Haaretz/Israel, Feb 15, 2010
By Associated Press 
The United States should break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and deliver badly needed supplies by sea, a U.S. congressman told Gaza students.
Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington state, also urged President Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy to visit the Hamas-ruled territory to get a firsthand look at the destruction caused by Israeli’s military offensive last year.
The Obama administration, like its predecessor, shuns Hamas because the
I slamic militant group refuses to recognize Israel or renounce violence.
Israel and Egypt have restricted access to Gaza since Hamas’ victory in parliament elections in 2006 and tightened the blockade after Hamas seized Gaza by force in 2007.
Israel allows humanitarian supplies and food into Gaza, but has kept out cement and other building supplies needed for reconstruction. Israel argues such materials could be diverted by Hamas for military use.
Baird, who has announced his retirement from Congress, told a group of Gaza students Sunday evening that the U.S. should not condone the blockade.
“We ought to bring roll-on, roll-off ships and roll them right to the beach and bring the relief supplies in, in our version of the Berlin airlift,” he said, adding that the supplies could be delivered to UN aid agencies.
On Saturday, the Palestinian Ma’an new agency, quoting the Strip’s Energy Authority, reported that Gaza’s sole power plant will cease functioning within hours due to a fuel shortage.
The Gaza Energy Authority wrote in a statement that while most of the power plant’s generators have been shut down, the remaining amount of fuel will only suffice to continue the plant’s electricity output for a few hours longer.
According to the Ma’an report, the Strip-based authority also claimed that the reduction of fuel transfers into Gaza continued, with the first week of February seeing 1,600 cubic meters of fuel entrring the costal enclave instead of the 2,200 cubic meters decided upon in an Israeli court decision.
Authorities appealed to international and humanitarian organizations, as well as Arab states and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to end the ongoing electricity deficit in Gaza.
Last week, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip inflicted “protracted suffering” on Palestinians.
He described the blockade as “unacceptable and counter-productive” to development and reconstruction in the war-torn territory.
By Cindy Sheehan, Information Clearing House, Feb 15, 2010
“The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” Jacques Ellul
On Super Bowl Sunday, the reason that I wrote my new book: Myth America: 20 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution, literally hit home.
Since it was the Holy Day of Obligation for our national religion of Football, I headed for my health club because I have always been a heretic. I arrived there a little before kick off, so the club was still occupied, but after kick-off it was deserted.
After my water workout and swim in the pool that I had all to myself, I headed to the hot tub which was occupied by another spa patron—an older gentleman named Bill whom seems to come to the club just to sit in the hot tub and chat. I get the feeling he is very lonely, and this following exchange may be why:
Bill: I think what you do disgraces your son, his memory and what he died for.
Cindy: Oh really? Since he was killed in an illegal and immoral war, I think this nation disgraced him.
Bill: But they attacked us on 9-11.
Cindy: Who attacked us on 9-11?
Bill: Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Cindy: Are you serious? If you believe the official story, 16 Saudi Arabians attacked us.
Bill: But Saddam killed his own people.
Cindy: We have killed over one million of Saddam’s “own people,” (at this point Cindy does “air quotes?).
Bill: But we didn’t mean to.
Cindy: (deep sigh), So what team are you rooting for this afternoon?
At which point, Bill scrambled out of the hot tub and headed for the showers.
My “friend” Bill has been thoroughly propagandized from the right—there was no use sitting in the hot tub with the jets blasting and trying to reason with a man who thinks that over one million people can be killed “accidentally.”
As Israeli soldiers we hang our heads in shame over last year’s attack on Gaza’s civilian population. Dialogue, not war, is needed
by Arik Diamant and David Zonsheine, The Guardian/UK, Feb 15, 2010
Civilians flee during last year’s war on Gaza. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
The Israeli media marked the one-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, the war on Gaza, almost as a celebration. The operation is recognised almost unanimously in Israel as a military triumph, a combat victory over one of Israel’s deadliest enemies: Hamas.
As combat soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), we have serious doubts about this conclusion, primarily because hardly any combat against Hamas took place during the operation. As soon as the operation started, Hamas went underground.
It’s a convenient argument for both governments, but the Binyam Mohamed ruling will not harm UK-US intelligence co-operation
The UK court ruling in the case of Binyam Mohamed demonstrates once more that judges on both sides of the Atlantic have had enough of governments hiding behind national security “secrets” to shield themselves from their many trespasses in the “war on terror”.
The court’s decision to publish a seven-paragraph summary of intelligence given to MI5 by the CIA has been met by the convenient, and wholly unbelievable, argument from British and American officials that the release could damage intelligence co-operation and sharing between the two allies.
The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, has argued that keeping the summary secret was vital to ensuring that the US continues to share vital intelligence with the British security services. The White House only played up this threat after the decision was handed down.
“We’re deeply disappointed with the court’s judgment because we shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said. “As we warned, the court’s judgment will complicate the confidentiality of our intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK, and it will have to factor into our decision-making going forward.”
There are two important things to remember when analysing Miliband and the White House’s arguments concerning the “intelligence” released on the treatment of Ethiopian-born British resident Binyam Mohamed while he was in US custody.
First, the seven-paragraph summary details that the interrogation practices endured by Mohamed while in American custody during 2002 constituted “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. It reveals nothing besides the fact the US and its proxies resorted to barbarous methods to extract information from captives they believed were al-Qaida terrorists.
Second, far more damning information on Mohamed’s torture was published last year by a US court. In November 2009, US District Judge Gladys Kessler granted the habeus corpus petition of Gitmo detainee Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed – another indicator of the cross-Atlantic return of the rule of law. The prisoner had been held indefinitely without charge at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, based partly on Mohamed’s confessions to US interrogators. There was one problem, however: US interrogators coerced Mohamed’s allegations against Mohammed through torture. “The government does not challenge Petitioner’s evidence of Binyam Mohamed’s abuse,” Kessler wrote in her decision. It’s important to note that the “abuse” Mohamed says he endured during his detention included having his genitals slashed by a razor.
In short order, the information the British court ordered released yesterday was neither intelligence nor secret. What it did show, however, was what we already knew. The US had systematically tortured detainees it deemed terrorists without due process, and British intelligence was complicit.
Therefore the probability the United States would jeopardise its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom over the Mohamed release is remote. It would demonstrate that the United States values protecting its lawless practices overseas more than the national security of its greatest ally. Imagine the public relations disaster if the British public learned the United States did not share intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack because of this judicial decision. Fortunately, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the US intelligence community, has already played down any break in the cross-Atlantic alliance. “This court decision creates additional challenges, but our two countries will remain united in our efforts to fight against violent extremist groups,” yesterday’s statement read.
So when the Milibands and White House apparatchiks of this world claim that exposing state crimes jeopardises the government’s ability to protect its citizens from terrorist atrocities, it’s important to remember the words of the radical political philosopher Michael Bakunin:
“There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state’.”
Torture is a crime; it is not a state secret.
Tamil women in a camp for displaced persons in Sri Lanka asking for news of their relatives who were taken away by the army, allegedly for rehabilitation.
The government has been keeping 11,000 people in a legal limbo for months. It’s time to identify who presents a genuine security threat and to release the rest.
(New York) – The Sri Lankan government should end its indefinite arbitrary detention of more than 11,000 people held in so-called rehabilitation centers and release those not being prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 30-page report, “Legal Limbo: The Uncertain Fate of Detained LTTE Suspects in Sri Lanka,” is based on interviews with the detainees’ relatives, humanitarian workers, and human rights advocates, among others. The Sri Lankan government has routinely violated the fundamental rights of the detainees, Human Rights Watch found. The government contends that the 11,000 detainees are former fighters or supporters of the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Willian Blum, Foreign Policy Journal, Feb 7, 2010
“The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction,” writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine’s international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. “Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.”[1]
Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to “provoke an overreaction”, or to “sow fear”? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria’s article.
West Bank, 13 February, 2010 (Pal Telegraph)- The Palestinian Ministry of Detainee Affairs said that the occupation authorities have stepped up recently abductions of Palestinians from various parts of the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, where more than 150 residents were abducted during the past two days.
Maidhc O Cathail, uruknet.info, Feb 12, 2010
Chutzpah, a Yiddish word meaning “shameless audacity,” has been famously defined as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Considering Israel’s increasingly outrageous behaviour, perhaps it’s time for a new definition. The one that springs to mind is “that quality enshrined in a state, which having induced its ‘allies’ into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, then urges them to attack Iran.”
Peace and Justice Post 
Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts
February 15, 2010By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post, February 14, 2010
When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.
The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.
Continues >>
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Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Bagram prison, CIA, Joby Warrick, Karen DeYoung, Obama, Pakistani govt and drone attacks, Somalia, targeted killings and no detentions
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