Human Rights Glance
The French Foreign Ministry said Friday that Israel has refused to allow the French government from bringing the filtration system to Gaza, where people have been without clean water for weeks.
In some parts of Gaza, sewage is flooding streets and homes after the three-week long Israeli assault that ended last week when Israeli officials declared a ceasefire.
The Israeli military has violated the ceasefire seven times since then, including an attack yesterday that wounded a number of primary school students in Khan Younis. Palestinian fighters killed one soldier who was invading southern Gaza in violation of the ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the Israeli imposed closure of the Gaza Strip remains in place, and Palestinians have been unable to even clean the racist graffiti and feces smeared on their walls by the Israeli military, due to the lack of water.
Israeli military refuses water filtration system for Gaza
Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool
The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.
But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.
Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.
TVNL Comment: How is that for "change"?
Israeli soldiers recall Gaza attack orders
“Fire on anything that moves in Zeitoun” – that was the order handed down to Israeli troops in the Givati Shaked battalion, who reduced the eastern Gaza City suburb to little more than rubble in a matter of days.
According to Israeli soldiers who took part in the three-week offensive, the destruction of the area, a known Hamas stronghold, was designed to send a wider message to Gazans. “We pounded Zeitoun into the ground,” an Israeli soldier who was deployed in the area, told The Times.
VIDEO: Israel Again Destroys Food Supplies. More Crimes Against Humanity.
| | The scale of the damage caused by Israel's war on Gaza continues to emerge. TVNL Comment: For as long as we can remember Israel has plowed olive groves (as collective "punishment"), destroyed or contaminated water wells, and now they control the water supply thanks to the"mapped" out and parsed up land "deals."If Americans knew what took place in Israel and the occupied territories here would be no support for Israel in this nation. |
Bush officials authorized torture of US citizen, lawyers say
Attorneys for US citizen Jose Padilla -- who was convicted of material support for terrorist activities in 2007 -- say that high-level Bush Administration officials knew their client was being tortured during the time he was held an enemy combatant in a South Carolina brig, because of the command structure and that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld employed in approving harsh interrogation tactics.
Yoo: Bush okayed torture to outwit defense lawyers
But now, in a Thursday editorial published by the Wall Street Journal, John Yoo, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, explained that the Bush administration's torture programs, for which he co-authored the legal justifications, were initially designed to outwit crafty defense attorneys.
"The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up," writes Yoo. "The [Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds] or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery -- which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place."
Judge to hear arguments in Padilla detention case
Federal officials are asking a judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a convicted terrorism conspirator who says he was abused while being held in a South Carolina military prison. Attorneys for the Justice Department will ask a federal judge in Charleston Thursday to dismiss the claim by Jose Padilla, who was convicted in 2007 of three terrorism-related charges in Miami federal court.
In 2007, Padilla and his mother filed a civil lawsuit accusing the federal government of mistreating and illegally detaining Padilla while he was being held at a U.S. Naval brig near Charleston.
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