Chris Hedges - First They Come For the Muslims

Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Mehanna, a teacher at Alhuda Academy in Worcester, was convicted after an eight-week jury trial of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and providing material support to al-Qaida, as well as making false statements to officials investigating terrorism. His real “crime,” however, seems to be viewing and translating jihadi videos online, speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and refusing to become a government informant.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/first_they_come_for_the_muslims_20120416/

Paul Pillar - Netanyahu’s ‘King David’ Complex

Israeli hardliners and American neocons say U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same, meaning that if Israel bombs Iran, the United States should join in. But other observers say Washington must create some distance from Israel’s messianic Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

We have a comparative lull at the moment in what has been saturation attention to Iran and its nuclear program. The lull comes after the concentrated warmongering rhetoric associated with the recent visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the AIPAC conference in Washington, and before the opening in mid-April of the only channel offering a way out of the impasse associated with the Iranian nuclear issue: direct negotiations between Iran and the powers known as the P5+1.

It is a good time to reflect on how much the handling of this issue underscores the gulf between Israeli policies and U.S. interests. The gulf exists for two reasons. One is that the Netanyahu government’s policies reflect only a rightist slice of the Israeli political spectrum, with which many Israelis disagree and which is contrary to broader and longer-term interests of Israel itself.

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http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/02/netanyahus-king-david-complex/

Winslow Myers - From Israel, a Declaration of Interdependence

The fond foolishness—or was it?—of the Israeli graphic designer’s recent Youtube video declaring his love for the Iranian people and his pledge not to bomb Iran brought back the almost forgotten Christmas moment in the trenches of World War I, when soldiers on both the French and German sides put down their weapons and sang “Silent Night” together. Peace threatened to break out all up and down the lines until those pitiless realists on both sides, the generals, forced their minions to restart the interminable slaughter.

The Israeli’s video also brought back the memory of a powerful event thousands of us attended in 1984. To celebrate the achievements of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, my organization, Beyond War, had set up a live televised satellite “spacebridge” between Moscow and San Francisco. Large audiences in both places listened to the pleas of the two leaders of the IPPNW, Leonid Brezhnev’s personal physician Evgeny Chazov, and the distinguished Boston cardiologist Bernard Lown, for reconciliation between the Soviet and American nations.  Chazov played a recording of a healthily pulsating heart to underscore the reality that human hearts beat identically everywhere. The Moscow Boy’s Choir and the San Francisco Boy’s Choir sang—together.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/28-1

Pratap Chatterjee - Militarizing the Middle East: Arms Shipments Continue Despite Abuses

A mysterious ship laden with weapons is expected to dock in Port Said, Egypt, this week. The MV Schippersgracht left Southport in North Carolina, the Pentagon’s largest ammunition port, on March 3, 2012. The ship is on contract to the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command, which refuses to explain what weapons are on board or what the ultimate destination of the weapons are, claiming security concerns.

Data on the MV Schippersgracht shipment came from an investigative collaboration between Amnesty International, Transarms and the International Peace and Information Service (IPIS).

Brian Wood, Amnesty International’s head of arms control, raised the alarm: “This ship of shame should not be allowed to unload its dangerous cargo in Egypt, and there is a substantial risk that this is what it plans to do,” he said in an Amnesty press release.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/22-0

Sustained Attacks on Gaza: 15 Dead in Two Days

Up to 15 are now dead in what is said to be the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian flare-up in more than three years. Israeli strikes began on Friday when an air raid killed Zohair al-Qaisi, the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Gaza.

Al-Jazeera reports:

At least 14 Palestinians have been killed and a dozen others wounded, including children, in a series of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip, medical sources have said.

On Saturday an Israeli drone targetted a motorbike in Khan Younis, south of Gaza city, killing one person.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/10

US Continues Drone Strikes in Yemen

US and Yemini airstrikes beginning late Friday have killed at least 45 according to varying reports from the region. The US has increased its drone attacks in Yemen as tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced in recent violence there.

The Guardian reports:

At least 45 militants linked to al-Qaida, including a number of tribal leaders, have been killed by air strikes in south Yemen.

Twenty-five militants were killed in Bayda, about 166 miles south-east of the capital, Sana'a, on Friday, while 20 died at a base in the restive southern town of Jaar, residents told Reuters on Saturday. [...]

Working with the Yemeni authorities, the US has repeatedly used drones to attack militants from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/10-0

Senator McCain Wants to Wage War Against Syria

Republican US Senator John McCain, his party's nominee for president in 2008 and a perennial war hawk, urged US military intervention in Syria on Monday. On a speech from the Senate floor, McCain said the US should use its "full weight of air power" against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

"Providing military assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is necessary. But at this late hour, that alone cannot be sufficient to stop the slaughter and save innocent lives.The only realistic way to do so is with foreign air power." He added, "The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centers in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on Assad's forces."

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/06

Francis Boyle - Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam

Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America's manifest destiny to rule the world.

Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain - in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today- all in the name of securing America's so-called place in the sun.

And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy which is total nonsense.

For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind's parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.

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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28661

Robert Naiman - Judy Miller Alert! The New York Times is Lying About Iran's Nuclear Program

It's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is lying about allegations that said country is developing "weapons of mass destruction."

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil "), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective" is a lie.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/06-8

Renee Parsons - Israel's Nuclear History as US Troops Deploy to Drill

As the Obama Administration coordinates a global PR campaign of scare tactics for the upcoming attack on Iran, eerily reminiscent of the Bush Administration’s lies of WMD’s to justify its invasion of Iraq, it comes as no surprise that the US Congress has added its voice, enfeebled and corrupt as it is, in repayment for the Israel lobby’s $3 M during the 2010 election cycle, to ban any communication between US and Iran government officials. 
   
Intensifying the drums of war with over-the-top statements that Iran, with an inferior set of missiles and a vastly inadequate Navy, represents ‘the greatest threat to world peace” and that ‘the actions and policies of Iran threaten the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States” ignore the inconvenient reality that US intelligence has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons capacity in Iran.Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who needs to cut back on the coffee, recently told 60 Minutes that Iran has “reached a point where they can assemble a nuclear bomb in a year or less’ only to have Pentagon press secretary George Little set the record straight “we have no indication that Iran has made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon.”  

Read More:

http://trueblueprogressivereport.blogspot.com/2012/01/israels-nuclear-history-as-us-troops.html