Afif Sarhan/Basra & Caroline Davies | May 11

The Observer - Two weeks ago, The Observer revealed how 17-year-old student Rand Abdel-Qader was beaten to death by her father after becoming infatuated with a British soldier in Basra. In this remarkable interview, Abdel-Qader Ali explains why he is unrepentant - and how police backed his actions.

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

New York | May 8

Reuters - A U.S. judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday to submit to the court a 2002 memo said to specify harsh interrogation methods used on suspected terrorists held abroad.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the memo was written by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and sent to the CIA in August 2002. The ACLU described the memo as "one of the most important torture documents still being withheld by the Bush administration."

In a copy of the order posted on the ACLU's Web site, Judge Alvin Hellerstein told the government to produce the memo so he can determine whether it should be made public as part of a lawsuit the ACLU and other organizations filed in June 2004 requesting records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.

Hellerstein has scheduled a review of the document for Monday.

"This memo authorized the CIA to use specific torture techniques -- including waterboarding," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU's national security project director, said in a statement.

May 8 | The Independent

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more. more after the jump

May 2

BBC - A cameraman from the al-Jazeera television station, freed from US detention in Guantanamo Bay, has arrived home in Sudan.

Sami al-Hajj had been in US custody for more than six years. He was detained in Afghanistan in 2001.

He arrived in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on a US military plane in the early hours of Friday morning.

After a 16-month hunger strike, Mr Hajj grimaced as he was carried off the plane by US military personnel.

"I have been so overwhelmed with happiness that I've been in tears," he said shortly after his arrival.

"I have every right to cry after I've survived these seven horrid years of humiliation, repression and injustice for no fault on my part apart from being a Muslim."

The lead story in April was the raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound in Texas. The story was that a woman (in this case a sixteen year old girl), called the authorities and claimed that she was being held against her will and was being forced to have sex with older men. The details from that point on are a little bit confusing. The truth is that this entire saga is, and continues to be, so confusing that the mainstream media has seemingly dropped it.

At the time of the first news reports, I received a call from a colleague in Texas. He stated at the time that he believed that the entire story was a hoax. He went on to say that he believed that there was no phone call from this “mystery woman” because she didn’t exist. That wasn’t all, he went on to say that the warrant wasn’t legal, and that the government had broken the law by allowing members of another religion to take custody of the church members (remember the buses with “First Baptist Church” on the sides?) and illegally searching the FLDS compound.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

Andrew Geoghegan

ABC.net.au - Almost 200 people arrested by Zimbabwe's security forces last week have been released, but there are reports of violence against Opposition supporters.

More than 200 people were rounded up by Zimbabwe police last week as part of a security crackdown by President Robert Mugabe.

Most of those arrested have now been released after the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change successfully applied for a court order for them to be freed or charged.

But there are indications that the crackdown is continuing as the country continues to wait for results of the presidential election.

Human Rights Watch says a brutal campaign of organised terror against perceived Opposition supporters has intensified.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

Thousands of children in southwest China have been sold into slavery like "cabbages", to work as labourers in more prosperous areas such as the booming southern province of Guangdong, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

China announced a nationwide crackdown on slavery and child labor last year after reports that hundreds of poor farmers, children and mentally disabled were forced to work in kilns and mines in Shanxi province and neighboring Henan.

"The bustling child labor market (in Sichuan province) was set up by the local chief foreman and his gang of 18 minor foremen, who each manage 50 to 100 child labourers," the Southern Metropolis Newspaper said.

Josh White | Guantanamo Bay, Cuba | April 29

Washington Post - The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials...

His testimony in a small, windowless room -- as a witness for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an alleged driver for Osama bin Laden -- offered a harsh insider's critique of how senior political officials have allegedly influenced the system created to try suspected terrorists outside existing military and civilian courts.

Davis's claims, which the Pentagon has previously denied, were aired here as the Supreme Court nears a decision on whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that laid the legal foundation for these hearings violates the Constitution by barring any of the approximately 275 remaining Guantanamo Bay prisoners from forcing a civilian judicial review of their detention.

Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."

WIlliam Glaberson | April 26

IHT - Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.

But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Hamdan, already the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has essentially been driven insane by solitary confinement in a tiny cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo "boil his mind.""He will shout at us," said his military defense lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer. "He will bang his fists on the table."

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo's climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for insanity. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo.

One would have to strain to be shocked that a racist ad is finding its way out of the bowels of conservativism in North Carolina. For political observers from the 1980s will remember that Senator Jesse Helms--an early sign of the shift of racially conservative whites in the South from their ancestral home in the Democratic Party to the GOP--was a master of using divisive tactics to undermine his African-American opponent for the U.S. Senate (not to mention white opponents such as Governor Jim Hunt, too).

Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, recalled this unsavory record upon Helms' retirement in 2002:

Not a day goes by without mention of the phrase “tipping point”, and with good reason. Different variations of this phrase include “critical mass”, “precipice” and the ever popular “day of reckoning”. The truth is alarming when one considers how many times these phrases are used, and used correctly. Our nation and the World are facing challenges that need to be addressed, and addressed as swiftly as possible. The human race can no longer pass off the responsibility of meeting challenges by doing nothing while we put the onus of problem solving onto our children and grandchildren. The time of band-aids and temporary short term fixes in regard to our most pressing problems is just about over. This planet is poised to reap the rewards that have come about from choosing half measures and politically acceptable “solutions” that are not solutions at all, but rather compromises expressly designed to placate the people, while protecting political, economic or religious interests.

China appeared to bend to international pressure on Friday as the government announced it would meet with envoys of the Dalai Lama, an unexpected shift that comes as violent Tibetan demonstrations in western China have threatened to cast a pall over the Beijing Olympics in August.

China’s announcement, made through the country’s official news agency, provided few details about the shape or substance of the talks but said the new discussions would commence “in the coming days.” The breakthrough comes as Chinese officials have pivoted this week and moved to tamp down the domestic nationalist anger unleashed by the Tibetan crisis and by the protests at the international Olympic torch relay.

From telegraph.uk

"The Olympic movement found itself at the centre of a new storm over China's human rights record yesterday as officials from Beijing 2008 and the International Olympic Committee faced fresh accusations of endorsing the country's controversial policies, this time over the civil war in Sudan."

"In what must be one of the more bizarre stories to hit the image of the Games, IOC president Jacques Rogge was forced to field awkward questions over the Chinese government's continued support for the Sudanese government despite the 2004 atrocities in Darfur."

IOC on defensive over China's 'genocide Games'

From the Christian Science Monitor

"Hammered by criticism over its own human rights record and perhaps worried about its reputation ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics, China signaled Tuesday that it might turn around a ship full of arms bound for its longtime ally, Zimbabwe."

"The ship had docked first at South Africa's main port, Durban, where South African dock workers refused to offload the nearly 3 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition and thousands of rounds of rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, all bound for the troubled regime of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia have also said the ship is not welcome in their ports."

(huliq.com) Human Rights Watch . . . reminds us that China ‘remains a one-party state that does not hold national elections, has no independent judiciary, leads the world in executions, aggressively censors the Internet, bans independent trade unions, and represses minorities such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians’. Social unrest arising from distress about housing, migration, political freedoms, poverty and other domestic issues is dealt with severely.

www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/18/china12270.htm

Moreover, in asserting that a country’s domestic politics are its own affair alone, China aims to prevent the international community from scrutinising its interactions abroad. But in joining the global community, China must realise that this is not how the world works today. We have moved beyond the 1950s. Decades of marching against the Bomb, of anti-colonialist and anti-apartheid campaigning, a string of anti-poverty events linked up across the globe, the coming together of civil activists from all over the world to work on poverty, the emergence of an international climate-change coalition, the wide-spread revulsion of the American invasion of Iraq, the creation of international agreements on blood diamonds and corporate corruption – these and other global movements demonstrate that citizens and states increasingly see events, wherever they take place, as interconnected.

The political situation in the United States is different at this particular time than in any other time that I have witnessed in my 57 years on this planet. This is the only time in my life that I can ever remember when the right and the left agree more with each other than the so-called “centrists’” of the GOP and the Democratic Party. Those that lean left, like myself, are afraid of losing their civil liberties, afraid of the corporate control of the mainstream media, afraid of the government’s surveillance of our personal activities, afraid of violations of the second amendment when it comes to gun ownership and are thoroughly disgusted with the governments clampdown on our 1st Amendment rights on free speech. When we see protesters tasered and sprayed with tear gas, hit by rubber bullets and clubbed, as in what happened at the G8 meetings in Washington, something is definitely wrong in this republic.

April 19

Independent - In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron

..The Israeli public was given an unflattering glimpse of military life in Hebron this year when a young lieutenant in the Kfir Brigade called Yaakov Gigi was given a 15-month jail sentence for taking five soldiers with him to hijack a Palestinian taxi, conduct what the Israeli media called a "rampage" in which one of the soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place, and then tried to lie his way out of it.

In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."

The Israeli military did not prosecute the soldier who had fired on the Palestinian, as opposed to Gigi. But the military insists "that the events that occurred within the Kfir Brigade are highly unusual".

But as the 22-year-old soldier, also in the Kfir Brigade, confirms in his testimony to Breaking the Silence, it seems that the event may not have been exceptional. Certainly, our interview tells us, he was "many times" in groups that commandeered taxis, seated the driver in the back, and told him to direct them to places "where they hate the Jews" in order to "make a balagan" – Hebrew for "big mess".

upi, rna, truthout - UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour came under fire by the lead lawyer for the Rwanda Tribunal (ICTR) after a recent interview Arbour did with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC. On the CBC website, Christopher Black made shocking allegations that the former Chief Prosecutor of the Rwanda Tribunal operated so as to shield certain powerful state actors involved. Furthermore he called Ms Arbour a "war criminal". There has been much speculation as to why Arbour was stepping down from the Human Rights post after only one term. Possibly the revelations of her actions on the Rwanda file contain the answer. There has been virtually no coverage of this important story in the mainstream Canadian media. Both Arbour and former General Romeo Dallaire, also implicated, are regarded as national heroes. Clearly it is an important story and is either true or it is not. Please help spread the word since truth is precious and lies are all around. Peace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide

Cultural genocide is a term used to describe the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political, military, religious, ideological, ethnical, or racial reasons.

Relevance to International Law

As early as 1933, Raphael Lemkin proposed a cultural component to genocide, which he called "vandalism".[1] However, the drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention dropped that concept from their consideration.[2] The legal definition of genocide was confined to acts of physical or biological destruction with intent to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or national group as such.[3]

I have been writing about the same things for years now. I have been writing against the loss of our freedoms, the draconian laws that have been enacted in order to “protect” us from people that “hate us for our freedom”, I have written about the corporations that have tied this nation to war and more war. Even though my message has been the same, I find that my writing has fallen on deaf ears as of late. In fact, my writing, because of my criticism of this phony two-party system that has led us to where we are now, I have been banned from OpEdNews.com, DailyKos.com.TPMMuckracker.com, and left me with a small sidebar on SmirkingChimp.com.

Eileen Sullivan | Washington | April 16

The Guardian - The federal government wants to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone who is arrested by a federal law enforcement agency. That would be a departure from the current practice of collecting samples only from convicted felons.

The government also wants to collect DNA samples from foreigners who are being detained, whether they have been charged or not. Justice Department spokesman Erik Albin says the DNA would be collected through a cheek swab.

Expanding the DNA database, known as CODIS, raises civil liberties concerns about the potential for misuse of such personal information, such as family ties and genetic conditions.