Israeli activists launch campaign to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes

Resistance Begins...And So Does the Repression

 

Lucia Pizarro
International Coordinator
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
PO Box 2030, 91020 Jerusalem, Israel
info@icahd.org

Yesterday, June 11, 2007, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) announced the launching of a campaign to rebuild the home of every Palestinian family whose house is demolished over the coming year.  We held our launch in conjunction with the 40th year of the Occupation, for which we returned to the place where the Occupation began—the few houses of what had been the historic Mughrabi Quarter where, on the night of June 11, 1967, 135 Palestinian families were roused from their beds in the Middle of the night and their neighborhood demolished so as to create a plaza in front of the Wailing Wall.  It was an act that had nothing to do with either the war or with security.  It represented only the creation of the first "fact on the ground" of thousands that would come asserting exclusive Israeli claims over the entire country.

The ICAHD activists, accompanied by Israeli, Palestinian and international press, were met in the Quarter's sole remaining mosque by Mahmoud Masloukhi, the Mughrabi Quarter mukhtar, who offered words of greeting and spoke of the night 40 years ago when his home was demolished.  Aisha Masloukhi, Mahmoud's sister, also spoke of her experiences that night and what happened to the Quarter's residents in the years following that traumatic night.

Jeff Halper, ICAHD's Coordinator, told the assembled Mughrabi Quarter residents that we had come as Israelis not only to remember the night the Occupation began but to take responsibility for the actions of our government, responsibility Israel has tried to avoid all these decades.  ICAHD's latest campaign, he said, went beyond mere acknowledgment and solidarity, however.  It represents a further intensifying of ICAHD's resistance to the Occupation.  Meir Margalit, ICAHD's Field Coordinator, then presented a general overview of Israel's house demolition policy and its impact on the Palestinian population.

After fielding questions from the press and doing interviews, the ICAHD activists, accompanied by Palestinian residents (and a contingent of Border Police and undercover detectives), proceeded to the home of Naim Kabaja, whose one-room home in the Muslim Quarter was demolished last week.  There we began construction of the first official house of the campaign (though we have built 10 over the month of May in preparation).  First thing this morning (the 12th), inspectors of the Jerusalem Municipality arrived and took their pictures.  Within a day or two a demolition order will be placed on the rebuilt home, and within a week the house will likely be demolished again.

ICAHD will stay at the family's side and will resist any attempt to demolish the home.  Crucial for the success of our resistance is the international support you can offer us. Follow our website—and those of ICAHD USA and ICAHD UK—for updates and information.  Mobilize community organizations where you live, professional associations and your political representatives.

Through this campaign we can focus intense international pressures on Israel to stop demolitions and, by raising public consciousness, to generate international opposition to the Occupation as a whole.  Let us begin by saving the Kabaja home!

http://www.nimn.org/articles/whats_new/000651.php

Intel folks unhappy with Contractor Liability Bill

From Secrecy News:

"...Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill to extend federal legal jurisdiction to crimes committed abroad by U.S. contractors in war zones such as Iraq, so that such crimes could be prosecuted in U.S. courts.

But before the bill (H.R. 2740) was passed, it triggered alarms by those who were concerned that its provisions could undermine U.S. intelligence activities.

"The bill would have unintended and intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations," the White House said without elaboration in an October 3 statement (pdf) outlining its opposition to the bill.

[ ... ]

More fundamentally, he complained, the new bill "applies the entire criminal code to the new category of potential offenders and could implicate the authorized business of the intelligence community employees and contractors."

[ ... ]

The motion was approved, but not without some critical commentary.

"The [Forbes] amendment raises serious questions about the activities its proponents may be seeking to protect," said Rep. David Price (D-NC), who authored the new bill.

"Given that my bill only targets activities that are unlawful, why do my colleagues feel the need to clarify that it does not affect activities that are permissible?"

"What activities are contractors carrying out that are permissible but not lawful?" Rep. Price wondered aloud..."

Full article >>

Top secret tourism

The Joy of Snooping

Posted on Aug 30, 2007

Truthdig’s James Harris and Josh Scheer speak with Harry Helms, author of “Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You’re Not Supposed to Know About,” which his critics have called a handbook for terrorists. Helms explains why his work doesn’t threaten national security and what it’s like to visit some of the most secret sites in America.

 

"...Harris: Why do you think that this is a good book for others to read?  What’s the most important chronicle you think you wrote here?

Helms: I think the whole purpose of this book was not really so much the purpose of a travel guide, but to make some of these sites transparent.  We pay for this top-secret government, sometimes with our taxes, sometimes with curtailment of our liberties.  And for people who purchase this thing, and who are really the owners of it, we have the right to know just exactly what is being done in our name and for what purposes.  I’m not one of these Pollyannas who thinks you can conduct an entirely open government in a dangerous world.  No.  Obviously there are some military secrets that have to be kept secret.  But [what] I’ve discovered doing this book is that most of these secrets relate to things like mismanagement, failed projects, ineptitude, waste and in some cases possible dishonesty.  That’s what I want to explore, and that’s one reason that I find that a lot of these claims about national security are less about the nation’s security and more about the security of some of the people conducting these projects and wasting our money...

 

...Scheer: It seems like—.  Are you recommending this for me?  So, say, I want to go to Plum Island or the Nevada Test Site; we should handle this with care, right?

Helms: As I said in the book, visiting these sites is like visiting an art museum.  You can look all you want, but you can’t touch.  You can go up to the border, you can drive by the border, you can sit and look over the border, but don’t put a foot over.  These are very highly guarded sites.  You will be nailed, and chances are you will be fined and perhaps subject to imprisonment.

Scheer: Well, not just imprisonment, but what you were saying just a second ago about ... deadly force [being] authorized; I’d be kind of nervous about getting shot.

Helms: There are things you have to realize is when you step over the border in some of these areas, it’s almost like you’ve entered a foreign country.  Local police cannot enter these sites.  The local civil law enforcement authorities have no power or authorization whatsoever on these sites.  It’s really almost akin to the fact that since the end of World War II, large sections of the U.S., particularly in the West, have been controlled by this occupying power.  What I call the top-secret government, the one that directs these classified activities.  The normal rules and regulations, etc., the rest of us have to live by, those are totally gone..."

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China: forgotten biowarfare victims

"...In China, hundreds of victims of biological warfare are still suffering from painful wounds, more than 60 years after their villages were attacked with anthrax, glanders and other biological weapons agents.

Beginning in 1932, the Japanese Army developed and tested biological weapons in occupied Manchuria, the northeastern part of China. In 1936, they built a huge laboratory complex in Ping Fan, a small village near the city of Harbin. This unit became later known as Unit 731 and operated until the end of war in 1945.

In Ping Fan, the Japanese army developed and produced in huge quantities biological warfare agents such as the causative agents of plague, anthrax, typhus and many others. Also a broad variety of delivery systems were developed and tested, from porcelain bombs to plague-infected fleas. A most gruesome aspect of Ping Fan were the human experiments. Several thousand prisoners were tortured and killed in the death laboratories of Unit 731, not only to test biowarfare agents, but also to pursue other medical research. Not a single prisoner of Ping Fan survived..."

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The UK in 10 years: a 'chilling, dystopian' future

From the Sunday Herald: 'UK 2017: under surveillance' by Neil Mackay

 

"...This Orwellian vision of the future was compiled on the orders of the UK's information commissioner - the independent watchdog meant to guard against government and private companies invading the privacy of British citizens and exploiting the masses of information currently held on each and every one of us - by the Surveillance Studies Network, a group of academics.

On Friday, this study, entitled A Report on the Surveillance Society, was picked over by a select group of government mandarins, politicians, police officers and academics in Edinburgh. It is unequivocal in its findings, with its first sentence reading simply: "We live in a surveillance society." The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, endorses the report. He says: "Today, I fear that we are, in fact, waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us."

The academics who compiled the study based their vision of the future not on wild hypotheses but on existing technology, statements made about the intentions of government and private companies and studies by other think tanks, regulators, professional bodies and academics.

The report authors say that they believe the key theme of the future will be "pervasive surveillance" aimed at tracking and controlling people and pre-empting behaviour. The authors also say that their glimpse of the future is "fairly conservative. The future spelled out in the report is nowhere near as dystopian and authoritarian as it could be."

Here's how 2017 might look..."

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Vatican to absolve Knights Templar?

From the Telegraph:

 

"...A new book, Processus contra Templarios, will be published by the Vatican's Secret Archive on Oct 25, and promises to restore the reputation of the Templars, whose leaders were burned as heretics when the order was dissolved in 1314.

The Knights Templar were a powerful and secretive group of warrior monks during the Middle Ages. Their secrecy has given birth to endless legends, including one that they guard the Holy Grail...

 

...The Pope concluded that the entrance ritual was not truly blasphemous, as alleged by King Philip when he had the knights arrested. However, he was forced to dissolve the Order to keep peace with France and prevent a schism in the church.

"This is proof that the Templars were not heretics," said Prof Frale. "The Pope was obliged to ask pardon from the knights..."

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Following where the Nazis led

From Times Online:

"...George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute..."

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Jury hung on federal income tax evasion case

Picked up by the Arctic Beacon:

"...A criminal tax case alleging income tax evasion and conspiracy dissolved in federal court this week, when a jury returned zero convictions on 161 charges faced by nine defendants.

Monday's verdict "sends a strong message," said defense attorney Lisa Rasmussen, who represented Joel Axberg, a tile layer.

Informally called the Kahre case -- after the primary defendant, local business owner Robert Kahre, who paid workers in gold and silver coins -- the trial lasted four months...

...Michael Kennedy, who defended Lori Kahre, said the case turned on the notion that taxpayers could be wrong without being criminal. He was referring to the fact that his client, Lori Kahre, and other defendants had not paid taxes according to the market value of the precious metal content of the coins in which they were paid, as opposed to their face value. He conceded at trial that his client may owe federal taxes for her mistakes.

The Internal Revenue Service had never before provided guidance on how to handle gold and silver coins that circulate, only on noncirculating collectible coins, according to Kennedy, who is a federal public defender. "If that's the case, we're not going to take someone's liberty from them, on something that a (certified public accountant) with a master's degree doesn't even know. That's a scary country, and I don't live in that country." ..."

Full article >>