The People's Record

Feature: Our veterans – the elephant in the room?
May 7, 2013

Apart from when the occasional veteran makes the headlines and is arrested (perhaps for carrying out a training run fully kitted up and armed; or by posting borderline material on facebook and being detained and sectioned under Section 922(g)(4) of the US Code) once our marines have stepped down from active duty, very little is heard of them and that seems to be the way the government likes it.

They must be feeling uneasy to say the least at the growing movement of veterans who are standing up and voicing their concerns about the way in which our country is governed and the Constitution being undermined by successive rafts of legislation, some of which is pushed through without adequate consultation or proper procedure. The government would have us believe that these few “voices in the wilderness” belong to misfits, miscreants and malcontents – that most veterans are happily adjusted to everyday society and living out their lives in the bosom of their family as productive citizens.

Myth versus reality

Truth is there is a huge gulf between the myth foisted upon us by the government and the reality. Many of these veterans start out their career in the US forces with high ideals and a vision of serving their country and protecting their family and others like it; young men and women with a clear conscience, a deep sense of moral duty and strong loyalty to their government. By the time they have done a tour or three they come back as different people with a totally changed perspective. We are fed images and news reports by the media of spouses and little children welcoming back the homecoming heroes and heroines, smiling faces, happy tears and a good helping of the American dream, complete with cream and sugar. We aren’t shown the rows of flag draped coffins; we aren’t told about the conditioning imposed on these service men and women to psychologically prepare them for the battlefront or about the drugs which are forced on them to make sure they remain emotionally stable during their tour of duty. In 2012 more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in the war zone. In fact, 6,500 veterans killed themselves that year alone – that equates to 1 every hour and 20 minutes.

The harsh reality is that these men and women come home, having seen things they won’t talk of to anyone other than another veteran, tired, disillusioned, often traumatized and diagnosed with PTSD, unable to easily step back into their old lives. It is no wonder that so many isolate themselves from others in the community, very often becoming reliant on alcohol or drugs (prescription or illegal) to make it through each day. It is telling that the US government has stepped up their Veterans Alcohol and Drug Dependence Rehabilitation Program, providing support for former service members at an ever growing number of drug and alcohol detox centers across the States. For drug and alcohol detox in Massachusetts, as an example, there are centers in almost every town and city across the state – something like 64 all in all. Those that make it through the transition back into civilian life and survive or avoid addiction have gone on to become some of the harshest critics of our government.

People like Adam Khokesh, who served in the US Marine Corps Reserves in Iraq, have become vocal opponents of the very government they swore to obey when they joined the forces. They have seen through the illusion that government and media have fed to communities everywhere and are joining together to voice their opposition to today’s politics specifically and to war across the board. These highly trained personnel of yesterday have become today’s conscience of the nation, highlighting injustice, false flag events and illegal or immoral activities, including wars against other sovereign states. Groups like Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans against the War now actively oppose government and governmental policy, standing against the very things they previously stood for before the veil was torn from their eyes. The treatment many of them receive only serves to underline the government’s self interest and it is telling that the government considers veterans to be a danger, with Homeland Security classifying returning US veterans as a potential terrorist threat.

With something like 20 states wanting to secede from the United States, it may be that those same veterans who no longer support the corrupt political structure will be the vanguard of our changing world. When a country as large as the United States, with the influences it has across the globe, undergoes radical change it will surely impact us all.

-Written & submitted for The People’s Record by Evelyn Roberts

Lovely submission from Evelyn Roberts. Thank you so much. Veterans are part of the story, and they are, complicated victims of the system in their own way. Of course, the communities they are trained & instructed to destroy are also a big part of the conversation – they are victims of the system and are subjected to a whole different kind of horror because it. We would be remiss to not feature stories about both.

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Regarding “Jonathan Lash’s” false flag (pun intended) e-mail
May 7, 2013

On April 26th, the Hampshire College community received an email from its president, former president of the World Resources Institute Jonathan Lash, that announced his decision to flip the campus American flag upside-down and lower it to half mast.  The email articulated that this action was meant as “a two-fold statement: … a reclamation of mourning, and … an act of resistance against the symbolic violence of the American flag.”  He went on to make powerful assertions about the coercive ways in which the state mobilizes the flag in order to create a culture in which the state violence of the police and military is condoned, in which mourning over events such as the Boston bombing and 9/11 are channeled into a racist and bloodthirsty patriotism, and in which dissent and alternative reactions to tragedy are repressed and silenced.

Throughout the day, the email spread rapidly over social media and through word of mouth.  Dozens of people thanked President Lash for his words of solidarity with those oppressed by state violence.  Others marveled that such a statement would come from an administration with a “decades-long streak of complacence with neoliberalism”. A friend of mine who is of Arab descent was thrilled at the statement and sent President Lash a personal letter of thanks saying that she was “more proud than ever to be at Hampshire”.

Halfway through the day, this same friend received a response from the president.  It said that he had not written the email.  This was accompanied by a campus-wide response that read, “This afternoon someone falsely sent out a message under my name regarding the flag.  It was not written by me.  Hampshire welcomes discussion and dissent, but not by misrepresentation.”  Apparently, student(s) had written the original statement and hacked his account to send it under his name.

The majority of the criticism of the action accused the students responsible for assuming that all in the community shared their sentiments.  A subsequent email from the campus IT director asserted that the action had “blatantly trampled the community’s right to debate and arrive at a common position”.

Such a forum for administration-approved “discussion and dissent” was created a few weeks earlier when students facilitated an open dialogue about the campus flag.  Numerous international students, some of whose home countries have long histories of colonialist oppression at the hands of U.S. imperialism, expressed outrage and personal discomfort over the flag’s presence on campus.  In this discussion, the administration promised to at least partially acknowledge these concerns by putting up an earth flag on earth day and leaving it up permanently. The earth flag flew for one day and was removed.

The argument that all differing opinions concerning the American flag are valid and must be given institutional weight completely misunderstands mechanisms of oppression and destroys the prospect of solidarity.  It is the responsibility of the institution and  all those who benefit from U.S colonialism (via white privilege, class privilege, settler status…etc) to support those oppressed by this legacy of violence. The personal patriotism of some individuals should not obscure the real violence committed on the world and members of our community under the symbol of the flag.

Those arguing in favor of the American flag have significant power over those opposed.  They have the power of the state, the power of a long history of colonial genocide, and the power of the continued legacy of white supremacy.  They also have the power of the administration which continues flying the flag without the consent of the community.  Advocating for a “common position” in this regard would inevitably involve compromise on the part of the oppressed.  This is not solidarity.  This is the perpetuation of racist and colonialist dominance and oppression in the tradition of liberal “democracy”.

Sending the email was a powerful act of resistance used to expose the oppressive nature of institutional power at Hampshire.  The students responsible rejected the channels of resistance established for them by the administration and claimed the authority of the president in order to subvert that very authority.  By releasing a statement that spoke forcefully and directly against state violence, the students exposed the administration for being complicit with that violence by espousing an empty rhetoric of commitment to some vague notion of “diversity” and “social justice”.  The email challenged the administration and the campus to transcend the tradition of mere lip-service (http://www.hampshire.edu/shared_files/INSIDE_Spring_2013_5.2.1.pdf) and work instead toward a tradition of true solidarity with those oppressed by the state.

President Lash failed this challenge.  His response did not engage with the argument of the forged email whatsoever, and the American flag continues to proudly fly over the center of Hampshire’s campus.

Source

whitehouse:

Share the news: Our economy added 176,000 private-sector jobs last month, while unemployment dipped to its lowest rate since December 2008. http://at.wh.gov/kGdc9

Share the news - Barack Obama is a war criminal.

Share the news - poor people don’t know what you’re talking about, we’re still jobless or over-worked & underpaid and yes, poor. 

Share the news - we want a private-sector DEATH. We want private-sector abolition!

Share the news - it was a really bad idea for the White House to get a Tumblr. You are not welcome here. 

Share the news!

(via slothtanic)

TW: Suicide: Guantanamo attorney found dead in apparent suicide
May 1, 2013

An attorney who represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay was found dead last week in what sources said was a suicide.

Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed.

Hart’s death comes amid escalating chaos that has engulfed Guantanamo over the past three months—from a mass hunger strike to military commissions and renewed pressure on the White House to shut down the prison facility. Hart was one of three-dozen Guantanamo attorneys who signed a letter in March urging Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to take immediate action and bring about an end to the hunger strike.

Because Hart was a federal employee working on sensitive legal issues the FBI was contacted about his death. It is unknown if the agency has been investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.

Neither the FBI nor local law enforcement officials in Toledo, Ohio returned calls for comment. A phone number listed for Hart was disconnected Wednesday.

Truthout learned about the details of Hart’s death Wednesday from an investigator who has been tapped by attorneys to work on a number of cases involving Guantanamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions. The investigator requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Dennis Terez, the top federal public defender in the Northern District of Ohio, where Hart worked, declined to comment on his colleague’s death.

“At this time and out of respect for Mr. Hart’s family and friends, we have no comment,” Terez said.

Hart’s name has since been removed from the federal public defender’s website.

Hart worked closely with attorney Carlos Warner, who was based out of the federal public defender’s Akron, Ohio office. Warner referred requests for comment about Hart to Terez.

With Warner, Hart was assigned by the government to defend Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani, who was detained by the CIA and allegedly subjected to torture methods until his transfer to Guantanamo in March 2008. The government maintained that al-Afghani was Osama bin Laden’s translator and a top al-Qaida official.

Hart also represented Saudi Khalid Saad Mohammed, who was transferred back to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo in 2009. He was also the attorney for Adel Hakeemy, a Tunisian who has been detained at Guantanamo for 11 years.

The Guantanamo prisoners he represents have not yet been notified about Hart’s death, according to the investigator.

In addition to defending Guantanamo prisoners, Hart also was the defense attorney for Richard Schmidt, an alleged white supremacist and convicted felon who was under federal investigation over allegations he amassed high-powered weapons and ammunition.

In 2011, Hart was assigned to represent Jeff Boyd Levenderis, 54, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on suspicion of concealing a biological toxin, ricin, and making false statements to federal investigators. An 11-year-old daughter survives Hart.

Source

The Pentagon’s army of space-age robot warriors is getting a lot more real with the PETMAN robot
April 8, 2013

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has released video footage of a project that’s been long in the works and really starting to now take shape. The Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin — or “PETMAN,” for short — is the subject of the latest clip, and very well could be all it takes to scare off any insurgents once it’s ready for the battlefield.

PETMAN is a bipedal robot that has been displayed during previous tests as having the ability to climb stairs and even do pushups. In the latest video, though, the experimental project is showcased as being more lifelike than ever before.

Scientists at Boston Dynamics have released a video that shows PETMAN, clothed head-to-toe in full-on camouflage, jogging in place on a laboratory platform. But unlike earlier videos in which PETMAN appeared to be nothing more than a pile of wires enclosed in metal, the newest footage shows the science project at its all-time most humanness.

PETMAN isn’t being tasked with running like a human being for simply the sake of being creepy, though. Boston Dynamics have outfitted the robot in high-tech protective camo clothing that is designed to keep soldiers — real, cyborg or other — safe from hazardous chemicals. “PETMAN has sensors embedded in its skin that detect any chemicals leaking through the suit. The skin also maintains a micro-climate inside the clothing by sweating and regulating temperature,” explains Boston Dynamics.

The robot, adds the scientists, can balance itself, move freely, walk and do a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics — all while being exposed to chemical warfare agents. “Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions,” adds Boston Dynamics. “The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.”

And yeah, PETMAN can walk the walk — but he doesn’t stop there either. Scientists have programed the robot to “simulate human physiology,” so that when being exposed to chemical agents, researchers can send signals to the robot that forces it to mimic human sweating and switch its body temperature like a real-life soldier might do while on the field. So with PETMAN being able to do all of that and then some, what does DARPA have planned next? That’s likely top-secret, but critics of the US Defense Department’s science lab say projects like this will lend themselves to changing the face of war from a human one to a robotic one.

“It’s going to be used for chasing people across the desert, I would imagine. I can’t think of many civilian applications - maybe for hunting, or farming, for rounding up sheep,” Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC previously in regards to DARPA’s robot creations.

“But of course if it’s used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it’s not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers,” he said.

Source

Nathan Blanc: Israeli teenager & conscientious objector
April 7, 2013

Nathan Blanc is an Israeli conscientious objector. He’s getting ready to serve his 8th stint in jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. He believes in democracy. From the video:

The main reason for my refusal is the feeling our country is going towards a non democratic condition of civil inequality between us and the Palestinians. There are two people in the same land but only the Israelis can vote in the elections.

Blanc has internalized one state/ two peoples.

Israel is refusing to offer him civil service as an alternative to military service and he doesn’t want to get a mental health deferment; “I’m not going to put on an act,” he toldHaaretz last January. He thinks the army is trying to “wear him down with the repeated confinements until he gives in and enlists.”

That was after two months in prison, now he’s been in for over 100 days. Harriet Sherwood reports for The Guardian, Israel set to jail teenage conscientious objector for eighth time:

It is a routine Nathan Blanc knows well. At 9am on Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old will report, as instructed in his draft papers, to a military base near Tel Aviv. There he will state his objection to serving in the Israeli army. Following his refusal to enlist, Blanc expects to be arrested and sentenced to between 10 and 20 days in jail. He will then be taken to Military Prison Number 6 to serve his time. And then, following his release, the cycle will begin over again.

The reason why Blanc knows what to expect is that this will be the eighth time the teenage conscientious objector has been jailed in the past 19 weeks. Since the date of his original call-up for military service, Blanc has spent more than 100 days in prison; on one occasion, he was released on a Tuesday and re-imprisoned two days later on a Thursday.

Blanc began to consider the possibility of refusing the draft several years ago. “It was a very hard decision, it took me a long time to get to it,” he says.

The turning point was Operation Cast Lead, the war in Gaza that began at the end of 2008 and ended three weeks later with a Palestinian death toll of around 1,400. In a statement issued when he was first imprisoned, Blanc said: “The wave of aggressive militarism that swept the country then, the expressions of mutual hatred, and the vacuous talk about stamping out terror and creating a deterrent effect were the primary trigger for my refusal.”

The government, he said, was “not interested in finding a solution to the existing situation, but rather in preserving it … We will talk of deterrence, we will kill some terrorist, we will lose some civilians on both sides, and we will prepare the ground for a new generation full of hatred on both sides … We, as citizens and human beings, have a moral duty to refuse to participate in this cynical game.”

In an interview with the Guardian, he says: “The war going on in this country for more than 60 years could have ended a long time ago. But both sides are giving into extremists and fundamentalists. The occupation was supposed to be temporary, but now no one speaks of it ending.”

The Israeli state, he adds, keeps people “under our control” without democratic rights. Palestinians are subject to “collective punishment” for the actions of a few.

Will our msm write about this? Probably not. Here is a facebook page with updates about Blanc, including video messages for him from other Israeli Refusniks.

War Resistors International:

Repeated imprisonment is a violation of international legal standards. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Opinion 24/2003 on Israel came to the conclusion that the repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Israel is arbitrary, and therefore it constitutes a violation of 14 par 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Israel is a signatory.

Natan Blanc refuses to enlist in the Israeli Army based on beliefs and conscience. He claims his human right to conscientious objection, as guaranteed by Article 18 of the ICCPR.

Source

Hopi Indians of Arizona have asked federal officials to help stop a high-price auction of 70 sacred masks in Paris next week.
April 4, 2013

The tribe is receiving advice from the State and Interior Departments, but each agency says its ability to intervene is limited. But imagine if ‘national treasures’ like that cracked bell or that crusty constitution in the U.S. were stolen. The truth here is that the U.S. government just does not care about protecting the rights of the people whom they stole land from and executed genocide against.

In many ways, the Hopi case illustrates a paradox in the way artifacts are repatriated around the world.

While foreign nations routinely rely on international accords to secure American help in retrieving antiquities from the United States, Washington has no reciprocal agreements governing American artifacts abroad. And the United States laws that provide some protection against the illicit sale of Indian artifacts in this country have no weight in foreign lands. So tribes reaching overseas to recover objects that they view as culturally important are left to do battle on their own.

“Right now there just aren’t any prohibitions against this kind of large foreign sale,” said Jack F. Trope, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which is seeking new laws and treaties that would give the United States more force to intervene. “The leverage for international repatriation just isn’t there.”

The Hopis, who number about 18,000 in northeast Arizona, regard the objects in the Paris sale, which they call Katsinam, or “friends,” as imbued with divine spirits. They object to calling them “masks” and say that outsiders who photograph, collect or sell them are committing sacrilege. The brightly colored visages and headdresses, often adorned with horsehair, sheepskin, feathers and maize, are thought to embody the spirits of warriors, animals, messengers, fire, rain and clouds, among other things. They are used today, as in the past, in many Hopi rites, like coming-of-age ceremonies and harvest rituals.

The Néret-Minet auction house in Paris says that its sale, on April 12, will be one of the largest auctions of Hopi artifacts ever, and it estimates that it will bring in $1 million. Many of the objects are more than 100 years old and carry estimates of $10,000 to $35,000. The auction house says that among the spirits represented are the Crow Mother, the Little Fire God and the Mud Head Clown.

“Sacred items like this should not have a commercial value,” said Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykotsmovi, Ariz. “The bottom line is we believe they were taken illegally.”

 “This sale is not just a business transaction but a homage to the Hopi Indians,” Gilles Néret-Minet (the director of the auction house selling the stolen, sacred items) said through a hateful, dismissive, racist smile.

Artifacts were confiscated by missionaries who came to convert the tribe in the late 19th century. Some were sold by tribe members. But even those sales were not legitimate, Hopi leaders say, because they may have been made under duress, and because the tribe holds that an individual cannot hold title to its religious artifacts — they are owned communally.

The market for American Indian artifacts, both here and abroad, is robust, experts say, and auctions of Indian items in the United States typically proceed unimpeded by American law and unchallenged by most tribes. There are some protections, though, under United States theft statutes, experts say, as well as restrictions on the sale of pieces by museums and federal agencies.

The Hopis and their supporters say the Paris sale is especially objectionable because of its size and the religious significance of the items involved. They say it also illustrates a striking disparity between what the government is empowered to do to help a foreign country recover an object from the United States and its inability to do much to retrieve an American artifact for sale overseas.

Source

Bolded my commentary embedded in the otherwise-too-“neutral” NY Times article.

CIA trains & spies for Syrian rebels – report
March 23, 2013

Some Syrian rebel groups get training and intelligence straight from CIA officers, US officials told media. The helping hand is meant to bolster the secular opposition against both governmental troops and Islamist forces.

The CIA’s increased involvement in Syria is part America’s greater engagement in the war-torn country, according to The Wall Street Journal. The spy agency has selected some small rebel units from the Free Syrian Army to receive combat training and fresh intel they can act upon, the newspaper says, citing unnamed US officials and rebel commanders.

The training is provided by the CIA, working together with British, French and Jordanian intelligence agencies. The rebels are taught to use various kinds of arms, including anti-tank weapons. They are also schooled in urban combat tactics and counterintelligence tactics. The experience will supposedly help them stand against the professional Syrian army, which scores victories against the armed opposition thanks to both more advanced weapons and better organization.

The rebels are also receiving fresh intelligence collected by the CIA, which they can act upon at short notice. The extent of the info provided remains in secret, but the US can potentially provide what they gather trough satellite and signal surveillance as well as intelligence coming through exchanges with Israeli and Jordanian agencies.

The CIA is said to keep this part of dealing with the rebels limited, withholding sensitive types of information, like the suspected locations of Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles.

The US spy agency was previously working in Turkey vetting rebel groups for receiving arms shipments from Gulf monarchies. The effort aimed at preventing the weapons from being funneled to Islamists had mixed results, the WSJ says. The CIA also works with Iraqi counterterrorism units to counter the flow of Islamist militants across the border to Syria.

The White House has been reluctant to send combat-worthy equipment to Syrian rebels, despite calls inside the US and from Gulf and some European countries to do so. It is concerned that those would end up in the hand of the more powerful Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist force, the Nusra Front. Unlike arms, the intelligence from CIA is operationally useful for a short period of time and would not be traded for years to come, a US official explained.Washington’s concern over the growing influence of the Nusra Front was reiterated on Friday by President Barack Obama, as he was visiting Jordan as part of his Middle Eastern tour. 

“I am very concerned about Syria becoming an enclave for extremism because extremists thrive in chaos, they thrive in failed states, they thrive in power vacuums,” Obama said after meeting Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

The Nusra Front is believed to be responsible for the bloodiest bombings in Syria over the past months. The latest such attack was the assassination of Mohammad Buti and influential Sunni preacher and supporter of the Syrian government. Buti was killed on Thursday along with some 50 others when a car bomb was detonated near a Damascus mosque.

The US is reportedly gathering intelligence on Nusra Front commanders and fighters for a possible campaign of targeted drone killing similar to those the CIA wages in Pakistan and Yemen and the Pentagon in Afghanistan.

Source

U.S. Pentagon’s interest in neuroscience should be viewed with critical suspicion
March 17, 2013

Duke University experiments in connecting the brains of two rats through implanted electrodes and the planned Brain Activity Map project reflect a growing Pentagon interest in neuroscience for applications that range from such far-off ideas as teleoperation of military devices (think mind-controlled drones), to more near-term and less controversial technology, like prosthetics controlled by the human brain, BBC Future reports.

The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.

But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.

While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).  That’s raising questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.”

In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”

Sharon Weinberger spoke in more detail about the Pentagon’s growing interest in neuroscience in her talk A Manhattan Project of the Mind at SXSW.

Source

Hundreds of people held a protest march in the Pakistani capital Islamabad to demand the release of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, who is imprisoned in the United States, Press TV reports.
March 11, 2013

Sunday’s demonstration was organized by the country’s largest political-religious party Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a Press TV correspondent said.

The protesters highlighted the plight of Siddiqui, who is currently detained at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, which provides specialized medical and mental health services to female prisoners.

An activist said that the Unites States’ judiciary had proved that it was fully biased against Muslims and Islam, when it sentenced Siddiqui for 86 years in prison without due process of law.

The protesters were holding placards and banners bearing anti-US slogans. They also denounced the Pakistani government for taking a hands-off approach in dealing with the Siddiqui issue.

In September 2010, a court in New York sentenced Siddiqui to 86 years in prison after she was found guilty of opening fire on FBI agents and US military personnel in a police station in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was being interrogated, in 2008.

The mother of three vanished in Karachi with her three children on March 30, 2003. The following day, local newspapers reported that she had been abducted by US forces and charged with terrorism.

Human rights groups say that Siddiqui was secretly transferred to the US base in Bagram, north of Kabul, and tortured for five years prior to the alleged incident in 2008.

She was taken to the US in July 2008 and then convicted in the New York court in February 2010.

Source

this-is-not-native:

phxtiger:

chicksandchoppers:

Indian

Now there’s a chief

Nope.

Nope. It’s a settler person sexualizing the women of my race and desecrating sacred regalia and I’ll have none of it.

• My Identity Is Not A Costume for You To Wear!
• On why prancing around in a headdress and war paint isn’t ~appreciating~ “native culture”
• An Open Letter to Non-Natives in Headdresses
• Redface - The history of racist Indian stereotypes [link may not work due to exceeded monthly bandwith limit, but check anyway]

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So this lobbyist (representing weapons/drones companies) testifying to the House Public Safety Committee explains honestly why his group is putting money into making sure that drones are allowed:

My name is Paul Applewhite; I’m on the board of directors for the Pacific chapter of the Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International…in the Pacific Northwest we represent about 80 companies, 1,400 employees, about 120 million dollars in taxable revenue…the backlash against unmanned vehicles has just caused the city of Seattle to cancel their unmanned systems. Back in May of 2012, you had Ian Stawicki who ran around and killed 5 people. The longer this man was running around the city of Seattle, the more people he was killing…why are we denying ourselves this great technology that is now available?

…

But now every time you pull this out you have to DOCUMENT IT, which to me discourages the use of it. We give every one of our law enforcement officers lethal force on their hip. We’re saying, give them the judgment to be able to pull this thing out and use it, up to and including lethal force. Why is this technology so much different? 

So, it’s really come to this already. Lobbyists transparently, openly, unapologetically calling to use drone technology to kill Americans on U.S. soil - not that it is any worse or more significant than killing U.S. citizens who are out-of-the-country, like American citizen Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki (neither of whom had a history of violence, at all) both of whom were killed by the U.S. without being charged with any crime and without any form of due-process.

But still, that this sort of discourse is now the status-quo, and is now being aggressively pursued by billion-dollar special interests publicly is terrifyingly.

Thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails are staging a one-day hunger strike to protest the death of a fellow inmate
February 24, 2013

“About 3,000 prisoners announced that they would refuse meals,” Israel Prisons Service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman, told the AFP news agency on Sunday.

Arafat Jaradat, a 30-year-old father of two, from the village of Sair near Hebron in the southern West Bank, died on Saturday in an Israeli jail from what prison authorities said appeared to have been cardiac arrest.

Palestinian officials and the detainee’s family alleged that Jaradat was mistreated by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, saying he was healthy at the time of his arrest last week.

An autopsy on Jaradat’s body was due to take place at Israel’s national forensic institute on Sunday and Issa Qaraqaa, the Palestinian minister in charge of prisoner affairs, said a Palestinian doctor and Jaradat family members would be present.

Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston, reporting from outside Ofer military prison, near Ramallah, said there were about 800 to 900 Palestinian prisoners there taking part in the hunger strike over Jaradat’s death.

Johnston said there was a “heavy Israeli police presence” outside the prison.

In the Gaza Strip, hundreds of Palestinians from Hamas, which governs the territory, Islamic Jihad and other factions, also gathered to protest against Jaradat’s death.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Fawzi Barhoum, an Hamas spokesperson, said: ”This is a crime against our prisoners committed by the Israeli government.

“There must be a third Intifada [uprising] and a revolution … to pressure Israel to protect our prisoners.”

Jaradat’s death could exacerbate tensions in Israel and the Palestinian territories which have been rocked in past weeks by protests of solidarity with four other prisoners detained by Israel who are on hunger strike.

‘Unequivocal demand’

Protests in solidarity with Samer Issawi, one of the four hunger strikers who has refused food since August to protest against his detention, were also held on Sunday. 

Issawi’s family recently told Al Jazeera he would be close to death if he continues his action.

Protesters in Issawi’s village and in different parts of Hebron city hurled stones at Israeli security forces who responded with tear gas and stun grenades, witnesses said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s envoy has made “an unequivocal demand” to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority to quell the wave of protests in the West Bank, a government statement.

Sunday’s statement added that Netanyahu had also ordered the transfer of January arrears of tax revenues that Israel collects on the behalf of the Palestinians but has been withholding.

Israel holds more than 4,600 Palestinians in jail on charges that range from stone-throwing to deadly attacks on Israeli targets. Of the detainees, 159 are being held without charge or trial. 

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