By Vicky Short, wsws.org, May 29, 2010
The internationally renowned Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, was suspended from his post on May 14, accused of perverting the course of justice by the body that oversees the judiciary, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). His suspension shows the millions that have sought justice for the victims of the fascist Franco dictatorship the power and influence still wielded by the extreme right 30 years after the so-called “transition to democracy”.
Willam Fisher, Inter Press Service North America
NEW YORK, 26 May (IPS) – Human rights advocates are expressing shock at a federal court ruling that detainees held by the United States in Afghanistan do not have the right to challenge their detention in a U.S. federal court – and dismay that their path to a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court may be blocked.
A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, warned that if the precedent stood, U.S. President Barack Obama and future presidents would be able to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without ever having to prove their case in court.
Like vampires, the neocons never die. They constantly revive themselves, going where the vein is richest, eager to feed upon new blood.
By Ira Chernus, AlterNet, May 27, 2010
Remember the neoconservatives? Maybe you don’t. Their death was announced on the cover of Time magazine long before George W. Bush left the White House. By now you might think that they’re, thankfully, only a footnote to the history of a frightening bygone era.
But no. Like vampires, the neocons never die. They constantly revive themselves, going where the vein is richest, eager to feed upon new blood. Now — we should have seen it coming — they are sinking their fangs into the Tea Party. That’s where the fresh political blood is, so that’s where the neocons are.
Ann Wright, CommonDreams.org, May 27, 2010
By the time you read this, we will be on the high seas of the Mediterranean (we hope the seas will not be too high).
Our two U.S. flagged Free Gaza boats, will join two other passenger ships, a 600 passenger ship from Turkey sponsored by the Turkish humanitarian organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH) and a 50 passenger ship from Athens sponsored by the European Campaign Against the Siege and the Greek/Swedish Ships to Gaza campaign, to sail to the shores of Gaza to break the Israeli naval blockade of the 1.5 million citizens in Gaza.
Military psy-ops took over operation after intelligence project failed to take off
Steve Watson, Prisonplanet.com
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east.
The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.
Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.
That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.
However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:
The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.
“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.
This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.
As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.
IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.
IntelCenter was also caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.
Could the CIA group of “dark skinned actors” have been behind the infamous December 2001 “Fat nosed” Bin Laden video, that was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?
The tape featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong. This Osama also used the wrong hand to write with and wore gold rings, a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.
Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin Laden, the CIA stood by it and declared it to be the official “9/11 confession video”.
The latest revelations also shed light on another past Bin Laden release – a tape in which he ludicrously declared himself in league with Saddam Hussein in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
The notion that the CIA project was taken over and drastically improved by the Pentagon at some point after 2003 jives with the improvement in quality of Bin Laden videos in later years. Most notably the video that was released immediately ahead of the 2004 election, and it’s digitally manipulated duplicate from 2007, in which Bin Laden appeared to have a dyed beard.
Shouldn’t the world welcome the actions of two significant, responsible, democratic, and rational states to intervene and help check the foolishnesses of decades of US policy on Iran?
Graham E. Fuller, The Christian Science Monitor, May 24, 2010
Washington
If Washington thinks it now faces complications on getting United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran, that’s not the half of it. A greater obstacle is the subtle change introduced into international power relationships by the actions of Brazil and Turkey that has accompanied it.
These two medium-size powers, Brazil and Turkey, have just challenged the guiding hand of Washington in determining nuclear strategy towards Iran. They undertook their own initiative to persuade Iran to accede to a deal on the handling of nuclear fuel issues. Not only was that initiative entirely independent, it moved ahead in the face of fairly crude American warnings to both states not to contemplate it – even though it closely paralleled one offered to Iran last year that fell through, mainly due to Iranian maneuvering and its fundamental distrust of Washington’s intent and blustering style.
By Jeremy R. Hammond, World Policy Journal, May 25, 2010
This article was originally published at the Palestine Chronicle.
There is a general perception that the reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has continued for so long is because it is extremely complex. Nothing could be further from the truth. Placed in historical context, understanding the root cause of the conflict is simple, and in doing so, the solution becomes apparent.
During the late 1800s, a movement known as Zionism arose to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, then a territory under the Ottoman Empire. As a result of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and Great Britain and France conspired to divide the territorial spoils of war between themselves. The British became the occupying power of Palestine. The League of Nations issued a mandate effectively recognizing Great Britain as such.
By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, May 25, 2010
Israel negotiated with South Africa for the sale of nuclear-armed missiles to the apartheid regime in the 1970s, according to a book published today. The revelation has surfaced at an inconvenient time for Washington as it campaigns for increased sanctions against Iran over Tehran’s own nuclear program.
The new book, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with apartheid South Africa,” was written by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the senior editor at Foreign Affairs, a publication oriented to the American foreign policy establishment. It has provided the first documentary evidence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. These documents also demonstrate that the Zionist state was prepared to sell these weapons to a pariah regime that had engaged in repeated military attacks on its neighbors, while oppressing and waging unceasing state violence against its own black majority population.
Peace and Justice Post 
Terrorism — Cause and Effect
May 29, 2010Jack A. Smith, Antiwar.com, May 29, 2010
“Terrorists” and “terrorism” have become Washington’s monomania since 9/11, guiding the foreign/military policies of the American superstate and holding its population in thrall.
“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term,” President Barack Obama said April 11, is the possibility that terrorists might obtain a nuclear weapon. The second biggest threat to world history’s mightiest military state, it goes without saying, are terrorists without nuclear weapons but armed with box-cutters, rifles or homemade explosives.
It’s “terrorism” 24/7 in the United States — the product of a conscious effort by the Bush Administration to keep the American people in the constant clutches of existential fear, in large part to justify launching endless aggressive wars. Anything goes if the target is said to be “terrorism,” as long as the Pentagon’s violence takes place in smaller, weaker countries usually populated by non-Europeans.
Continues >>
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Tags:1991 Gulf War, Bush-Obama anti-terrorism policy, Iraq war, Jack A. Smith, Obma and Afghan war, Palestine, Pentagon’s violence, President Obama and Iran, terrorism and terrorists, US dominance over Mideast regimes, US threats against iran
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