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Washington Post Again Flacks for Bush's Crimes
Robert Parry
With only 10 days left before George W. Bush leaves office, the Washington Establishment – and its chief mouthpiece the Washington Post – are trying to stymie any meaningful accountability for the outgoing administration and thus cover up for their own complicity in Bush’s crimes and incompetence.
The latest example is the Post’s front-page article on Jan. 10 which offers a one-sided defense of torture in the guise of discussing how President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure over his expressed goal of prohibiting abusive interrogation of detainees in the “war on terror.”
The Post article presents those interrogation policies as an undisputed success, even quoting Vice President Dick Cheney as something of an unbiased expert in declaring that the harsh tactics “have been absolutely essential to maintaining our capacity to interfere with and defeat all further attacks against the United States.”
Will Maryland see a more enlightened justice system?
Mary Shaw
A recent report by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment found numerous flaws in that state's use of the death penalty.
Dan Rodricks of the Baltimore Sun summed it up thusly:
In its report, the commission concludes that, over the past 30 years, the death penalty in Maryland has been expensive and ineffective, riddled with error and tainted with racial and geographic disparities beyond reform. It should be abolished.
The commission arrived at that recommendation after careful review of research into the familiar points of debate - the alleged biases that make the administration of the death penalty unfair, the costs of death sentences over life without parole, the benefits of executions to the state.
Consumers Have the Ultimate Power to Save the Economy
Joel S. Hirschhorn
When I was young talk about millions of dollars impressed me. When I was older talk about billions of dollars dismayed me. Now, regular talk about trillions of dollars, especially government spending, nauseates me. People never seem to learn that they control the fate of the American economy.
It is far too easy to blame in bad times or thank in good times Wall Street, the government, or super-rich and powerful financial entities. In actual fact it is always the spending of money by the general population on consumer products and services, housing, cars, or investments that drives the economy. The core problem is that the public does not act in concert to serve its own interests but, instead, takes its cues from the external world and puts its trust in the wrong people and entities.
Eye Witnesses in The War on Gaza
eileen fleming
I have only been as far as the Erez checkpoint, but I have four eyes in Gaza.
On December 9, 2008, I introduced Sam Habeeb, a twenty-something photo journalist and humanitarian worker in Gaza: www.wearewideawake.org
Yesterday, Sam received three death threats against him and his family because of his reports from Gaza: www.gazatoday.blogspot.com
I spoke with Sam today. His life is in danger from death threats and also the bombs that are very close to his home.
The Gaza Ghetto Uprising
Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh
The real reason for the onslaught on Gaza is also not about fundamentalist Islam. The US and Israel are happy to support those when they tow the party line (take Saudi Arabia for example). Like the attack on Lebanon in 2006 Gaza is pummeled to accept the colonization and power structures. In that context we can understand Israeli Deputy “Defense” minister Matai Vilnai who warned once that continuing resistance would bring upon Palestinians a “bigger holocaust”. Indeed resistance to colonization and occupation are natural and enshrined in International law and can only be obliterated by genocide.
In Gaza as in Iraq, the US public is being lied to while US taxpayers and US power is wasted to support aggression. Vanity Fair reported on the scheme to topple Hamas concocted by Eliot Abrams (a Zionist in the Bush administration) that was “part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs” that ended up strengthening Hamas. And by contrast to PR strategies, the former head of the Israeli intelligence services admitted in Israeli papers that Israel could have stopped Palestinian retaliatory home-made rockets long ago by lifting its siege of Gaza (a condition of the cease fire between Hamas and Israel agreed to but rarely implemented) but that Israel had a more strategic issue: to try a different way to topple the duly elected Hamas government.
Fact- and Law- Checking the Wall Street Journal and Alan Dershowitz, Part II: Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents, and Misapplies the Law
Franklin Lamb Beirut
"There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances. The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable." - Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Dr. Gilbert held back in Gaza
Flemming Trondsen
Dr. Mads Gilbert (left) during one of the many operations at
the Shifa hospital in Gaza, Palestine. Photo: ScanPix.
The Israelis won’t permit the convoy to leave Gaza.
The Norwegian doctors Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert had planned on leaving Gaza today, and just before 1 o’clock (pm) Norwac’s co-ordinator, John Eivind Jensen, informed that everything was going as planned.
The doctors had intended to take part in a convoy that were to take 10–15 patients out of Gaza City, but this convoy now has been prevented from leaving the area.
-The Israelis won’t let the convoy pass, Dr. Gilbert says to Aftenposten.no.
The convoy consists of 10-15 ambulances, and several of the wounded need to be transported elsewhere for treatment.
-Now we’ve had to take the people most seriously wounded out of the ambulances and back into the intensive care unit again, Gilbert says despairingly.
He thinks the reason for stopping the convoy could be that the Israelis now are bombing the area where it would have to pass through on its way to Egypt.
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?
Saree Makdisi
Israel has killed and wounded almost four thousand men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write these words, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel’s relentless barrage—and its deliberately terrorizing “warning” leaflets and prerecorded phone calls—had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same—“flee, flee for your lives!”). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.
All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to “an eye for an eye?”
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE
Gilad Atzmon
"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.” ~Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9
"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” ~Deuteronomy 7:1-2,
"…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you…” ~Deuteronomy 20:16
There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.
As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in Palestine by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to ‘destroy’ the Palestinians while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever.
Iran: Revisiting the 1979 Revolution
Jalal Alavi
The 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution is nearing. The revolution of 1979 was not only an act against the US domination of Iranian politics, which began with the US-British coup of 1953 against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, but also an act that was supposed to place Iran amongst the countries that made the transition to electoral democracy [1] as part of what the late Samuel Huntington and others have called the “third wave” of democratization.
Thirty years later, it seems fair to say that neither of the above objectives has been achieved to the satisfaction of the majority population in Iran, of course, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, as of the time of the revolution, may be said to be actor-based in nature: those who promised a more sovereign Iran and a more open society decided to establish a manifestly anti-Western theocracy instead, which eventually engendered not only a more interventionist Iran policy on the part of the United States and other Western powers, but also a clerical regime that turned out to be more reactionary than the secular autocracy it replaced.
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