Puppet MastersS


Heart - Black

Hundreds of Gaza children blocked from visiting parents in prison

childen of gaza
© Joe CatronChildren of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are barred from family visits.
"I dream of my father," eight-year-old Hamze Helles said in his family's house in Gaza City's al-Shajaiyeh neighborhood. "I miss him a lot, and am very eager to visit him. For five years, I have never seen him."

Hamze is one of two young sons of Majed Khalil Helles, a fighter in Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades who was captured by Israeli forces on 8 August 2008 and sentenced by an Israeli military court to five years' detention in Nafha prison.

Fourteen months before its military detained Helles, Israel imposed a comprehensive ban on family visits to Palestinian political prisoners from the Gaza Strip. Addameer, the prisoner advocacy organization, called the measure "part of [Israel's] policy of treating the Gaza Strip as an enemy entity following the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit one year prior."

The ban met wide criticism as an illegal act of collective punishment, Addameer said. "Israel's policy has been condemned, among others, by Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict in its report on the 2008 - 2009 Israeli offensive."

Detainees launched a 28-day mass hunger strike on 17 April 2012, Palestinian Political Prisoners' Day, with visits by families living in Gaza among their key demands. It ended on 14 May last year with an agreement that "family visits for first degree relatives to prisoners from the Gaza Strip and for families from the West Bank who have been denied visit based on vague 'security reasons' will be reinstated within one month" by Israel, among other provisions.

Propaganda

Witness accounts of two Palestinian teens' killings contradict Israel's version

relatives of killed palestinian boys
© Nedal Eshtayah/APA imagesRelatives of cousins Amer Nasser and Naji Balbisi, killed by Israeli soldiers, grieve during their funeral in Anabta, 4 April.
On Wednesday last week, four young Palestinians decided to protest against the death of Palestinian prisoner Maysara Abuhamdia, a cancer patient who died of medical neglect while in Israeli custody.

Two of the young men - Amer Nassar, 17, and his cousin Naji Biblisi, 19 - were killed at an Israeli military checkpoint during the protests. Another cousin, Diaa Nassar, 18, was arrested and the fourth young man, Fadi Abu Asal, 20, managed to escape with an injury.

The four are residents of Anabta, a village near Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank. Two days after the incident, Abu Asal told The Electronic Intifada what happened. His version of events sharply contradict claims reported in the Israeli media.

Abu Asal was himself arrested by Israeli forces at his family's home in Anabta on Tuesday, 9 April.

Arrow Up

Morrissey: 'Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity'

Morrissey and Margaret Thatcher
© Getty/APMorrissey and Margaret Thatcher.
Singer Morrissey, of the seminal 1980s band The Smiths, reacts to news of the death of former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others.

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out.

She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone - and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.

Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women's movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a prime minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

Gold Bar

Why are the banksters telling us to sell our gold when they are hoarding gold like crazy?

Gold Bars
© The Economic Collapse Blog
The big banks are breathlessly proclaiming that now is the time to sell your gold. They are warning that we have now entered a "bear market" for gold and that the price of gold will continue to decline for the rest of the year. So should we believe them? Well, their warnings might be more credible if the central banks of the world were not hoarding gold like crazy.

During 2012, central bank gold buying was at the highest level that we have seen in almost 50 years. Meanwhile, insider buying of gold stocks has now reached multi-year highs and the U.S. Mint cannot even keep up with the insatiable demand for silver eagle coins. So what in the world is actually going on here? Right now, the central banks of the world are indulging in a money printing binge that reminds many of what happened during the early days of the Weimar Republic.

When you flood the financial system with paper money, that is eventually going to cause the prices for hard assets to go up dramatically. Could it be possible that the banksters are trying to drive down the price of both gold and silver so that they can gobble it up cheaply? Do they want to be the ones sitting on all of the "real money" once the paper money bubble that we are living in finally bursts?

Over the past few weeks, nearly every major newspaper in the world has run at least one story telling people that it is time to sell their gold.

Dominoes

Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady

Neruda
This Feb. 14, 1952 file photo shows Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Capri, Italy.
It's curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country's elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba's President Fidel Castro as Pinochet's goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende's; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago - a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the "Internationale" and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime's men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn't like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.

Vader

Obama's drone war kills 'others,' not just al Qaida leaders

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© Yslb Pak Zhang Qi/Xinhua/MCTPakistani soldiers stand guard at the Shamsi Airbase located some 320 kilometers southwest of Quetta in southwest Pakistan, on December 11, 2011.
Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified "other" militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans.

"It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative," President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. "It has to be a situation in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States."

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn't adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn't on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn't exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as "other militants" and "foreign fighters."

War Whore

Seriously, Dick Cheney? 'We're in deep doo-doo' with North Korea

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© UPI/Jim Ruymen
Republican leaders in Congress received a dire warning on Tuesday from former Vice President Dick Cheney on the ongoing crisis in North Korea.

"We're in deep doo doo," Cheney told lawmakers, according to a GOP leadership aide.

Cheney added the current North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, is unpredictable and doesn't share the United States worldview.

One lawmaker present at the session, Rep. Steve Southerland of Florida, said Cheney wore a cowboy hat and "looked really good, spoke really clearly, lucidly."

"It was nice to see him doing well," Southerland said, noting the last time Cheney was on Capitol Hill he "didn't look good - very frail, but in this meeting he looked great."

Cheney, 72, underwent a successful heart transplant in 2012 after a series of heart attacks over many years.

Southerland said Cheney spent about 10 minutes in the GOP leadership meeting Tuesday, and didn't give any specific policy recommendations or critiques of how the Obama administration is handling the situation in North Korea.

Dollar

Forget the need for a U.S. carbon tax - the economy has put a big dent in gasoline use and driving

A few days ago I did a report on the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) numbers for carbon dioxide emissions, showing that it was clearly down, and back to levels not seen since 1994, and noting that since Kyoto in 1997, U.S. emissions have dropped even though Kyoto was never ratified in the USA.

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If you thought that was troubling and strange have a look at these numbers which also indicate the state of the U.S. Economy. First, the number of miles driven monthly for the last 30 years. As you can see, just like global temperature has flatlined, so has the number of miles driven.

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Source data: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

Now the amount of gasoline sold. Note the regular seasonal "heartbeat" pattern up to about 2008, then that pattern gives way to a precipitous drop at the end.

V

Wikileaks publishes U.S. cable detailing plan to destabilize Chavez regime

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Would you believe that the United States tried to do something that was not nice against Hugo Chávez?

Wikileaks has done it again. I guess the US will really have to get tough now with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In a secret US cable to the State Department, dated November 9, 2006, and recently published online by WikiLeaks, former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to destabilize the government of the late President Hugo Chávez. The cable begins with a Summary:
During his 8 years in power, President Chavez has systematically dismantled the institutions of democracy and governance. The USAID/OTI program objectives in Venezuela focus on strengthening democratic institutions and spaces through non-partisan cooperation with many sectors of Venezuelan society.
USAID/OTI = United States Agency for International Development/Office of Transition Initiatives. The latter is one of the many euphemisms that American diplomats use with each other and the world - They say it means a transition to "democracy". What it actually means is a transition from the target country adamantly refusing to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs to a country gladly willing (or acceding under pressure) to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs.
OTI supports the Freedom House (FH) "Right to Defend Human Rights" program with $1.1 million. Simultaneously through Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), OTI has also provided 22 grants to human rights organizations.

Eye 2

WikiLeaks: Vatican dismissed Pinochet massacre reports as 'communist propaganda'

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© Getty fileDiplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday show a Vatican official during the papacy of Paul VI (above) downplaying reports of massacre under Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,200 people in Chile in the 1970s, but the Vatican dismissed reports of bloodshed at the time as "communist propaganda," according to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

Pinochet came to power in 1973 as the head of a military coup against democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. The right-wing junta that subsequently ruled the country from 1973 to 1990 was responsible for the murders of as many as 3,200 people, as well as the arrest of tens of thousands more, many of whom were tortured.

In a 1973 diplomatic cable addressed to Henry Kissinger, then serving as the United States' Secretary of State, high-ranking Vatican official Giovanni Benelli was quoted as relaying "his and the pope's grave concern over successful international leftist campaign to misconstrue completely realities of Chilean situation." Benelli dismissed reports of massacre as "unfounded" and "possibly [the] greatest success of Communist propaganda," while explaining away whatever violence had occurred as "unfortunately natural following coup d'etat."