KG13 http://kahlila.posterous.com Most recent posts at KG13 posterous.com Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:41:00 -0800 A personal and political history of Zionism in Einstein's words http://kahlila.posterous.com/a-personal-and-political-history-of-zionism-i http://kahlila.posterous.com/a-personal-and-political-history-of-zionism-i

This is a chronology starting with a summing up of medieval anti-Semitism and finishing in 1955, when Einstein died. The words are his, from letters and speeches. His views changed often, with events, but in the end he bequeathed his estate to the Hebrew University.

He was as much pro-Jew (even though an atheist) as he was anti-war. The collection of historical pix used to illustrate the story is fantastic. The sequence of letters and statements places Einstein’s famous and much-quoted anti-Israel letter to the NYT in context and shows that in general he supported Israel.

 


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Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:29:00 -0800 TV journalists as mouthpieces for Homeland Security http://kahlila.posterous.com/tv-journalists-as-mouthpieces-for-homeland-se http://kahlila.posterous.com/tv-journalists-as-mouthpieces-for-homeland-se

Every column of Greenwald's is a tour de force. Here he takes apart the thinking of American TV journos who shill for the government and all spout the same unexamined line that "Assange = Saddam".

The merger of journalists and government officials

The merger of journalists and government officials
Over the last month, I've done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists.  There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, "Assange = Saddam" script.  So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a "high-tech Terrorist,") that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it.  It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003.

It's not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class:  that's what makes them establishment journalists.  But even knowing that, it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist -- on MSNBC with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times' John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend -- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures.  They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles.  I'm not complaining here -- Yellin was perfectly fair and gave me ample time -- but merely observing how inseparable are most American journalists from the political officials they "cover."

If one thinks about it, there's something quite surreal about sitting there listening to a CNN anchor and her fellow CNN employee angrily proclaim that Julian Assange is a "terrorist" and a "criminal" when the CNN employee doing that is  . . . . George W. Bush's Homeland Security and Terrorism adviser.  Fran Townsend was a high-level national security official for a President who destroyed another nation with an illegal, lie-fueled military attack that killed well over 100,000 innocent people, created a worldwide torture regime, illegally spied on his own citizens without warrants, disappeared people to CIA "black sites," and erected a due-process-free gulag where scores of knowingly innocent people were put in cages for years.  Julian Assange never did any of those things, or anything like them.  But it's Assange who is the "terrorist" and the "criminal."  

Do you think Jessica Yellin would ever dare speak as scornfully and derisively about George Bush or his top officials as she does about Assange?  Of course not.  Instead, CNN quickly hires Bush's Homeland Security Adviser who then becomes Yellin's colleague and partner in demonizing Assange as a "terrorist."  Or consider the theme that framed last night's segment:  Assange is profiting off classified information by writing a book!   Beyond the examples I gave, Bob Woodward has become a very rich man by writing book after book filled with classified information about America's wars which his sources were not authorized to give him.  Would Yellin ever in a million years dare lash out at Bob Woodward the way she did Assange?  To ask the question is to answer it (see here as CNN's legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin is completely befuddled in the middle of his anti-WikiLeaks rant when asked by a guest, Clay Shirky, to differentiate what Woodward continuously does from what Assange is doing).

Read more at www.salon.com

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Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:21:00 -0800 In solitary, and how it breaks spirits http://kahlila.posterous.com/in-solitary-and-how-it-breaks-spirits http://kahlila.posterous.com/in-solitary-and-how-it-breaks-spirits

A comprehensive study of solitary confinement - how it affects prisoners and, towards the end, why it is used a lot in the US punishment system (including Gitmo).
Skim the first section about experiments with rhesus monkeys; that is actually the least interesting part.
The article includes powerful quotes from hostages such as Terry Anderson (journo held by Hezbollah), direct accounts of prisoners in the US system and psychiatrists' views.

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.
Read more at www.newyorker.com

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Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:29:00 -0800 Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency - from them this time, not us http://kahlila.posterous.com/julian-assanges-mission-for-total-transparenc http://kahlila.posterous.com/julian-assanges-mission-for-total-transparenc

The article (published in June) is a tour de force. Eighteen pages printed out, but I coudn't put it down. Below are a few cuts from it.

Amplify’d from www.newyorker.com
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, oversees a populist intelligence network. Digitally altered photograph by Phillip Toledano.

Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”

At around six in the evening, Assange got up from his spot at the table. He was holding a hard drive containing Project B. The video—excerpts of running footage captured by a camera mounted on the Apache—depicts soldiers conducting an operation in eastern Baghdad, not long after the surge began. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters has sought for three years to obtain the video from the Army, without success. Assange would not identify his source, saying only that the person was unhappy about the attack. The video was digitally encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack. Assange, a cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file was “moderately difficult.”

The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.

Assange was the sole decision-maker, and it was possible to leave the house at night and come back after sunrise and see him in the same place, working. (“I spent two months in one room in Paris once without leaving,” he said. “People were handing me food.”) He spoke to the team in shorthand—“I need the conversion stuff,” or “Make sure that credit-card donations are acceptable”—all the while resolving flareups with the overworked volunteers. To keep track of who was doing what, Gonggrijp and another activist maintained a workflow chart with yellow Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets. Elsewhere, people were translating the video’s subtitles into various languages, or making sure that servers wouldn’t crash from the traffic that was expected after the video was posted. Assange wanted the families of the Iraqis who had died in the attack to be contacted, to prepare them for the inevitable media attention, and to gather additional information. In conjunction with Iceland’s national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. “I have taken control,” he wrote, without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.” The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.”

Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state’s reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (“How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he later wrote.) He was convinced that “look/see” hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coöperate. “When a judge says, ‘The prisoner shall now rise,’ and no one else in the room stands—that is a test of character,” he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Assange’s only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”

Read more at www.newyorker.com

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Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:27:00 -0800 Why we need to fight censorship and authority as a matter of priority http://kahlila.posterous.com/why-we-need-to-fight-censorship-and-authority http://kahlila.posterous.com/why-we-need-to-fight-censorship-and-authority

The Australian government has been trying to put an internet filter in place to stop certain sites being seen here.
The purpose of it ostensibly is to protect children from porn and sexual predators, but the government wouldn't spell out what exactly was on it, and it was WikiLeaks which revealed that info early last year.
WikiLeaks itself was on the list of banned sites, although it has been removed this week.
Also banned were some poker sites, YouTube links, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

I personally would never trust authorities to censor the internet, and the revelations since last Sunday have reinforced in my mind the need to fight government secrecy as much as we do surveillance.

Some of my workmates still strongly support the idea of a filter.
They regard themselves as Labor and progressive, and feel it would be an advance.
Although I work on a newspaper and we're running a lot of stories about WikiLeaks, which was founded by an Australian, I think they mostly have nothing more than a vague admiration for WikiLeaks and no sense of connection with Julian Assange.
That, on the whole, is what working in the system does to people.
We're broadly in the same field as him but those of us who are paid by corporations are in a permanent state of anaesthesia.

_______

Text below the pic lifted from this article on the Australian ABC website

 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange attends Swedish seminar in Stockholm on August 14, 2010 (File image: Reuters)

There is precious little evidence available in the public domain, though the few details circulating make me extremely sceptical of both the rape (which seems 100 per cent false) and molestation charges against Assange. More on that in a minute. But for the wild-eyed, spittle-flecked conspiracists bloggers - and Assange himself - the charges reeked of a U.S. government plot. And sure, one only need to read the Church Commission report to realize that such dirty tricks have a long pedigree in American intelligence circles. But even a cursory look at the case would suggest that while it appears that Assange's name is being dragged through the mud, it isn't by the CIA.

But the speed with which the conspiracy theories spread throughout the moronosphere was enough for The New York Times London correspondent, the terrific John Burns, to produce an article headlined, "Plotting doubted in Wikileaks case". That would be the Pentagon/CIA plotting to destroy Assange, obviously. Assuming that Assange knew the identity of his accusers when contacted by prosecutors, he nevertheless told any reporter within earshot that "we have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us. And I have also been warned about sex traps." After expressing scepticism that it was an American intelligence job, Harpers magazine nevertheless warned that "as this incident makes clear, the war on WikiLeaks will be fought with unconventional tools and those following the story are advised to accept nothing at face value."

Amazingly, the bumbling fools in American intelligence managed to flip Anna Ardin, the left-wing feminist (often described in the Swedish blogosphere as a "radical feminist") spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden's Social Democratic Party (she is not, as I have seen written, a "Christian Democrat"). If any of these sub literate bloggers knew anything about the kristen vänster (but why should you know anything at all, when a simple, ideology-validating conspiracy is so much more satisfying?), they would probably have guessed that Assange's accuser was, as is common in Sweden, operating off of a very broad definition of rape and "sexual molestation."

If any of these bozos did twenty minutes of research, they might have found Ardin's blog - "my feminist reflections and comments on animal rights, Swedish politics and Cuba from a political scientist, Christian left and long distance runner" - and read her post, with the help of a Scandinavian comrade or Google Translate, "Våldtäkt en del av mäns makt" - rape [is] a part of men's power. Or they would have seen this article from Ardin's days at Uppsala University, where she, in her role as some sort of equality watchdog, denounced the tradition of singing ribald student songs, which included "references to genitalia and serious sexual content," as "offensive and stereotypical." She is, in other words, rather sensitive on gender issues. Or this blog post on how one can exact "legal revenge" on men who have been "unfaithful." According to The Guardian, sources close to the investigation claim that she filed a complaint because Assange didn't wear a condom during sex. So the boring truth is that Assange didn't come up against a CIA conspiracy, but the rather broad Swedish conception of what constitutes a sexual crime.

If you, like many of the conspiracists, are confused as to how the Swedish authorities could issue and then, in less than 24 hours, withdraw a warrant for Assange's arrest, then you don't know the Swedish authorities. Just ask the families of Anna Lindh and Olaf Palme for details. Indeed, when one prosecutor overruled the conclusions of another, more junior, prosecutor, she explained to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that "My decision doesn't mean that her decision was wrong." And to Aftonbladet, she dug in her heels: "That I changed the decision doesn't mean that her decision was wrong." Translation? Amateur hour at the prosecutor's office.

Michael C. Moynihan is senior editor at Reason magazine and Reason.com, where this first appeared.

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Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:00:00 -0800 Obama, the shabbos goy http://kahlila.posterous.com/obama-the-shabbos-goy http://kahlila.posterous.com/obama-the-shabbos-goy

V fine writing from Christopher Hitchens, uncompromising on the attitude of Israel's right wing to peace overtures from the US. Obama's role is neatly summarised in this situation as that of "the shabbos goy".

US President Barack Obama (L) makes remarks to the press with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Click image to expand.

The mathematics of the situation must be evident even to the meanest intelligence. In order for any talk of a two-state outcome to be even slightly realistic, there needs to be territory on which the second state can be built, or on which the other nation living in Palestine can govern itself. The aim of the extreme Israeli theocratic and chauvinist parties is plain and undisguised: Annex enough land to make this solution impossible, and either expel or repress the unwanted people. The policy of Netanyahu is likewise easy to read: Run out the clock by demanding concessions for something he has already agreed to in principle, appease the ultras he has appointed to his own government, and wait for a chance to blame Palestinian reaction for the inevitable failure.

The only mystery is this: Why does the United States acquiesce so wretchedly in its own disgrace at the hands of a virtual client state? A soft version of Rabbi Yosef's contemptuous view of the gentiles is the old concept of the shabbos goy: the non-Jew who is paid a trifling fee to turn out the lights or turn on the stove, or whatever else is needful to get around the more annoying regulations of the Sabbath. How the old buzzard must cackle when he sees the gentiles actually volunteering a bribe to do the lowly work! And lowly it is, involving the tearing-up of international law and U.N. resolutions and election promises, and the further dispossession and eviction of a people to whom we gave our word. This craven impotence will be noticed elsewhere, and by some very undesirable persons, and we will most certainly be made to regret it. For now, though, the shame.

Read more at www.slate.com

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Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:56:00 -0700 Killing the messenger and anyone who questions the US's mission and methods http://kahlila.posterous.com/killing-the-messenger-and-anyone-who-question http://kahlila.posterous.com/killing-the-messenger-and-anyone-who-question

Putting the media coverage of the latest Wikileaks revelations in perspective - Greenwald compares the angles taken by major papers and news sites around the word with that of the NYT, which avoided the issue of torture. Avoided even the word "torture". As he says at the end, "that's what makes it 'establishment media' ".

Glenn Greenwald

BBC:

To supplement my post yesterday about The New York Times' government-subservient coverage of the WikiLeaked documents regarding the war that newspaper played such a vital role in enabling, consider -- beyond the NYT's sleazy, sideshow-smears against Julian Assange -- the vast disparity between how newspapers around the world and The New York Times reported on a key revelation from these documents:  namely, that the U.S. systematically and pursuant to official policy ignored widespread detainee abuse and torture by Iraqi police and military (up to and including murders).  In fact, American conduct goes beyond mere indifference into active complicity, as The Guardian today reports that "fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks."

The difference in how (a) the NYT "reported on" -- i.e., whitewashed -- these horrific, incriminating revelations about the U.S. and (b) the rest of the world media reported on it, could not be more vast.  Again, even Politico understood its significance, as this was the first line of its article:  "Newly released Iraq war documents paint a devastating portrait of apparent U.S. indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army, raising new questions about the Obama administration's plans to transfer the nation's security operations to Iraqi units."  But the NYT in its headline chose to venerate the superiority of American detainee treatment, while barely mentioning one of the most critical revelations from this leak.

Similarly, newspapers around the world heavily covered the fact that the U.N. chief investigator for torture called on the Obama administration to formally investigate this complicity in Iraqi abuse, pointing out that "if leaked US files on the Iraq conflict point to clear violations of the UN convention against torture, Barack Obama's administration has a clear obligation to investigate them," and that "under the conventions on human rights there is an obligation for states to criminalise every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse."   Today, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister called on the British Government to fulfill that obligation by formally investigating the role British troops might have played in "the allegations of killings, torture and abuse in Iraq."

The notion that the Obama administration not only should -- but must -- investigate the role its military played in enabling this widespread, stomach-turning torture and abuse in Iraq is simply suppressed in American political discourse, most of all by the newspaper which played the leading role in enabling the attack on that country in the first place.  It's not hard to see why.  The last thing American political and media elites in general want is a discussion of the legal obligations to investigate torture and bring the torturers to legal account, and the last thing which enablers of the Iraq War specifically want is a focus on how we not only allowed but participated in the very human rights abuses which we claimed (and still claim) our invasion would stop.

ABC NewsDiane Sawyer demands to know whether WikiLeaks -- but not the U.S. Government officials responsible for perpetrating and sanctioning torture in Iraq -- will be arrested.   To paraphrase that exchange:

WikiLeaks documentsThere was mass torture, abuse, government deceit, reckless civilian deaths in Iraq.

Diane SawyerWill WikiLeaks be arrested?

As I wrote yesterday:  "serving the Government's interests, siding with government and military officials, and attacking government critics is what they do. That's their role. That's what makes them the 'establishment media'."

Read more at www.salon.com

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Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:50:00 -0700 Intoxicating colour and pattern work http://kahlila.posterous.com/intoxicating-colour-and-pattern-work http://kahlila.posterous.com/intoxicating-colour-and-pattern-work

Ruby Door says she is influenced most strongly by peacocks and water. She has an obvious affinity with Klimt. Huge collections of work here strongly recommended to lovers of colour, pattern and decorative art.

She's also on Flickr at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubydoor/sets/



Amplify’d from ruby-door.blogspot.com

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Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:24:00 -0700 Aid flotilla (New York version) aims to free Hebron for the Jews http://kahlila.posterous.com/aid-flotilla-new-york-version-aims-to-free-he http://kahlila.posterous.com/aid-flotilla-new-york-version-aims-to-free-he

Given that this event is being held to raise funds for the conquest of an Arab area - particularly given the theme and imagery it has chosen - are they not inviting international terrorists to make a landing and shoot nine passengers dead?

Amplify’d from mondoweiss.net
hebronflotilla

JEWISH COMMUNITY OF HEBRON TO HOST NYC FUNDRAISER
- CONTINUED BUILDING CELEBRATED IN JUDEA & SAMARIA (WEST BANK)
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NEW YORK, October 20, 2010 – The Hebron Fund announced today they would host a fundraiser on Tuesday November 16th at 6 PM aboard a ship holding 1000 people. The event is entitled “The Hebron Aid Flotilla.” The boat will leave from Pier 59 at Chelsea Piers.

The Hebron Fund Annual dinner, which last year was held in Citi Field stadium amidst much controversy and protest, takes on special significance this year as many are celebrating the continued construction of Jewish settlements, after Israeli Prime Minister bowed to world pressure and stopped building temporarily.

“We are thrilled at the expansion of Jewish life in all areas of the so called West Bank and we decry the anti-Semitic attempts to curb that expansion. After the world absurdly condemned Israel for a boarding a terrorist flotilla, we decided to hold our fundraiser on a ship. Our flotilla will support peace and life!”

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Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:25:00 -0700 Guantanamo Bay from the inside (as described by David Hicks) http://kahlila.posterous.com/guantanamo-bay-from-the-inside-as-described-b http://kahlila.posterous.com/guantanamo-bay-from-the-inside-as-described-b

Three excerpts from a book that will be must reading for those interested in Guantanamo Bay . . .

"I first witnessed the IRF (Instant Reaction Force) team a day or two after my arrival. An MP (military policeman) stopped outside the cage of an Afghani, my closest neighbour at the time.
"He was the detainee with the prosthetic limb, who had been on the two ships with me. The MP demanded to know what the Afghani had scratched into the cement. He had not scratched anything and could not even speak or understand English.
"I heard the MP read, Osama will save us. The detainee had no idea what the guard was on about, yet the MP was furious when he did not respond. Ill teach you to resist, the MP threatened and stormed off.
"Suddenly six MPs in full riot gear formed a line outside his cage. The first one held a full-length shield. He entered the cage first, slamming the detainee, pinning him to the cement floor with the shield, while the others beat him in the torso and face.
"The last to enter the cage was a military dog handler with a large German shepherd. The dog was encouraged to bark and growl only centimetres from the Afghanis face while he was being beaten. In later cases, the dogs bit detainees."

David Hicks
THE long-awaited book by former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has been released.

It describes the journey of a young man who left Adelaide in 1999 and returned eight years later after being held a prisoner of war for more than five years by the US military.

Excerpt 3: Guantanamo

I awoke on a concrete slab with the sun in my face. I looked around and saw that I was in a cage made out of cyclone fencing, the same as the boundary fence around my old primary school. Internal fences divided the cage into ten enclosures, and I was in one of the corner-end cells. Around me, I saw five other concrete slabs with what looked like birdcages constructed on top. A fence covered in green shadecloth and topped with rolls of razor wire was wrapped around these six concrete slabs, able to house sixty unfortunate human beings. Hanging on the inside of this fence were signs saying, If you attempt escape, you will be shot, complete with a featureless person with a target for a head.

All around the outside of the shadecloth, civilian and uniformed personnel cleared and flattened grass and trees. They poured cement and assembled the wire cages, calling them blocks. There was nothing much else around us except guard towers boasting large, painted American flags and manned by armed marines.

My block was only the second to have been built, but that would change over time. As this prison grew out of the grass, more detainees, as they liked to call us, rather than POWs, arrived. About a month later, around three hundred and sixty of us lived in these outdoor enclosures. They were open to the wind, sun, dust and rain and offered no respite. The local wildlife was being disturbed as their homes were bulldozed to make room for the concrete blocks, and scorpions, snakes and nine-inch-long tarantulas tried to find shelter in what were now our enclosures.

My cage, like all the cages, was three steps wide by three steps long. I shared this space with two small buckets: one to drink out of, the other to use as a toilet. There was an isomat (a five-millimetre-thin foam mat), a towel, a sheet, a bottle of shampoo that smelt like industrial cleaner, a bar of soap (I think), a toothbrush with three-quarters of the handle snapped off and a tube of toothpaste. When I held this tube upside down, even without squeezing, a white, smelly liquid oozed out until it was empty.

This bizarre operation was called Camp X-Ray. Our plane was the first to arrive on this barren part of the island, and we remained the only detainees for the first three or four days. We had been spaced apart because of the surplus of cages. Every hour of the day and night, we had to produce our wristband for inspection, as well as the end of our toothbrush, in case we had sharpened it into a weapon. These constant disturbances prevented us from sleeping. We were not allowed to talk, or even look around, and had to stare at the concrete between our legs while sitting upright on the ground. If we did lie flat on the concrete, we had to stare at a wooden covering a foot or so above our cages, which served as some type of roof. Apart from blocking the sun for about two hours around high noon, the roof offered no other benefit.

Sitting or lying in the middle of the cage, away from the sides, were the only two positions we were allowed to assume. We could not stand up unless ordered to, while the biggest sin was to touch the enclosing wire. If we transgressed any of these rules, even if innocently looking about, we were dealt with by the IRF team, an acronym for Instant Reaction Force. The Military Police (MP) nicknamed this procedure being earthed or IRFed, because they would slam and beat us into the ground.

Read more at www.adelaidenow.com.au

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Sat, 09 Oct 2010 02:52:00 -0700 Remembering nine men murdered on the Mavi Marmara http://kahlila.posterous.com/remembering-nine-men-murdered-on-the-mavi-mar http://kahlila.posterous.com/remembering-nine-men-murdered-on-the-mavi-mar

1. Farrakhan Dogan - American, 2. Cengiz Okez , 3. Cengiz Sunqur , 4. Vahri Yildiz , 5. Necdet Yildirim , 6. Cetin Topkoogelo , 7. Kovdit Kililar , 8. Ali Heyder Bengi, 9. Ibrahim Bilgen

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Fri, 08 Oct 2010 09:28:00 -0700 Mogul with sights on the LA Times, which he sees as nauseatingly pro-Palestinian http://kahlila.posterous.com/mogul-with-sights-on-the-la-times-which-he-se http://kahlila.posterous.com/mogul-with-sights-on-the-la-times-which-he-se

This is a long but rewarding, even riveting, read about one of the world's richest men, who happens to be driven by power and ambition in the world of American and Israeli politics and the media. He is a close friend of the Clintons and the Democratic Party's largest private donor. He has also been negotiating to buy 50% of Al-Jazeera (though that is not mentioned in the article).

The Influencer

An entertainment mogul sets his sights on foreign policy.

Haim Saban, a

Haim Saban, a “former cartoon schlepper,” at home in Beverly Park. A major political donor, his greatest concern is to protect Israel. Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

Saban is not given to modest ambitions. Sixty-five years old, with a broad, dynamic countenance and slicked-down wavy black hair, he is known in Los Angeles as the man who brought the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Japan to America; the chairman and part owner of Univision, the nation’s leading Spanish-language media company; a staunch supporter of Israel (he has dual citizenship); and one of the largest individual donors to the Democratic Party. “Haim is a force of nature,” his friend Barry Meyer, the chairman and C.E.O. of Warner Bros., said. As a youth in Israel, Saban attended an agricultural boarding school where, he says, immigrants like his parents sent children they could not afford to feed. When he was expelled for being a troublemaker, he began attending a night school, where the principal told him, “You’re not cut out for academic studies; you’re cut out for making money.” The prediction seemed to come true in 2001, when Rupert Murdoch and Saban sold their joint venture, Fox Family Worldwide, to Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney: Saban made one and a half billion dollars. It was—and still is, he points out—the biggest cash transaction by an individual in the history of Hollywood. In March, Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.3 billion.

Perhaps Saban’s greatest asset over the years has been his remarkable ability to cultivate, charm, and manipulate people. “Being charming and analytical is quite a combination,” said Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, who has been a close friend of Saban’s for more than twenty years. “Charmers from time to time get lost.” But Saban, he continued, “isn’t floating in the air.” As a way of disguising his shrewdness and his mental agility, Saban is often self-deprecating; he describes himself as a “former cartoon schlepper.” English is one of his six languages, and his adversaries are sometimes disarmed by his linguistic stumbles, but he uses words very skillfully.

Although Saban has lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, he remains deeply connected to Israel. He watches Israeli news shows, via satellite, throughout the day, and is a devout fan of the Ha’gashash Ha’chiver (Pale Pathfinder), a popular Israeli comedy troupe that performed for decades. “He knows every sketch of theirs by heart, and he uses their language very often when he speaks Hebrew,” his friend Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, said. His hundred-year-old mother and his brother live in Israel, and Saban travels there frequently. Through the years, one of his closest advisers has always been an Israeli and, in business meetings with others on his team, the two would occasionally slip into a side conversation in Hebrew.

He remains keenly interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His “three ways to be influential in American politics,” he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party. That year, he also founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He considered buying The New Republic, but decided it wasn’t for him. He also tried to buy Time and Newsweek, but neither was available. He and his private-equity partners acquired Univision in 2007, and he has made repeated bids for the Los Angeles Times.

By far his most important relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2002, Saban donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential library, and he has given more than five million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy address at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, co-sponsored by the Saban Center. And last November Bill Clinton was a featured speaker at the Saban Forum, an annual conference attended by many high-level Israeli and U.S. government officials, which was held in Jerusalem. Ynon Kreiz, an Israeli who was the chairman and chief executive of a Saban company and Saban’s closest associate for many years, attended the conference, and when I commented that his former boss appeared to be positively smitten with Bill Clinton, Kreiz replied, grinning broadly, “No! No! I remember once Haim was talking to me on the phone, and he said in Hebrew, without changing his tone so Clinton would have no idea he was speaking about him, ‘The President of the United States, wearing his boxers, is coming down the stairs, and I am going to have to stop talking and go have breakfast with him.’ ”

Read more at www.newyorker.com

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Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:36:00 -0700 I wish I had HIS life . . . http://kahlila.posterous.com/i-wish-i-had-his-life http://kahlila.posterous.com/i-wish-i-had-his-life

Jaime Silva lives in Lisbon, Portugal, but crosses Europe every August, photographing buildings and cities

 

. . . like St Petersburg

 

Berlin

 

and Dresden

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Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:04:00 -0700 Jane Marie Cleveland in Flickr http://kahlila.posterous.com/jane-marie-cleveland-in-flickr http://kahlila.posterous.com/jane-marie-cleveland-in-flickr

Specialties: building details and the colour grey, so neglected in a photographic world inclined to pump up the volume on colour!

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Sat, 25 Sep 2010 05:38:00 -0700 Gregoire and friends in abandoned places http://kahlila.posterous.com/28926553 http://kahlila.posterous.com/28926553

Now if Amplify is doing what it promises to do you will see below these few words a do-up of pix of intriguing rooms long since abandoned by all but the dedicated urbex photographer. And below that will be a key with links to each item. And you will see it whether you're in Amplify, Posterous or Tumblr, with a note to Twitter and Facebook as well. Plus, I will see it in Delicious. All sounds marvellous, doesn't it, but Amplify has not delivered on its promises in recent days. Let's see.

Tableau features work of Flickr's JREJ (Gregoire Cachemaille, who lives in Berlin), Mobileohm (Paris) and friends.
Click here to see it large or even at 1225px

  See key below for individual pix on their Flickr pages

1. Red Room, 2. Theatre, Krampnitz, 3. New Sky Building, 4. Square Room,
5. [ Potters living room ], 6. Welcome to my Nightmare, 7. Der Sessel am Fenster, 8. The Watcher,

9. [ abandoned children's home .02 ], 10. executive, 11. nature at work, 12. in my bed, 13. united color of communism, 14. unarmed, 15. royal,
16. Working class luxus suite

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Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:33:00 -0700 Ordinary Americans tracked by Mossad - in America http://kahlila.posterous.com/ordinary-americans-tracked-by-mossad-in-ameri http://kahlila.posterous.com/ordinary-americans-tracked-by-mossad-in-ameri

Talk about "makes you think"! Americans had better wake up to who's running the show, but I fear they won't. This is a truly sinister situation.

Did you know that attending a meeting to organize a bake sale for new band uniforms can put you on a terrorist watch list? You don't have to join a peace group or protest oil drilling to be considered dangerous. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hired ITRR, the Instititute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Jerusalem based company owned by the Mossad and tied directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense to track "dissidents" and "activists." In the process, they managed to find the most dangerous terrorist organization of all, the governor's own non-profit organization, one supporting school funding initiatives. From ITTR's website:

"All of the information ITRR's staff creates is sent to its monitoring center in Jerusalem, where it is analyzed"

Governments, states, cities and even rural towns, believing they are participating in a Homeland Security initiative, have contracted with this and other organizations under foreign control, read "Israeli," tracking organizations as diverse as the Tea Party and the Sierra Club. Reports submitted by ITTR showed them spying on nearly every organization they could find, no matter how innocent, patriotic or public minded. Organizations tied to Jewish causes, however, managed, somehow, to slip under the radar.

Read more at sabbah.biz

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Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:35:00 -0700 Israelis determined to silence all dissent, especially from Palestinians http://kahlila.posterous.com/israelis-determined-to-silence-all-dissent-es http://kahlila.posterous.com/israelis-determined-to-silence-all-dissent-es

Harsh, unjust, outrageous treatment of a protester who they admit is not violent - but more of the world is watching now and that is what Israel really needs to worry about. Once its ludicrous justifications no longer stick, Jews will be looking at another tragedy in a long history of tragedies - this one brought upon them by no-one but themselves (or at least by their fascist leaders).

Military Prosecution Demands More Than Two Years Imprisonment for Bil’in’s Abdallah Abu Rahmah

The sentencing phase in the trial of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, began yesterday at the Ofer Military Court. Abu Rahmah was convicted of organizing illegal marches and of incitement last month, but cleared of the violence charges he was indicted for – stone-throwing and a vindictive arms-possession charge for collecting used tear-gas projectiles and displaying them.

The prosecution demanded Abu Rahmah will be sent to prison for a period exceeding two years, saying that as an organizer, a harsh sentence is required to serve as a deterrence not only for Abu Rahmah himself, but to others who may follow in his footsteps as well. This statement by the prosecution affirms the political motivation behind the indictment, and the concern raised by EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, that “the possible imprisonment of Mr Abu Rahma is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non violent manner.”

Read more at palsolidarity.org

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Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:07:00 -0700 In case "peace" doesn't quite work out http://kahlila.posterous.com/in-case-peace-doesnt-quite-work-out http://kahlila.posterous.com/in-case-peace-doesnt-quite-work-out

Business as usual between the world's biggest war-mongers who also pretend to be interested in peace.

Gov't officially approves deal to buy F-35 fighter jets
Photo by: Associated Press

Gov't officially approves deal to buy F-35 fighter jets

  09/16/2010 19:36

Deal worth $3b. will bring 20 of the American made stealth planes to Israel; PMO: The purchase will significantly strengthen Israel's military.  

A fifth-generation stealth jet, the F-35 is said to be capable of evading all radars and anti-aircraft missile systems.

“The F-35 will provide Israel with continued air superiority and help retain its qualitative military edge in the region,” Barak said last month. “The plane will provide the air force with improved capabilities in ensuring Israel’s security when operating near and far away.”

 

Read more at www.jpost.com

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Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:16:00 -0700 Truly gruesome stories http://kahlila.posterous.com/truly-gruesome-stories http://kahlila.posterous.com/truly-gruesome-stories

. . . with photos, here - of 11 abandoned hospitals and asylums in the US. One of them - Greystone - was the final home of Woody Guthrie, who developed Huntingdon's disease in later life.
At least one is still inhabited - by squatters.

 

It wasn’t until Charlie Lord, a young conscientious objector to WWII and a Quaker, was sent as punishment to work as an orderly at Byberry that the outside world was given a glimpse of what life was like there. Lord was appalled at the conditions he saw; most patients were naked and huddled together in barren concrete rooms, defecating on the floor, with no mental stimulation or humane treatment of any sort. Unable to convince reporters of what he saw, Lord snuck a Agfa camera into the hospital and took three roles of 36 exposure film, capturing some unbelievable scenes.  One of the first people who saw the images was Eleanor Roosevelt, who vowed to end the horrors at Byberry. Lord’s photos were published in the May 1946 edition of Life magazine and single handedly helped bring about reform to mental health institutions across the country.

Read more at www.nileguide.com

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Wed, 15 Sep 2010 05:12:00 -0700 High camp on the streets of New York http://kahlila.posterous.com/high-camp-on-the-streets-of-new-york http://kahlila.posterous.com/high-camp-on-the-streets-of-new-york

The stubbled dude (Seth) combines forces on this blog, Advanced Style, with an older woman (bottom pic) who wears shorts over leggings and yet comments on personal style. Which shows she has a great sense of humour! As does the blog. Not sure about the people they photograph though - they appear to take themselves VERY seriously.

 

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