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Mar 25, 2011
NYTimes.com: Islamist Group Is Rising Force in a New Egypt
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Stop 'virginity testing' in Egypt!
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"Military Whistleblower Protection Act arguably covers Manning’s disclosures"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/03/24/chespirito/all-american-torture/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3307&hq_e=el&hq_m=741031&hq_l=9&hq_v=de8c60a2f6
London Review of Books
All-American Torture
Chase Madar 24 March 2011
Tags: america | law | torture | wikileaks
Since last June, Private Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old alleged source of the WikiLeaks hoard of war logs and diplomatic cables, has been kept in solitary confinement at Quantico. He is in his cell for 23 hours a day, frequently deprived of clothing and denied the right even to do press-ups. He has no contact with other prisoners and is forced to acknowledge to a guard that he is OK every five of his waking minutes. Whether this no-touch torture is being inflicted on Manning to force a confession implicating Julian Assange, or is merely an object lesson to other potential whistleblowers, is not clear.
There is a growing rumble of criticism, from the usual scattering of law professors, pop stars and left-liberal media figures, and last Sunday some 400 protesters gathered outside the Quantico brig, including Daniel Ellsberg". Even the State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, a hitherto unflappable font of bland doubletalk, recently blasted the treatment of Manning as 'ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid'. He resigned the next day.
Obama, however, has stayed serenely on-message. Asked by a reporter last week if he agreed with Crowley, the president said that he had personally inquired with the Pentagon about this and they had assured him that the prisoner's treatment met their 'basic standards' and that 'some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.' This treacly concern for Manning's wellbeing recalls the confinement of political dissidents to mental institutions in both the Soviet Union and the rightwing dictatorships of South America. With his soothing defence of Manning's ongoing torture, Obama fed through the shredder any last hopes that he would spend political capital on civil liberties.
He can get away with this because the leaks have been hyped as the gravest blow to national security since 9/11. No real damage is discernible, however: only one ambassador has resigned, and the Pentagon has expressly denied that any Afghan informants named in the war logs have suffered reprisals. Julian Assange is hardly the first person to assert the virtues of transparency in statecraft, demands for which used to be a staple of American political discourse: that 'diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and the public view' is in the first of Woodrow Wilson's '14 Points' proposing the creation of the League of Nations.
The Military Whistleblower Protection Act arguably covers Manning's disclosures, though the government will surely interpret the statute as narrowly as possible. The duty of soldiers to disobey illegal orders – Manning was ordered to convey Iraqi civilians to federal prisons where they were likely to be tortured – was not cooked up by Amnesty International last week but has deep precedential roots in American common law, from Mitchell v. Harmony in 1851 to Little v. Barreme in 1804. Even the Nuremberg Principles, which oblige soldiers to disobey illegal orders, are codified into US military rules in Army Field Manual 27-10.
The legal arguments are all well and good, but in high-profile cases like this the political climate usually shapes the outcome. Forty years ago, Ellsberg had solid support within Congress and the establishment media when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. Manning has no such high-level backing, and the majority of those opposed to his pretrial torture are at pains to stress they don't condone his alleged actions. When Ellsberg was tried for espionage and treason, he had the full weight of the presidency perversely working for him: Nixon's henchmen were so hamfisted, so patently criminal – breaking into his psychiatrist's office to steal records; offering the judge the directorship of the FBI midway through the trial – that they made a guilty verdict impossible. The Obama administration, however, is not a gang of self-defeating slobs and they have gone after whistleblowers with a vindictive focus unmatched by previous governments.
There is another, larger reason why Manning's torture is unlikely to stop soon. Since the early 1980s, we Americans have grown rather comfortable with long-term solitary confinement and other harsh punishments. 'Enemy combatants are being treated better than Bradley Manning,' as one Georgia Congressman has noted, and liberal pundits have bemoaned that the techniques of Bagram and Abu Ghraib have metastasised into the homeland. But if anything the influence has been in the other direction.
There are currently more than 25,000 prisoners in long-term isolation in the United States, seldom-mourned casualties of our wars on crime and drugs, trial runs for the war on terror. Many of these isolated prisoners are, like Manning, periodically and often arbitrarily deprived of what little they have left – clothing, meals, books, contact with visitors – at the often capricious discretion of prison authorities. Such profligate use of long-term solitary confinement was not always normal: in 1890 the US Supreme Court came close to banning the practice as unconstitutionally 'cruel and unusual'. We must be a lot tougher than our 19th century forebears. Viewed from any angle, Manning's torture is fully in the American grain.
--
Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish. Actually, it is safe to say that virtually every mainstream publication or or other type of media organ is "nothing more than a screen to present chosen views." The great battle over the last century has been a battle for the mind of the Western peoples, i.e., non-Jewish Euros. The chosen won it by acquiring control over essentially the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media of every type, and using that control to infuse and disseminate their message, agenda and worldview, their way of thinking, or rather the way they want us to think. Since at least the 1960s this campaign has been effectively complete. Since then they have shaped and controlled the minds of all but a seeming few of us in varying degree with almost no opposition or competition from any alternative worldview. So now most of us are mentally trapped in the box the chosen have made for us, which we have lived in all our lives. Only a few have managed to avoid it or escape it, or to even sometimes see outside of it, and so actually "think outside of the (Jewish) box." --Michael Santomauro
Thank you and remember:
Peace is patriotic!
Michael Santomauro
253 W. 72nd Street
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
E-mail me anything:
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com
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Dutch-German Holocaust survivor promoting boycott of Israel
From: <JoRiz@aol.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:36 AM
Subject: Dutch-German Holocaust survivor promoting boycott of Israel
Date: Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:36 AM
Subject: Dutch-German Holocaust survivor promoting boycott of Israel
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/03/23/3086523/dutch-german-holocaust-survivor-promotes-boycott-of-israel
Dutch-German Holocaust survivor promoting boycott of Israel
March 23, 2011
BERLIN (JTA) -- A Dutch-German Holocaust survivor has been promoting a
boycott of Israel during a speaking tour that recently took him to
South Africa.
Hajo Meyer, 86, a survivor of Auschwitz, announced his support for a
boycott at a dinner in Cape Town on March 20, according to Sowetan
Live online. He found a receptive audience in, among others, former
South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils and Western Cape
high court Judge Siraj Desa.
Born in Germany, Meyer escaped to Holland when he was 14, after the
Nazis barred Jews from attending public schools. He was deported to
Auschwitz after a year in hiding in Holland. Meyer's parents were
murdered in the Holocaust.
Meyer now says that life for a Jew in occupied Holland was better than
life for a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza today. He participated
in the "Never Again -- For Anyone" tour that visited a dozen U.S.
cities this winter.
The Anti-Defamation League on its website called the tour "the latest
effort by anti-Israel activists to exploit the sacred memory of the
Holocaust for the purpose of painting its victim, the Jewish people,
as the 'new oppressor in the form of Israel.' "
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Germans and their
Dutch collaborators deported 107,000 Jews to the death camps at
Auschwitz and Sobibor in 1942-43; approximately 5,200 survived. Of the
25,000-30,000 Jews who went into hiding, two-thirds survived.
Dutch-German Holocaust survivor promoting boycott of Israel
March 23, 2011
BERLIN (JTA) -- A Dutch-German Holocaust survivor has been promoting a
boycott of Israel during a speaking tour that recently took him to
South Africa.
Hajo Meyer, 86, a survivor of Auschwitz, announced his support for a
boycott at a dinner in Cape Town on March 20, according to Sowetan
Live online. He found a receptive audience in, among others, former
South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils and Western Cape
high court Judge Siraj Desa.
Born in Germany, Meyer escaped to Holland when he was 14, after the
Nazis barred Jews from attending public schools. He was deported to
Auschwitz after a year in hiding in Holland. Meyer's parents were
murdered in the Holocaust.
Meyer now says that life for a Jew in occupied Holland was better than
life for a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza today. He participated
in the "Never Again -- For Anyone" tour that visited a dozen U.S.
cities this winter.
The Anti-Defamation League on its website called the tour "the latest
effort by anti-Israel activists to exploit the sacred memory of the
Holocaust for the purpose of painting its victim, the Jewish people,
as the 'new oppressor in the form of Israel.' "
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Germans and their
Dutch collaborators deported 107,000 Jews to the death camps at
Auschwitz and Sobibor in 1942-43; approximately 5,200 survived. Of the
25,000-30,000 Jews who went into hiding, two-thirds survived.
--
"...when you have laws that question the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Michael Santomauro, March 23, 2011
Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish. Actually, it is safe to say that virtually every mainstream publication or or other type of media organ is "nothing more than a screen to present chosen views." The great battle over the last century has been a battle for the mind of the Western peoples, i.e., non-Jewish Euros. The chosen won it by acquiring control over essentially the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media of every type, and using that control to infuse and disseminate their message, agenda and worldview, their way of thinking, or rather the way they want us to think. Since at least the 1960s this campaign has been effectively complete. Since then they have shaped and controlled the minds of all but a seeming few of us in varying degree with almost no opposition or competition from any alternative worldview. So now most of us are mentally trapped in the box the chosen have made for us, which we have lived in all our lives. Only a few have managed to avoid it or escape it, or to even sometimes see outside of it, and so actually "think outside of the (Jewish) box." --Michael Santomauro
Thank you and remember:
Peace is patriotic!
Michael Santomauro
253 W. 72nd Street
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
E-mail me anything:
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com
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