Category: US

Posted on

UN School Bombed, 40 Killed – US calls for immediate cease fire

Israel crossed the line.

@KABOBFest A UN school in #gaza where people were taking shelter was just tank-shelled by Israel, killing 40 people there. http://tinyurl.com/777edx

@AJGaza US state department says it wants an “immediate” ceasefire in #Gaza, that is “durable, sustainable and not time limited”.

@tweetsfromgaza Israeli tanks fire on 2nd UN school killing and injuring dozens of refugees with nowhere else to go. #Gaza

RT: @syrianews: UN says it “gave the exact GPS co-ordinates” of the location of the UN school which Israel CHOSE to bomb

From the Guardian:

The UN, which said the school was clearly marked, said it was “strongly protesting these killings to the Israeli authorities and is calling for an immediate and impartial investigation”.

“Where it is found that international humanitarian law has been violated, those responsible must be held to account. Under international law, installations such as schools, health centres and UN facilities should be protected from attack. Well before the current fighting, the UN had given to the Israeli authorities the GPS co-ordinates of all its installations in Gaza, including Asma elementary school.”

Just prior to the announcement of the UN school massacre, the Israeli Consulate tweeted:

@IsraelConsulate New Post: How to End the Battle Successfully http://is.gd/eGKS #AskIsrael #Israel #Gaza

Bret Stephens writes in today’s Wall Street Journal on ways that Israel can achieve its military aims without imposing unnecessary hardship on the residents of Gaza.

…

Achieving this aim would not require Israel to take over large swaths of Gaza, but it would require an extended policy of smaller-scale counterterrorism operations, along the lines of the successful West Bank operations.

We shall have to wait and see which post conflict model is adopted, and how free an arm the US gives Israel to complete its balancing act, and whether international monitors will be involved as previously mentioned by Israel.

Khalid Mish’al, head of Hamas Political Bureau says in the Guardian:

“What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel’s dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.

Gaza enters 2009 just as it did 2008: under Israeli fire. Between January and February of last year 140 Gazans died in air strikes. And just before it embarked on its failed military assault on Lebanon in July 2006, Israel rained thousands of shells on Gaza, killing 240. From Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza today, the list of Israel’s crimes is long. The justifications change, but the reality is the same: colonial occupation, oppression, and never-ending injustice. If this is the “free world” whose “values” Israel is defending, as its foreign minister Tzipi Livni alleges, then we want nothing to do with it.

Israel’s leaders remain in the grip of confusion, unable to set clear goals for the attacks – from ousting the legitimately elected Hamas government and destroying its infrastructure, to stopping the rockets. As they fail to break Gaza’s resistance the benchmark has been lowered. Now they speak of weakening Hamas and limiting the resistance. But they will achieve neither. Gaza’s people are more united than ever, determined not to be terrorised into submission. Our fighters, armed with the justice of their cause, have already caused many casualties among the occupation army and will fight on to defend their land and people. Nothing can defeat our will to be free.

Once again, Washington and Europe have opted to aid and abet the jailer, occupier and aggressor, and to condemn its victims. We hoped Barack Obama would break with George Bush’s disastrous legacy but his start is not encouraging. While he swiftly moved to denounce the Mumbai attacks, he remains tongue-tied after 10 days of slaughter in Gaza. But my people are not alone. Millions of freedom-loving men and women stand by its struggle for justice and liberation – witness daily protests against Israeli aggression, not only in the Arab and Islamic region, but worldwide.

Israel will no doubt wreak untold destruction, death and suffering in Gaza. But it will meet the same fate in Gaza as it did in Lebanon. We will not be broken by siege and bombardment, and will never surrender to occupation.”

Posted on

Bush to visit apartheid state

Bush’s upcoming visit to Israel is unlikely to stimulate any relief for the collectively punished, long-suffering Palestinians, despite vague waffle by Olmert on illegal settlement evacuations. Israel has a political half nelson on the US, who are blinkered by pro-Israeli propaganda, who do not realise or do not care that they are co-conspirators in war crimes and heinous human rights abuses. For the uneducated, the Israelis are always the good guys and the Palestinians the bad. Nor do any of the Democrat presidential candidates offer any hope for change. The Israel First Zionist lobby is too strong – to speak of justice for Palestine would be electoral suicide. Why the presidential hopefuls speak of Israel as a democracy is mystifying – perhaps it is a reflection of the lack of real democracy in a country primarily driven and controlled by big money lobbies and corporations.

Jonathan Cook analyses the Barak Oslo offers and makes some chilling conclusions about Olmert’s present political plans toward those hapless people the apartheid State of Israel currently occupies and from whom it blithely and cynically continues to steal land:

In truth, Israel’s need for recognition as a Jewish state is proof that it is not a democratic state, but rather an ethnic state that needs to defend racist privilege through the gerrymandering of borders and population. But in practice Olmert may yet use the recognition test to back Abbas, a weak and unrepresentative Palestinian leader, into the very corner that Arafat avoided.

Before Annapolis, Livni declared: “It must be clear to everyone that the State of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people,” adding that Israel’s Palestinian citizens would have to abandon their claim for equality the moment the Palestinian leadership agreed to statehood on Israel’s terms.

Olmert framed the Annapolis negotiations in much the same way. It was about creating two nations, he said: “the State of Israel — the nation of the Jewish people; and the Palestinian state — the nation of the Palestinian people.”

The great fear, Olmert has repeatedly pointed out, is that the Palestinians may wake up one day and realize that, after the disappointments of Oslo and Camp David, Israel will never concede to them viable statehood. The better course, they may decide, is a South African-style struggle for one-person, one-vote in a single democratic state.

Olmert warned of this threat on another recent occasion: “The choice … is between a Jewish state on part of the Land of Israel, and a binational state on all of the Land of Israel.”

Faced with this danger, Olmert, like Sharon and Barak before him, has come to appreciate that Israel urgently needs to persuade Abbas to sign up to the two-state option. Not, of course, for two democratic, or even viable, states, but for a racist Jewish state alongside a Palestinian ghetto-state.

With Bush also wanting a two state solution by the end of his disastrous term of office, the future of Palestinians looks as usual, bleak.

Posted on

Repubes snapping at Doodoo

Doodoo is sinking fast in the estimation of his colleagues with rumbles of discontent threatening a storm of dissension. And such colourful language!

… Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, told CNN that he warned Rove last week that “The president is a young man and should think about his legacy.”

He should know history will not be kind unless he can come up with a plan that protects the troops and stabilizes the region,” Voinovich said he told Karl Rove, whom Bush dubbed “the architect” of his 2004 re-election.

Voinovich added that other Republicans are close to speaking out against the President’s current strategy.

“I won’t mention anyone’s name. But I have every reason to believe that the fur is going to start to fly, perhaps sooner than what they may have wanted.”

In private, Voinovich is more blunt, using a profanity to describe the White House’s handling of Iraq by charging the administration “F*ckeded up” the war.

Despite the endemic disability of conservative blinkerdom, his minions may soon be deserting in droves. Better late than never I guess.

Posted on

Doodoo rolling in doodoo

With the Dems of the US Congress in hot pursuit of the treasonous imbecile responsible for utterly debasing the office of the US presidency, our interest in current events in the United Stupids is tickled once more. Doodoo gets his soul mate and hatchet man Scotfree Libby’s sentence commuted – as Sen. Patrick Leahy puts it “His silence has been bought and paid for, and he would just take the fifth” if asked to testify by Congress in regard to the Plame investigation.

Will Fitzgerald reveal all that transpired in his interviews with Doodoo and Dirty Dick Cheney? will Doodoo’s former aides testify regardless of his telling invocation of executive privilege and admonishments in the matter of the political firings of federal attorneys?

Whether they do or not, even Blind Freddy should see that in a guilty manic reaction to the relentless exposure of his crooked connivances, Doodoo is running for cover faster than a dealer at a drug bust.

Posted on

Inherit the Family Jewels

Dirty CIA secrets from the 1970s are now available for download. Get ’em while they’re hot!

My motto is “The truth will always out” as opposed to the CIA’s hypocritical inscription inside the front of their lair “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Ironically the knowledge of the secret illegal activities revealed in the files may indeed contribute to freeing us – from that dark agent of the United Stupids’ profligate imperial colonialism itself.

Top Ten Most Interesting “Family Jewels”
Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007

1) Journalist surveillance – operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30)

2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)

3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program” (Sidney Gottlieb’s drug experiments) (p. 213)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)

7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)

8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)

9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591-93)

10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599-603)

Plus a bonus “Jewel”:
Warrantless wiretapping by CIA’s Division D (pp. 533-539)

Another stack of soiled linen is available here.

The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.