Posts from — September 2012

Delisting MKO: U.S. Officially Taking up Arms against Iran
30 September, 2012 – Kourosh Ziabari -Iran Review

In an act of unequivocal and explicit hostility toward Iran, the United States took the name of Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) off its list of foreign terrorist organizations on Friday, September 28, showing its unconditional support to the sworn enemies of the Iranian nation straight from the shoulder.

The U.S. government announced the decision a few days after the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton submitted a file of classified information about the terrorist cult to the Congress.

The decision was made under the pretext that MKO has not carried out any terrorist operation over the past 10 years. This controversial announcement which bespeaks of the United States’ undeniable animosity with the Iranian people comes while there are several reliable documents confirming that the MKO is responsible for the killing of more than 40,000 Iranians during the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq. This gang has also assassinated Iran’s former President Mohammad Ali Rajaei, Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar and judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti in the first years of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. Since 2010, it has also assisted Israel’s Mossad to kill four high-ranking Iranian nuclear scientists in a bid to thwart Iran’s scientific progress.

Immediately after the announcement by the U.S. government, the Paris-based leader of the terrorist group Maryam Rajavi made a statement, hailing the decision: “this has been the correct decision, albeit long overdue, in order to remove a major obstacle in the path of the Iranian people’s efforts for democracy.” Rajavi promised that her group will step up pressure on Iran, and one may easily visualize what devilish and malicious plans they have in mind for the people of Iran.

New York Times says that MKO bribed some of the influential U.S. politicians in the Department of State and some lawmakers in the Congress to convince them to uphold the anti-Iranian bid. Some of the high-ranking U.S. officials supporting MKO include former CIA Directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss; former FBI director Louis J. Freeh; former U.S. President George W. Bush’s homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge; Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey; and President Barack Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones.

The MKO which receives underground funding from Israel and some of the Western governments had invested a lot in attracting the support of high-ranking American politicians and is said to have paid fees amounting from $15,000 to $30,000 to these people as an incentive to compel them to attend their rallies and give speeches in support of their anti-Iranian activities.

The former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Edward G. Rendell, admitted in March that he had received a total of $150,000 from the group to support their cause.

One day after the U.S. government de-listed MKO, Lord Ken Maginnis, a neo-conservative member of the House of Lords and a former UK parliamentarian called it a “landmark decision by U.S. State Department” and “a victory for justice.”

“Now, the best way to ease the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is to facilitate a regime change in Tehran. And that is on the horizon. The Iranian resistance doesn’t need troops or arms; it needs the support of freedom-loving people and of governments that eschew tyranny,” he wrote in an article.

There are credible reports, indicating that MKO members have received considerable amounts of money, military training and equipments from the states which are hostile to Iran and fear of its growing influence in the Middle East, including the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In an article published in New Yorker on April 6, 2012, the renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that how the U.S. government has furtively supported the MKO terrorists. The article entitled “Our Men in Iran?” documented that members of the MKO were trained in communications, cryptography, small-unit tactics and weaponry by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at a base in Nevada starting in 2005.

“JSOC instructed MEK operatives on how to penetrate major Iranian communications systems, allowing the group to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran for the purpose of sharing them with American intelligence,” wrote Nile Bowie in a research article published on Global Research on April 16, 2012. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a component command of the United States Special Operations Command and is known to have carried out clandestine operations in Iran with the direct authorization of George W. Bush. …more

Contradictions and Hypocrisy
Professor Obama Lectures The Muslim World
28 September, 2012 – CounterPunch – By Esam Al-Amin

On Sept. 25, Professor-turned President Barack Obama lectured the Muslim World and world leaders during his annual address before the United Nations.

The beautifully crafted speech of the Nobel peace laureate would have been believed – and better received—had it simply been genuine. The president’s appeal for rejecting violence, spreading peace among nations, while emphasizing the vital use of diplomacy in international relations, as well as his call for respecting the rule of law, due process, and cultural understanding were remarkable. But unfortunately, they were simply not credible.

In his speech, the president admonished the Muslim World by underscoring the important belief that people must “resolve their differences peacefully” and that “diplomacy” should take “the place of war.” Laudable words, but only if America practiced what it preaches.

In his seminal work “A Century of U.S. Interventions,” based on the Congressional Records and the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Services, Zoltan Grossman chronicled 133 U.S. military interventions by the most active military in the history of the world, between 1890 and 2001. Similarly, William Blum’s study “A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” covered 67 interventions between 1945 and 2000 that, according to him, resulted in the deaths of 13-17 million people. In his book “The Fall of the U.S. Empire – And Then What?,” European intellectual Johan Galtung listed 161 incidents of American overt political violence between 1945 and 2001, including 67 military interventions, 25 bombings, 35 political assassinations (or attempted ones), 11 foreign countries that were assisted with torture, and 23 interferences with elections or the political process abroad. And all that was before the 9/11 attacks.

Since then, the U.S. military has been extremely busy, invading Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses and causing hundreds of thousands of casualties while creating millions of refugees. Before that, it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, causing tens of thousands of casualties in the longest war in U.S. history while still maintaining to this date over 70,000 soldiers on the ground. The U.S. has also been waging open warfare with the whole world as its theater of operations in the so-called “war on terror.” This endless war allowed the U.S. military to engage in undeclared military operations, violating the sovereignty of many countries in Asia and Africa including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti, and numerous Sub-Saharan and West African countries. So much for peaceful conflict resolution and mutual respect between nations.

During that period, the Bush administration allowed (and the Obama administration has since refused to prosecute) the CIA to violate the sovereignty of allied countries including in Europe by authorizing the use of prison black sites, rendition, and torture. In one case, Italy tried and convicted in absentia twenty-three CIA operatives who violated its sovereignty when they kidnapped and rendered an Egyptian cleric to be tortured by the former Egyptian regime. Likewise, Germany condemned the U.S. intelligence agency for kidnapping and torturing one of its citizens of Lebanese descent. While Canada regretted and apologized for its role in rendering one of its citizens of Syrian descent, the U.S. – the country that actually carried out the rendition knowing that the subject would be tortured by the Syrian regime that it now enthusiastically condemns- still refuses to acknowledge its role, let alone apologize for the gross violation of its human rights obligations under international treaties.

Moreover, no American senior officials were ever held accountable for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and torture in Iraq, or for waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation techniques” (read: torture) used against Muslim prisoners (the overwhelming number of whom were innocent bystanders according to legal and human rights organizations) at Guantanamo, Bagram, or elsewhere.

President Obama further stated in his scolding of Muslim world leaders that they needed to emulate the behavior of civilized nations that respect “the rule of law and due process that guarantees the rights of all people.” But such lofty rhetoric from the president might be very difficult to accept since he himself acted as prosecutor, judge, and executioner when he ordered the murder of several American citizens, including a cleric of Yemini descent and a magazine editor of Pakistani descent with a drone attack in Yemen. People across the Muslim world wondered why the rule of law was absent in these cases and why their due process rights did not apply. Even two weeks after their death, the cleric’s sixteen-year old son, also an American citizen with supposedly constitutional protections, and a child by international standards, was also assassinated in a separate drone attack. So much for due process or respect for human rights.

In fact, since Obama became president in 2009, dozens of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and else where have been killed each year. But rarely does the civilized nation apologize for killing innocent Muslim civilians because “America does not apologize” as many American politicians repeatedly love to say.

Furthermore, Obama’s commendable call for mutual respect among nations may have fallen on deaf ears because it was considered by many as disingenuous. As noted above, for years the U.S. has disrespected the sovereignty of Pakistan and Yemen as it assassinated many individuals, including U.S. citizens, on their soil without any regard for the national sovereignty of the host countries, which are not at war with the U.S. But Obama could not have dared to use a drone attack in the U.K. to kill a cleric of Egyptian descent, who the U.S. has been after for years. In the U.K., the U.S. simply asked the British to extradite him so that he could be tried on U.S. soil. So the U.K. gets every consideration while the administration only shows contempt for Yemen or Pakistan.

In his speech, the president lauded the “enshrined” American values of constitutional protections and freedom of speech, as he reminded his world audience that “citizens cannot be thrown in jail because of what they believe,” and that they should be allowed to “speak their minds and assemble without fear.” He then emphatically stated that in the U.S. “our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”

Yet Muslims around the world wondered where were these protections of freedom of speech when several American Muslims were indicted and sentenced to as much as life in prison in the U.S. for exercising First Amendment activities, including an American Muslim pharmacist of Egyptian descent in Boston who was sentenced to seventeen years in 2012 for translating passages and uploading videos to the internet, and a cable operator of Pakistani descent who was sentenced to almost six years in 2004 for connecting his New York customers to Hezbollah’s satellite channel.

In many of these cases, government prosecutors speculated that the speech of the Muslim defendants was not protected because it could have led to violence even though no evidence was ever presented to support such a theory. Contrast that with the proven record of hate speech spewed by numerous American Islamophobes, many of whom were quoted extensively by anti-Muslim extremist Anders Breivik, who deliberately killed in cold blood 77 people in Norway in July 2011. In his 1500-page manifesto, Breivik cited many American anti-Muslim haters such as Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, Martin Kramer, and others. They apparently inspired him to commit the atrocious killings, though none were ever held, even morally, accountable, or subsequently condemned for their hateful inciting anti-Muslim speech.

Moreover, President Obama proudly affirmed his belief in “freedom and self-determination” and expounded that such concepts are “not unique to one culture,” since they are “not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values.” But these words ring hollow as the American president failed to explain to peoples around the world why the U.S. and its Western allies while steadfastly declaring that they “believe in these values” have continuously blocked freedom and self-determination, even symbolically at the United Nations, to the Palestinian people who have been suffering for over six decades either under brutal military occupation or in squalid refugee camps.

He further failed to justify why America has continued to fully arm and finance the tools that maintain and sustain the Israeli military occupation for decades, while shielding Israel’s atrocious policies against the unarmed Palestinian civilian population. Or why it protects Israel from any accountability for its illegal settlement activities and occupation in flagrant violations of international law and the Geneva conventions.

Towards the end of the speech, President Obama accused the Iranian government of supporting “terrorist groups” in the Middle East (none of which is known to have targeted the U.S.), while his administration has just delisted the Iranian terrorist group MEK, which has a bloody history and in recent years has been responsible for many terrorist attacks and assassinations inside Iran including the targeting of government officials, scientists, and academics.

Overlooking the fact that he started his speech by emphasizing peace and diplomacy, the president ended it by implicitly threatening Iran with war unless it accepts the dictates of the West as he stated that “the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” since “it has failed to take the opportunity to demonstrate that its nuclear program is peaceful.”

Most Americans might simply be deceived by Israeli propaganda in regard to the Iranian nuclear program, but most of the citizens of the world are not oblivious to the facts or the double standard applied to this issue by the American administration and its Israeli ally. So here are the facts that the president is fully aware of but conveniently decided to totally ignore.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons- over 300 nuclear heads along with their delivery systems. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), while Iran is. Under the NPT, Iran not only has the right to have a robust civilian nuclear program, but the five recognized nuclear power countries have the obligation to help Iran develop one.

Moreover, Iran’s nuclear facilities have been fully and are currently under the IAEA inspection regime. Iran has repeatedly disavowed the use of nuclear arms and has only enriched its uranium stockpile to the civilian use level of twenty percent- not the ninety eight percent needed for weaponization. Moreover, since at least 2007 the consensus of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies has been that Iran abandoned any steps towards building a nuclear arms program. Finally, it was Iran that accepted the conditions set by President Obama in 2010 in his communication with the president of Brazil and prime minister of Turkey for Iran to prove its civilian use intentions. But it was Obama who subsequently backed away from the diplomatic solution as soon as Iran agreed to it, the same plan that he himself outlined to the world leaders.

When Obama arrived on the world stage in 2009, people the world over including many in the Muslim World had high hopes for real and genuine change. People were ready to turn the page on the painful years of the arrogant behavior of George W. Bush. But apparently the empire’s inertia overpowers the raised hopes of any false prophets.

Regrettably, with such self-aggrandizing posture, Obama’s tenure, whether it ends in four months or four years, will not conclude in celebration or optimism. Rather, in all likelihood its ending may follow T. S. Eliot’s words: “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” …source

Esam Al-Amin can be contacted at alamin1919@gmail.com

Ali Naema murdered by Bahrain Security Forces with illegal and negligent of Shotgun using lethal rounds. 17 year old Ali was shot in the back at very close range. Ali is from Sadad Village. Another tragic loss of life at the hands by US supported “friends” in the al Khalifa Regime. Shotguns have become another tool of misery and weapon of choice in the murder of young men since US Security Consultant and “head bashing”, US Chief John Timoney and Scotland Yards, ‘phone scandal cover-up man’, John Yates signed on to help regime. The US State Department praised their role last year as they showed up with US and UK Public Relation firms, expert in spinning tyranny as Western Market Opportunity and transforming the image of torturous regimes into ‘favored Western Trading Partners’.

The murder of Ali is just another in a continuous pattern of murder of young men by the Security Forces. Today, under pressure from Western Governments, a Bahrain Policeman was sentenced to 7 years for murdering another protester in a separate incident. It has become a recognizable pattern of abuse from regime Security Forces and MOI leaders to use violent and bloody methods of retaliation when they are pressured by Western governments to Stop Human Rights Abuse. This is a clear and predictable response from police in retaliation for the conviction of one of their own.

According to an eye witness, Martyr Ali Neama was kicked and dragged on the road after getting shot by shotgun”. The same abuse has been reported in other Security Force Murders. A Physician has verified bruising was visible on young Ali’s body.

Security Forces are expected to assault the funeral at the time of his burial. Police routinely attack funerals of the Bahrain Martyrs and a means of desecration and intimidation.

6 January, 2012

Upon The Occasion of the Appeals Trial for Nabeel Rajab
28 September,2012

SumayaRajab ‏@binmrajab

First, officer Abdulla Dha’en stopped us in the sun on the door of the court &appears to have been implementing superior orders 2 provoke us

After Abdulla &his masters failed to provoke us, prevention news spread & foreigners arrival, they let us in out of fear of scandal #Bahrain

Ironically the killer of martyr Hani AbdulAziz was sitting in the same courtroom and was free while HRD Nabeel Rajab was detained ! #Bahrain

Presenting a HRD to a trial detained and a killer loose! Proved to foreigners what we’ve been saying to them about the #Bahrain’i judiciary

The comparison between the view of Nabeel Rajab in court and the loose killer became a place of laughter and ridicule by attendants #Bahrain

I wish the Minister of Justice attended the trial yesterday to see foreigners laughing on this farce trial #Bahrain

The killer was moving between the police and chatting with them and going out to smoke, while Nabeel was surrounded with police #Bahrain

The defense has pointed out bringing Nabeel to court imprisoned and the killer is loose, but the judge acted as if he did not know! #Bahrain

Judge failed to provide any evidence to convict Nabeel and movies that he used to convict Nabeel was great and had adversely impact #Bahrain

The judge’s violation of the laws and procedures and trying to cram new evidence (2/2) #Bahrain

Because of poor fabricated cases against Nabeel Rajab, the court and with the complicity of P.prosecution manipulated the file #Bahrain

Manipulated the case file and entered new evidence in clear violation of the law #Bahrain

The funny great misfortune that the judge displayed a tape of a speech by Nabeel and immediately the defense revealed that it’s fabricated !

Just imagine a judge in the Court displays fabricated tapes to convict the accused, you know why? Coz his argument is weak and wants an exit

In the first section of the tape, Nabeel in #Manama march raises the V sign &second section pasted, youth throwing Molotov in another area

Second tape displayed by the judge in the court is another huge scandal and the fabrication in it is clear even to the blind ! #Bahrain

It was an attempt to convince the audience that the first section and the second section of the tape is the same protest #Bahrain

Although the cutting and pasting is clear and the sections were in different areas ! #Bahrain

Government is trying desperately to accuse Nabeel w violence to justify his continued imprisonment, but whenever they try they fail #Bahrain

A third tape was displayed by the judge only to Nabeel &lawyers w/o the audience &foreigners on the pretext that screens don’t work #Bahrain

Apparently the tape didn’t help the judge #Bahrain

Skills of the defense team won a victory yesterday in court and Nabeel succeeded again (1/2) #Bahrain

And Nabeel Rajab succeeded again and as usual to turn his trial into a court condemnation of the regime (2/2) #Bahrain

End – Source, Twitter 28 September, 2012

21 April, 2011

UN’s Ban Ki-moon Has No Comment on Bahrain Jailing Zainab al-Khawaja
By Matthew Russell Lee – Inner City Press

UNITED NATIONS, September 27 — With all the talk at the UN General Assembly about the Arab Spring and freedom of expression, the UN’s and others’ failure to speak out again Bahrain jailing Zainab al-Khawaja for tearing up a photo of the King, even when asked, is noteworthy.

On September 26, the day after US President Obama’s speech about freedom of expression and after months of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon statements about the right to non-violent protest, Inner City Press asked Ban’s spokesman Martin Nesirky:

Inner City Press: The daughter of a very prominent Bahrain activist — the daughter’s name is Zainab al-Khawaja — has been sentenced to two months in jail for tearing up the picture of a Bahraini royal, and I am wondering, does the Secretary-General or the Secretariat have any view of this arrest in terms of freedom of speech, or in terms of the right to oppose one’s Government?

Spokesperson Nesirky: No specific comment on this specific case. If that changes, I will let you know.

Twenty-one hours later, no statement had been issued. Nesirky went on to point backward:

Spokesperson Nesirky: But you will have seen that the Secretary-General met already with the Foreign Minister from Bahrain. And I would refer you to the readout that we gave on that.

But here was that readout:

The Secretary-General today met with H. E. Shaikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The Secretary-General and the Foreign Minister reviewed the situation in the region. They also discussed current developments in Bahrain, including the human rights situation. The Secretary-General welcomed the commitment made by His Majesty King Hamad bin Issa Al Khalifa, to dialogue, good governance and genuine democracy and called on the Government to complete the implementations of the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry and the recommendations of the Universal Periodic Review. He also emphasized that a genuine, all-inclusive dialogue that addresses the legitimate aspirations of all Bahraini communities is the best way to promote lasting peace, stability, justice and economic progress in Bahrain.

And days after Ban “welcomed the commitment made by His Majesty King Hamad bin Issa Al Khalifa, to dialogue, good governance and genuine democracy,” a prominent democracy activist was sentences to prison for tearing up the King’s photograph. Now Ban, and others, have “no specific comment on this specific case.” So it goes at the UN. ..source

Systemic Destabilization as “A Strategy of Tension”: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing
By Prof Peter Dale Scott – Global Research – 24 September, 2012

Introduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in Italy

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”2

The examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980.

These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going “strategy of tension” to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether.3 As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”4

Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary “stay-behind” network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as “Operation Gladio.”

In 1984, questioned by judges about the 1980 Bologna station bombing, Vinciguerra said: “With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages…[it] lies within the state itself…There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army…A secret organisation, a super-organisation with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…A super-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.5

Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently revealed in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey.6

The original purpose of Gladio was to consolidate resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover. But many of the senior Italians involved in the bombings implicated the CIA and NATO in them as well:

General Vito Miceli, the Italian head of military intelligence, after his arrest in 1974 on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the government, testified “that the incriminated organization, … was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO.” Former Italian defense minister Paulo Taviani told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation “that during his time in office (1955-58), the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by ‘the boys in Via Veneto’—i.e. the CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome.” In 2000 “an Italian secret service general [Giandelio Maletti] said . . . that the CIA gave its tacit approval to a series of bombings in Italy in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power. . . . ‘The CIA wanted, through the birth of an extreme nationalism and the contribution of the far right, particularly Ordine Nuovo, to stop (Italy) sliding to the left,’ he said.”7

Another conspirator, Carlo Digilio, “described how he passed on details of planned bomb attacks to his CIA contact, Captain David Carret, who had told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan to create a state of emergency.”8 Daniele Ganser, in his important book Nato’s Secret Armies, has endorsed a Spanish report that in 1990 NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner (a German politician and diplomat) secretly confirmed that NATO’s headquarters, SHAPE, was indeed responsible:

The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO’s military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary-General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations.9

Extrapolating from such testimony, Ola Tunander has compared the strategy of tension in Italy, with its false-flag bombing attacks, to “what the Turkish military elite might describe as the correction of the course of democracy by the ‘deep state’ [a Turkish term].”10 …more

48 hours in Sanabis
Matthew Cassel – 28 September, 2012 – AlJazeera

“We need supplies,” said the doctor, “Who can go get them?” One activist, a computer engineer in his 20s, quickly volunteered and invited me to go with him. It was nearly midnight and the injuries were piling into the makeshift medical clinic in a home in the Sanabis village, a suburb of Manama, the Bahraini capital. Injured protesters couldn’t be brought to hospitals or medical centres where they’d likely be arrested, so they were treated inside the villages. Volunteer medics were out of burn ointment and IV syringes, and needed someone to bring them from another makeshift clinic on the other side of the village.

There was a rare silence outside on the street. The protesters, mostly shabab (youth), had been dispersed only minutes earlier when dozens of police stormed through firing tear gas, rubber bullets and bird shot. The stench of gas still lingered; it never really disappeared fully from Sanabis during the two days of protests there.

We left the house into the streets. Some stone-carrying shabab were starting to return to the main crossings in central Sanabis, standing over broken glass and spent tear gas cartridges – all clearly marked “made in USA” – waiting for the police to return.

We passed through the narrow alleyways, some barely wide enough for a car to pass through. Some parts were well lit with the bright orange glow of the street lights, others pitch black. Some areas were tight giving a sense of protection, while others were more open, leaving us completely exposed for a number of seconds when anything could happen. We could only hope as we approached the next street corner that there wouldn’t be any police waiting around it, while we kept looking backwards to make sure there were none there either. Too fast and we would come upon them with no place to run, too slow and we’d get caught from behind.

In the chance that we did see police, which was more likely than not, we knew it’d already be too late. Their uniforms are unmistakable: blue bodysuits topped with bright white helmets. We had seen their weapons cause countless injuries all day long, and if we were spotted they’d fire at us. Up ahead atop a roof a couple of shabab on lookout waved to let us know the coast is clear. At the next crossing another group motioned for a signal to know if there are any white hats from where we just came.

As we continued to creep along in the shadows an abaya-clad woman peaked through the crack of her front door. “Come in,” she whispered waving her arms for us to get off the street, “do you need anything?” “Thank you, hajjiyyah, we are okay,” the runner whispered back, continuing his mission.

More than seven months after it began with marches of tens of thousands to Manama and sit-ins at the now-destroyed Pearl roundabout, this is what the Bahrain uprising has become.

After a brutal crackdown followed by months of martial law, the uprising is now largely confined to the numerous predominantly Shia villages around the country. It’s an increasingly organised and (still unarmed) guerilla resistance movement against the police force armed with “non-lethal weaponry”. …more

Pugnacious Prick, Patrick Clawson of Washing Institute speaks of provoking War with Iran at US expense…

Bahrain deteriorating
By Brian Dooley – September, 2012 -Foreign Policy

Bahraini human rights activists who went to Geneva to tell the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) about the kingdom’s ongoing government crackdown are again being targeted, this time in the wake of last week’s conclusion to Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. In May, several activists were threatened on social media and criticized in government-friendly newspapers because they appeared in Geneva to participate in the UPR. At that time, Laura Dupuy Lasserre, president of the HRC, reminded the Bahraini government that “we are all duty bound to ensure that nobody is persecuted on his return to his country for having participated in meetings of the human rights council or other bodies.” Bahrain clearly didn’t understand her message.

Right now, Bahraini activists who gave their side of the story in Geneva as part of the UPR are being targeted by government-supporting media in Bahrain. The Al Watan newspaper has featured their names and also published a photo with the activists’ faces ringed in red. In Bahrain, such a “ringing is red” is taken as a threat and has often been a precursor to arrest. Newspaper reports suggest the activists have “contributed to the distortion of Bahrain’s reputation abroad.” One human rights defender, Mohammed Al Maskati, said he received death threats by phone while in Geneva. Such developments signal a further escalation of suspicion about what’s happening in Bahrain. The one thing that Bahraini officials, U.S. government leaders, the opposition, and international NGOs all seem to agree on is that things are bad and probably getting worse.

Earlier this month, the most prominent opposition leaders and dissidents in Bahrain were sentenced to long jail terms after the trumped up charges against them were affirmed by an appeals court. Leading human rights defenders Nabeel Rajab and Zainab Al Khawaja have also recently been detained; Rajab was given a three-year sentence for his part in “illegal gatherings.” And dozens of others are living in limbo. The verdicts for 28 medics detained and tortured last year were again delayed, this time from September 11 to October 2.

Last week, the ministry of the interior announced it will soon “tackle crimes related to defamation and abuse on social media networks” after “it was noticed that some people were using the communication technology to abuse national and public figures through the Internet.” Bahrain is ruled by the Al Khalifa monarchy and its supporters. It’s clear that we should all expect a crackdown on anyone ridiculing the Bahraini royals on Twitter or participating in other forms of non-violent political dissent. The prime minister, coincidentally the king’s uncle, also declared last week that protests in the capita, Manama, would not be tolerated. He noted that opposition groups had “tried to turn Bahrain into a playground for subversion, anarchy and social divide.”

Some protests have taken on a violent edge in recent months as police clash with a minority of demonstrators using petrol bombs and other missiles. Violence doesn’t occur at every protest, but a common pattern is for a protest to deteriorate into missile throwing from a small number of demonstrators while police fire tear gas or rubber bullets or sometimes birdshot. Three weeks ago, a 16 year-old boy was shot dead by police. …more

At General Assembly debate, Bahrain urges UN unity to tackle Syrian crisis
27 September, 2012 – UN News Center

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister issued an urgent appeal in the General Assembly today for the United Nations to find a common position to end the crisis in Syria, where over 18,000 people have been killed since an anti-government uprising erupted 18 months ago.

“Our organization must therefore shoulder its responsibilities for the protection of unarmed civilians and must not allow the procedures of the United Nations to impede its ability to prevent crimes against humanity,” Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Bin Mohammed A1 Khalifa told the Assembly on the third day of its annual General Debate, at UN Headquarters in New York.

“It must put aside the narrow geopolitical interests and proceed to the attainment of the supreme goal which is the responsibility to protect civilians in armed conflicts,” he added.

He highlighted Bahrain’s firm faith in the indispensable role of the UN in addressing international and regional problems, adding that the region is now in great need of that role given the speedy and regrettable developments in Syria.

“The international community, represented in the UN and its bodies entrusted with the maintenance of peace and security, is called upon to unify its position so as to put an end to the humanitarian suffering of the Syrian people and to find a political solution to the crisis that brings to an end violence and bloodshed,” he declared.
[Read more →]

Bahrain policeman gets 7 years for killing protester: lawyer
27 September, 2012 – Agence France Presse

DUBAI: A Bahraini court Thursday sentenced a policeman to seven years in prison for killing a protester during the Shiite-led anti-government demonstrations that rocked the tiny Gulf kingdom in 2011, a lawyer said.

“The policeman was sentenced to seven years in prison for the murder of Hani Abdel Aziz,” a Shiite protester, said the lawyer who asked to remain anonymous.

However, the court “acquitted two other officers who were charged with the murder of two other protesters, Ali al-Moumin and Issa Abdel Hasan,” the lawyer added.

All three victims died of wounds sustained in clashes with riot police who used bird shot to disperse the crowds.

On September 17, the kingdom’s attorney general charged a total of seven police officers with torture.

The authorities say they are implementing the recommendations of an independent commission of inquiry called for by the king that confirmed allegations of excessive use of force by security forces during the month-long Arab Spring uprising against the Sunni ruling dynasty.

Home to the US Fifth Fleet and strategically situated across the Gulf from Iran, Bahrain has continued to witness sporadic Shiite-led demonstrations, mostly outside the capital since it crushed the pro-democracy uprising in March last year.

According to Amnesty International, at least 60 people have been killed since the protests first erupted last February.
…more

Anti-Muslim producer detained without bail
28 September, 2012 – Al Akhbar

An Egyptian-American man behind an anti-Islam film that has stoked violent protests across the Muslim world was arrested on Thursday in California for allegedly violating his probation, and a federal judge ordered him jailed without bond.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was taken into custody at an undisclosed location by US marshals and brought to court in Los Angeles still wearing his street clothes but handcuffed and shackled at the waist.

Nakoula has been under investigation by probation officials looking into whether he violated the terms of his 2011 release from prison on a bank fraud conviction while making the film, though authorities have said they were not probing the movie itself.

“The court has a lack of trust in the defendant at this time,” US Magistrate Judge Suzanne Segal said in refusing Nakoula’s request for bail at a hearing in US District Court.

His crudely made 13-minute video was filmed in California and circulated online under several titles including “Innocence of Muslims.” It portrays the Prophet Mohammad as a fool and a sexual deviant. …source

Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab’s appeal trial resumes
27 September, 2012 – RT

Leading Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab’s appeal trial to a three year sentence resumes Thursday after his lawyers challenged the trial’s fairness. Rajab will remain in detention, having been refused bail.

Rajab faces three criminal cases against him over his participation in peaceful gatherings in support of human rights and democracy, which the charges note he also helped to organize.

He has been in police custody since July 9, and on August 16 a lower Bahraini court sentenced him to three years for “involvement in illegal practices, inciting gatherings and calling for unauthorized marches through social networking sites.”

On September 10, his request for bail was rejected.

In response to the sentence, Rajab’s son Adam tweeted, “jail me for 3 years or 30, I will never give up,” quoting his father.

Rajab told the court that he had been mistreated in prison.

The three-year sentence followed a three-month prison term for posting anti-government messages on Twitter that had been handed down to him on July 9.

He had tweeted in June that residents of the town of Muharraq had made a show of support for Bahrain’s prime minister only because they were paid to do so.

He was fined $800 on June 27 for the critical tweet.

Prior to this, he was arrested and released twice in May after appearing as a guest on The World Tomorrow, broadcast by RT and hosted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, where he criticized the US invasion of Iraq and Washington’s refusal to take action during the Bahraini protests.

Rajab is a fierce critic of the Bahraini authorities and a prominent international human rights activist. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division.

He is also one of Bahrain’s best known bloggers, and being in jail has not slowed down his popularity, with his Twitter account boasting over 170,000 followers.

During Thursday’s hearing, Rajab’s lawyers will argue that defense evidence was not heard before he was convicted and sentenced.

Souhayr Belhassen, President of the International Federation for Human Rights, condemned the sentence, saying “it’s been over a year that the Bahraini people have been peacefully asking for human rights and democracy. How does the government remain so deaf to these calls?”

In a separate case on September 10, Bahraini human rights blogger Zainab al-Khawaja also appeared in court. She has been jailed for participating in peaceful protests, with 13 cases currently filed against her.

The World Organization Against Torture issued a statement Thursday calling for Bahraini authorities to respect Bahrainis’ rights to peaceful assembly and expression.

Anti-regime protests in the island nation, home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, have been ongoing since the beginning of February 2011. As of April 2012, at least 50 people have been killed in the clashes, with nine of them under the age of 18.

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned the Bahraini police for using excessive force against protesters. The police’s conduct in Bahrain has been described as “brutal,” with midnight raids, beatings at checkpoints and even activists being denied medical care. Around 3,000 people have been arrested since the opposition movement began.

The protestors were initially calling for greater political freedom for the majority Shia population, but after a deadly night of clashes with police on February 17, 2011, they are also demanding the end of the monarchy of King Hamad, a Sunni Muslim whose government received Western backing. …source

Press Release-Bahrain:The Launch of a Website that Monitors Human Rights Conditions with Photos and Videos
28 September, 2012 – Bahrain youth Society for Human Rights

The Bahrain Youth Society for Human (BYSHR) Rights launched yesterday the website “Bahrain Hub ” which is a website that monitors the human rights conditions in Bahrain by using photos and videos, as well as monitoring the articles and news published about Bahrain in the international media.

The BYSHR said that, “the correspondents, journalists, those working in the media and citizens can send photos and videos about the daily events in the different areas and the human rights violations.”

Mr.Mohammed Al-Maskati – BYSHR president – confirmed that, “the website has been divided into three parts, and a number of volunteer photographers will contribute with the BYSHR by monitoring human rights violations and publishing them in Arabic and English.

Mr.Al-Maskati clarified that the “website has been divided according to the Bahraini villages and towns and this will facilitate the search for international organizations and media.” …more

See New Site HERE

Total Surveillance: NYPD Launches New All-Seeing ‘Domestic Awareness System’
theintelhub.com – 2 August, 2012

The New York Police Department already has thousands of cameras aimed all over the island of Manhattan, but this literal surveillance state is about to be brought up a notch. The NYPD is teaming up with Microsoft to track action across the city.

Later this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to come forth with more details about a new surveillance project the head of the NYPD hinted at last week.

In conjunction with engineers at Microsoft, the NYPD will unleash an advanced “domestic awareness system” that will combine its already extensive city-wide surveillance system with law enforcement’s established databases in order to track the moves of suspected terrorists.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly first commented on the program over the weekend at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, but those close to the project have failed to extrapolate much further other than on the basics.

So far little is known about the Domain Awareness System, but an unearthed Public Security Privacy Guidelines memo dated back to 2009 details some of what is to be expected.

According to the memorandum, the Domain Awareness System is designed to implement “technology deployed in public spaces as part of the counterterrorism program” of the NYPD, and will work in tandem with the closed-circuit television cameras (CCTVs) already used by the force, as well as license plate readers “and other domain awareness devices, as appropriate.”

Currently there are reported no fewer than 3,000 CCTVs operated by the NYPD on just lower Manhattan. …more

New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance
By Naomi Gilens, ACLU – 27 September, 2012

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

Electronic Surveillance Is Sharply on the Rise

The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. …more

The Ubiquitous New Yorker
by Philip Giraldi – 27 September, 2012 – AntiWar.com

Remember the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel who made his mark saving aristos from the guillotine? “They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel.” Fortunately Baroness Orczy’s creation lived and worked in the eighteenth century. It’s not so difficult to find people these days given the capabilities afforded by high tech methods of intruding into people’s lives and monitoring their activities. Nowadays the Pimpernel would no doubt be detected and detained when using his cell phone or swiping his credit card at a 7-11.

For New Yorkers nostalgic for a reminder of life in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s city, experiencing something from home is not now nearly so elusive. In fact, New York is pretty much anywhere you turn. A little bit of New York has turned up in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and even Williamsburg, Va. It’s in Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Spain, India, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, and Israel. No, it’s not in the form of a Broadway deli or a Famous Original Ray’s pizza. It’s the New York City Police Department, which proudly displays the motto “Fidelis ad Mortem,” faithful unto death. The NYPD is everywhere.

In the wake of 9/11, the New York City Police Department decided that it had to have its own CIA, so it hired David Cohen, who had recently retired from the Agency. Cohen was a career intelligence analyst who somehow had been appointed Director of Operations by Bill Clinton’s CIA Director, John Deutch, who had taken a shine to him. Cohen suddenly found himself managing the CIA’s spies even though he had only limited exposure to that type of work. Both he and Deutch, an engineer by training, were not surprisingly very unpopular among the rank and file at the Agency. Cohen was replaced after two years in 1997, following on Deutch who had left six months before under a cloud. Deutch admitted to having in his residence “enormously sensitive material” downloaded to his unsecured home-computer. Deutch’s computer was also used for accessing porn sites and for e-mail exchanges with a Russian scientist.

Apparently Cohen’s somewhat shaky credentials were good enough for NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Cohen was named Deputy Police Commissioner of Intelligence, a position that he continues to hold. The intelligence and counterterrorism budget was boosted substantially, reaching $178 million in 2010. Cohen, inexperienced in running either police or intelligence operations, decided to “Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can and see what we get.” He attempted to recreate the CIA in miniature, bringing in former Agency officers Larry Sanchez and Marc Sageman and even sending NYPD officer Steve Pinkall to attend courses at the CIA’s clandestine training center “The Farm” near Williamsburg, Va. He also ordered the creation of the force’s “Demographics Unit,” which targeted Muslim groups and communities all over the Eastern United States. Its first job was to map New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut’s ethnic communities in search of “hot spots.” And for ethnic, read Muslim, not Middle Eastern. Coptic Egyptians and Jews of Sephardic origin were automatically excluded from the program.

Muslims who Americanized their names were particularly targeted, placed on special “suspicion” lists. Police informants were introduced into places of worship, into social groups, and even into restaurants. Islamic student groups at 16 colleges were monitored and in some cases infiltrated. It was all done without any liaison with local police forces but the program was exposed in June 2009 when a building superintendent discovered an NYPD safe house and surveillance point in an apartment close to the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick New Jersey. In a subsequent press conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the NYPD’s right to go anywhere in the United States in search of terrorists without informing the local police. …more

Iran unveils ‘indigenous’ drone
by Staff Writers – Voice of Russia – 27 September, 2012

Witness 129 unmanned drone.

Iran has unveiled its own, “indigenous” drone which it said was capable of flying over most of the Middle East, media report. The Witness 129 unmanned drone has a range of 2,000km and can be equipped with bombs and missiles, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps says.

Last year, the Iranian authorities displayed a US drone which they claimed to have brought down electronically. Iran’s state aerospace agency then said it was trying to build a copy of the American unmanned aircraft.

Its unveiling followed a major naval exercise in the Gulf by the US and its allies, to which President Ahmadinejad responded with an ambiguous “We have all the defensive means at our disposal and we are ready to defend ourselves.” …source

Mitt Romney and his neocon advisers want to confront the Muslim world with a “credible military threat” as if more American “tough-guy-ism” will quell the region’s anti-Americanism. But the reality is that the long history of U.S. intervention has engendered the hostility, says the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland.

The Price of US Interventionism
26 September, 2012 – consortiunmnews.com – By Ivan Eland

The attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four U.S. diplomats, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, is the latest example of tragic blowback from the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy in the Islamic world. That it happened on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an even more severe example of such blowback, is a cruel irony.

After 9/11, President George W. Bush told us that Islamist terrorists attack us for “our freedoms.” This contradicted the conclusion of his own Defense Science Board and other expert opinion — including that of the perpetrator of those attacks, Osama bin Laden — that al-Qaeda attacked us for our foreign policy of intervening indiscriminately in Muslim lands.

A map showing the results of the Arab Spring. Dark blue represents government overthrown; red is for civil war; light blue for civil disorder and governmental change; orange for major protests; beige for minor ones; and dark gray for related disorder in neighboring areas. (Graphic produced by User:Brightgalrs)

The enduring lack of introspection on the part of the American government and people about the ill effects of those needless interventions leads to their continuation and consequent unpleasant blowback. Unfortunately, the killing of American personnel in Libya and the attacks on and violent protests at U.S. diplomatic facilities in 20 Islamic countries are examples of this payback.

At the time, critics of the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi rightfully asked during the process exactly who made up the opposition the U.S. was supporting and what kind of government would replace him. They held out the possibility of post-Gaddafi instability, tribal warfare, and maybe even an Islamist takeover of the country.

The attack on the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya is an example of that instability even in an Islamic country with relatively favorable feelings toward America. The new Libyan government was too weak to protect U.S. diplomats and actually blamed the United States for not evacuating its personnel sooner.

Obviously, some Libyan factions aren’t very grateful for the help of Western air power in Gaddafi’s overthrow and continuing Western aid.

However, some would say that it was the Internet film insulting Islam that caused worldwide anti-American violence, not U.S. intervention. Yet the film was only the trigger, and the real underlying issue is U.S. and Western meddling in Islamic lands and culture.

The U.S. superpower has been pursuing an interventionist policy in the Islamic world since World War II — ramping it up even further after 9/11 with the unnecessary invasion of Iraq — and is roundly hated for it, thus making it the target for such blowback attacks, even among peoples the U.S. tried to “help.”

In addition, the Western overthrow of Gaddafi — a long-time nemesis of the United States and West who had recently given up his nuclear program and had begun cooperating with the West, including holding Islamist detainees in his prisons for a U.S. government that had rendered them there — sent the wrong message to other countries thinking about getting or working on nuclear weapons.

The United States showed no respect for non-nuclear Libya or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but certainly has for nuclear North Korea.

Yet after the seemingly easy overthrow of Gaddafi — using only Western air power supporting an indigenous opposition force, with no need for boots on the ground — pressure is now building for a repeat in Syria. But the blowback attacks in Libya, Egypt, and other Islamic countries should be a cautionary note about what could come after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

Like the heavily armed and rival tribal militias now roaming Libya, Syria has many heavily armed opposition factions, which continue to commit atrocities against civilians and, according to U.S. intelligence, have been infiltrated, and are sometimes commanded, by al-Qaeda.

To illustrate, a doctor recently back from a humanitarian mission in Syria was shocked at the number of radical Islamist fighters in the opposition forces battling the Assad regime. Post-Gaddafi Islamist radicalism should have been no surprise in Libya, because al-Qaeda had always had a high participation rate from Benghazi and eastern Libya, the cradle of the anti-Gaddafi revolution.

After the doctor’s report in Syria, such an Islamist upsurge should be no surprise to the U.S. government in any post-Assad Syria either. Furthermore, overt U.S. military intervention in Syria will do nothing for America’s already very low popularity in the Islamic world. …more

Assange Addresses UN Members, Lambasts Obama’s UN Address for Rewriting History
By: Kevin Gosztola – 26 September, 2012 – The Dissenter

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange addressed members of the United Nations at an event with Ecuador Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino and Center for Constitutional Rights legal director Baher Azmy. He spoke to members on the current status of his asylum case and how the United States currently is engaged in a wide investigation into members of WikiLeaks and others, who the US believes to be connected.

“Despite having been detained for 659 days without charge, I am free in the most basic and important sense,” Assange began. “I am free to speak my mind. This freedom exists because the nation of Ecuador has granted me political asylum and other nations have rallied to support its decision.”

Thanking Ecuador for providing him a platform to speak again at the UN, he noted the “circumstances” were “very different” in comparison to his participation in the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva in 2010, when he spoke about WikiLeaks’ work “uncovering the torture and killing of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens.”

Assange then told members, “Today I want to tell you an American story. I want to tell you the story of a young American soldier in Iraq.” He proceeded to share his thoughts on how the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ most high profile leaks to date had come to decide to provide documents to WikiLeaks.

The soldier showed early promise as a boy, winning top prizes at science fairs three years in a row. He believed in the truth and like all of us he hated hypocrisy. He believed in liberty and the right of all of us to pursue it and happiness. He believed in the values that founded an independent United States.

He believed in Madison. He believed in Jefferson. And he believed in Paine. Like many teenagers, he was unsure what to do with his life, but he knew he wanted to defend his country and he knew he wanted to learn about the world.

Manning entered the military, trained as an intelligence analyst, deployed to Iraq in late 2009 and in Iraq he saw a US military that “did not often follow the rule of law.” It “engaged in murder and supported political corruption.” Assange added, it was there in Baghdad that he allegedly gave to WikiLeaks and the world “details that exposed the torture of Iraqis, the murder of journalists and the detailed killings of over 120,000 killings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Assange recounted how he had been imprisoned for nine months and abused in Quantico and suffered treatment that UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez had called torture.

Hillary Clinton’s spokesman resigned. Bradley Manning – science fair all-star, soldier and patriot – was degraded, abused and psychologically tortured by his own government. He was charged with a death penalty offense. These things happened to him as the US government tried to break him, to force him to testify against WikiLeaks and me.

Manning, he noted, had been imprisoned for over 850 days without trial. …more

Why Qatar wants to invade Syria
By Pepe Escobar – 28 September, 2012 – Asia Times

Make no mistake; the Emir of Qatar is on a roll.

What an entrance at the UN General Assembly in New York; Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani called for an Arab coalition of the willing-style invasion of Syria, no less.

In the words of the Emir, “It is better for the Arab countries themselves to interfere out of their national, humanitarian, political and military duties, and to do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria.” He stressed Arab countries had a “military duty” to invade.

What he means by “Arab countries” is the petromonarchies of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC), previously known as Gulf Cooperation Council – with implicit help from Turkey, with which the GCC has a wide-ranging strategic agreement. Every shisha house in the Middle East knows that Doha, Riyadh and Ankara have been weaponizing/financing/providing logistical help to the various strands of the armed Syrian opposition engaged in regime change.

The Emir even quoted a “similar precedent” for an invasion, when “Arab forces intervened in Lebanon” in the 1970s. By the way, during a great deal of the 1970s the Emir himself was engaged in more mundane interventions, such as letting his hair down alongside other Gulf royals in select Club Med destinations, as this photo attests (he’s the guy on the left).

So is the Emir now preaching an Arab version of the R2P (“responsibility to protect”) doctrine advanced by The Three Graces of Humanitarian Intervention (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power)?

This is certainly bound to go down well in Washington – not to mention Ankara and even Paris, considering French president Francois Hollande has just called for UN protection of “liberated zones” in Syria.

As for the Emir’s Lebanon precedent, that’s not exactly uplifting, to say the least. The so-called Arab Deterrent Force of 20,000 soldiers that entered Lebanon to try to contain the civil war overstayed its welcome by no less than seven years, turned into a Syrian military occupation of northern Lebanon, left officially in 1982 and still the civil war kept raging.

Imagine a similar scenario in Syria – on steroids.

A ‘pretty influential guy’

As for the Emir’s humanitarian – not to mention democratic – ardor, it’s enlightening to check out what US President Barack Obama thinks about it. Obama – who defines the Emir as a “pretty influential guy” – seems to imply that even though “he himself is not reforming significantly” and “there’s no big move towards democracy in Qatar”, just because the emirate’s per capita income is humongous, a move towards democracy is not so pressing.

So let’s assume the Emir is not exactly interested in turning Syria into Scandinavia. That opens the way to an inevitable motive – connected to, what else, Pipelineistan.

Vijay Prashad, author of the recent Arab Spring, Libya Winter, is currently writing a series on the Syria Contact Group for Asia Times Online. He got a phone call from an energy expert urging him to investigate “the Qatari ambition to run its pipelines into Europe.” According to this source, “the proposed route would have run through Iraq and Turkey. The former transit country is posing to be a problem. So much easier to go north (Qatar has already promised Jordan free gas).” …more

‘I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly. I can wash dishes.’ Rachel Corrie, September 2003, before going to Gaza

Nine years since Rachel’s death – and little has changed in Gaza
By Noreen Sadik – New Internationalist

The death of Rachel Corrie in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, nine years ago is not an unusual occurrence. The circumstances of her death are.

Rachel, a 23-year-old American pro-Palestinian peace activist, was volunteering for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), when she was crushed by a US-made, Israeli-driven Caterpillar bulldozer almost two months after arriving to Gaza.

Rachel’s parents filed a suit against the Israeli Ministry of Defense. All they asked for was a symbolic $1 for damages and legal expenses. Their search for accountability amounted to nothing when, contrary to witness reports, Judge Oded Gershon said the driver of the bulldozer did not see Rachel. He described Rachel’s death as a ‘regrettable accident’, and concluded that Israel was void of responsibility.

Many years have passed since Rachel died, and the verdict of ‘not guilty’ came out last month. So, you may ask, what is the point of writing this now? Well, over the years the world has seen many changes – political conflicts, environmental disasters, mass murders, economic disasters – but one thing that has not changed is life in Gaza.

Rather than experience the life endured by Palestinians through a television screen from the comfort of her home in the US, Rachel went to Gaza to protect Palestinian homes from being demolished.

According to the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), since 1967, Israel has demolished over 25,000 homes in the West Bank and Gaza, resulting in over 160,000 internally displaced Palestinians. During Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week war against Gaza in 2008-09, a staggering 6,268 houses and 186 greenhouses (and livelihoods) were destroyed. …more

iPhone’s iOS6 considers Jerusalem stateless
27 September, 2012 – Al Akhbar

Apple iPhone’s widely-anticipated operating system, iOS6, does not label Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and instead lists the city as a stateless one.

A non-Israeli Jerusalem represents a shift from previous iPhone operating systems, and is found on the phone’s Apple Maps and World Clock functions. It abides by Jerusalem’s legal status under international law.

The United Nations rules that the highly religious city be under the aegis of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, a body sanctioned to manage non self-governing territories. A General Assembly resolution adopted in 1980 determined Israeli imposition of laws, jurisdiction, and administration on the city to be illegal and therefore null and void, and called on all states to transfer diplomatic missions out of the city. The assembly renewed the resolution in December 2000. …more