Is justice right side up?

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones—the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes the five nations with veto power in the United Nations inviolable? Is it of a divine origin that veto power of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to guard the peace? Is it fair that world peace is in the hands of the very five nations who are also the world’s main producers of weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet another example of organized crime?

Those who clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding murderers yet say nothing about missile-wielding arch-murderers.

And one asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they try to aim their murderous proclivities at social injustice? Is it a just world when, every minute, three million dollars are wasted on the military while at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or curable disease? Against whom is the so-called international community armed to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?

text taken from here.

Torture Logic

Recent reports that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate illegal torture carried out during the Bush administration is a positive sign, especially given President Obama’s desire to avoid what he has called "a backward-looking" inquiry. When Holder began studying the brutal acts carried out in America’s name, some of them even exceeding the horrors authorized in the infamous Justice Department torture memos, he reportedly said it "turned my stomach." In "Tortured Logic," a video released by the ACLU today, you’ll hear well-known people like Oliver Stone, Rosie Perez and Philip Glass, among others, read from those chilling memos, which were disclosed as part of ACLU litigation:

Text taken from here.

Read the torture memos here.

Former FBI Translator: Bin Laden Worked for U.S. Right Up Until 9/11

Before you hear what Sibel Edmonds has to say, you should know a little about her background.

Edmonds is a former FBI translator, who the Department of Justice's Inspector General and several senators have called extremely credible (free subscription required).

And some of Edmonds allegations' have already been confirmed by the British press.

Now, Edmonds is saying that Osama Bin Laden worked for the U.S. right up until 9/11,and that that fact is being covered up because the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years.

Outrageous claim, right?

Actually, there are several lines of confirmation of Edmonds' claim.

• According to one of the most reputable French papers, CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

• Two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later told CNN that “in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

In other words, American forces had many opportunities to capture Bin Laden, and yet failed to do so.

Indeed, even after 9/11, the U.S. military intentionally let Bin Laden evade capture. Outrageous? Don't believe it?

See for yourself:

• The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan

• A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:

  "We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ....Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden."

• French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them

This is how a government treats its own agents, not foreign terrorists.

For background, you may wish to note that the government not only listened in on Bin Laden's calls, they also heard the hijackers' plans from their own mouths.

And the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And the CIA may have helped many of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation" (the audio is here).

And, as documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950's posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay).

Moreover, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. If you view no other links in this article, please read the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

And Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the Bush administration funded terrorist groups (see confirming articles here and here).

What does all this mean about Bin Laden? Make up your own mind.

Text taken from here.

Parroting the Two-State Solution

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana surprised observers on 11 July when he called, during a speech in London, for the UN Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state by a certain date even if no agreement had been reached between Israelis and Palestinians.

On its face, this proposal sounds dramatic. There must be some who still believe that a Security Council decision would result in real and drastic action. The reality, however, is that the Security Council is not the powerful executive organ it was created to be.

Yet Solana clearly angered Israel by daring to make such a proposal. Israel is not used to being surprised, and normally the big powers consult it before making any major statements about the Middle East situation. This time it seems Solana did not seek the proper Israeli permission. Yet the Israeli anger itself seemed to give added credence to the idea that Solana must have said something significant.

Solana praised the new peace initiative of US President Barack Obama and suggested that if that fails to bring about a binding agreement between the parties, then the "international community" should intervene through the Security Council. Specifically, Solana proposed:

"After a fixed deadline, a UN Security Council resolution should proclaim the adoption of the two-state solution. This should include all the parameters of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and security arrangements. It would accept the Palestinian state as a full member of the UN, and set a calendar for implementation. It would mandate the resolution of other remaining territorial disputes and legitimize the end of claims."

What this seemingly bold statement boils down to is that Solana wants the Security Council to join the chorus of those who have been singing the two-state solution song for decades. Instead of suggesting concrete measures to enforce previous and long-ignored UN resolutions, or to check Israel's violations which made a Palestinian state impossible, Solana simply wants the UN to recognize an imaginary Palestinian state as a full member of the UN.

If we try to put a positive spin on it, we could say that the "two-state solution" is already half way to being achieved. After all, one of the two states -- Israel -- has been in existence for more than 60 years, and moreover has been expanding its territory for all that time.

The problem, however, is that this "success" means that there is nowhere left for a second state. Solana, like many others, finds it easy to parrot the two-state solution, but does not have the courage to demand a complete end even to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which began on 4 June 1967.

Text taken from here.

Israel’s Discriminatory Land Policies

In 1973, former Israeli scholar, critic, and lifelong human rights activist, Israel Shahak (1933-2001), wrote a paper titled, “What is the Meaning of the Jewish State” in which he said:

“The real situation in Israel is really very simple: Israel is not an ‘Israeli’ state, or a state of its citizens but it is a ‘Jewish state.’” With regard to land, “More than 90% of the inhabited areas of the State of Israel are under the rule of the Jewish National Fund regulations, under which non-Jews cannot rent or buy a house or flat, open a business, in short cannot live. This land is called in Hebrew ‘the land’ saved. The land which belongs to non-Jews is called unsaved not national (meaning Jewish) and by buying or confiscating it from a non-Jew by a Jew, the land is supposed to be ’saved.’ ”

It’s only the beginning. Numerous privileges are afforded Jews alone that include:

• not only the right to the land but to a mortgage or loan to finance it;
• on confiscated West Bank land, “Jewish inhabitants enter into prepared houses, with water and electricity;” unconnected Arab villages are forbidden to use either; and
• “A building project for the newly-married applies only for the Jewish newly-married and so forth; to be a Jew in a Jewish state is to be both a privileged being, and to be able to receive a lot of ‘easy’ money a non-Jew can not ever get.”

Read further here.