The former UK Deputy Prime Minister says the reaction to Hamas' rockets is brutally disproportionate and grossly indiscriminate.

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Imagine a country claiming the lives of nearly three times as many as were lost in the MH17 plane tragedy in less than three weeks.

A nation which blasted a hospital, shelled and killed children from a gunboat as they played football on the beach and was responsible for 1,000 deaths, at least 165 of them children, in just two weeks.

Surely it would be branded a pariah state, condemned by the United Nations, the US and the UK. The calls for regime change would be ­deafening.

But these howls of protest are muted. The condemnation softened.

For this is Israel.

Israel's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trots out the same excuses. Hamas "militants" in Gaza fired their rockets first. Israel has a right to defend itself. It needs to protect its citizens.

And he's right on all three counts - but as always with Israel this is not the full story. The military action supposedly targeting Hamas is so brutally disproportionate and so grossly indiscriminate that it makes it impossible not to view Israel's actions as war crimes.

A political analyst says Israel's relentless onslaught against the Gaza Strip is aimed at ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Press TV reports.

In an interview with Press TV on Saturday, Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist, said the Tel Aviv regime seeks to wipe the entire Palestine of its native inhabitants.

"This is genocide. This is ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine," Rickard said, adding that Israel's crimes against Palestinians amount to "war crimes."

"They're basically trying to wipe out the entire Gaza infrastructure and reoccupy Gaza," the analyst added.

He also lashed out at the Egyptian government for helping the Israeli regime with its crimes against Palestinians by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed.

Jon Snow recounts the scene in Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, where doctors struggle to treat adults and children wounded by Israeli attacks.

It is not an exaggeration to say Saudi Arabia is one of the most oppressive, authoritarian regimes on the planet. Despite having been the main foreign instigator pushing for conflict in Syria, as well as its increasingly disturbing ties to the attacks on 9/11, it remains one of the U.S. government's closest allies.

I've covered some of the human rights abuses of the Saudi regime on several occasions due to the fact that it so clearly exposes the total hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy. The most recent example was the recent sentencing of human rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu Alkhair to 15 years in prison for "inciting public opinion," i.e., effectively utilizing free speech.

I covered this in detail in the post: Saudi Human Rights Lawyer and Activist Jailed for 15 Years for Free Speech Under New "Anti-Terror" Law.

Thanks to revelations from Edward Snowden, we now know that our taxpayer money is directly funding the ability of this autocratic regime to brutalize its citizenry.

The United States evacuated its embassy in Libya on Saturday, driving diplomats across the border into Tunisia under heavy military escort after escalating clashes broke out between rival militias in Tripoli.

Security in the Libyan capital has deteriorated following two weeks of fighting between brigades of former rebel fighters who have pounded each other with rockets and artillery fire in southern Tripoli near the embassy compound.

The violence is the worst seen in Tripoli since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Western governments fear Libya is teetering toward becoming a failed state just three years after the NATO-backed war ended his one-man rule.

Three F-16 fighters provided air support and Osprey aircraft carrying Marines flew overhead the U.S. convoy as a precaution, but there were no incidents during the five-hour drive from Tripoli to Tunisia, U.S. officials said.

"Security has to come first. Regrettably, we had to take this step because the location of our embassy is in very close proximity to intense fighting and ongoing violence between armed Libyan factions," a U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a statement.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, angrily sputtered during a congressional hearing Friday that the White House should not be held up to scrutiny, saying that there was no right to know what it was doing behind closed doors.

"You don't have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government," Norton said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

It was, to put mildly, a significant departure from the more traditional liberal stance that openness and transparency are must to prevent abuses of power by government officials. Instead the leading advocate for statehood for the District of Columbia literally argued that even the congressional committee charged with oversight shouldn't be asking questions in the first place.

She made the comments while protesting the committee's Republican majority for voting to ignore a claim by the White House that David Simas, director of it's Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, was immune to a congressional subpoena to testify. Republicans believe the office is being used a political campaign operation, a violation of federal election law.

The CIA obtained a legally protected, confidential email between whistleblower officials and Congress this spring, raising questions over whether the agency illegally has access to other communications regarding whistleblowers, McClatchy reported.

It is unclear how the CIA got hold of the email and other unspecified communications between Daniel Meyer - the intelligence community's top official for whistleblower cases - and lawmakers, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy.

The email was about allegations that the CIA's inspector general, David Buckley, failed to properly investigate potential agency retaliation against an official who was cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee on an investigation pertaining to the 'The Company's' use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques during the George W. Bush administration.

In December 2013, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who led calls for the swift publication of the report, revealed that the Intelligence Committee had become aware of an internal CIA report, which he said was "consistent with the Intelligence Committee's report" and "conflicts with the official CIA response to the committee's report." The report was not shared with the Committee investigators.

The Pentagon said on Friday the transfer of heavy-caliber multiple-launch rocket systems from Russia to Ukrainian separatists appeared to be imminent with the arms close enough to the border they could be handed over "potentially today."

"We have indications that the Russians intend to supply heavier and more sophisticated multiple-launch rocket systems in the very near future," said Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, adding that the weapons were in the over-200mm range.

Warren indicated the weapons had been seen getting closer to the border and the Pentagon believed a transfer was imminent and could happen "potentially today."

"We believe that they are able to transfer this equipment at any time, at any moment," he said.

Warren said it was unclear whether Russian operators of the rocket launchers might cross the border as well, but he said there have been indications of Russian operators of other systems going over.

BEIRUT: The Israeli Police Foreign Press Spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, appears to have falsified the Israeli government's claim that Hamas was responsible for the killing of three Israeli settler teens in June, by saying responsibility lies with a lone cell that operated without the complicity of Hamas' leadership.

The kidnapping and subsequent killing of three Israeli settler teens last month is considered to be a flashpoint for the escalated violence in Gaza -- that as of day 19 of the conflict has left 926 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead.

At the time Israeli authorities placed the blame squarely on Hamas, with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu saying "They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by animals in human form. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay."

Journalist Mai Bei, (Yahoo News) is reminding America of its recent dark past vis-à-vis that longtime rogue agency the CIA's global torture operations during that rogue regime of the Bush administration.

The plot thickens with the Senate Intelligence Committee strongly in favor of declassifying its five years in the making, 6,700 page report bringing to light in graphic criminal detail the plethora of Geneva Convention and international law violations committed by overzealous CIA henchmen in their quest to torture information out of thousands of detainees the world over "fighting" America's so called war on terror.

Today's article attempts to create high drama Washington-style by hyping up anticipation of an executive-legislative showdown between how much of the CIA's dastardly deeds should be disclosed to the waiting American public.

Pressure is mounting on our current beleaguered president known for his disastrous foreign policy on the heels of the exact same disastrous foreign policy launched by the war criminal neocons before him. As a recent backdrop leading to this latest theatrical release of government-gone-bad is the back and forth sniping charges between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA, both accusing the other of illegal spying.

Committee Chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had long been cozy with protecting CIA secrecy and criminality right until she learned that Director John Brennan's CIA was busily violating her committee's privacy. She had no problem with the American public's privacy constantly violated in act after unconstitutional act or for that matter any world citizen's right to life being destroyed in the name of national security. But her ire was hypocritically provoked when the CIA no doubt got up too close and personal on her naked body politic and she did not like it one bit.

Then lest we forget we had President Obama campaigning on the promise once Bush was gone to be the most open, honest and transparent presidency in US history. What does he do? He proceeds to become the most secretive president in US history, racking up more cover-up scandals, more charges of espionage, more press harassment and more denials of Freedom of Information Act requests than all previous presidents combined!