An exhibition of spent tear gas grenades and projectiles in the village of Bil'in for which Abu Rahmah was indicted on. Picture credit: Oren ZivActiveStills*
Yesterday, I got the following message from The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee:
23 December 2009
Display of used tear gas canisters shot by the army earns Bil’in activist an arms charge in Israeli military court
Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a school teacher and coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, was indicted in an Israeli military court yesterday. Abu Rahmah was slapped with an arms possession charge for collecting used tear gas canisters shot at demonstrators in Bil’in by the army and showcasing them in his home.
Mara Ahmed and I were given the opportunity to interview Tariq Ali when he spoke at Hamilton College in Upstate New York on November 11, 2009, during his recent speaking tour of the United States. Tariq, a native of Pakistan who lives in England, is a well known writer, intellectual and activist. He has traveled all over Southwest Asia and the Middle East while researching his books. Mara, who is working on a film highlighting the opinions of the Pakistani people regarding the current situation in Pakistan and the Western initiated ‘Global War on Terror’, had a lot of questions for Tariq about the internal state of Pakistan. I wanted to ask Tariq for his opinion about the effects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what alternatives he thought might be available.
Mara: What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror? Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?
Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we’re just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they’re not like us, they’re Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.
A force of 28,000 Pakistani army personnel is at the moment conducting an operation in South Waziristan. The operation was preceded by months of aerial bombing, and as the following Al Jazeera reports show the human cost in terms of lives lost, and displacement is high. A BBC crew earlier found the refugees so outraged with the Pakistani military’s operation that they were chanting slogans in support of Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and other TTP leaders.
Operating since 2006, Social TV was established out of deep concern from the ability of Israeli Media to perform its duty as democracy’s “watch dog”. In the last two decades three major corporations have gained control over most of Israel’s television channels, newspapers, radio channels and popular news sites. As a result Israel’s media has become quite homogenous and pluralism of opinion declined… Today Social TV is the only independent on-line TV channel in Israel.
Jonathan Cook reports about the collusion of Israeli doctors in the torture of Palestinians based on evidence presented in a new joint report by the Public Commitee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. This comes in the wake of a petition signed by 725 physicians from 43 countries who are demanding that the current president of the World Medical Association Yoram Blachar be removed from office, claiming that the Israel Medical Association which he heads has ignored evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are allowing torture. In return, Blachar has recruited the help of Hadassah – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America – to launch a couter-campaign to discredit the work of the human rights NGOs. (See also the recent report by PCATI which documents the torture and physical abuse of prisoners held by Israeli security forces.)
Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.
9 June 2009, Waziristan — In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:
“The planes always come…like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.”
The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20th, 2009. A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.
C. S. Soong is one of the best radio interviewers, erudite and articulate, and on his show Against the Grain you will always find some of the most stimulating discussions on politics, philosophy, literature and activism.
Terrorists, we are told, threaten our freedom and democracy. What does this kind of rhetoric ignore, and what kind of governmental violence does it justify? Matthew Carr calls attention to a tradition, beginning in the 19th century, of using violence against symbolic targets to achieve a political victory. He also discusses the Mau Mau in Kenya and the counterterrorism initiatives of the Reagan era.
Pakistani refugees fleeing fighting in Swat, Buner and Lower Dir queue for rations in a relief camp at Mardan yesterday (DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES)
There is an exodus of Pakistani civilians as battle against Taleban rages, Zahid Hussain reports. They may yet succeed, but it appears no one seems to have told the Pakistani government the first rule of counterinsurgency: it is not the driving out of opposition that constitutes success, it is the ability to hold on the gains. The militants could have been neutralized through the use of sparing and targeted force in conjunction with a political settlement. This one is guaranteed to backfire.
With jet fighters screeching overhead, tens of thousands of people fled Pakistan’s once-idyllic Swat Valley yesterday, increasing a humanitarian crisis that threatens to undermine public support for the military campaign against the Taleban.
The UN says that more than 200,000 people have left Swat in the past few days, and another 300,000 are on the move or trying to leave after the collapse of a three-month-old peace deal between the Government and the Islamists this week. They will join the estimated 555,000 who have fled other conflict zones in northwestern Pakistan since August, taking the total number of displaced people in the region to more than one million.
As government forces claimed to have killed 143 militants since Thursday, The Times spoke to dozens of refugees arriving — bedraggled, exhausted and crammed into buses, vans and trucks — at a makeshift camp in Jalala, just outside Swat.
The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a “major terrorist plot” amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.
Eleven Pakistani students and one British man were freed after extensive searches of 14 addresses in North-west England failed to locate evidence of terrorist activity, according to security sources. Police did not find any explosives, firearms, target lists, documents or any material which could have been used to carry out an attack. Yesterday, the Government’s own reviewer of terrorism legislation said he would investigate the case.
The Home Office said it would deport the 11 Pakistani men, who are aged 22 to 38 and were in Britain on student visas, because the Government believed they represented a threat to national security.
The Obama administration has released the four torture memos in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information request today. The redactions are not as extensive as initially thought. All the memos are available here. See the characteristically brilliant commentary by Glenn Greenwald below and Democracy Now’s interview with Greenwald and Justice Department whistleblower Thomas Tamm.
Obama to release OLC torture memos; promises no prosecutions for CIA officials
(updated below – Update II)
In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that — in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit — he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that “there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos.” Marc Ambinder is reporting that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed. Simultaneously, and certainly with the intend to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has “informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted,” and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.
presented in a new joint report by the 
P U L S E 