Winter Patriot Community Blog

May 1, 2012 - Jose Rodriguez, the high-ranking CIA official who ordered the destruction of 92 videos showing the agency's interrogation of Terrorist suspects, was interviewed on Sunday night about his new pro-torture book by 60 Minutes (that show's network, CBS, and the publisher of Rodriguez's new book, Simon & Schuster, are both owned by the CBS Corp., now synergistically profiting off of torture advocacy). There is an important lesson to be learned from this interview. As many commenters correctly noted, the torture-defending Rodriguez is clearly a crazed sociopath (of the distinctly banal type identified by Hannah Arendt)....

May 1, 2012 - Amira Hass reports in Ha'aretz: Israel's military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. In response to the ruling, B'Tselem attorney Yael Stein said, "It cannot be that in a well-managed system no person will be found guilty of the army operation that led to the killing of 21 people who were not involved in combat, and resided in a structure on the instructions of the army - even if the attack was not done purposefully." "The manner in which the army rids itself of responsibility in this case... again illustrates the need for an investigatory body outside of the army," she added. With such impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity a benchmark of the Israeli state, any hope for real justice is futile. Below is the story of the Israeli military's willful murder of the Samouni family's men, women, and children, as reported in relevant sections of the Goldstone Report (PDF, pages 159-168). Read it. Then remember and honor them...

May 1, 2012 - Israel's military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. A letter was received by the human rights group B'Tselem from Major Dorit Tuval, Deputy Military Advocate for Operational Matters. Tuval said that the case has been closed after the investigation has found that the attack on the civilians, "who did not take part in the fighting," and their killing were not done knowingly and directly, or out of haste and negligence "in a manner that would indicate criminal responsibility." B'Tselem activists condemned the decision and called for an alternative investigatory body to probe such incidents...

May 1, 2012 -- After 63 days on hunger-strike, two Palestinian prisoners face severe health deterioration and are at risk of death, lawyers said Tuesday. Bilal Diab, 27, from Jenin, and Thaer Halahla, 33, from Hebron, have been transferred to an Israeli hospital in a serious condition, their lawyer Jamal Khatib told Ma'an. Israel's Supreme Court will hear their case on Thursday, he said, after an appeal against their detention without charge was rejected by an Israeli military court last week...

May 1, 2012 - Hundreds of residents on Tuesday staged an angry protest against NATO-led forces in the southern province of Zabul, blocking the busy Kabul-Kandahar highway, officials said. Three children were killed and another three wounded during a clash between Taliban and foreign troops on Monday evening, when the fighters attacked a gathering of tribal elders, local policemen and foreign forces in the Shor Bazaar area of Shah Joy district. One militant and three children were killed, and as many others wounded in the clash, the governor's office confirmed, saying the minors were taken to a health facility of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)...

May 1, 2012 - On 15 August 2011, Omar Abu Shalal was attempting to cross the Allenby Bridge - one of the crossings between the West Bank and Jordan - with his sister Samira, when Israeli authorities promptly arrested him. Omar was immediately sent to Ofer prison just west of Ramallah. A few hours later he was handed a six-month administrative detention order, without knowing why he was imprisoned or what the charges against him were. He was travelling to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage when he was arrested. It was in the middle of the month of Ramadan. While his sister continued on the journey, Omar found himself transferred to Megiddo prison near Haifa...

May 1, 2012 - Today there is a protest outside Ofer Prison in Ramallah, where a large group of people have joined in solidarity with the 1,400 prisoners who are on currently on hunger stike in Israeli jails. So far tweet updates suggest that the Israeli Occupying Force has used heavy punitive measures against the demonstrators including tear gas, rubber coated steel bullets and stun grenades. There is so far two injuries reported, one man was hit in the head and an old man was injured in both legs, both with a rubber coated steel bullets. The victims have been taken to hospital for treatement....

May 1, 2012 - .... According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there have been upwards of 350 U.S. military and CIA drone strikes on Yemen and Pakistan since 2004, with the majority in Yemen (20 to 36) occurring in the last two months. As if their children were less valuable than our own, most Americans either ignore or remain passive-aggressively ignorant of the civilian carnage associated with these so-called "targeted strikes." Sadly, this has translated into broad public support of what has become the third post-9/11 American War following Iraq and Afghanistan - the Drone War. ...

May 1, 2012 - The United Nations mission for Libya has expressed its concern to the country's authorities over the recent deaths of three people in a detention centre in the north-western city of Misrata, saying it believes that the deaths were the result of torture. The detainees died on 13 April in the Zaroug detention centre, which is controlled by a committee under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) said in a statement, in which it added that it had raised the concerns at the highest levels of the North African country's authorities...

May 1, 2012 - Thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel gathered in the western Galilee for the annual March of Return last week, on 26 April. Timed to coincide with the annual Israeli "Independence Day" celebrations, each year for the past 15 years participants have marched to the lands of different villages destroyed during the Nakba - the 1947-48 catastrophe during which Zionist militias evicted approximately 750,000 Palestinians from what then became Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were blown up with dynamite and demolished....

May 1, 2012 - According to data that the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) provided to Adalah in a letter on 28 February 2012, there were 19,561 prisoners in detention facilities managed by the IPS, 4,631 of them were classified as "security prisoners." 4,275 of the security prisoners were Palestinians who are living in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, 340 are Palestinians citizens of Israeli, two were from the Golan Heights, and fourteen were Jewish security prisoners. From the Palestinian prisoners classified as security prisoners who are from the West Bank and Gaza, 533 have life sentences. According to data and reports provided by human rights organizations, Israel holds about 320 Palestinians from the West Bank in administrative detention according to Adameer. In prisons under the responsibility of IPS, 1,355 Palestinian prisoners who were convicted for illegal presence in Israel are classified as security prisoners....

May 1, 2012 - Drones - unmanned aerial vehicles - come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to massive "hunter/killer" Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high. Once used exclusively by the military to carry out aerial surveillance and attacks on enemy insurgents abroad, these remotely piloted, semi-autonomous robots have now been authorized by Congress and President Obama for widespread use in American airspace. The military empire is coming home to roost...

April 30, 2012 - The Local Coordination Commitees in Syria: The number of martyrs on Monday reached 20; 8 martyrs were reported in Idlib, 5 martyrs in Homs, 3 martyrs in Deir Ezzor, 2 martyr in Damascus, 1 martyr in Daraa, and 1 martyr in Damascus Suburb....Hama: AbdulKarim Mahmoud Arbo and Motaz Haytham Maghmouma were martyred by security forces after they were kidnapped while they were heading back to their houses near Salehin mosque at Homs road. They were delivered this morning to National hospital with effects of torture on their bodies and their families were forced to bury them immediately...

...."But Mr. Brennan supplies legal conclusions, not legal analysis. We continue to believe that the administration should release the Justice Department memos underlying the program - particularly the memo that authorizes the extrajudicial killing of American terrorism suspects. And the administration should release the evidence it relied on to conclude that an American citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, could be killed without charge, trial, or judicial process of any kind." Brennan maintained the Obama administration was committed to transparency when it came to deciding who would be subject to lethal drone strikes. But Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said the program is both unconstitutional and overly broad....

April 26, 2012 - ...In his book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman said "Americans are the most entertained and least informed people in the world." Most know little or nothing about what matters most. Public ignorance isn't universal, but a significant majority's affected. Henry Ford once said: "It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." It's also true for out-of-control imperialism, war and peace overall, political corruption, corporate power, illusory democracy, elections little more than theater, police state lawlessness, an unprecedented wealth disparity, shocking poverty, unemployment, hunger and homelessness levels, and numerous other issues in the world's richest country....

April 26, 2012 - In January of 2012, the US Congress passed legislation that will open up the US sky to unmanned drones. The robotic aircraft will be used for military and police operations and will add to America's current arsenal of around 7,000 drones. According to some accounts, peaceful protest might be a reason that feds would deploy the unmanned craft. There are currently 300 active drone permits in the US, but will that soon swell out of control? ....

April 26, 2012 - The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is concerned over the lives of two administrative detainees, Bilal Diab and Tha'er Halahla, who have been on hunger strike for two months. PCHR holds the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for their lives and calls upon the international community to exert pressure on them to immediately release Diab and Halahla, as they have been placed under administrative detention without charges or a trial. It should be noted that thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention facilities declared a hunger strike last week....

April 26, 2012 - ...So here's yet another war that Obama is escalating, now ordering people's death with greater degrees of recklessness, now without even bothering to know who is being targeted. Although Miller doesn't bother to mention the likelihood of more deaths of innocent Yemenis, this is the same policy that has caused large numbers of civilian deaths in Pakistan (just read this heart-wrenching and amazing account of a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Aziz, oh-so-coincidentally killed by an American drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin, just days after he attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths by drones). Anonymous officials claim that greater caution will be exercised in Yemen than in Pakistan, a claim Miller uncritically prints, but these types of nameless strikes are certain to kill far more civilians. Indeed, the oh-so-coincidental killing of Anwar Awlaki's 16-year-old American son in Yemen a mere two weeks after his father was killed proves how easily civilians were already being killed. The problem will only worsen now. As Johnsen pointed out, "in Yemen, just because it has a beard, carries a gun, and talks about Islamic law doesn't mean its al-Qaeda," but no matter: that's who will now be extinguished by Obama's drone campaign....

April 26, 2012 - As midnight approached on April 17, Khader Adnan, a Palestinian political prisoner who made headlines around the world after going on hunger strike for 66 days, was given a hero's welcome as he returned to his home. Fireworks coloured the night sky, horns blared and people on foot, in cars, and on tractors rushed off to receive Adnan at the gates of his village. "I won't believe he is out of prison until I see him for myself," said his visibly anxious wife, Randa, who had borne a heavy burden during her husband's four-month ordeal. Yet, in a gesture indicative of the leader Adnan has recently become, he refused to be taken to his own home before visiting relatives of those other political prisoners from his village who remained in prison and on hunger strike...