This short documentary addresses the issues of solitary confinement and other measures of inhuman and degrading treatment to which Palestinian prisoners are subjected in Israeli jails. The film further highlights the human rights violations related to family visits and the Israeli abuse of administrative detention. Help give a voice to those who are isolated behind bars and calling out for justice through a wide distribution of this video.

On Israeli Independence Day, same day that marks the premeditated ethnic cleansing of ~700,000 Palestinians in order to create a Jewish majority by force, the Israeli police besieged the offices of Zochrot at the heart of Tel-Aviv in order to prevent the activists present from holding a very symbolic memorial activity for that day. This video shows arriving at the place already besieged by the police, the people inside prevented from leaving and those outside prevented from entering the office building. At the time of writing this, police is still present as well as over 100 citizens demonstrating outside the offices. The police attacked and arrested some demonstrators, while preventing entry-exit to the office.

A US federal court has backed the Obama administration in refusing to release pictures or video from military operation. [For a good reason: Osama bin Laden probably died in December 2001. Therefore they probably didn't kill him in Pakistan in May 2011. So far they have not submitted anything whatever with which to prove that they actually did so. - Photoshopped images don't cut it.]

A federal judge has refused to order Barack Obama's administration to release pictures and video of the US military operation that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan almost a year ago. The government watchdog group, Judicial Watch, had requested that the defence department and Central Intelligence Agency release any pictures or video footage of the operation on 1 May 2011 that killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The defence department said it had no pictures or videos sought by the group and the CIA said it had 52 such records, but refused to release them. It cited exemptions to the US freedom of information act for classified materials and other reasons. Judicial Watch sued in federal court and the US district judge James Boasberg sided with the Obama administration.

Paul Craig Roberts: Osama bin Laden’s Second Death
Paul Craig Roberts: Americans Are Living In 1984: A people as gullible as Americans have no future
AWIP: Americans so happy over "killing Osama Bin Laden" they're even giving Congress credit

TEHRAN (FNA)- Senior Iranian military officials announced that the country's experts have decoded the intelligence gathering system and memory hard discs of the United States' highly advanced RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft that was downed by Iran in December after violating the country's airspace. - The unmanned surveillance plane lost by the United States in Iran was a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA. The aircraft is among the highly sensitive surveillance platform in the CIA's fleet that was shaped and designed to evade enemy defenses. The drone is the first such loss by the US. The RQ-170 has special coatings and a batwing shape designed to help it penetrate other nations' air defenses undetected. The existence of the aircraft, which is made by Lockheed Martin, has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The revelation came after Russia and China asked Tehran to provide them with information on the capture US drone.

The drone-happy President authorizes attacks on people in Yemen even when their names are not known.

Ten days ago, I wrote about a request made by CIA Director David Petraeus to expand the drone war in Yemen in accordance with the following, as expressed by the first paragraph of The Washington Post article reporting it:

At the time, I wrote that “it’s unclear whether Obama will approve Petraeus’ request for the use of ‘signature strikes’ in Yemen,” though that was true only in the most technical sense. It was virtually impossible to imagine that a request from David Petraeus, of all people, to Barack Obama, of all people, for authority to target even more people in Yemen for death, now without even knowing who they are, would be anything but quickly and eagerly approved. And that is exactly what has now happened. - So here’s yet another war that Obama is escalating, now ordering people’s death with greater degrees of recklessness, now without even bothering to know who is being targeted.

PressTV: Obama Administration approves broader Yemen drone strikes

Russia has condemned the armed opposition in Syria for using terror and embarking on a campaign to kill as many civilians as possible despite a UN-backed ceasefire. - Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich on Thursday called on Damascus to "fully implement the obligations it assumed” in accordance with the six-point peace plan proposed by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan in March. "There is another side in Syria," Lukashevich noted. "Opposition groups have essentially reverted to waging wide-scale terror in the region," he pointed out, accusing the gunmen of using tactics that pointed to the involvement of al-Qaeda terrorists. "Killing as many peaceful civilians as possible and destroying civilian infrastructure remind one of what is happening in Iraq, Jordan and other places where al-Qaeda and its groups operate," the official said.

Special Report day two: Stillbirths, disabilities, deformities too distressing to describe - what lies behind the torments in Fallujah General Hospital? - The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia. "We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath. But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts.

Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
Gerry Georgatos: Victims of war - Iraqi children and families - Depleted uranium and trauma

AWIP: Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's story

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) suggested Tuesday that the prostitutes at the center of the Secret Service scandal represented a grave danger to national security because they could have been planted by another country like Russia Israel. - After The Hill published a story on Grassley’s remarks, an aide to the senator said Grassley was not insinuating that the prostitutes in this case were themselves Russian Israeli spies. Grassley has been pressing the White House for more information on the controversy, including whether any White House staffers engaged in improper behavior. The White House on Monday said an internal probe had cleared White House staff, but Grassley on Tuesday morning said he wanted more questions answered.

Philip Giraldi: Washington Felons Fret Over Hanky-Panky in Cartagena

The program was broadcast for the first time in March 2003 just a few hours before Britain launched a criminal war against Iraq. Seemingly, the BBC knew who was possessing WMD in the region.

Three US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan after a bomb struck a US patrol in the Panjawi district of the country's southern province of Kandahar, Press TV reports. - The US soldiers were on patrol when the blast occurred on Thursday. The southern regions of Afghanistan, including Kandahar, are among the most dangerous parts of the war-ravaged country for the US-led foreign troops. Insecurity continues to climb across Afghanistan despite the continued presence of nearly 130,000 US-led forces in the Asian country. According to the icasualties.org website, at least 130 US-led troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year. The rising number of military casualties in Afghanistan has caused widespread anger in the US and other members of the Western military alliance of NATO, undermining public support for the US-led war.

There have been contrasting reactions to Charles Taylor's conviction for aiding an abetting war crimes in the two countries most closely associated in the case. - As the BBC's correspondents in the region report, Taylor is a divisive figure. In Sierra Leone, where thousands were caught up in a vicious civil war, and where forces loyal to Taylor carried out widespread abuses of human rights, there was satisfaction. But in Liberia, where Taylor ruled until he was deposed nine years ago, there were some angry scenes.

A military judge refused on Wednesday to throw out the charges against Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of providing thousands of sensitive documents to WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of government secrets in the country's history. - Colonel Denise Lind, the judge presiding over Pfc Manning's court-martial, denied the defense motion to dismiss all 22 charges during a pre-trial hearing. Pfc Manning is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website run by Julian Assange. The US government says the publication of that material online aided al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The defense has filed several motions seeking dismissal of individual charges, including the most serious, aiding the enemy. The offence carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

[Part 1/4] [Part 2/4] [Part 3/4] [Part 4/4]

BBC: Spain's stolen babies and the families who lived a lie
Daily Mail: 50-year scandal of baby trafficking by the Catholic church in Spain
Daily Beast: Spain’s Baby-Snatching Scandal Focuses on Nun’s Alleged Role
ARGENTINA: Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents

Russia's outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday said his job swap with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will assure a continuity of power that lasts "a long time" despite anger on the street. - Medvedev told the nation ahead of Putin's May 7 inauguration to a third term as president that he initially bristled at the idea of being viewed as the weaker link of a leadership "tandem" with his mentor Putin. But Russia's only president to serve a single term – a lawyer by training whose liberal leanings brought initial hopes of political change – said he soon got used to the idea and now felt perfectly comfortable being politically wedded to Putin.

"There is nothing unusual about this," Medvedev said in the live studio interview. "We have laid out a certain future. So you should relax. This is all for a long time," said Medvedev.

The comments will confirm suspicions among some liberals that Medvedev has only paid lip service to reform causes since entering the Kremlin in 2008, while in fact ensuring the preservation of the status quo.

With the current Administration’s Agenda 21 focus on destroying the natural food and herb industry, is it not unsurprising to see unconstitutional terrorist legislation used on innocent, law abiding citizens? - Monsanto’s Food and Drug Administration can’t close down small dairies and private food clubs fast enough, bursting on the scene with guns drawn as if the criminalized right to contract for natural foods we’ve consumed for millennia deserves SWAT attention. Now, Obama has the Dept. of Justice going after small farmers under the post-911 “Bank Secrecy Act” which makes it a crime to deposit less than $10,000 when you earned more than that.

The retired top CIA officer who ordered the destruction of videos showing waterboarding says in a new book that he was tired of waiting for Washington's bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives. [Sociopath] Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA's once-secret interrogation and detention program, also lashes out at President Barack Obama's administration for calling waterboarding torture and criticizing its use. "I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled 'torturers' by the president of the United States," Rodriguez writes in his book, "Hard Measures."

Glenn Greenwald: Crime boasting for profit

PETE SEEGER’S MUSIC TO BE FEATURED AT OSLO HATE TRIAL

Thousands of Norwegians will take to the streets of Oslo on Thursday to sing a children’s song calling for peace and fraternity, in a protest against mass killer Anders Behring Breivik who has called it Marxist brainwashing. They plan to sing arm-in-arm a few blocks from the courthouse where Breivik is on trial for the killings of 77 people in a gun and bomb rampage last year. “I grew up with this song and have sung it to my child,” said Lill Hjoennevaag, one of the organizers of the demonstration. “Everybody I know feels strongly about this song and we need to take it back,” she told public broadcaster NRK. Lillebjoern Nilsen’s “Children of the Rainbow”, a Norwegian rendition of American folk singer Pete Seeger’s 1971 “My Rainbow Race”, is a popular song in Norway. “Breivik has used it as an example of brainwashing, but it is rather an example of the opposite,” said Christine Bar, another organizer, who launched the event on Facebook. (Junge, Heiko/NTB scanpix)

The first story was shaky from the start, that Sgt. Robert Bales "sneaked" off a combat outpost into hostile, landmined territory in the middle of the night, walked north a little over a half mile to a village, engaged in bloody murder, then walked back that half mile, past the base, and another mile south, killed more people, then turned himself in at the gate, all within an hour. Sharp-eyed bloggers did the math and recalled from other reports that Bales has part of a foot missing from a wound in Iraq, making the feat all the more remarkable. Among the dead were a number of children, including a two-year-old.

Following last week's eviction of the Palestinian Natcheh family from their Beit Hanina home, Israeli Knesset members Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad visited the house now inhabited by some eight settlers. To mark the occasion they posted a picture of themselves lounging on the Natcheh's sofa on Facebook.

"We are at the start of the establishment of a new Jewish neighborhood in the area, which will create a continuous sequence of Jewish neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem," said Eldad to the settler online mouthpiece, Israel National News. "Only the stubbornness of the Jewish landowners and Aryeh King of the National Land Redemption Fund ultimately led to the achievement of the day and we are confident law enforcement agencies will be required from now on to remove Arab squatters from all the properties of the Jews in the area." Ben-Ari and Eldad "affixed mezuzahs" inside of the house, rituatlistically marking the takeover.

The Knesset ministers hope to judaize Beit Hanina, though historically there have never been Jewish residents in this East Jerusalem neighborhood. On Facebook, Ben-Ari said the settlers will build 50 new housing units on the property. Ben-Ari and Eldad are both members of the right-wing National Union party. Previously, Ben-Ari was a member of the now illegal Kach party.

Army major's despair at our 'pointless war': Senior officer's damning emails reveal plummeting morale at heart of Afghan campaign that has cost 409 British lives. - They are stark words that reveal the despair of our forces fighting in Afghanistan. Emails sent to a former military chaplain paint a damning picture of sinking morale among Servicemen who feel the human cost of the conflict can no longer be justified. Dr Peter Lee, a university lecturer who spent seven years as an RAF padre, has released the emails to highlight the extent of disillusionment within the ranks. The correspondence includes two emails sent by a major on the brink of a fresh deployment to the region. He likens the prospect to ‘being put on for the last two minutes of a lost game’ of rugby.

Britain’s economy is “deeply dependent upon debt” as no money is used in any kind of production, business or job creating activity, a British economist tells Press TV. - The comment comes as Britain's economy has slumped back into recession after its gross domestic product (GDP) fell 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Britain's GDP has fallen 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012, adding to a 0.3 percent contraction at the end of 2011. A recession is defined as two straight quarters of contraction, and these new figures will be a deep blow for Britain's Conservative/ Liberal Democrat coalition, which has slid in opinion polls. Press TV has conducted an interview with the CEO of Bank of the Future, Simon Dixon, to discuss the issue further. The program also provides the opinions of two additional guests: international economist with Fundacion Alternativas, Manuel De La Rocha and the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Larry Birns.

Great news: Connecticut has become the 17th US state to abolish capital punishment. Thank you Connecticut for joining the majority of countries in the world in rejecting the death penalty! - Killing prisoners is not justice; it is an abuse of basic human rights. It also does nothing constructive for the victims of violent crime, their families or their communities. By abolishing the death penalty, Connecticut has become a leading example of respect for human rights in the US. Globally, Connecticut joins 141 countries (over two-thirds of the world’s nations) in rejecting the death penalty. Express your gratitude to Connecticut’s leaders, including Governor Dannel Malloy, who fought hard for this bill to pass. Sign on to our letter of thanks! Read More

Benny Gantz has told Israeli daily Haaretz that the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people. - Israel's military chief, Benny Gantz, has stated he doesn't believe Iran will decide to make nuclear weapons and that Iranian key decision makers are rational. Speaking to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, Gantz said: "[Iran] is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn't yet decided whether to go the extra mile." The chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces said the decision to develop nuclear weapons is only in the hands of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. [...] According to Gantz, western pressure on Iran by means of diplomacy and economic sanctions has had an effect on Tehran's rulers but a military response is still an option, albeit the last.

The phosphorus shells that devastated this city were fired in 2004. But are the victims of America's dirty war still being born?

For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room. But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.

Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
Gerry Georgatos: Victims of war - Iraqi children and families - Depleted uranium and trauma
The WE!: WELCOME TO WAR

The WE!: New World Order Statistic - In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital, Iraq, had 170 new born babies, 24% of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75% of the dead babies were classified as deformed. This can be compared with data from the month of August in 2002 where there were 530 new born babies of whom six were dead within the first seven days and only one birth defect was reported. Doctors in Fallujah have specifically pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of birth defects but what is more alarming is: "a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop severe disabilities at a later stage."

Shielded from all forms of accountability, a CIA official is able to publish a book glorifying his illegal acts - On December 7, 2007, The New York Times reported that the CIA “in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program.” Documents obtained when the ACLU asked a federal judge to hold the CIA in contempt of court — for destruction of evidence which that judge had ordered be produced — subsequently revealed that the agency had actually “destroyed 92 videotapes of terror-suspect interrogations.” The videotapes recorded interrogations of detainees who were waterboarded and otherwise tortured. The original NYT article, by Mark Mazzetti, reported that “the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was the head of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s clandestine service” (the NYT later reported that some White House officials had participated in the deliberations and even advocated the tapes’ destruction). [...] Protected by the DOJ and Judge Hellerstein from any and all accountability for what he did, the CIA official who ordered the videotapes’ destruction, Jose Rodriguez, is now enjoying the fruits of his crimes. He just published a new book in which he aggressively defends his decision to destroy those tapes (“The propaganda damage to the image of America would be immense. But the main concern then, and always, was for the safety of my officers . . .I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk”). He also categorically justifies the CIA’s use of torture (“I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques … shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture of killing of Usama bin Ladin”) as well as the agency’s network of black sites (“Why not bring the detainees to trial?,” asks The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest in a review today of the book; Rodriguez’ answer in the book: “because they would get lawyered up, and our job, first and foremost, is to obtain information”). The title of the book: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”