A Documentary Film: The Killing of Kashmir

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I would soon learn the security forces and the militants take who they want, they torture, and they kill. Caught in the middle are the people of Kashmir. More than 60,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, have died in the 15-year conflict. Half a million Indian troops are stationed in Kashmir, fighting Pakistani-funded militants who slip across the border to attack the troops but also to terrorize the local population into giving them shelter and assistance.

While both governments talk of peace, Unreported World reveals that, on the ground, very little has changed. For the local villagers life is a cycle of militant violence and government repression. The team arrive in Srinagar to find Indian police have just violently beaten a group of women who are protesting about the detention of two men and a woman for alleged links to pro-Pakistan militants.

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10 Years Since Downing St. Memo: Is It Happening Again?

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The Real News, July 24, 2012:

	10 Years Since Downing St. Memo: Is It Happening Again?
	Ray McGovern and Annie Machon: British Intelligence chief ramps up war talk against Iran  July 24, 2012

	The Downing Street memo Pt.1
	McGovern: It’s there in black and white – The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy  August 8, 2009

	The Downing Street memo Pt.2
	Ray McGovern: The “Memo” shows a premeditated war of aggression with intent to deceive  August 10, 2009

The Dark Side Of The Obama White House

Dan Froomkin, HuffingtonPost, July 25, 2012

The most conspicuous reaction in Washington to a series of astonishing national security revelations, many of which emerged in two new books, has come from prominent members of Congress demanding investigations into who leaked them.

One member, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, even complained of learning more from one of the books than she did in her top oversight post over the intelligence community.

But anybody upset about finding things out this way should be angry at the people who didn’t tell them what they needed to know — not the ones who did.

In “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” New York Times reporter David E. Sanger describes in quite extraordinary detail the Obama administration’s hitherto secret cyberwar campaign against Iran, its targeted drone strikes against Al Qaeda and affiliates, and any number of other covert ops, including of course the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As he indicates in his subtitle, Sanger concludes that the biggest surprise of the Obama presidency is just how aggressive he has been in his application of military power.

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Richard Falk: A Brief Further Comment on Syria

Richard Falk, July 25, 2012

Some of the sharpest critics of my posts contend that I focus too much attention on Israel while exempting the far worse Syrian regime from any sort of harsh condemnation. In fact, I did write a post devoted to the Syrian situation on May 31, 2012 in which I referred to the criminal character of the Assad regime and pointed to such bloody deeds (Crimes Against Humanity) as the Houla massacre that had occurred a few days before. In my mind, there is no doubt that the behavior of the ruling clique in Damascus is genocidal, and should be condemned and appropriate international action undertaken to protect the people of Syria.

But what is appropriate in such a situation is far from self-evident. The clarity of condemnation should not be confused with devising a prescription for action. Military interveRichard Falkntion rarely succeeds, violates the right of self-determination, and often expands the scope and severity of violence, especially if carried out from the air. Furthermore, we know little about the opposition in Syria, to what extent its governance of the country would be based on the rule of law and human rights. There are confusing reports about rebel atrocities as well as concerning the role of Al Qaeda operatives leading some of the rebel forces, and also indications that Gulf money and weapons have been supplied to these forces ever since the beginning of the anti-Damascus uprising. Every government has the right to fight against its internal enemies, especially if heavily assisted by hostile external forces, although that right must be exercised within the framework of constraints imposed by international humanitarian law.

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Glenn Greenwald: The Obama GITMO myth

 

New vindictive restrictions on detainees highlights the falsity of Obama defenders regarding closing the camp

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, July 23, 20

Accused Sept. 11 co-conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh is shown while attending his military hearing at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. (AP/Janet Hamlin)

Most of the 168 detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government for close to a decade without charges and with no end in sight to their captivity. Some now die at Guantanamo, thousands of miles away from their homes and families, without ever having had the chance to contest accusations of guilt. During the Bush years, the plight of these detainees was a major source of political controversy, but under Obama, it is now almost entirely forgotten. On those rare occasions when it is raised, Obama defenders invoke a blatant myth to shield the President from blame: he wanted and tried so very hard to end all of this, but Congress would not let him. Especially now that we’re in an Election Year, and in light of very recent developments, it’s long overdue to document clearly how misleading that excuse is.

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Obama: Shooting People “Evil … Senseless”

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by Jay Janson, Dissident Voice, July 22nd, 2012

While reading the text of Obama Statement on Shootings in Colorado, one line struck this writer as quite astounding:

“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.”

The President may have realized afterward that since he has been ordering the shooting of thousands in a half-dozen countries, the words “evil, senseless, beyond reason” could easily reflect back on himself. A later Obama statement on the massacre in a Colorado movie house did not contain the words “evil,” “senseless,” “violence beyond reason.”

In any case, history books, in some future, probably not to distant, day will deplore Obama’s pathetic 9/11 excuse for increasing and extending a ten-year-old military occupation war in dirt poor Afghanistan, killing, and killing easily, young and old Afghani, who are fighting invaders of theirir nation as they have always done. And perhaps one day independent investigative journalism will reveal whose instructions Obama was following from within that “financial element” that FDR confided “has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson.”¹

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Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe

The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded.

The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Laura Roberts, The Telegraph, Sep 2, 2011

The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.

In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

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Victims of Norway mass murderer Anders Breivik remembered one year on

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Daily Record, July 22 2012

norway jens stoltenberg Image 1

NORWAY is commemorating the 77 victims of a bomb and gun massacre that shocked the peaceful nation one year ago.

Anders Behring Breivik, a 33-year-old far-right fanatic, has admitted to the attacks on July 22 last year – a bombing of the government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight, and a shooting rampage that left 69 dead at the left-wing Labour Party’s youth camp on Utoya island.

In a wreath-laying ceremony at the bomb site today, prime minister Jens Stoltenberg said Breivik had not succeeded in his declared goal of destroying Norway’s commitment to being an inclusive, multicultural society.

Mr Stoltenberg said: “The bomb and the gun shots were meant to change Norway. The Norwegian people answered by embracing our values. The perpetrator lost. The people won.”

In Oslo, tarps still cover the windows of bomb-damaged buildings on the plaza, and large cement road blocks stop all but pedestrian traffic.

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Then and Now

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by  Badri Raina

Then one called out to children,
Now  we reach for Remotes;
Those homes had lively voices,
These  currency notes.

What is a world without a voice
That  one may  call one’s own?
What  worth this  cloistered comfort,
With no  sharer  of  pleasure or pain?
When was the last you met your friend
In  beloved flesh and blood?

Now, not we but our laptops  meet
As though we might be dead.
We now speak of ‘sentiment’
As stocks go  bull or bear;
The  ‘human’  seems a wasteful bore,
It is the ‘numbers’ that endear.

Ilan Pappe: Israel coined the term “Nakba” and is still implementing it

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Prof. Ilan Pappe,The Electronic Intifada, 20 July 2012

Home demolitions carried out today are a continuation of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

(Mahfouz Abu Turk / APA images)

In the July lull between the two truces of the 1948 war that involved Israel and troops sent from neighboring Arab states to try and salvage Palestine, another stage in the ethnic cleansing operation of the country was completed.

While in April 1948 the urban space of Palestine was almost completely destroyed by the Zionist forces, pockets of the rural areas and three towns, al-Lid, Ramleh and Nazareth were still safe, but not for long.

Within the ten days of the lull (known in Israeli historiography as the “ten days war”), more Palestinian land was occupied and more people uprooted. The newly-born Jewish state promised the UN mediator at the time to cease fighting and explained that the July operations were just minor cleansing of pockets of resistance.

The UN did not buy the lie, but was already then a helpless and hapless organization. Only the city of Nazareth was spared and it is not very clear why. Zionist leader and Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was very keen to depopulate it not only from its original inhabitants but also from the tens of thousands of refugees who found shelter there since May 1948, in the very last moment was convinced by someone to leave i intact.

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