The human rights crime in Gaza

Former US President, Jimmy Carter, writes:

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.

Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicised killing of a woman and her four children last week, this pattern had been illustrated by a report from B'Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organisation, which stated that 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians, and 25 were under 18 years of age.

On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable acts of terrorism, since most of the 13 victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants ...

Read on

Categories: refugees, palestine, israel, human-rights

Coleman co-sponsors troubling, under-the-radar domestic terrorism bill

"Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman is the Senate co-sponsor of a little-noticed domestic anti-terrorism bill that could carry us several steps closer to the good old days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (S.1959) is currently in committee after passing the House last year with no media scrutiny and no real debate by a 404-6 margin. The primary sponsor of the Senate bill is fellow Republican Susan Collins of Maine.

"The purpose of the measure is to create a permanent federal commission to scrutinize radicals and would-be terrorists, and to fund a series of university-based centers devoted to ferreting out and tracking the dangerous subversives among us. The latter would operate under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. A handful of critics from the blogosphere and the legal world have called out the measure on grounds that it its vague mandate amounts to criminalizing dissent. But even in the civil liberties demi-monde, it seems to be making little impact.

"One reason the bill has attracted so little attention: It's a thoroughly bipartisan push that actually originated in the Democratic party ...
Source

Thought Crime Bill

Alert Congress: Violent Radicalization & Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act fails to meet Constitutional Benchmarks

More at Huffington Post

Categories: terrorism, war-on-terror, surveillance, liberty, authoritarianism, usa

Sacred shrine of shamans threatened by real estate speculation in Brasilia

"In Brasília the local administration wants to build a luxurious neighborhood, called Northwest, in a place where indigenous groups of different ethnicities, like Fulni-ô/Thapuwia, Tuxá, Cariri-Xocó, had live [sic] for more than 30 years. The place is also the last area of Cerrado in the city, a native vegetation from the central part of Brasil. It´s a environmental sanctuary of great importance for the regional rivers and at the same time is also a place where indigenous from diferent parts of the country can stay while travelling trough Brasilia.

"The financial interests are huge and defended by those who were supposed to take care of a healty environmental and for cultural diversity, instead of being spokesman of the private interests that wants to destroy the Shamans Sanctuary, the indigenous and the environment. The governor José Roberto Arruda was involved in scandals in the Congress a few years ago and the vice governor Paulo Octávio, a senator, owner of the biggest land company, owner of a TV station and also owner of the Brasilia newspaper (Citizen Kaine), wants to destroy this history, using state propaganda that the Northwest Sector will be an ecological neighborhood, a model of modernity and progress when in fact it's a prove of the intolerance, prejudice and racism of the capitalist development that destroy the nature and victimizes native and black people, and all those who opposes this mega project ..."
IndyMedia

Categories: racism, brazil, environment, protest, activism, religion, shamanism

Olympic torch protests

"Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, warned Beijing yesterday that he would not allow Chinese officials to provide their own security for the Olympic torch when it is carried through Canberra this month.

"Speaking after complaints in London and Paris about the behaviour of the Chinese Olympic officials who wrestled with demonstrators and, at one point, appeared to take control of Downing Street, the Australian leader said that such incidents would not be repeated in his capital.

"'All security, repeat all security, is provided by Australians,' he told The Times during a visit to London.

"The Olympic torch is due to be carried through Canberra on April 24 and is likely to attract antiChinese demonstrations similar to those seen in London, Paris and this morning in San Francisco."
Times Online

Olympic torch route through Australian capital is changed

Olympic Torch Protests Hit San Francisco
Olympic torch protest draws international icons to San Francisco
Interactive: Olympic Torch relay route
2008 Summer Olympics torch relay, at Wikipedia

Coloradans Head To San Francisco For Torch Protest cbs4denver.com
Radio New Zealand - San Francisco Chronicle
all 7,674 news articles »

Categories: china, olympics, tibet, protest

Missing: monks who defied Beijing

By Nigel Morris

"They were the 15 youthful Tibetan monks – three still in their teens – who sparked a rebellion by daring to speak out against China's repression of their homeland.

"The group paraded peacefully down Barkhor Street in Lhasa old town on 10 March handing out leaflets, chanting pro-independence slogans and carrying the banned Tibetan flag. Their demand was that the Chinese government that has ruled Tibet since 1951 should ease a 'patriotic re-education' campaign which forced them to denounce the Dalai Lama and subjected them to government propaganda.

"The reaction of the authorities, desperate to snuff out the most serious uprising against Chinese rule for almost half a century, was rapid and brutal. The group was detained on the spot, with eyewitnesses reporting that several of the monks suffered severe beatings as they were arrested and taken away. They have not been seen since.

"Amnesty International called last night for their immediate release, along with all the other anti-Chinese demonstrators picked up in the past three weeks. The human rights organisation said they were at 'high risk of torture and other ill treatment' and called on supporters to write to Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, with copies to the Chinese embassy in London.

"Steve Ballinger, a UK spokesman for Amnesty, said: 'China's reaction to peaceful protests in Tibet and neighbouring provinces – detaining demonstrators, flooding the area with troops and reportedly using violence – does not bode well for the Olympics ...'"
The Independent


Monsters and Critics.com

Tibetan monks begin 3-day hunger strike
Mumbai Newsline, India - 11 hours ago
Mumbai, March 24 Cries of ‘Bodgyallo’ (Victory to Tibet) reverberated across Azad Maidan on Monday evening as around 600 Tibetan monks began their hunger ...
Tibetan monks protest ‘genocide’ The Statesman
Exiled Tibetans continue their peaceful demonstration Thaindian.com
After unrest, China likely to focus on Buddhism's future leaders Lanka Business Online
Independent - Reuters
all 2,748 news articles »

Gulf Times

Nepal police stop Tibetan protest in front of Chinese embassy visa ...
International Herald Tribune, France - 3 hours ago
AP KATMANDU, Nepal: Police in Nepal have stopped a protest by Tibetan refugees and monks in front of the Chinese embassy visa office, arresting 100 people. ...
Nepalese Police Beat Monks, Refugees in Tibetan Protest; 40 Arrested FOXNews
Nepal police stop Tibetan protest in front of Chinese embassy ... The Canadian Press
Nepali police break up Tibetan protests Radio Australia
Reuters
all 217 news articles »

Free Countries Must Defy Chinese Blackmail and Greet the Dalai Lama

Categories: dalai-lama, human-rights, amnesty-international, civil-rights, torture, china, tibet, direct-action, protest

Torture in our own backyards: The fight against supermax prisons

"Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.

"You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.

"You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must 'earn' two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling ...

"The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it 'extremely harsh.' 'The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to,' they stated, 'the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.'"
AlterNet

Categories: prison, human-rights, crime, law, legal, civil-rights, torture, usa

Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate ...

Read on at The Independent

Categories: bush, blair, usa, iraq, uk, war, war-on-terror, disinfo, disinformation

Text of Australian Prime Minister 'Sorry' speech

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology motion has been tabled in Parliament:

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

News on Rudd and sorry

Categories: australia, indigenous

Police America Act

"The so-called 'Protect America Act of 2007,' which we are calling the 'Police America Act,' allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contains virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans' private communications up to this administration."
ACLU factsheet

"The Protect America Act is a dangerous nationalistic law that tips the United States toward tyranny by providing legal protections for a massive program of electronic surveillance called Total Information Awareness."
Protect America - Act!



"With a partisan stalemate in the Senate holding up any revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the House today adopted a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act, legislation last August that expanded the surveillance powers of the Bush administration.

"Senate Democrats are unable to agree among themselves and with their GOP counterparts on proposed FISA amendments, specificially a Intelligence Committee proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have participated in President Bush's warrantess surveillance program."
CBS

"Right now members of Congress are trying to pass a law that would grant immunity to large telcos like AT&T that have been spying on their customers' private phone conversations and passing along what they've learned to the National Security Agency. The law, called the Protect America Act, would allow telephone and Internet providers to hand over all private data on their networks to the government -- without notifying their customers and without any court supervision of what amounts to mass wiretapping."
A Polite Message from the Surveillance State

Security Experts Say Protect America Act Leaves US Citizens' Privacy Unprotected

More news on this subject :: More online videos
Surveillance and subservience :: Protect America Act of 2007
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Categories: liberty, bush, authoritarianism, usa, privacy, civil+rights, 1984, homeland+security, surveillance

Facebook and its CIA connections

With friends like these ...

By Tom Hodgkinson

"I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as 'a social utility that connects you with the people around you'. But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

"And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

"Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ('I like Facebook,' said another friend. 'I got a shag out of it.') It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are 'popular', in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: 'How To Double Your Friends List.'

"It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: 'It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of.'

"All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

"Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

"Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him 'one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country'. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled 'The PayPal Mafia' by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: 'Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.' ...

"The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA ... In-Q-Tel, ... 'identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions'.

"The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,' defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. 'We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.' In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: 'She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.' ... "
Guardian Unlimited

"Keyhole, Inc was also an asset of In-Q-Tel until Google bought them in 2004, for an undisclosed sum. Keyhole does work in 'geospatial data visualization applications,' but we know them as the engine behind GoogleEarth, the greatest piece of software humankind has ever created."
Source

Information Operations Roadmap

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow (PDF)

Facebook - The CIA Conspiracy

In-Q-Tel at Wikipedia

Categories: liberty, privacy, 1984, surveillance, facebook

Bush further expands 'national security' snooping

"Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US's own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.

"Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation."
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

"President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

"The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored."
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

"The White House warned Democratic leaders yesterday that President Bush would veto a proposal to extend an expiring surveillance law by 30 days, saying that Congress should quickly approve a Senate bill favored by the Bush administration.

"The move is aimed at forcing Congress to renew and expand the Protect America Act -- which is due to expire at the end of the day Thursday -- and escalates a national security showdown between Democrats and the White House just before the president's annual State of the Union address."
Veto of Wiretap Measure Is Threatened

Categories: liberty, bush, authoritarianism, usa