By Khalid Amayreh

April 25, 2009 Just released from a PA lockup ostensibly in connection with his outspoken criticisms of the Palestinian Authority, Abdul Sattar Qassem has accused his incarcerators of mistreating and humiliating him. "They kept me in the company of criminals and murderers all these days." Qassem was arrested by the Preventive Security Force (PSF) last week on what seemed to be fabricated libel charges filed against him by two members of PA security agencies. Qassem, a former presidential candidate and Professor of Political Science at al-Najah University in Nablus in the northern West Bank, said he believed his detention was meant as a warning against criticizing the PA government and security apparatus. He described his ordeal as a "self-defeating act" for the PA, saying that he would continue to call the spade a spade irrespective of intimidation from the security agencies. "Freedom of speech and expression is a paramount issue over which there can be no compromise. Shielding this freedom from the forces of repression and despotism is a collective responsibility. If we tolerate violations of our human rights and civil liberties, then we will be jeopardizing our future as a people." Qassem strongly denied PA allegations that he had "besmirched the image" of certain PFC members during a television interview. "I have been a victim of intimidation, assault and vandalism. I was always careful to submit a complaint against the perpetrators. However, instead of arresting the perpetrators and prosecuting them for their crimes, the PA authorities decided to arrest me. Isn’t that strange?" Qassem spoke defiantly, saying that he wouldn’t be silenced. "This country is our country, this land is our land, Falastin (Palestine) is our homeland, we have no other homeland, and we shall remain faithful to our faith, values, history and the legacy of our forefathers." PA political and security officials labeled Qassem’s arrest "criminal rather than political." However, most observers in occupied Palestine are convinced that the arrest of Qassem, a well-known political intellectual, was motivated by a desire on the PA part to punish and intimidate political opponents. The PA continues to detain dozens of political activists and journalists on suspicion of being associated or affiliated with the Hamas movement. Last week the PA arrested journalist Mustafa Sabri from his home in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya. The arrests coincide with the resumption in Cairo of the Hamas-Fatah dialogue. Sources in Cairo reported that the main stumbling block impeding a national reconciliation agreement lied in PA demands that Hamas recognize Israel and abandon resistance to the Israeli occupation. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel as a matter of religious ideology.

When Policies And Words Diverge

by Emily Spence / April 22nd, 2009

The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.

– President Bush in June 2003

I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved … I told the country we did that. And I also told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it.

– President Bush in April 2008 about interrogation tactics used on detainees.

As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it.

– President Obama in November 2008

Based on legal precedence, there is plenty of evidence that interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo Bay and other US run facilities, such as Abu Ghraib, constituted torture in violation of US and international laws. It makes no difference that some slick legal counselors, that were under pressure to deliver lies, skirted these regulations and informed operatives that barbaric actions are acceptable. Regardless of the justifications used, the infractions still stand and represent a breach of laws that government agencies are sworn to uphold.

Indeed, serious circumvention of statutes should always result in legal proceedings and usually does so unless some affair is settled, to the satisfaction of all parties involved, outside of judicial processes. At the same time, refusal to obey illicit orders, even when commanded to conduct them by superiors, does stand as defense in courts as events related to the My Lai slaughter and similar incidents verify. As such, any claim that one is forced to obey wrongful orders has no weight any more than it did during Stanley Milgram’s experiments wherein subjects assumed that they were electrically shocking others and carried out the action merely because they were told to do so.                                       More...............................

by Doug Page / April 23rd, 2009

The Connection between Torture, Wall Street Bank Profits and Our Descent into Poverty

We who are watching President Obama carefully observe that he has betrayed us. For unknown, hopefully innocent and unknowing reasons, he has chosen an economic policy based on a massive falsehood, and advisors who have enabled Wall Street Banks to earn rich profits in the short run based on that falsehood. Obama has committed $12.8 Trillion to bailing out crooked Wall Street Banks, fraudulent by the public admissions of their own CEOs, and attempting to make them whole, a ratio of 14 for Wall Street Bank crooks to 1 for our Main Street economy. Obama continues the idiotic policy through massive bailouts of Wall Street crooks by trying to restart the unregulated real estate bubble, specifically including unregulated derivatives, credit default swaps, and hedge funds.

Instead of hope and change from the policies of the Bush Administration that some of us expected, every single policy regarding the maintenance of an aggressive economic empire abroad has been retained or expanded. We are all concerned about the depression that now confronts us, our loss of jobs and our loss of our homes in foreclosure, and the loss of our old age security. We had somehow assumed that Obama would deal with that directly and effectively by taking steps to restore purchasing power. An obvious first thing we expected was that he would enlarge and lengthen unemployment benefits. This has not happened. President Obama has not clearly explained how his present bail out priorities will help us. He has announced no alternate strategy if the present strategy does not work. Our disillusion was capped off by an article in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2009 reporting that Obama was considering secret retention of the right of the CIA to torture. We get no explanation of this from the mainstream media, nothing from the Democratic Party and nothing from the Republican Party. Even Marxists seem unconcerned about Wall Street Banks. It is left to us citizens and voters to try to find answers to these perplexing questions from non-mainstream sources and from economists and analysts who are not beholden to Wall Street’s status quo. We thus have a massive job of self-education and education of friends and neighbors. As Professor Michael Hudson suggests, we might copy a small European nation where labor unions called a one day general strike for the purposes of educating citizens. In the United States, we may need a one week general strike, probably more than one.                                                           More.............................

by Tom Burghardt / April 23rd, 2009

A major scandal involving a top Democrat, the Israeli lobby-shop AIPAC and charges that former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sought congressional help to suppress media reports of systematic, illegal warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) broke on Sunday.

Congressional Quarterly revealed that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) “was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department [to] reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.”

The former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Harman is the co-sponsor of the shameful “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” (H.R.1955) and its mutant relative in the Senate (S.1959). In other words, Harman’s “liberal” veneer is the perfect cover for currying favor with politically well-connected corporate grifters, major beneficiaries of the national security state’s largesse.                 More.....................

Frank Barat writes of the life and death of Bassem Abu Rahme, shot by an IOF soldier with “the rocket”, a new kind of weapon also used on critically injured US citizen Tristan Anderson some weeks ago.

On April the 17th, like any Friday afternoon for the last 4 years, the small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah, was preparing for the usual demonstration against Israel’s annexation wall … The village of Bil’in has, since the mid eighties, lost more than 60% of its land for the purpose of Israeli growing settlements and the construction of the wall. The inhabitants of the village used to live mainly from agriculture and olive trees plantations but more and more, the people of Bil’in have to rely on the women to survive. Embroidery has become one of the main resource of the place, located a few kilometres away from Tel Aviv (on a nice day, you can see the “inaccessible”–for the Palestinians– beach from the roof tops of Bil’in).

In January 2005, a village committee (led by Mohamed Khatib, Iyad Burnat and Abdullah Abu Rahme) was created and a month later non-violent demonstrations started, first taking part every day, then once a week, on Yum Al Juma’a (Friday, day of prayer).

The village won a huge battle in August 2008 (1) when the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the new route of the barrier in Bil’in was in violation of the Court ruling released on September 2007 (2) (which ruled that the Wall path was prejudicial to Bil’in and must be altered) and ordered the State to present within 45 days a new route, which will uphold the principles of the ruling.                                                    More...........................

Bush Administration memos released by the White House on Thursday provide new insight into claims that American agents used insects to torture the young children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In the memos, released Thursday, the Bush Administration White House Office of Legal Counsel offered its endorsement of CIA torture methods that involved placing an insect in a cramped, confined box with detainees. Jay S. Bybee, then-director of the OLC, wrote that insects could be used to capitalize on detainees’ fears.

The memo was dated Aug. 1, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children were captured and held in Pakistan the following month, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

While an additional memo released Thursday claims that the torture with insects technique was never utilized by the CIA, the allegations regarding the children would have transpired when the method was authorized by the Bush Administration.

At a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into revealing their father’s whereabouts.

The statement was made by Ali Khan, the father of detainee Majid Khan, who gave a detailed account of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American guards in Pakistan. In his statement, Khan asserted that one of his sons was held at the same place as the young children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.                                                      More......................................

Tel Aviv University historian, Professor Shlomo Sand, opens his remarkable study of Jewish nationalism quoting Karl W. Deutsch:

A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours” [1]

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity.  It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of depravation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

“When And How the Jewish People Was Invented” is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a 'nation-race', they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew”. Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually” [3].  In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions.  Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater”. [4] It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms, in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en masse without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity.  Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry’. For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging.  The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson.  Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

All of a sudden
A man wakes up
In the morning
He feels he is people
And he starts to walk
And to everyone he comes across
He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionary national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”  [5]  In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…” [6]

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.                                                           More................................

New book from man tasked by government to help investigate attacks unveils how “official story is almost entirely untrue”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - says that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack.

Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), and is also a former New Jersey Attorney General.

Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released in September.

The book unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”

Only the very naive would dispute that an agreement not to tell the truth is an agreement to lie. Farmer’s contention is that the government agreed to create a phony official version of events to cover-up the real story behind 9/11.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The publisher of the book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, states that, “Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security.”

In August 2006, the Washington Post reported, “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.”

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

John Farmer

Farmer himself is quoted in the Post article, stating, “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

As we also reported in August 2006, released portions of NORAD tapes from 9/11, which were featured in a Vanity Fair article, do little to answer skeptic’s questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.

Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job, however, Farmer’s testimony, along with that of his fellow 9/11 Commission members, conclusively demonstrates that, whatever really happened on 9/11, the official story as told to the public on the day and that which remains the authorities’ version of events today, is a lie - according to the very people who were tasked by the government to investigate it. This is a fact that no debunker or government apologist can ever legitimately deny.

by James Keye / April 13th, 2009

Human economies have no separate existence; they are not some universal latent design waiting for the human substrate to be displayed. We ask the wrong questions with: “What is wrong with the economy and how can we fix it?” Our first efforts must be to understand the origin of how we have come to exchange materials and behaviors, and then to ask: “Is this how we want to do our exchanges and what are the consequences?” It may seem a monumental task to retool the present way of assigning value and doing exchanges, but the current depth of troubles are pointing more and more directly to the conclusion that our present economic structures have run their course and are placing us, and the earth’s living systems, in the greatest peril.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs may have begun as a classification of the internal motives of human action and the order in which they dominate our experience of life, but they have become a ‘selling’ list for the entrepreneur. A most basic biological tenet is that an organism is to be in primary control of the behaviors, environments and situations that meet its essential needs; that is to say, it is to be well adapted to its environment. A basic tenet of the entrepreneur is that no human need should be able to be met by the simple and direct action of the person; a way is to be found to intrude into the space between need and the behaviors or the material for the need’s satisfaction and to extract some amount of the energy in the transaction. And that is to say, a defining quality (as I have drawn it here) of the entrepreneur is very similar to the biological definition of parasitism.                                           More...............................

An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi

by Michael Collins / April 8th, 2009

April 7, WASHINGTON, DC — The legendary Los Angeles County prosecutor and top selling true crime author, Vincent Bugliosi, continues to make the case that he argued in detail in his New York Times bestseller, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. His crime, according to the esteemed former prosecutor: deliberately deceiving the United States into an illegal war that resulted in the deaths of 4,200 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians.

He has the help of a citizens group called ABA Publishing headed by Arminda and Bob Alexander with Jude Morford. The all-volunteer group recently sent Bugliosi’s cover letter and book to 2,200 local prosecutors across the country.

Bugliosi is offended by the prominence of proposed torture charges to the exclusion of what he argues is the much larger charge: murder.

Prof. Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University School of Law was asked what charges were the most likely if there’s ever a serious investigation into Bush administration criminal activities. Turley noted:

“The two most obvious crimes in this administration are the torture program and the unlawful surveillance program. Despite the effort to pretend that there is some ambiguity or uncertainty on these crimes, the law is quite clear.” (Blog of Legal Times, Dec. 23, 2008)

Torture and illegal wiretapping are important concerns to Bugliosi.

But murder is by far the larger crime with a much stronger case, Bugliosi argues.

The former top prosecutor demands justice for the deaths of 4,200 U.S. citizens, soldiers who gave their lives in a war based on calculated lies by the Bush administration. Their loss is the basis for his murder charge. While Bugliosi couldn’t find a way to attach the 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians to the indictment, those deaths are part of the larger record of Bush crimes Bugliosi stated with passion.                                         More............................

When an idiot pretends to be  smart- all people laugh but when a smart person pretends to be an idiot - all people start to worry.

Russian saying

I am not laughing anymore. It's not funny.

It's not funny when President Obama betrays the Constitution and refuses to prosecute the  members of the previous administration for their crimes. It is not funny when Professor Jonathan Turley on MSNBC tells us to  'forget your civil rights because those are not protected anymore.'  That's now? Not under Bush? Not funny at all.It's not funny when it becomes obvious that  Eric Holder sold his soul to the Devil  when he agreed on a deal to let Sen. Stevens off the hook and denigrate his own office. It's not funny when after that the Justice Department helps(!) to promote the impunity of the illegal wiretapping.

It's not funny  when our President in total ignorance and malice promises in Prague to continue the infamous ABM program although  the whole world knows that program to be a stupid and dangeorus  provocation, nothing more.

It's not funny when we now see that the real group which brought Obama and Co. to power are Big Pharma and Big Agro. The unbelievable vehemence and hurry  of the stem research fed funding, NAIS and HR 845 speak loud and clear about whom does Obama oblige.

It's not funny when the Dem administration in total stupidity and malice attacks the most skillful  groups of the US workforce- automotive workers, aerospace engineering core,   IAM,  etc.  Our government not only does not  want to stop the avalanche of layoffs of those people but  in fact promotes it in all possible ways.

It's not funny  when  a former bouncer and a petty gangster becomes a Foreign Minister of Israel, proclaims  openly the extremist views and hatemongering and our Secretary of State... keeps  nice and silent. Remember what happened when Hamas was elected?

It's not funny when our President calls the Iraqi war 'an achievement'. It is  a dishonorable atrocity and  a lie.     More.....................