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Jun 11, 2010

Pentagon Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder

 

CIA assassination squads we can believe in: Pentagon Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder By Philip Shenon 10 Jun 2010 Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security [?], government officials tell The Daily Beast. The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

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New Lauren Booth + 2 new videos

 

1. Shocking Testimonials from the Mavi Marmara survivors. And one Israeli fembot by Lauren Booth

DateFriday, June 11, 


One of the most striking trends following the flotilla attack has been how quickly Israeli hasbara is being exposed by internet journalists. The doctored IOF audio clips, where amateurs with mock Arab accents hiss 'Go back to Aushwitz' to Israeli naval officers. Well they didn't take long to pull apart did they? Then there are the (so-pathetic-they're-almost-funny  claims the flotilla was linked to Al Quaeda. I laughed out loud to read in an Israeli paper that humanitarian activist (and former US marine) Ken O'Keefe was going to Gaza to; 'train a commando unit in Hamas.' I know Ken fairly well. Quite frankly I'm not sure who should be more insulted by this stupidity him or Hamas? Either way flinging the words 'Hamas' 'Jihadists' and 'Israel's security' around is no longer having the same shock and awe effect on journalists or the public at large.

Click to read more ...


3. Humanity vs Tribalism

Date...
 


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Dalton's Holocaust Radio Debate on April 24, 2010:

http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/Barrett_10.html

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

http://www.DebatingTheHolocaust.com

Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton

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GAZA: The real reason Israel attacked Gaza: oil

 

GAZA: The real reason Israel attacked Gaza: oil

 
The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.

The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).

The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).

The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.

The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could be much larger.

Who Owns the Gas Fields

The issue of sovereignty over Gaza's gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

The death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza's offshore gas reserves.

British Gas (BG Group) has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government. In turn, the Hamas government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.

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Alvin Green faces a felony charge, which stems from a University of South Carolina student's complaint that he showed her a pornographic website, then talked about going to her room at a university dorm.

 

Candy Crowley said Alvin Green is indeed a veteran...he did leave early from the military. Green left college in 2000.
 
He has $100 bucks in his campaign chest but somehow paid the $10,000 filing fee.
 
CNN pro-Bush correspondent Candy Crowley couldn't find anything bad to say about Republicans in this instance, either; despite the fact Crowley was being questioned by another CNN anchor who alleged that Republicans paid Greene's $10,000.00 filing fee and met with him as well. Keith Olbermann interviewed Green and the interview was cringing. Clearly Green was a space-case, lost as a goose and clearly not-ready-for-primetime at all.
 
Crowley actually made up excuses why this guy Green won. Journalist (sic) Crowley theorized Green won because his name was the first name on the list. Candy Crowley was one of the shameless pro-Bush CNN reporters who ushered Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 - both STOLEN ELECTIONS.

Just when you thought South Carolina politics could not get any stranger, along comes the Curious Case of Alvin Green. Party officials asked Greene to sit out of the race after The Associated Press reported he faces a felony charge, which stems from a University of South Carolina student's complaint that he showed her a pornographic website, then talked about going to her room at a university dorm.
Yahoo: Alvin Greene has been on the phone all day. That's to be expected for the guy who just won South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary and is facing incumbent Republican Jim DeMint in November. But everyone calling Greene has just been trying to find out who the heck he is —  
Greene, a 32-year-old unemployed military veteran who lives with his parents, defeated Vic Rawl on Tuesday for the Democratic Senate nomination despite having run essentially no public campaign — no events, no signs, no debates, no website, no fundraising.
The result has baffled political observers, who had heavily favored Rawl — a former state legislator, attorney and prosecutor who had the edge inasmuch as he actually campaigned and tried to win. Many in South Carolina (which has grandly lived up to its reputation as a political circus this year) suspect that somewhere, a crafty GOP politicaloperative is snickering.
As far as the local political press can discern, the only positive step Greene took toward campaigning was when he plunked down a $10,400 check in March to satisfy the state's filing fee and get on the ballot. He never registered a campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission or filed a financial disclosure with the Senate Ethics Committee. 
The story gets even stranger; as the media checked to see whom the heck Alvin Green is they found that he has a criminal record.
… the Associated Press reported that Greene was arrested in November on the obscene photo complaint. Charges are pending, and he hasn't entered a plea. One could, of course, note that such charges wouldn't necessarily hurt a candidate in a Palmetto state election season that's featured plenty of sensational sexual charges. 
So let me get this straight. A brother, with a shady past who lives with his folks and has no job, comes up with over $10k for the filing fee. The brother then with no visible campaigning, wins the South Carolina Democratic Party nomination for the US Senate. Um, can you say plant?

Yahoo News thinks that Green may have been planted by Republicans to stir up racial trouble for Vic Rawl. Given the sleazy behavior some South Carolina Republicans have shown towards Nikki Haley, I would not be surprised by this notion. If Green really is a plant, I think the whole scheme ended up in a huge backfire. Now that Green has won, he has vowed not to drop out.
 
 

Clyburn wants feds to probe SC Senate candidate

Alvin M Greene AP – South Carolina Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Alvin M Greene, poses for a photo in Manning, S.C. …

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The No. 3 Democrat in the U.S. House called on federal authorities Thursday to investigate how an unemployed South Carolina military veteran entered and won the state's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

"Here is Alvin Greene, unemployed, he goes into the Democratic headquarters and pays $10,000. That's no little bit of money for an unemployed person," House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said. "This guy, who is he? Where did he come from?"

Greene, 32, stunned the Democratic Party establishment Tuesday night when he handily defeated Vic Rawl, a four-term state lawmaker and former judge, for the party's nomination. Rawl, who had campaigned little but already raised $186,000, was forced to scrap a fundraiser planned for Thursday night.

Greene has not reported any fundraising, run any ads, or put up signs or a website in his challenge of Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint. He had been considered such a long shot that neither his opponent nor the media bothered to check his background, which includes a November arrest on a charge of felony obscenity.

"There are a number of things that are taking place in the South Carolina political process that I find suspicious," Clyburn said. "I believe there's a coordinated effort to circumvent state and federal laws and seriously subvert the electoral process. Something needs to be done."

Greene, who says he left the military last August after 13 years in the Army and Air Force, has said he paid the $10,440 filing fee by saving up two years of his service pay. On Thursday, Clyburn said he's skeptical Greene paid the fee himself and demanded that federal authorities investigate where the money came from.

Clyburn said state law makes it illegal for candidates to let someone else pay their filing fee if their candidacy is intended to damage another candidate.

Party officials asked Greene to sit out of the race after The Associated Press reported he faces a felony charge, which stems from a University of South Carolina student's complaint that he showed her a pornographic website, then talked about going to her room at a university dorm.

But Greene insists he's staying put.

"I am a legitimate candidate," Greene said Thursday, in response to questions about Clyburn's investigation request. "There's no need for it."

Arriving for interviews at a Columbia television station Thursday afternoon in a dark suit, driven in a hired car, Greene marked a stark contrast to the day before. On Wednesday, Greene greeted a reporter at his childhood home in Manning, clad in a T-shirt and sweat pants.

Greene would be required to report campaign spending to the Federal Election Commission, which regulates federal campaign finances. But the cash for the filing fee itself is given directly by candidates to the state party they wish to represent, and that money isn't subject to FEC filing requirements, officials with the agency said Thursday.

That answer doesn't satisfy Clyburn, who suspects there is more to be learned about Greene's pursuit. Clyburn also raised concerns about the possibility of a whisper campaign to encourage voters to pick the ballot's first name, which happened to be Greene's. He wants anything "untoward" in the race to be investigated.

"He's been paid to stay in it, by somebody," Clyburn said. "I just think this is a ploy by someone to dishonor and embarrass the Democratic Party."

Joel Sawyer, executive director of South Carolina's Republican Party, said Clyburn's allegations are evidence that the state's Democrats know they can't defeat DeMint.

"The Democratic Party is grasping at straws, and making absurd accusations to cover for their laughable incompetence in vetting candidates," Sawyer said. "That being said, if they're not even going to bother doing basic things like checking to see if their candidates have pending felony charges, we're feeling pretty doggone good about November already."

In Washington, the head of the committee to elect Democrats to the Senate tried to distance himself from the South Carolina primary results.

"South Carolina is not a place I'm focused on a lot," said Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "I'm simply saying the DSCC is not engaged."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_us_senate_sc

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IDF Executed Mavi Marmara Victims | Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

 

June 11 , 2010

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/06/10/idf-executed-mavi-marmara-victims/

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
@ 917-974-6367

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Israeli Mad Dogs

 

The White House gave complete support to the invasion, accompanied by nearly unanimous House and Senate votes endorsing the slaughter. Two weeks into the carnage, just five House members voted against a resolution expressing "vigorous and unwavering commitment" to "the survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," as well as Israel's "right to act in self defense to protect its citizens against Hamas's unceasing aggression, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter." [For the record, Hamas achieved national political power by winning elections pronounced free and fair by that dangerous radical Jimmy Carter. Since their election in January 2006 Hamas leaders have stated clearly that their operative goal is a long-term truce with Israel, the right of return for Palestinian exiles, and creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 occupied territories. Their social agenda is conservative, not extremist, and neither Israel nor the U.S. has any right to dictate their politics, let alone use them as pretext for denying human rights to the entire Gazan people.]

The Democratic Party's presidential standard bearer in 2004, John Kerry, found the Gaza attack entirely right and just. Democratic majority leader Harry Reid took note on the floor of the Senate that the upper chamber's resolution reaffirmed "Israel's inalienable right to defend [itself] against attacks from Gaza." Two weeks later at Hillary Clinton's swearing-in ceremony, President Obama proved himself equally in favor of Jewish aggression: "America is committed to Israel's security," and "will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats."

No one in Washington argued that Gazans had a right to defend themselves against Israel. This in spite of the fact that the civilian population of Gaza was being collectively punished by policies that UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinians Richard Falk condemned as a crime against humanity. Israel had been provoking Palestinians in Gaza by holding their territory under almost total siege since June 2007, blocking their access to food, medicines, humanitarian assistance, travel, and much else, instigating a major humanitarian crisis that caused a minister for the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace to compare Gaza to a "big concentration camp."

Entombing hundreds of Gazans in rubble, Israel's assault left carnage everywhere - in city streets, at a mosque, in hospitals, police stations (almost all police departments and other security-related installations were hit), a jail, a university bus stop, a plastics factory, a TV station. The strikes were carried out mostly with F-16 bombers and Apache attack helicopters, both supplied to Israel through U.S. military aid grants of about $3 billion in taxpayer money every year. The U.S. was complicit in the attacks because it confirmed it was fully aware of Israel's plans, which commenced six months in advance.

U.S. media coverage of these events took care to reverse the roles of victimizer and victim, so that Palestinian responses to Israeli bombardment were defined simply as "terrorism," and Palestinians resisting attack as "militants," as though meekly submitting to mass slaughter would have been a more reasonable reaction. On the other hand, Israeli violence rooted in structures of oppression and dispossession that have killed dozens of times more victims than anything attributable to Palestinian "terror" were given the ennobling labels of "self-defense" and "retaliation."

The Goldstone Commission, a U.N. Fact-Finding Mission, found that the Israeli attack on Gaza was carried out not against "terrorists," however defined, but against the "people of Gaza as a whole," with the intent "to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population." Results ranged from the destruction of life and limb to the "destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses," and, in short, "the economic capacity of the Gaza Strip." Such collective punishments, are, of course, illegal, and the Commission determined that responsibility lay "with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations," who could boast a kill ratio of 100 Palestinians for every dead Israeli.

None of this, of course, is new. Israel has been engaged in political violence from birth, not in self-defense as it likes to claim, but to impose Jewish-supremacist politics on an overwhelmingly Arab part of the world. Among its perpetually criminal policies are targeted assassination of political and military leaders, hostage taking, "reprisal" bombings, collective punishment of civilians under military occupation, torture, building of Jewish settlements on Arab land, demolition of homes, uprooting of orange and olive groves, eviction of residents, building mazes of roadblocks and checkpoints, shooting at ambulances, preventive detention, use of shock grenades, water cannon, rubber coated bullets, tear gas, and live ammunition against peaceful protesters, ignoring an International Court ruling that its enormous separation wall is illegal, stealing land and water from Palestinians and giving it to Jewish settler-fanatics, freely attacking across borders in an endless series of raids, wars, and assassination programs, refusal to accept a Hamas election victory on the West Bank, enforced starvation, blackouts, mass arrests, beatings, imprisonment of political enemies - including Parliament members and children, sexual humiliation, denial of medical care, and blowing up electrical and water systems.

Apart from their sheer destructiveness, these policies are also blatantly racist, with Israeli leaders regularly referring to Palestinians as "grasshoppers," "roaches" and "two-legged beasts." Unfortunately, this does not deter U.S. leaders from declaring their "solidarity" with Israel, which they say forms an "unshakeable bond" with the Jewish state, one that does not allow for any "space" between Washington and Tel Aviv on the issues. Hillary Clinton insists the bond between the U.S. and Israel is eternal and evinces an "absolute commitment to Israel's security," that is, its ethnic cleansing operations. Vice President Joe Biden has publicly declared himself a "Zionist," adding that Israel forms "the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as vice president of the United States." These sentiments characterize Washington's political class across the board.

Meanwhile, in Gaza there are regularly no medical supplies or drugs for hospitals, no fuel for the electricity plant or for generators during the long blackouts (the lack of fuel means that sewage and treatment stations cannot function properly, which decreases the supply of potable water to Gazans and results in tens of millions of liters of untreated or only partially treated wastes being dumped in the sea). There is no private sector and no industry. Gaza's agricultural crops have been destroyed and Israel continues to shoot at farmers trying to plant and tend fields near the border. Most productive activity is simply impossible. The overwhelming majority of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian food aid to meet basic needs.

The regularly invoked claim of "global terrorism," though a crucial pretext in U.S. efforts to justify its support for Israeli occupation and apartheid, is false. Acts of violence carried out by Palestinians are indigenous responses to foreign occupation and would cease if foreign occupation ceased. Washington's attempts to equate all Islamic forces that resist U.S. hegemony with Al Qaeda terror are transparent efforts to justify further crimes.

The root of the conflict is aptly summed up by economist Edward Herman: "The Israeli leadership has never been willing to make a peace settlement with the Palestinians because that would require agreeing to a Palestinian border when the Israeli objective has always been to keep dispossessing and seizing land, easier done under an occupation than after a negotiated settlement."

As peace activist Jeff Halper notes, if Israel had the good intentions it claims for itself, the whole nightmare would have been over long ago: "If peace and security were truly the issue, Israel could have had that 20 years ago if it would have conceded 22 percent of the country required for a viable Palestinian state."

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