Khader Adnan Ending Hunger Strike

by Stephen Lendman

Ma'an News said Adnan will stop hunger striking following a deal to release him on April 17, according to PA Prison Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqe.

  Khader Adnan: Dying for Justice

by Stephen Lendman

He's a legend in his own time. Global human rights groups, activists, and many others support him. 

His extraordinary courage demands acknowledgement and recognition.

  Israeli Torture: Accountability Denied

by Stephen Lendman

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI) "believes that torture and ill-treatment of any kind and under all circumstances is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law." 

  Solidarity with Khader Adnan

by Stephen Lendman

Day 62 and counting. Adnan's hunger strike continues. On February 15, Israel let his wife Randa see him for the second time. 

The Italian Coalition Stop That Train celebrates the news that the City Council of Naples, Italy has approved a motion condemning Pizzarotti for its involvement in a project in blatant violation of international law, the Israeli high-speed train cutting through the occupied Palestinian territories. The decision of the Naples City Council, which follows that of Rho (Milan) on November 30, 2011, is a strong sign for responsible action by local authorities, in this case one of Italy’s largest cities.

Stop That Train congratulates the Committee "For a Pizzarotti-Free Naples!" for the work done to mobilize citizens in support of the Campaign and in establishing dialog with the local administration in order to encourage it to take a stand on the issue.

By John Grant

I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake. Instead, here I was on the side of truth, justice and the American way. Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue.
 
-Jeff Lindsay
Dearly Devoted Dexter

I teach creative writing in a maximum security prison in Philadelphia. During the week I scour two thrift shops for 35-cent paperbacks that I haul in to stock a small lending library I created for inmates. Amazingly, the prison had no library.

  Khader Adnan: Day 60 and Counting 

by Stephen Lendman

On February 15, Palestinian faction leaders began supportive hunger strikes. Gazans erected a sit-in tent near ICRC's Gaza City offices.

Islamic Jihad leaders Sheikh Nafth Azzam, Ahmad Al-Mudallal, Dawood Shihab and Khader Habit joined with others and civil society organization members.

  Israeli Hanging Judge Sentences Khader Adnan to Death

by Stephen Lendman

On Monday, military Judge Moshe Tirosh rejected Adnan's appeal as expected. Israel wants him dead. In his 59th day without food, his life hangs by a thread.

By Dave Lindorff

The attacks and attempted attacks this week on Israeli embassy personnel in Georgia, India and Thailand should serve as a serious warning to the people of both Israel and the US that there will be an increasingly heavy price to pay for the kind of government-sponsored terror that both countries have long practiced, and that too many Americans and Israelis have mindlessly cheered on.

The technology of terror has become so wide-spread, and the materials needed to construct magnetically-attached  car bombs, cell-phone detonators, armor-piercing IEDs, diesel/fertilizer bombs and the like, so accessable at consumer shops, hardware stores and local junkyards, that any government, and even any relatively savvy non-government group, can assemble and employ them.

From New York Daily News:

Israeli Madonna fans are asking their country to give peace a chance — at least until after the Material Girl's late-spring concert there.

They're rallying around, what else, a Facebook page, called "Bibi don't start a war with Iran until after Madonna's show on May 29."

Translated, that message suggests that Israel will eventually attack Iran if Iran doesn't back off on its nuclear development program.

But it asks that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delay any such action until after the Madonna show, because of the likelihood that foreign artists would not want to play in a country with a war in progress.

  Khader Adnan's Heroic Struggle for Justice

by Stephen Lendman

Saturday marked his 56th hunger striking day. "My dignity is more precious than food," he said. He's willing to die courageously defending it.

He's protesting his lawless detention and treatment by repressive Israeli prison authorities. They're committing willful, malicious slow-motion murder.

Grab a screen shot HERE now before it's gone. And read this together with Seymour Hersh.

Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News

Mehdi Marizad / Fars via AP file

A car that was bombed by two assailants on a motorcycle in Tehran on Jan. 11, killing Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan, is removed by a mobile crane. The photo was distributed by the semi-official Iranian photo agency Fars.

By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem
NBC News

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.

ROCK CENTER EXCLUSIVE

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The Iranians have no doubt who is responsible – Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.

Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describes what Iranian leaders believe is a close relationship between Israel's secret service, the Mossad, and the People's Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel.  “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information.  And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”

Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs.  In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack.

Much of what the Iranian government knows of the attacks and the links between Israel and MEK  comes from interrogation of an assassin who failed to carry out an attack in late 2010 and the materials found on him, Larijani said. (Click here to see a video report of the interrogation shown on Iranian televsion.)

The U.S.-educated Larijani, whose two younger brothers run the legislative and judicial branches of the Iranian government, said the Israelis’ rationale is simple. “Israel does not have direct access to our society. Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have … a good number of … places to get into the touch with people. So I think they are working hand-to-hand very close.  And we do have very concrete documents.”

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News  the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.”  All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations. 

As it has in the past, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined comment. Said a spokesman, "As long as we can't see all the evidence being claimed by NBC, the Foreign Ministry won't react to every gossip and report being published worldwide."

From CodePink

A recent response to a subpoena from the United States Capitol Police has revealed the main assailant of a peaceful demonstrator who was physically attacked and injured on May 24, 2011, to be Stanley Anthony Shulster, allegedly a member of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to the lawsuit, Mr. Shulster, a retired lawyer, admitted to assaulting Rae Abileah, a member of CODEPINK, in the House of Representatives while she protested the Israeli occupation of Palestine during the speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. The Capitol Police issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Shulster for this attack.
 

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a relief to know that President Obama’s “preferred” solution to dealing with disagreements with Iran is diplomacy, as he said yesterday in an interview on NBC TV, but at the same time, it’s profoundly disturbing that he is simultaneously saying that, as an AP report on the interview put it: he would “not take options off the table to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106652 

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

The leak by Panetta (above) appears to confirm fears that efforts to distance the U.S. from an Israeli attack are undermined by competing interests.  Credit:U.S. Navy

WASHINGTON, Feb 4, 2012 (IPS) - When Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius this week that he believes Israel was likely to attack Iran between April and June, it was ostensibly yet another expression of alarm at the Israeli government's threats of military action.

But even though the administration is undoubtedly concerned about that Israeli threat, the Panetta leak had a different objective. The White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months. 

The real aim of the leak brings into sharper focus a contradiction in the Barack Obama administration's Iran policy between its effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran. 

The Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama's effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack. It seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel's defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran, as IPS reported Feb. 1. 

A tell-tale indication of Panetta's real intention was his very specific mention of the period from April through June as the likely time frame for an Israeli attack. Panetta suggested that the reason was that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had identified this as the crucial period in which Iran would have entered a so-called "zone of immunity" – the successful movement of some unknown proportion of Iran's uranium enrichment assets to the highly protected Fordow enrichment plant. 

But Barak had actually said in an interview last November that he "couldn't predict" whether that point would be reached in "two quarters or three quarters or a year".

64% of Israelis favor a nuclear-free zone

  Promoting War, Spurning Peace

by Stephen Lendman

US and Israeli agendas need enemies. Both pursue rogue state policies.

They defy international laws and conventions, applying rule of law standards to others, not themselves. Their interests alone matter, no matter the toll on others.

  Israeli Settlements: An Obstacle to Peace 

by Stephen Lendman

Netanyahu's Likud Party platform says the following about Palestinian self-determination:

By Dave Lindorff

Let’s see now. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who oversees both the FBI and the CIA, is warning that Iran’s leaders have “changed their calculus” and, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “now appear willing to conduct an attack within the US.”

Speaking at a Join Intelligence Committee hearing in Congress, the aptly-named Clapper said that Iranian leaders, “probably including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei” are “now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States as a response to real or perceived actions that threaten the regime.”

Well gee, that sure should come as a shocker.

  Khader Adnan Mohammad Musa: Israeli Prisoner of Conscience

by Stephen Lendman

In 1948, brute force established Israel. In 1967, militarized occupation of one-fifth of former Palestine followed. 

  Israel Lawlessly Indicts MK Sa'id Naffa - by Stephen Lendman

Israel reveals its rogue credentials daily. In mid-July 2010, its Knesset stripped MK Hanin Zoabi of key parliamentary rights and privileges for participating in the May 2010 Freedom Flotilla bringing vital aid to Gaza. 

Since then, she's been vilified, threatened, and may be prevented from standing for reelection. Hard-liners call her a "traitor."

  Targeting AIPAC

by Stephen Lendman

On January 23, Occupy AIPAC announced plans to confront the powerful Israeli Lobby in Washington from March 2 - 6. More on what's planned below.

From Hannah's Blog

By John Grant

The State Department has threatened to withdraw the $1.3 billion it sends every year to Egypt because the Egyptians are holding US citizens connected with pro-democracy groups the Egyptians claim have instigated the Tahrir Square movement.

Specifically, the Egyptian military government prevented a half dozen Americans -- including Sam LaHood, director of the US International Republican Institute in Cairo -- from leaving the country. LaHood is the son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. The State Department’s goal in supporting groups like Mr LaHood’s is to encourage democracy friendly to the US.