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Israel stops money for Gaza’s disabled
Jonathan Cook
NAZARETH // Yunis al Masri was luckier than his two brothers in Gaza. Although the truck that ploughed into their car as they travelled to work in Israel 24 years ago killed Jaber and Kamal instantly, Mr al Masri survived with shattered bones, internal bleeding and brain damage. Today, aged 49 and after many operations, he has difficulty walking and problems remembering to do things. Any hope of working again was crushed in 1985 amid the car wreckage.
Like tens of thousands of other Palestinian manual labourers who worked inside Israel before Gaza was progressively sealed off to the outside world from the early 1990s, Mr Al Masri had paid regularly into Israel’s social security fund from his salary. Certified as disabled by an Israeli medical committee, he is entitled to a monthly allowance of US$800 (Dh2,900) from Israel’s National Insurance Institute, out of which he has supported his wife and 10 children in their home in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza. In early January, however, the transfers of disability benefits stopped arriving in his bank account in Gaza. About 700 other injured workers are in the same situation.
The reason, they have learnt, is that while the Israeli army was rampaging through the Gaza Strip during its winter assault, the Bank of Israel severed ties with Gaza’s banks. The ending of financial relations between Israel and Gaza, in a deepening of the three-year blockade of the Hamas-ruled enclave, means Mr al Masri and other disabled workers have been without a source of income for the past nine months.
What Obama Actually Said About Health Reform
(Left) 1965 - President Lyndon Johnson signs Medicare bill while President Harry Truman looks on. Truman signed up for Medicare right away. Image
Address to Congress
President Obama closed his address to the joint session of Congress by scolding those who have raised the absurd charges regarding his health care initiative. It was well timed and diverted attention from fundamental flaws in his proposal.
Ronald Reagan's Torture
Robert Parry
Lost amid the attention given George W. Bush’s “war on terror” torture policies was the CIA’s cryptic admission that it also engaged in interrogation abuses during Ronald Reagan’s anti-leftist wars in Central America, another era of torture and extra-judicial killings.
The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released last month, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”
The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” [HRE] in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
The euphemism aside, the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual,” the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released last month).
Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth
Julio Godoy/Lara Marlowe/TOP VIEW
[Three reviews of Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie]
U.S. Policy on Taliban Influenced by Oil By Julio Godoy
Under the influence of United States oil companies, the government of President George W. Bush initially blocked intelligence agencies' investigations on terrorism while it bargained with the Taliban on the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim.
In the book, "Bin Laden, La Verite Interdite" (Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth), that was released recently, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Deputy Director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction.
Osama bin Laden - The Forbidden Truth
Firoz Osman
[This article was published by Media Monitors Network in November 2001]
It is becoming more apparent that the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with terrorism, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban or the World Trade Centre. Realpolitik, the need and greed for oil and gas are, once again, the source of misery and tragedy. This time it is in Central Asia, just as it was in Iraq.
In a book entitled “Unholy Wars”, ABC news correspondent John K Cooley reveals United States and multi-national oil companies intentions to establish pipelines to route the oil and natural gas of Central Asia and the Caspian Basin to the West. To this end the aims of the generals of the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and their American counterparts, the CIA, converged. They saw in the Taliban the means by which they could achieve their objectives.
Reviewing David Swanson's "Daybreak"
by Stephen Lendman
David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com. He's also a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace as well as a member of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice.
Subtitled "Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming A More Perfect Union, Daybreak" is Swanson's first book, a timely and impressive account of presidential extremism, congressional complicity, the urgency for progressive change, and how to do it.
Swanson exposes what was wrong under George Bush and provides a compelling prescription for real change.
In his book "Cracks in the Constitution," Ferdinand Lundberg explained that the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, never deterred presidents or sitting governments from doing what they wished, then inventing justifications for their actions. During eight years in office, George Bush personified it and said so in his own words. In 2005, he told congressional Republican leaders:
68.4% of weapons sold to foreign powers are supplied by the United States: “Quit arming the fuck’n world Man!”
by chycho
The business of death and destruction is booming for weapons manufacturers operating in the United States of America.
As reported in the New York Times, according to a new Congressional study, “the United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar.” This is 10-times more than their closest rival, Italy, at $3.7 billion.
Keep in mind that this boom in business is occurring during a global economic meltdown which has been compared to the Fall of Rome by the former Comptroller General of the United States.
The US & NATO Intensifies Military Deployments + Carnage In the Wake of the Afghan Election
Rick Rozoff
After NATO pledged 5,000 more troops for the war in Afghanistan at its sixtieth anniversary summit In Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany this April, U.S. President Barack Obama hailed the commitment as representing "a strong down payment on the future of our mission in Afghanistan and on the future of NATO."
The Alliance offer was in addition to Obama's own vow to deploy 21,000 more American forces to the war-wracked nation where the U.S. is waging its longest war since that in Vietnam and NATO is fighting the first ground and first Asian war in its history. A conflict that will enter its ninth calendar year next month.
Latin America and the End of Social Liberalism
James Petras
The current world recession and the potential recovery of some countries reveals all the weaknesses of the traditional “export market” – free trade - comparative advantage doctrines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent experience of Latin America.
Despite recent popular upheavals and the ascent of center-left regimes in most of the countries in the region, the economic structures, strategies and policies pursued, followed in the footsteps of their predecessors particularly in relation to foreign economic practices.
The Kunduz Massacre: The Real Nature of Afghanistan War
wsws.org
Rahmatullah, 19, a victim of Friday' NATO air strike, tries to sit up on his bed in a
hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009. URUKNET.
An air strike ordered by the German army at the end of last week has resulted in one of the worst massacres in the history of the eight-year-old NATO war in Afghanistan.
It is now clear that in the course of Thursday night at least 125 persons were killed in the attack, which had been ordered by the military commander of the German “Provincial Reconstruction Team” (PRT) in Kunduz, Colonel Georg Klein. In addition to armed fighters, the attack wiped out many inhabitants of neighbouring villages. The incident was one of the bloodiest air strikes since US forces invaded the country in the autumn of 2001.
Such a massacre is not the result of “bad decisions”, an alleged “disregard of NATO rules” or an “unclear situation”. It is the inevitable result of the objective logic of the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan.
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