phrase, with no shame whatsoever. Golda Meir was their Hebrew Klan Grand Dragon. She produced a low cost and instant holocaust hat trick. “There are no Palestinian people,” she said.

One of the main tasks of Israeli espionage has always been to protect Israel from judgment day for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people. To them this is a war, and they take no prisoners. When are we going to figure this out, when it comes to dealing with them?

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