One man take on the system......and is suffering for it

The hunger-strike of one Palestinian one in Israel - 62 days so far - has not only brought worldwide attention to his plight but the whole "system" of detention of Palestinians by Israelis, the conditions under which Palestinians exist ("live" is hardly the appropriate word) in the West Bank and Israel itself and Israel's appalling legal (not "justice") system.

"A Palestinian man who has refused to eat since he was detained without charge two months ago by Israel “could die at any minute,” one of his lawyers told The Guardian newspaper on Thursday, day 61 of the hunger strike.

An Israeli medical charity’s report on the condition of the detained man, Khader Adnan, which was submitted in support of his appeal to Israel’s High Court, agreed that his life was in danger.

As Amira Hass reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, Mr. Adnan, 33, was arrested in December at his home in the West Bank and began his hunger strike to protest “what he regards as humiliating practices exercised by Shin Bet security service interrogators.” Three weeks after his arrest, an Israeli military prosecutor obtained an order that would initially keep Mr. Adnan in prison for four months, without charge or trial. According to Israeli authorities, classified information presented to the court suggested that Mr. Adnan was “a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who is involved in organizational activity” on behalf of the militant group, which has killed Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Mr. Khader has acted as a spokesman for Islamic Jihad in the West Bank in the past, as my colleagues Christine Hauser and Steven Erlanger reported in 2005.

Under Israel’s system of military justice in the occupied West Bank, Palestinians can be held in detention under “administrative arrest orders” without the right to see the evidence against them. According to Ms. Hass, this puts lawyers for prisoners like Mr. Adnan in an impossible situation. In her account of a hearing on Mr. Adnan’s detention in a military court, Ms. Hass wrote: “The process of opposing administrative arrest turns into a guessing game, or a game of tag in which one side is blindfolded while the other side has a full view of events. There is no indictment, nor is there evidence to dispute.”

In a report for the Israeli news blog +972, Yossi Gurvitz explained, “Administrative detention in Israel is based on the British emergency laws, which were never repealed.” He added: “A person may be detained for up to six months without the government needing to show any evidence against him. Perhaps the most cruel element of administrative detention … is the fact that it may be extended time and time again.”

In an op-ed for Al Jazeera, Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American activist who has argued for Israelis and Palestinians to share a single state, explained that Mr. Adnan had explicitly stated that his strike was in protest at the system of administrative detention.

Adnan wrote in a letter published through his lawyer, “I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.”

According to Amnesty International, which has issued two urgent appeals on Adnan’s behalf, as of Dec. 31 last year, 307 Palestinians were in Israeli administrative detention, including 21 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was elected in January 2006.

“I hereby assert that I am confronting the occupiers not for my own sake as an individual, but for the sake of thousands of prisoners who are being deprived of their simplest human rights while the world and international community look on,” Adnan wrote in his letter.
Mr. Abunimah’s argument in favor of a shared Israeli-Palestinian state is based in part on what he sees as the example of Northern Ireland. On Thursday, he noted on Twitter that a spokesman for Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, called for Ireland’s government “to urgently intervene to save Khader Adnan’s life.” In the 1980s, 10 I.R.A. prisoners died after long hunger strikes protesting the conditions under which they were held in a Northern Ireland jail. The first striker to die, Bobby Sands, died 66 days into his fast."

This piece, here, is worth reading in order to get a sense of the issues in the hunger-strike. Meanwhile, Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, also writes about this Palestinian's situation.

"Khader Adnan was arrested on December 17. Israeli soldiers came to this house in the middle of the night. This was his seventh detention or arrest by Israel. The first time was in 1999, when he was held for half a year without trial. After that, he spent eight months in detention in 2000; he was arrested again in 2002-2003; detained in 2004; detained for 18 months in 2005-2006 and six months in 2008.

In 2010, the Palestinian Authority arrested him for 12 days. Then, too, he went on a hunger strike, for the first time in his life. Between arrests, he worked at a pita bakery in Qabatiya and was an Islamic Jihad activist. His family says he is a political activist."

Hey, haven't we heard all this before?

Lesson #101 on how, principally, mainstream media fails us.    On this occassion it is the so-called coverage of Iran - with echos and re-runs ever-so-familiar of what we all heard and read before the Coalition of the Willing attacked Iraq.       The Huffington Post has pulled it all together in this piece:

"Military strikes expected! Weapons inspectors called in! A murky al Qaeda connection! And Cheney says time's up for Ira...

Wait. Haven't we seen this movie before?

It's already been a decade since the media hyped bogus WMD claims prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it sure feels like 2002 for anyone who was around then and is now scanning newspaper headlines or watching TV talking-heads discuss a possible Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities -- an act which could pull the U.S. into another thorny Middle East military conflict.

Some of the media's more overheated Iran coverage bears an eerie resemblance to Iraq coverage, but instead of former Vice President Dick Cheney we have his daughter Liz Cheney making the Sunday show rounds.
"A nuclear weapon in the hands of the world's worst sponsor of terror, one of them, is something we can't stand for," Cheney said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

The Iran nuclear story has also led several network newscasts this week. On Tuesday, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer talked of a "shadow war being waged by Iran," followed by chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross describing a "violent series of attacks by Iran," which may be retaliation for the recent killing of Iranian scientists.

CBS News anchor Scott Pelley kicked off Wednesday's broadcast by saying that Iran is "defying the world," while NBC's Brian Williams asked if "the U.S. about to get dragged into a new confrontation."

One national security reporter, who has covered the intelligence community and Iran but was not authorized to comment, says that pre-Iraq War coverage and recent Iran coverage are "terrifyingly similar."

"I don't think we are falling totally back into where we were before, but I do think you're seeing, in some corners of our profession, we're making the same mistakes we made a decade ago," the reporter said. "We're taking things at face value and we're rushing to get ahead of a story that we don't know where it's going."

While questions have loomed for years about Iran's nuclear intentions and ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, we're now in the midst of a full-scale flood of stories suggesting that Iran is on track to build a nuclear bomb, and even some speculating that the Iranian regime may strike the United States, perhaps in collusion with terrorists.

On Wednesday, British broadcaster Sky News -- citing intelligence officials -- claimed that Iran and al Qaeda "have established an operational relationship amid fears the terror group is planning a spectacular attack against the West." The Daily Telegraph, another British outlet, published a similar story attributing the link to what "officials believe."

National security and intelligence reporting often requires quoting anonymous officials, of course, and is subject to the same pitfalls that other source-centric beats face (like Wall Street dealmaking, for example). Even a piece on coverage of that coverage -- like this one -- includes one anonymous source. All of which begs a very germane question: To what extent is this community of foreign policy background sources spinning the media on Iran? And does the media really have any way of meaningfully assessing the merits of what those sources are saying?"

If only the dominos would fall....

Credited to Miel, The Straits Times, Singapore

Tony Blair exposed!

John Pilger could never be described as a journalist or writer who holds back or doesn't call a spade a shovel.    He takes no prisoners in detailing a book - in a piece on Information Clearing House - just released in Britain which catalogues how Tony Blair can fairly be described as a war criminal.

"In the kabuki theatre of British parliamentary politics, great crimes do not happen and criminals go free. It is theatre after all; the pirouettes matter, not actions taken at remove in distance and culture from their consequences. It is a secure arrangement guarded by cast and critics alike. The farewell speech of one of the most artful, Tony Blair, had "a sense of moral conviction running through it", effused the television presenter Jon Snow, as if Blair's appeal to Kabuki devotees was mystical. That he was a war criminal was irrelevant.

The suppression of Blair's criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce's Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the "moral and legal pandemonium" in the wake of 9/11 is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alistair Campbell, Cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them.

Advocates such as Peirce, Phil Shiner and Clive Stafford-Smith have ensured the indictment of dominant powers is no longer a taboo. Israel, America's hitman, is now widely recognised as the world's most lawless state. The likes of Donald Rumsfeld now avoid countries where the law reaches beyond borders, as does George W. Bush and Blair.

Deploying sinecures of "peace-making" and "development" that allow him to replenish the fortune accumulated since leaving Downing Street, Blair's jackdaw travels are concentrated on the Gulf sheikhdoms, the US, Israel and safe havens like the small African nation of Rwanda. Since 2007, Blair has made seven visits to Rwanda, where he has access to a private jet supplied by President Paul Kagame. Kagame's regime, whose opponents have been silenced brutally on trumped-up charges, is "innovative" and a "leader" in Africa, says Blair."

Do you live in a "happy" country?

How does where you live rate?    A "happy" country?   And where does it rate on the totem pole of other countries?

"You thought bankrupt Greece or borderline Portugal? Forget it.

War-torn Sudan or Sri Lanka? Relatively happy on this scale.

Mob-ruled Mexico? Positiviely beaming.

The world’s unhappiest country, according the annual IPSOS survey, is Hungary.

It has always been a morose place, but it’s down 4 percent this year and falling. This racist government is getting everyone down.

The happiest land, by the way, is Indonesia. Book your flights now......."

The US, Israel.....and attacking Iran

One would have to have one's head in the sand not to see that an attack on Iran is being ratcheted up.    The critical question in all of this is whether Israel will feel compelled to go it alone or whether Obama will, in the end, cave in and go along with and support Israel.     Bear in mind that it is an election year in America, the GOP candidates are falling over themselves to urge attacking Iran and the Israeli PM knows how to play Obama, and America, to a break.

"President Barack Obama has finally begun in recent months to signal to Israel that the United States would not get involved in a war started by Binyamin Netanyahu without US approval. If it is pursued firmly and consistently through 2012, the approach stands a very good chance of averting war altogether. If Obama falters, however, the temptation for Netanyahu to launch an attack on Iran, indulging in what one close Israeli observer calls his “messianism” toward the issue of Iran.US officials then came up with a new strategy for pulling Israel back from the precipice of war by letting Netanyahu know that, if the US were denied a full role in coordinating military policy toward Iran, it would not come to Israel’s aid in such a war.

Netanyahu, like every previous Israeli prime minister, understands that an Israeli strike against Iran depends not only on US tolerance, but direct involvement against Iran, at least after the initial attack. In May 2008, his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had requested the approval of George W Bush for an air attack on Iran, only to be refused by Bush.

Netanyahu apparently feels, however, that he can manipulate right-wing Israeli influence on American politics to make it impossible for Obama to stay out of an Israeli war on Iran. He has defied the Obama administration by refusing to assure Washington that he would consult them before making any decision on war with Iran.

The Obama administration’s warning signal on the danger of an Israeli attack began flashing red after Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta came back empty-handed from a trip to Israel in September."

February update: Libya and the Middle East

Now that the media has moved on from reporting on Libya one might be forgiven in thinking that all is well in the country now that NATO forces got rid of Gaddafi.    All too sadly not.

The Independent reports:

"Almost a year after the start of the Libyan uprising that led to the ousting and killing of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, new research suggests more than a third of its citizens would rather return to being ruled by a strongman than embrace democracy.

Despite thousands of deaths in the revolt against Colonel Gaddafi's 40-year rule, fewer than a third of Libyans would welcome democracy, according to the study published by the Institute of Human Sciences, at the University of Oxford, and Oxford Research International.

Libya is traditionally a tribal society and there are concerns that the vacuum created by Colonel Gaddafi's removal in October could lead to clashes between the factions that toppled him. In recent weeks, medical and human-rights groups have complained that the situation in parts of country is getting out of control.

The deaths of 12 detainees who lost their lives after being tortured by the various militias running law and order in towns and cities across country are documented in an Amnesty International report released today. The study follows last month's decision by Médecins sans Frontières to halt operations in Misrata after being asked by officials to treat prisoners midway through torture sessions, allowing authorities to abuse the victims again.

Still, the survey found 35 per cent would still like a strong leader in five years' time, although more than two-thirds wanted some say in future governance."

As this report from AlJazeera shows there is another plight in the Middle East brought about by the so-called Arab Spring:

"The 'Arab Spring' led hundreds of thousands of Asian migrant workers to flee the region.

Today, some remain stranded, while others are just starting to return.
 
The uprisings sweeping through the Middle East has attracted attention across the world.

The rise and fall of dictators and the ongoing challenges for these countries dominate the news discourse.

But very little is known about the Asian migrant workers who have been inadvertently caught up in the fighting.

The Libyan uprising triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of Asian labourers. Some, however, were forced to stay in the war-torn country."

The real situation in Afghanistan

All to regularly do we read or see reports on Afghanistan which paint a fairly rosy picture of what is happening there.     There are doubtlessly small gains being made in the country, but as this piece on TomDispatch so clearly, and soberly, points up, the situation on the ground is near enough to being described as grim.

"In Afghanistan, “victory” came early -- with the U.S. invasion of 2001.  Only then did the trouble begin.

Ever since the U.S. occupation managed to revive the Taliban, one of the least popular of popular movements in memory, the official talk, year after year, has been of modest “progress,” of limited “success,” of enemy advances “blunted,” of “corners” provisionally turned.  And always such talk has been accompanied by grim on-the-ground reports of gross corruption, fixed elections, massive desertions from the Afghan army and police, “ghost” soldiers, and the like.

Year after year, ever more American and NATO money has been poured into the training of a security force so humongous that, given the impoverished Afghan government, it will largely be owned and paid for by Washington until hell freezes over (or until it disintegrates) -- $11 billion in 2011 and a similar figure for 2012.  And year after year, there appear stories like the recent one from Reuters that began: “Only 1 percent of Afghan police and soldiers are capable of operating independently, a top U.S. commander said on Wednesday, raising further doubts about whether Afghan forces will be able to take on a still-potent insurgency as the West withdraws.”  And year after year, the response to such dismal news is to pour in yet more money and advisors.

In the meantime, Afghans in army or police uniforms have been blowing away those advisors in startling numbers and with a regularity for which there is no precedent in modern times.  (You might have to reach back to the Sepoy Mutiny in British India of the nineteenth century to find a similar sense of loathing resulting in similarly bloody acts.)  And year after year, these killings are publicly termed “isolated incidents” of little significance by American and NATO officials -- even when the Afghan perpetrator of the bloodiest of them, who reportedly simply wanted to “kill Americans,” is given a public funeral at which 1,500 of his countrymen appeared as mourners.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to pursue a war in which its supply lines, thousands of miles long, are dependent on the good will of two edgy “allies,” Russia and Pakistan.  At the moment, with the cheaper Pakistani routes to Afghanistan cut off by that country’s government (in anger over an incident in which 24 of their troops were killed by American cross-border air strikes), it’s estimated that the cost of resupplying U.S. troops there has risen six-fold.  Keep in mind that, before that route was shut down, a single gallon of fuel for U.S. troops cost at least $400!"

Continue reading here.

Washington's Insouciance

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate.     He writes on Information Clearing House on the havoc and mayhem Washington has wrought to various countries around the world whilst lecturing the world on the sanctity of life, human rights and the rule of law.    The hypocrisy of Obama was again evident just in the last days as Obama sought to "lecture" China's VP Jinping during his visit to Washington.

"Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods."

No celebration called for

Credited to Mike Luckovich

Rampant craziness

Abby Zimet at CommonDreams asks more than a fair question.    Is there "more crazy out there than ever?"   In a word, yes!

 "We dunno: Is there more crazy out there than ever? Maybe it's just that the latest - a Maine law letting you bring your gun to work and an Iowa bishop calling on believers to "violently oppose" contraception as "the devil" - were the proverbial straws. Forthwith, a look at a bunch of bizarro news in no particular order of awfulness. Spilled sperm to no lunch to public hangings to many fetuses: It's A Wonderful Life.

In New Hampshire, GOP legislators want to save the economy by eliminating  lunch breaks for (very likely) dawdling workers.

In North Carolina, Republican Rep. Larry Pittman wants to deter crime by reinstating public hangings, especially for “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers.”

In Missouri, GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler, "a big believer in visuals," wants anti-choice activists to post pictures of aborted fetuses in college dorms.

Then again, Oklahoma GOP State Sen. Ralph Shortey wants a law to ensure that aborted human fetuses are NOT used for "enhancing flavor" in manufacturing food.

In New York, meanwhile, Fox News is worried about another "nightmare" - overpaid hotel maids. And Rick Santorum is worried the famously-anti-religion Obama administration is "on the path" to guillotining Christians.

In Arizona, GOP legislators want to ban swearing by teachers in classrooms or anywhere else on school property, and ban any profanity in any book or other material used in the classroom, which means good-bye to a whole mess of great literature from Catcher in the Rye to pretty much all of Shakespeare.

In Mississippi, patriots want to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America just to make sure who it belongs to.

And in Oklahoma, where proponents of the “personhood” movement are trying to ban abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization to protect "all the rights, privileges, and immunities (of) the unborn child," State Sen. Constance Johnson tacked on a provision ruling that "any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child" - thus outlawing oral sex, anal sex, masturbation and pulling out.

Tricky footnote: Two of these pieces of legislation were in fact offered as a joke. For now, there's still a Gulf of Mexico and you can still do whatever you want to do in the privacy of your home. For now. Most alarming part of the footnote: It's nigh-on impossible to discern them from the rest."

Cops in the newsroom

The really, really hard questions are just beginning to be asked about the widespread corruption and illegal conduct at News Limited.   Try as they might, the Murdochs and their PR machine will be hard-pressed to escape unscathed from this unwholesome and outrageous "business".  

From Columbia Journalism Review:

"The New York Times piqued my interest by writing this on Sunday:

'Dozens of people — lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic computer technicians and, sometimes, police officers — gather daily at a site in Thomas More Square here, where News International is based, searching through 300 million e-mails and other documents stretching back a decade.'

Here we are presented with the spectacle of police and News Corp. cheek-by-jowl investigating together a scandal that the company covered up for years and which involves the police themselves. If you think that sounds a bit awk, you’re not alone.

Behind it is a sticky question: What happens when an organization accused of systematically breaking the law is a news publisher with legitimate interests in protecting confidential sources? The tension is thick on the ground: News International’s newspapers are under criminal investigation for thousands of alleged crimes, including deadly serious ones like bribing police and other public officials, but the company also has sensitive information regarding its legitimate newsgathering.

On one hand, giving cops free run of the place could easily result in the exposure of confidential sources and the chilling of future whistleblowers, who would understandably think twice about ever talking to the press.

On the other, after years of News Corp. stonewalling, police can’t simply trust the company to sift through its own data on the cops’ behalf."

Widespread worldwide hunger

Here we are with such disparate situations.    Obesity in many Western countries and  widespread wastage of food.  Approximately one quarter of the world's food is wasted it is said.    

Contrast that with the dire situation which the Save the Children Fund paints of widespread hunger around the globe.    The world stands condemned for allowing such a situation to exist.

"A quarter of young children around the world are not getting enough nutrients to grow properly, and 300 die of malnutrition every hour, according to a new report that lays bare the effects of the global food crisis.

There are 170 million children aged under five whose development has been stunted by malnutrition because of lack of food for them and their breastfeeding mothers, and the situation is getting significantly worse, according to research by the charity Save the Children.

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Peru and Nigeria – countries which are the home of half of the world's stunted children – recent rises in global food prices are forcing the parents of malnourished children to cut back on food and pull children out of school to work.

According to the report, A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition, a third of parents surveyed said their children routinely complain they do not have enough to eat. One in six parents can never afford to buy meat, milk or vegetables. It suggests that six out of 10 children in Afghanistan are not getting enough nutrients to avoid stunted growth."

The new bogey on the block

Since 9/11 we have witnessed the "bad-guys" being Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so on.  Now the latest bogey is Iran.    Glenn Greenwald rightly points out in his latest op-ed piece "U.S. media takes the lead on Iran" on Salon, how the American media, unquestioningly, is going along with the ride in blackening Iran and essentially talking up war on Iran or at least an attack on that country's nuclear facilities.

"It’s just remarkable to watch the American media depict Iran as the threatening, aggressive party here. Literally on a daily basis, political and media figures in both the U.S. and Israel openly threaten to attack Iran and debate how the attack should happen with a casualness that most people use to contemplate what to have for lunch. The U.S. has orchestrated devastating and always-escalating sanctions which, by design, are wrecking the Iranian economy, collapsing its currency, and generating serious hardship for its 75 million citizens. The U.S. military has that country almost completely encircled. The U.S. military behemoth, and Israel’s massive nuclear stockpile and sophisticated weaponry, make the Iranian military by comparison look almost as laughable as Saddam’s. Iran’s scientists have been serially murdered on its own soil, their facilities bombarded with sophisticated cyber attacks, and dissident groups devoted to the overthrow of their government (ones even the U.S. designates as Terrorists) have been armed, trained and funded by Israel while leading American politicians openly shill for them in exchange for substantial payments."