Kurt Nimmo

The Israel state has manufactured terror as a pretext for ethnic cleansing and mass murder.

Scott Horton, the editorial director of the Antiwar website, has found further evidence that Hamas is an Israeli-controlled terror organization. Horton points to a recent post at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article is locked up behind a paywall. However, it is posted on the Archive.org website.

During Netanyahu’s fraud trial, writes Gidi Wewitz, the prime minister is quoted as declaring,

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Emphasis added.)

In addition, Bibi admitted (and this is well-documented; see below) that Israel is in the business of undermining its neighbors.

“We have neighbors,” he said, “who are our bitter enemies ... I send them messages all the time ... these days, right now ... I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and them hit them over the head.” The suspect then continued his lecture: “It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them ... Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

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Suzie Dawson

They say a good magician never gives away their tricks, but I’m breaking that rule today. Because my hard-learned tricks (derived from practical experience gained in the course of my activism career) have the potential to save other activists a huge amount of grief, pain, confusion and disgrace, or even strengthen and empower them in ways that could be the difference between the make or break of their social movements. So it’s imperative that they are shared, savoured, bookmarked, and shared again.

Information Cuts Both Ways

To our governments, information is the most powerful weapon. They steal it, they hoard it for themselves, they jealously guard it, they limit access to it, they taint it, they monopolise it, they misuse it, they commercialise it and they censor it.

To WikiLeaks, information is a tool of emancipation. They verify it, then they gift it to the public.

In authentic, meticulously executed journalism such as theirs, information is gleaned from deep research and careful study – unearthed clues, puzzle pieces, accumulated over extended periods of time that when compiled, cross-referenced and verified add up to something previously unimaginable, yet undeniable once that ring of truth resonates and then reverberates.

Without any doubt, this is the fundament of what any true journalist engages in, a form of information activism. The returning of information to those to whom it ultimately belongs, and who benefit most from it – you, me and all of humanity. Real journalists deliver us the truth on a platter and then staunchly defend our right to it.

When those true journalists are under threat or attack, it is then our obligation to staunchly defend them in turn.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Below is a piece that never got posted in all the hackfoonery that was going with the site recently. It was written in the first heat of Egypt's uprising, but in some ways, it is even more pertinent today, as the Obama Administration rallies around the suave and vicious torturer they have installed in Cairo, in a desperate attempt to produce the kind of "continuity" of militarist-elitist corruption in Egypt that Barack Obama has achieved so magnificently at home in his takeover from the Bush Regime.

This is when you know a regime is in on the ropes: when its security apparatchiks start the panicked, wholesale destruction of the evidence of their crimes. From the Economist:

I KNEW it was truly over when I came home to find a neighbour in a panic. He had smelled a fire nearby. We traced its source soon enough, after climbing to the roof of my building. Smoke drifted from the garden of the villa next door, where workers had recently been digging a peculiarly deep hole, as if for a swimming pool. In a far corner of the garden stood rows of cardboard boxes spilling over with freshly shredded paper, and next to them a smouldering fire. [...] More intriguingly, a group of ordinary looking young men sat on the lawn, next to the hole. More boxes surrounded them, and from these the men extracted, one by one, what looked like cassette tapes and compact discs. After carefully smashing each of these with hammers, they tossed them into the pit. Down at its bottom another man shovelled wet cement onto the broken bits of plastic. More boxes kept appearing, and their labours continued all afternoon. [...] The villa, surrounded by high walls, is always silent. Cars, mostly unobtrusive Fiats and Ladas, slip in and out of its automatic security gates at odd hours, and fluorescent light peeps through shuttered windows late in the night. This happens to be an unmarked branch office of one of the Mubarak regime's top security agencies. It seems that someone had given the order to destroy their records. Whatever secrets were on those tapes and in those papers are now gone forever.

There were of course no such scenes in the leafy suburbs surrounding Washington in the days after Barack Obama's election. Naturally, during the Bush years there had been the judicious destruction of particular pieces of evidence -- tapes of torture sessions, for instance -- that might have proved briefly embarrassing. (And embarrassment was really all that the Bushists had to worry about when they were still in power; they had seen that even the horrors of Abu Ghraib had scarcely troubled the public waters for more than a couple of news cycles.)

But there were no worries at all about the coming of Obama. No need for those involved in the torture of thousands and the custodial killing of dozens of captives to start digging deep holes and sealing their tapes and papers beneath concrete. They knew well how Obama would treat them: like heroes. Indeed, one of his earliest acts was to appear at CIA headquarters and assure the assembled covert operators that they would never be held accountable under the law for their atrocities.

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Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine

[Reporter Joshua Phillips discusses how American veterans have been psychologically scarred by their abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners. AUDIO (Information Clearing House)]

Earlier this year, Joshua Phillips received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for his 2008 American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray. Now he’s developed that story in a book that offers a compelling account of how the use of torture and abusive techniques on prisoners affected the lives of American soldiers caught up in it. I put six questions to Joshua Phillips.

1. Most of the discussion of torture has focused on the prisoners as victims; you turn this around by describing the tragic consequences of torture for soldiers. How did you come to this approach?

By accident. I learned about the central story while investigating various veterans’ issues, and the problems that some troops faced trying to report prisoner abuse to their superiors. One of the soldiers I interviewed was Jonathan Millantz, an Army combat medic. Millantz told me he was upset by the pushback that he faced from officers when he tried to report abuse. Over time, he revealed how he and his fellow unit members became involved in prisoner abuse and, in some cases, torture. It was important to Millantz that I understand the complex circumstances that led to such misconduct. He and his fellow troops also wanted me to recognize how damaging the experience had been for them—especially for soldiers who felt remorseful about their involvement with abuse, such as Sergeant Adam Gray.

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Stephen Lendman

Currently writing a twice-weekly Washington Post column, Broder is called America's "dean" of political journalists, having covered every presidential campaign since Kennedy-Nixon. At age 81 (ironically born September 11, 1929), his bio lists an array of awards as well as accolades like:

● "Washington's most highly regarded columnist;
● Best Reporter;
● Hardest Working;
● the high priest of political journalism;
● the most respected and influential political journalist in the country; and
● Least Ideological," among others.

Phew, for a man distinguished more for supporting power and privilege than delivering real journalism, the kind found nowhere in the dominant media, especially in establishment broadsheets like The New York Times and Washington Post. Both papers and their star reporters are plagued by conflicts of interest, Broder more than most. Atop the media food chain, maybe all, and it shows.

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Andy Worthington

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The article is cross-posted below (and I’ve added some additional links).

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Jeffrey Kaye & Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t

Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t;
Adapted: mike.benedetti, Dirty Bunny

A major Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation on the drugging of detainees held at Guantanamo and other Department of Defense (DoD) facilities was completed almost a year ago and shared with a key Senate committee. According to DoD spokesperson, Maj. Tanya Bradsher, the report is classified. News of the completion of the investigation and the OIG's report came as a surprise to human rights advocates who had been involved in investigating the drugging claims. While the findings of the investigation is unknown, a spokeswoman for the Senate Armed Services Committee said the OIG's investigation did not substantiate allegations of drugging of prisoners for the "purposes of interrogation." The involuntary use of drugs on prisoners would violate a number of domestic and international laws, as well as basic ethical codes of the medical professions.

Truthout filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last week to gain access to the OIG report. Kelly McHale, a senior FOIA Specialist who works in the Inspector General's office, said Tuesday the Defense Department "may be unable to respond to your request within the FOIA's 20 day statutory time period as there are unusual circumstances which may impact on our ability to quickly process your request.

"These unusual circumstances may be: (a) the need to search for and collect records from a facility geographically separated from this Office; (b) the potential volume of records responsive to your request; and (c) the need for consultation with one or more other agencies or DoD components having a substantial interest in either the determination or the subject matter of the records," McHale wrote in an email in response to Truthout's FOIA request. "For these reasons, we placed your request in our complex processing queue and will process it consistent with the order in which we received your request. Please note that we currently have an administrative workload of 105 cases."

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Chris Floyd

James Bovard at Antiwar.com points out one of the more egregiously sick-making of the many atrocious "arguments" employed by Barack Obama in his successful effort to block the efforts of Maher Arar to seek justice for his unjust rendition and proxy torture in the Great War of Global Terror.

Obama bade his legal henchmen -- his own personal John Yoos, as it were -- to tell the Supreme Court that it should kill the Canadian citizen's case seeking compensation for his unlawful arrest by U.S. officials, who then rendered him not unto Caesar but to the untender mercies of Syria's torture cells. The Robed Ones agreed, dismissing, without comment, Arar's appeal of a lower court ruling that quashed his case -- a decision that Scott Horton rightly likened last year to the Dred Scott case, which upheld the legality of slavery, even in states which prohibited it.

The Arar ruling upholds the "legality" of a new, universal form of slavery, i.e., the United States government can deprive anyone in the world of their freedom, and dispose of their bodies as it sees fit: torture, "indefinite detention," or even "targeted assassination." The fact that it is a man of partly African descent who is now outstripping the Southern slavers in this extension of servitude to the entire world is one of those poisonously bitter ironies with which history abounds.

But grim and depraved as Obama's position is, it is not without its comic elements. As Bovard notes, one of the "arguments" offered by the Obama/Yoo administration was that the case should be dismissed because it might call into question “the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.” We kid, as they say, you not.

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Stephen Soldz

Bagram airbase & torture center

A recent pair of articles by Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has shed new light upon activities in the secret so-called “black jail” on the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Among other aspects, these new revelations suggest that psychologists may be playing a major role inside the facility, raising questions about the reasons for American Psychological Association (APA) lobbying activities in support of the agency that Ambinder reports is running the detention center.

In recent months the Washington Post, New York Times, and BBC reported on a secret prison on fringes of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Referred to by former prisoners as the “black jail,” this institution is reportedly a site where prisoner abuse is regular and systematic. The BBC reported that all nine former prisoners they interviewed:

told consistent stories of being held in isolation in cold cells where a light is on all day and night.

The men said they had been deprived of sleep by US military personnel there.

Thus, we can assume that psychological torture techniques of isolation, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia are routine aspects of treatment inside the facility.

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Chris Floyd

To borrow the deathless phraseology of Professor AbuKhalil: for those who care and do not care, my interview with Scott Horton at Antiwar Radio can be heard here.

As usual, Scott led the conversation in several interesting directions, to which I made the usual rambling, semi-coherent contributions. But one thing I did try to put forth was the idea of a "united front" across the political spectrum, dedicated to a single, overarching goal: dismantling the empire. Much evil would cease, and many good things would flow from such a development.

I worked up some notes on the matter before the talk, and added some more thoughts afterward; these are appended below. Much of this is an expansion and refinement of some ideas mentioned in a recent post, so I hope you'll forgive any repetition. But that original piece dealt with other topics as well, and I thought this idea merited a spotlight of its own. So here it is.

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