Mordechai Vanunu: “Israel does not want me nor do I want Israel”

MARK WEISS in Jerusalem, The Irish Times, May 9, 2011

MORDECHAI VANUNU, the man who revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the world in 1986, has demanded that Israel rescind his citizenship and allow him to leave the country.

In a weekend letter to Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai, the nuclear whistleblower cited a new law passed in March under which Israelis convicted of treason automatically lose their right to citizenship.

“I request that you set me free of Israel, since Israel does not want me nor do I want Israel,” he wrote. “I have no interest in Israeli citizenship, I don’t want to go on living here.”

Mr Vanunu, a low-level technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, first hit the headlines in 1986 when he leaked details with photographs he took surreptitiously to the British Sunday Times .

The revelations marked the first concrete proof that Israel had the capacity to manufacture nuclear bombs. Israel maintains a policy of “nuclear ambiguity”, neither confirming nor denying foreign reports of its nuclear potential.

Partly based on the secrets he revealed, foreign experts concluded that Israel was the world’s sixth-largest nuclear power.

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Asian Human Rights Commission, May 6, 2011

Bangladeshi national F M A Razzak is the President of Human Rights Development Centre (HRDC) and Editor of the Pakkhik Gonomichhil in Paikgachha of Khulna district, Bangladesh. On April 29, 2011, Razzak and his younger brother, Mr. Bodiuzzaman Bodiar; brother-in-law, Mr. Bakkar, were attacked after having been kidnapped by the relatives of an army major, Mustafizur Rahman Bokul, upon the latter’s order.

After they were kidnapped and in custody of the Mustafizur Rahman’s relatives, the three were beaten severely. They gouged Razzak’s eye socket with screw drivers. They deliberately delay, with the tolerance of the local police, to have Razzak and the two other victims taken to hospital to be treated. Even when they were inside the hospital they were not given the immediate medical attention they needed. Had it not been due to pressure and publicity on their case, they would have probably been left to die.

What had happened to Razzak and his brothers is no different to the life of ordinary Filipinos in the country. The use of power and authority, in this case, being part of the security forces and by relatives of the security is a common practice of abuse in Filipino society. To be part of the security forces and to have a relation with anyone from the security forces–the police and the military–is in fact considered a form of protection for their family and for their interest.

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By Stephen Lendman, MWC News, May 7, 2011

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as “covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.”

They’re “big lies,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic.”

America’s decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment.

Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.

In his exhaustive research and writings, David Ray Griffin provided convincing evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and that bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December 2001.

The former spawned a decade of overt and covert “war on terror” lawlessness at home and abroad. Policies and events following the second have yet to unfold, but expect little at best to be positive.

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Bashar.. or else

Bashar al-Assad or chaos. This is the new media mantra unleashed by the Syrian authorities to discredit the protest movement against the embattled president’s autocratic rule.

“We Syria,” “The collaborators are seeking discord,” “Yes to stability rather than chaos,” and “Freedom is not sabotage,” are some of the string of slogans screaming out on street posters and television clips in Damascus.

“The message of our campaign is simple. The word freedom as defined by protesters is not true freedom,” says Shaza Ferzli, 33, who heads the regime’s media account at United Group, the largest advertising company in Syria.

Wherever one turns one’s head in Damascus there is a slogan.

There are signs calling for “national unity” and “co-existence between communities” on buildings, bus stops and public transport alongside giant posters of President Bashar al-Assad.

One poster with the slogan “No to Dissent” is put up next to a picture of a church and a mosque under the slogan “Yes to coexistence.”

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By Ray McGovern, Counterpunch, May 6 – 8, 2011

As America’s morbid celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden begin to fade, we are left with a new landscape of risks – and opportunities – created by his slaying at the hands of a U.S. Special Forces team at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The range of those future prospects could be found in Wednesday’s Washington Post. On the hopeful side, a front-page article reported that the Obama administration was following up bin Laden’s death with accelerated peace talks in Afghanistan. On a darker note, a Post editorial hailed bin Laden’s slaying as a model for “targeting” Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and his sons.

So, while there is the possibility that the United States might finally begin to wind down a near-decade-long war in Afghanistan, there is the countervailing prospect of the United States consolidating an official policy of assassination and violence as the way to impose Washington’s will on the Muslim world.

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Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) — A suspected U.S. drone struck and killed targets in Pakistan’s tribal region Friday, the first such attack since American troops killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden north of Islamabad earlier this week.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials told CNN that 12 suspected militants were killed in the assault in the Data Khel region of North Waziristan, one of the seven districts of Pakistan’s volatile tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The drone, an unmanned aircraft, attacked a militant hideout and a vehicle carrying militants.

The U.S. operation targeting bin Laden intensified discord and highlighted the mistrust between Pakistan and the United States, which did not inform the Pakistanis of the raid in the military garrison town of Abbottabad.

Before that dramatic operation, many Pakistanis had been particularly displeased with the controversial practice of targeting militants with unmanned aircraft because civilians have died in the operations.

Last month, 44 people were killed in a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal region and the government of Pakistan formally asked the U.S. government for an apology.

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Richard Falk, MWC News, May 3, 2011

One of the glories of the Western Enlightenment, especially as embodied in the lifeblood of political democracies, is freedom of expression.

This freedom gives people the right to voice their opinions in public spaces, airing unpopular, tasteless, and provocative ideas – and especially those critical of the prevailing political order.

In the United States, particularly, ideas are extended to symbolic acts such as burning the flag as a way of repudiating official policies, or more broadly, the compulsions of nationalism and patriotism.

The US Supreme Court has generally taken a very broad view of freedom of expression, but it finds some outer limits.

It indicated famously that it would validate laws prohibiting members of a movie audience from falsely shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre, as it explained that the likely result is panic and a stampede that can hurt or kill.

Even at the height of the Cold War, with McCarthyism creating waves of conformity, the endorsement of Communist ideas were generally allowed, although loyalty oaths for certain types of employment were imposed and actual.

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by James Petras, Dissident Voice,  May 6, 2011

The assassination of bin Laden has been celebrated as a great strategic victory by the White House, the European capitals and all the major mass media outlets throughout the world. The killing has served as a major propaganda tool to enhance the standing of the US military in the eyes of the domestic public and to serve as a warning to overseas adversaries.

Contrary to this immense propaganda campaign and despite whatever symbolic value the killing may have in the eyes of his executioners, there is no evidence that the death will have any impact on the deteriorating military and political position of the US in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa or elsewhere.

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“I call for giving the coming government a chance by maintaining” the ceasefire deal, Ismail Haniyeh said in a speech, a day after Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement signed a unity pact in Cairo.

“We do not fear threats. We do not fear the occupation,” he added, referring to Israel.

“We always said that we seek and have sought to avoid a new war,” Haniyeh said in a two-hour address.

Haniyeh’s comments seemed the first concrete sign of progress for the unity deal brokered by Egypt for which security had been envisaged as a potential pitfall.

The agreement seeks to resolve a four-year split in the Palestinian national movement that had hindered the quest to achieve statehood in land captured by Israel in the 1967 war.

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