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Charles Taylor sentenced to 50 years in prison for war crimes

Owen Bowcott
The Guardian
Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00 UTC
Judge at court in The Hague says ex-Liberia president's crimes were of the 'utmost gravity in scale and brutality'


Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, has been sentenced to 50 years in jail for being "in a class of his own" when committing war crimes during the long-running civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Judges at a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague said his leadership role and exploitation of the conflict to extract so-called "blood diamonds" meant he deserved one of the longest prison sentences handed down so far by the court.

Taylor, 64, was found guilty last month of 11 counts of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, when supporting rebels between 1996 and 2002 in return for conflict gems.

The offences included murder, rape, sexual slavery, recruiting child soldiers, enforced amputations and pillage.

Comment: And the western governments who sponsored him? The western corporations he worked for? When are they getting theirs? Never. Why? Because the ICC is a sham, covering up for the real criminals who plunder people and planet at will.

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MIB

Syrian 'rebels' (CIA, Mossad, MI6) issue ultimatum to Assad: Capitulate or we blow your country apart

Dominic Evans
The Daily Star, Lebanon
Thu, 31 May 2012 03:37 UTC
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Syrian 'rebels' pose for the camera
Syrian rebels have given president Bashar al-Assad a 48-hour deadline to comply with an international peace plan otherwise they would renew their battle to overthrow him.

The ultimatum was issued after UN observers reported the discovery of 13 bodies bound and shot in eastern Syria, adding to the world outcry over the massacre last week of 108 men, women and children.

The latest developments emphasised how the peace plan drafted by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has failed to stem 14 months of bloodshed or bring the Syrian government and opposition to the negotiating table.

Col Qassim Saadeddine of the rebel Free Syrian Army said its leadership set a deadline of 9am tomorrow for Mr Assad to implement the peace plan, which includes a ceasefire, deployment of observers, and free access for humanitarina aid and journalists.

If it fails to do so "we are free from any commitment and we will defend and protect the civilians, their villages and their cities," Mr Saadeddine said in a statement posted on social media.
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Hourglass

WikLeaks Founder Assange Loses U.K. Extradition Appeal


The Vancouver Sun
Wed, 30 May 2012 02:32 UTC

Britain's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden, but put his deportation on hold to give his lawyers a final chance to reopen the case.

The court, which handed down its decision after an 18-month legal marathon, rejected Assange's argument that the Swedish prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant over sex crime allegations was not entitled to do so.

Julian Assange
© unknownJulian Assange
"The request for Mr Assange's extradition has been lawfully made and his appeal against extradition is accordingly dismissed," Supreme Court president Nicholas Phillips said as he delivered the ruling to a hushed courtroom.

The seven judges were split five to two but their majority ruling was that the prosecutor was a rightful judicial authority, and therefore allowed to issue the warrant for the Internet whistleblower.

But in a new twist, Assange's lawyer Dinah Rose asked for 14 days to consider whether to apply to reopen the case, on the grounds that the judgment referred to material that was not mentioned during the last hearing in February.

The judge granted the request, which is highly unusual in the three-year history of the Supreme Court.

"With the agreement of the respondent, the required period for extradition shall not commence until 13th June 2012," the Supreme Court said in a statement.
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Yoda

Best of the Web: Out of the Mouths of Babes: Twelve-Year-Old Money Reformer Tops a Million Views

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt
Wed, 30 May 2012 17:57 UTC

The youtube video of 12 year old Victoria Grant speaking at the Public Banking in America conference last month has gone viral, topping a million views on various websites.

Monetary reform - the contention that governments, not banks, should create and lend a nation's money - has rarely even made the news, so this is a first. Either the times they are a-changin', or Victoria managed to frame the message in a way that was so simple and clear that even a child could understand it.
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Sherlock

Times must be bad: Rothschilds and Rockefeller families join forces

Stephen Mangan and Chris Vellacott
Reuters
Wed, 30 May 2012 17:32 UTC
rothschild
© unknown
Two of the most glamorous names in global finance are linking up, with the Rothschild banking dynasty agreeing to buy a stake in the Rockefeller group's wealth and asset management business to get a long-sought foothold in the United States.

Rothschild's London-listed RIT Capital Partners (RCP.L) said on Wednesday it was buying the 37 percent stake from French group Societe Generale's (SOGN.PA) private banking arm for an undisclosed sum.

The transatlantic union brings together David Rockefeller, 96, and Jacob Rothschild, 76 - two family patriarchs whose personal relationship spans five decades.
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Yoda

Bradley Manning, America's martyr for open government

Birgitta Jónsdóttir
The Guardian
Wed, 30 May 2012 17:53 UTC
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Bradley Manning

The alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower, detained and abused for two years in prison, now on secret trial, defends all our freedoms

Little did I know when I was helping with the preparations for making public the historic leak "Collateral Murder" - the 2007 footage of a US Apache helicopter firing at and killing a group of people claimed to be insurgents, which included a Reuters journalist, released by WikiLeaks in 2010 - that the person possibly responsible for the courageous act of bringing the war crimes exposed in that video into the public domain, where it belonged, would end up in a military prison, even subjected to torture for months. Today marks two years of imprisonment of Private Bradley Manning. Two years out of his 24 years is a long time in military prison. His treatment has been highly controversial, every step of the way.

Following every bit of information available during the first few months of his ordeal made it clear that the US government was going to use Manning as a warning to anyone else who might feel compelled to report on war crimes, or any other crimes they witness from within the system. Blow the whistle, goes the warning, and you will be buried alive by the state, shredded by the same secrecy machine a whistleblower would try to expose.
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Pharoah

Best of the Web: Obama's God complex: America's Psychopathic President is clearly out of control

Yvonne Ridley
Opinion Maker
Wed, 30 May 2012 17:43 UTC
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The fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin shocked a nation, inspired tens of thousands to march for justice and even prompted the US President to declare, "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon".

It took nearly six weeks for George Zimmerman, the Florida man accused of killing the teenager, to be arrested and charged with second-degree murder after enormous pressure from the public.

Zimmerman - the captain of a Neighbourhood Watch group - pursued Trayvon because he said that he thought he was acting "suspicious" and "up to no good". And that is exactly the same excuse used by President Barack Obama as he justifies ticking off names on a "kill list" for drone attacks.

While Obama called on federal, state and local authorities to work together as part of the investigation into the killing of Trayvon, just who is going to investigate the President for his extra-judicial killings? He is a man out of control, and while his predecessor justified his actions with a catch-all "God told me to do it", this president thinks he is God, making decisions about who should live and who should die.
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USA

Media Propaganda: "Militants" really means anyone America kills for the fun of it

Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Tue, 29 May 2012 17:39 UTC
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To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were "militants" - even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed "officials" claiming that the dead were "militants." It's the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it's true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they're killing. I've written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of "militant" is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki's 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: "Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen").
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USA

America's murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror

Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Tue, 29 May 2012 17:35 UTC
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© Belle Mellor
Obama's escalation of a war that's already caused thousands of deaths will only destabilise his own allies and bolster al-Qaida

More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the "war on terror" was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war - the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands - is now being relentlessly escalated.

From Pakistan to Somalia, CIA-controlled pilotless aircraft rain down Hellfire missiles on an ever-expanding hit list of terrorist suspects - they have already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process.

At least 15 drone strikes have been launched in Yemen this month, as many as in the whole of the past decade, killing dozens; while in Pakistan, a string of US attacks has been launched against supposed "militant" targets in the past week, incinerating up to 35 people and hitting a mosque and a bakery.
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Vader

Rape and Torture: Weapons in the Propaganda War

Eric Draitser
Stop Imperialism
Tue, 29 May 2012 17:23 UTC
write what you're told propaganda poster
Rape and torture have become standard issue in the propaganda arsenal of Western media. Reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Council that claim to document the systematic use of rape and torture by the "enemies" of the West have become usual fair in the soft war against whomever the imperialists have chosen to attack. We have seen these claims used to legitimize aggression against Libya, Iraq, and now Syria.

In an article published in The Telegraph, the author cleverly uses a quote from a Deputy Director at Human Rights Watch making a general statement about the use of rape in detention facilities in order to humiliate, degrade and instill fear. However, he makes no direct reference to Syria, though the article clearly attempts to draw that abstract connection. In fact, as one reads further, the claims of rape and torture at the hands of Syrian security forces come from "activists" (the usual anonymous term applied to any quotable voice parroting the Western talking points regarding Assad and the regime) who have fled Syria. In fact, the so-called activists are, in many cases, wanted terrorists who have fled Syria not in fear of persecution but for fear of being brought to justice for their crimes.

Comment: Yes, the psychopathic perverts in power like to talk up rape when it suits them - usually to cast aspersions on their mark. The dark irony is that back home they commit mass rape of children all the time:

Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks in a world ruled by psychopaths

Interestingly, accusing people of pederasty was a typical charge of then psychopaths in power against political dissidents during the collapse of Roman civilization...

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