Amnesty slams flawed US penal system

Amnesty International has called attention to the US and its failing human rights record due to its use of flawed detention and execution systems.

On Friday, Amnesty International slammed the US for its indefinite detentions in Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, as well as its flawed capital punishment system, AFP reported.

"Scores of men remained in indefinite military detention in Guantanamo as [US] President [Barack] Obama's one-year deadline for closure of the facility there came and went," the report recently released by the body said.

The organization's annual global human rights report points to the execution of 46 people over the past year, in which the guilt of several of the defendants remained questionable. Some cases also included unclear proof of legal representation and mental impairment.

According to Amnesty International, of the 173 men currently detained at Guantanamo Bay, only three had been convicted under a military commission system, "which failed to meet international fair trial standards."

"Military commission proceedings were conducted in a handful of cases, and the only Guantanamo detainee so far transferred to the US mainland for prosecution in a federal court was tried and convicted,” the report added.

Upon taking office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to stop military commissions in order to close down the facility by 2010; however, this has not happened yet.

The organization accuses US authorities of also blocking efforts to “secure accountability and remedy for crimes under international law committed against detainees previously subjected to the USA's secret detention and rendition program.”

As for Afghanistan, the reports criticizes the US for holding “hundreds” at the US airbase in Bagram without due process and for subjecting some to “torture and ill-treatment, including prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures.”

The report further voiced concern over the “excessive force” used by US law enforcement. The use of Taser guns by police officers led to the death of some 45 people last year.

The country's health care system was also among the matters mentioned in the report. “Hundreds of women continue to die from preventable pregnancy-related complications,” as a result of a lack of proper health care coverage, the report added.

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http://www.presstv.ir/detail/179692.html

Jewish guerrillas told British: quit Palestine or die

Fighters were led by future Israeli premier Marcus Leroux A pamphlet warning Britons to leave the Middle East or face death has come to light in a stash of illicit propaganda.

The document does not hail from Basra or Baghdad, nor was it penned by the Islamists of al-Qaeda or the al-Mahdi Army. It was found in Haifa, about 60 years ago, and it was issued by the underground group led by Menachem Begin – the future Prime Minister of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The document, which surfaced at an auction house this week, is addressed to “the soldiers of the occupation army” and aimed at British soldiers serving in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, preceding the establishment of Israel in 1948. The print has faded and the paper has discoloured since it was unearthed from a grove of trees in Haifa in the summer of 1947. Yet the language and the concerns remain current.

Bombings and murders by underground groups, such as Begin’s Irgun, hastened the British withdrawal and the United Nations declaration that led to the founding of modern Israel.

Irgun propaganda targeted the British Army’s wavering morale, already dented by the bomb attack on the Mandate’s headquarters – the King David Hotel in Jerusalem – which killed 91 people.

In the document, Irgun tells British troops: “It is unavoidable that many Jewish soldiers and many British soldiers should fall. And it is only fair that these people know at least why they may be killed.”

It adds: “Most of you have been in this country for quite a long time. You have learned what the word ‘terrorist’ means, some of you may even have come into direct contact with them (and heartily desire not to repeat the experience). But what do you know about them? Why does a young man go underground?”

It then draws a parallel with what would have happened if, seven years earlier, Britain had been overrun by Nazi Germany. “Remember 1940. Then it seemed quite possible that your island country would be conquered and subjugated by Hitler hordes . . . what would you have done? Would you have gone underground?” The pamphlet says that the occupation is “illegal and immoral” and “parallel to the mass assassination of a whole people”, in language that echoes that used on a note pinned to the booby-trapped bodies of two British intelligence officers executed by Irgun that same summer.

The pamphlet came from a stash confiscated and burnt by cyptographers from the Royal Signals regiment. Corporal Raymond Smith found them buried in a secluded grove marked by a white Star of David and was ordered to destroy them, but took one as a memento. A collector acquired the document from Corporal Smith, and brought it to Mullock’s auctioneers in Shropshire.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, Mullock’s historical documents specialist, said the pamphlet was a remarkable find, which “ amounted to a manifesto for terrorist action”. He added: “It also raises the question as to who are ‘terrorists’ and who are ‘freedom fighters’. It’s a debate which raged through the troubles of Northern Ireland and continues in the Middle East.”

Begin’s Irgun set aside its differences with Haganah, a rival underground Jewish group led by David Ben Gurion – the first Prime Minister of Israel, who once likened Begin to Adolf Hitler.

Begin forged a political career as a hardliner, but, after becoming Prime Minister, signed the Camp David agreement with Egypt in 1979.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article4360655.ece

'The bloody Israeli sojourn in Gaza'

Controversial American Jewish scholar and specialist on the Middle East, Norman Finkelstein, says Israel committed massive atrocities in Gaza during the three-week war against Hamas militants.

The Terrorizing Truth About 9/11: It's Not A Matter of Keeping Secrets, But Maintaining a Grand Myth

The truth about 9/11 is slowly gaining the status of common knowledge, but it's been a real and frustrating decade-long struggle to set the historical record straight. The are still many people who can't believe that the Bush administration, and powerful decision-makers in the U.S. security apparatus could, first of all, pull off such a treacherous fraud, and second, that they were able to keep it a secret from other members of the U.S. government, the media, the American people, and the world for such a long period of time. Such a denial of the truth about the 9/11 attacks can't be attributed to blindness, or the cowardly avoidance of reality, but an underestimation of the power of myths in shaping our lives and our thoughts, and influencing the way we register facts and events in our world.

People who still believe the official 9/11 story often make the mistake in thinking that if the Bush administration really did 9/11 then there would be leaks, or government officials would come forward and speak to the media. Former CIA officer Valerie Plame expressed the widely shared view that 9/11 couldn't be a big lie because the American government can't keep a secret when she was asked at a recent public event in the University of Florida about supporting a new 9/11 investigation. The Gainesville Sun's Nathan Crabbe reported:

Several 9-11 truthers — who believe the fall of the World Trade Towers was a conspiracy — questioned Wilson about whether she supported a new investigation into the event. She dismissed the idea that such a conspiracy could be kept under wraps.

"Having worked for the government, I know it's really, really hard to keep a secret," she said.

The view that America's secretive government can't keep a secret is wrong for so many reasons, especially considering the fact that an even more secretive and criminal cabal is working within the government, doing everything in their power to misinform and bamboozle the American people. Their ability to keep secrets among themselves is well proven. If it wasn't for the courageous and truth-seeking Tillman family and others, we would've never known the truth about the death of Pat Tillman. Top military officials deliberately lied, and kept the truth hidden in order to sell a public myth about Tillman.

This "government can't keep a secret" view overlooks the reality that the Bush administration operated more like a gang than a government. In truth, the U.S. government as we know it didn't attack America and then lie to the world about the event. Instead, 9/11 was done by a few, well-organized individuals who hijacked the White House in 2000, and abused the machinery of government to promote their own evil ends. This small, tight-knit group that was involved in the planning and execution of 9/11 are not interested in revealing the truth, but in keeping secrets. Why would they leak secrets? If they spilled their guts about how they caused and covered up the greatest crime of the century they would be charged, and most likely found guilty, and then killed and/or imprisoned for life.

Individuals who lend their support to heinous and immoral acts like 9/11 most likely believe that such violence and deception is necessary and justifiable in the grand scheme of things. They believe that rulers have god-like status and can kill innocent people. Such violence is committed for a greater purpose in their minds, and to achieve many new changes that previously would've been resisted by both members of the government and the public. The new changes that 9/11 caused is obvious, they include: 1) public support for a global war on terror, and American wars in the Middle East; 2) the acceleration of the destruction of America's constitutional government and the further rise and influence of the National Security State; 3) profit for a few connected corporations and individuals that are close to the military-industrial complex; 4) the creation of new federal departments like Homeland Security that are unconstitutional and function as a police state to repress the American people and keep them from making serious political change; and, 5) 9/11 caused a deep psychological change in the people, making them fear that "terrorism" presents an existential threat to their personal safety, and the safety of their country.

http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com/2011/01/terrorizing-truth-about-911-its-not.html

Osama Bin Laden - Dead since 2001

Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.

This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.

Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?

What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.

Of course, there have been any number of conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, and it could be this is just another one.

But the weight of opinion now swinging behind the possibility that Bin Laden is dead - and the accumulating evidence that supports it - makes the notion, at the very least, worthy of examination.

Israeli army embarrassed by video - Watch, see Why

JERUSALEM - The Israeli army has expressed a note of contrition after a television station aired a videotape showing an army assault on a Palestinian home in which a mother of five children died.

When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem's hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel's Channel 2 broacast the tape last weekend"

History Of Mossad