Winter Patriot Community Blog

April 26, 2012 - You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security's National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely "al-Qaeda", but "exercise", "drill", "wave", "initiative" and "organisation": all proscribed words. The British government's announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy....

April 26, 2012 - The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia...

April 26, 2012 - Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the US government's illegal abuse of "detainees," against whom no evidence exists. In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture. For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney. Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because it cannot stand the light of day...

April 26, 2012 - Like several villages in the West Bank, the residents of al-Walaja hold weekly demonstrations against Israel's wall. On 13 April, however, the village gathered for something different. The Jenin-based Freedom Theater and its Freedom Bus crew had been invited to listen to and enact the autobiographical accounts of villagers who told stories of army violence, home demolitions, land confiscation and perhaps most importantly, their determination to stand firm in their struggle for justice. A crowd of more than 200 gathered to stand in solidarity with the people of al-Walaja and to hear their stories....

April 24, 2012 - Chase Madar's new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, pulls together the essential facts that we should try to somehow deliver to television viewers and victims of our education system. The subtitle is "The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History." The book looks at Manning's life story, his alleged action (leaking voluminous materials to Wikileaks), the value of the material he made available to us, the status of whistleblowers in our country, the torture inflicted on Manning during his imprisonment, the similar treatment routinely inflicted on hundreds of thousands of U.S. prisoners without the same scandal resulting, and the value of running a society in accordance with written laws..

April 26, 2012 - 1.1 - The issue of Palestinian prisoners is one of the worst consequences of the Israeli occupation. Since 1967, over 700,000 Palestinians, 20% of the population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have been detained. This number represents approximately 40% of the total male Palestinian population in the occupied territories. 1.2 - Today, there are about 6,000 prisoners in 17 Israeli jails and detention centres. They include six women and more than 200 minors. 1.3 - 330 Palestinians are being held in administrative detention with no formal charges having been brought against them in a court of law. 28 elected members of the parliament, and three former ministers fall within this category...

April 25, 2012 - "It is hard to conceive of a more profound constitutional violation than the torture of a US citizen on US soil," wrote lawyers for Jose Padilla in a petition filed Monday with the US Supreme Court. A lawsuit brought by Padilla, who was illegally "disappeared," imprisoned and tortured by the US government for four years, was thrown out by lower courts on the grounds that the courts have no authority to subject the wartime actions of the executive branch to "judicial scrutiny." Padilla's treatment constituted a test case for the incommunicado detention and torture of US citizens by the military without any judicial process. The Padilla case, as much as any other to date, illustrates the disintegration of democracy in the US and the erection of the legal scaffolding of a police state....

April 25, 2012 - The Obama administration has spent the last three years building the infrastructure of a totalitarian police state, that "has surpassed the Bush administration's attempts to expand executive power by crushing the civil liberties of US citizens." At the center of the repressive edifice is preventive detention without trial, buttressed by various measures that, effectively, criminalize dissent. Clearly, and methodically, "the US government is preparing for domestic insurrection."....

April 25, 2012 - At 2am on Tuesday April 24, the Palestinian-Syrian intellectual and activist Salameh Kaileh was arrested from his home "without explanation," as his lawyer Anwar Bunni of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research put it. This is not Salameh Kaileh's first time in a Syrian prison. He was a guest of the Assad family in its several jails for eight years and eleven days in the 1990s. Born in 1955 in Birzeit in the West Bank (Palestine), Salameh studied in Baghdad (Iraq) and Damascus (Syria). Salameh emerged out of the University of Baghdad in 1979 with a BA in Political Science, already as one of the brightest Marxist thinkers and as a brave fighter for universal freedom. His reputation would soon span across Syria, in Palestine, around the Arab world and elsewhere... Salameh went to jail in the 1990s when he renewed his criticism of the suffocation of the Ba'ath regime and its collusion with imperialism. Many have forgotten that in the Gulf War of 1991, the Syrian government participated alongside the Grand Coalition of the West against the Iraqi regime. As a gift for this participation, the West turned a blind eye to another round of reprisals by the Assad regime against its domestic opposition (as well as consolidating Syrian power in Lebanon)....

April 25, 2012 - The number of martyrs in Syria reached 100 martyrs, including dozens of women and children; 70 martyrs died in a new massacre committed by the regime's army in Hama, 7 martyrs in Idlib, 7 martyrs in Daraa, 5 martyrs in Damascus Suburbs (Douma, Harasta), 4 martyrs in Aleppo, 4 martyrs in Homs and 3 martyrs in Deir Ezzor... Hama: A new massacre after the one in the Arbaeen neighborhood just two days after the visit of the UN monitors to the city. The preliminary total number of martyrs who have fallen as a result of the explosion by security forces in the Mashaa Tayyar neighborhood is 54. This number includes minimum of 13 children, 16 women from Burghol familya nd 15 corpses at the Ibrahim Hallak school, most of them are women. The pulling out of corpses underneath the recuins continues until the moment...

April 25, 2012 - Environmentalists and scientists also complain that Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the US government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. "The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP," Viles says. "I don't know if it's Stockholm Syndrome or what." International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report on Tuesday criticizing the US government's reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying "offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced."...

April 25, 2012 - As US elections loom, President Barack Obama is loath to antagonise Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and with him the powerful American pro-Israel lobby. At the same time, bringing the Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table was one of Obama's key pledges. His opponents could justifiably accuse him of failure on this issue since he has been unable to broker a way out of the stalemate caused largely by Israeli intransigence. The Palestinians are adamant that they will not negotiate until illegal colony building on Palestinian land stops. The Israelis say the Palestinians should resume negotiations with no pre-conditions....

April 25, 2012 - Palestinians have been barred from running for election for the post of student union president at Zefat Academic College in Safed in the Galilee region of historic Palestine. A decision taken by the students' union at the college on 18 April has made running for the union's top post conditional on having served in the Israeli military. "It is clear that the decision aims to exclude Palestinian students, since Palestinians don't serve in the Israeli army," Khulood Abu Ahmad, a student at Zefat College, told The Electronic Intifada....

April 25, 2012 - The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal will be hearing the second charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes against former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defense, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General...

April 25, 2012 - After months of pressure from human rights activists, the U.S. government has granted Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar a visa to attend and speak at an International Drone Summit in Washington DC on April 28, 2012. The Summit is organized by the peace group CODEPINK and the legal advocacy organizations Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Akbar, co-founder of the Pakistani human rights organization Foundation for Fundamental Rights, filed the first case in Pakistan on behalf of family members of civilian victims of CIA drone strikes and has been a critical force in litigating and advocating on victims' behalf. He had been invited to speak in the US before and first sought a visa nearly a year ago. His request had been pending since then....

April 25, 2012 - When the Gulf Disaster happened, President Obama had solid majorities in Congress and a free hand. Instead of using it to protect the public, he grabbed for the favor of oil companies and protected their homicidal, ecocidal practices. Can there be any doubt who Barack really is?...

April 25, 2012 - On Israeli Independence Day, same day that marks the premeditated ethnic cleansing of ~700,000 Palestinians in order to create a Jewish majority by force, the Israeli police besieged the offices of Zochrot at the heart of Tel-Aviv in order to prevent the activists present from holding a very symbolic memorial activity for that day. This video shows arriving at the place already besieged by the police, the people inside prevented from leaving and those outside prevented from entering the office building...

April 25, 2012 - Israeli TV Channel 10 reported Monday that Israel will start the construction of a separation wall along part of the border with Lebanon, in the north of the country. The construction will commence next week, and the wall will be built around the border town of al-Motella. The wall will be more than 2 kilometers (1.24 Miles) long and 10 meters (32.8 Feet) high. Israel claims that the wall also aims at preventing armed clashes between Israeli soldiers and Lebanese soldiers as their posts and towers are often a few meters away from each other...

April 25, 2012 - The repercussions of the drone lobby's success in forcing open US domestic airspace to unmanned drones by 2015 are beginning to be felt across the US as civil liberties groups and politicians wake up to the implications for safety and privacy. An article on the Public Intelligence website asks the basic questions "Is it even logistically possible to operate thousands of pilot-less aircraft in domestic airspace?" The authors examine two basic practical problems with unmanned drones...