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[wvns] Americans Need the Truth About 9/11

2011-09-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

Americans Need the Truth About 9/11
by Eric Margolis
September 13, 2011
http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis258.html

We Americans become like the moribund Hapsburg Empire which was said to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

Watching 9/11 commemorations, which have by now become an annual religious-political event, reminds us of this old adage.

One of the biggest tragedies within the tragedy of 9/11 is that the nation has not learned the real lesson of 9/11 – the reason why the 19 suicide hijackers attacked New York and Washington.

Before this attack, the hijacker's ringleaders made clear their goal was to punish the United States for occupying the holy land of Saudi Arabia and for supporting Israel's repression of the Palestinians.

A subtext of the deadly operation was to make America experience some of the suffering and damage it had long inflicted on the Mideast.

In short, the motive for the assault was entirely political. But the Bush administration and then Congress were unable or unwilling to accept the fact that America's Mideast policies were the cause of the attacks. The US media cowered from discussing the true reasons for the attack as a third-rail that had to be avoided.

Instead, 9/11 was spun by the White House and a remarkably tame media into an assault on America by crazed Muslim fanatics who hated, as President Bush said, our freedoms, values, religion and way of life. Islam was to blame.

This message reverberated through the US media and government. Christian and some Jewish fundamentalist groups amplified the theme that Islam is a menace. Pundits opined that Islam was inherently and dangerously flawed, a religion that preached violence and sought world domination.

The lurid proclamations of Osama bin Laden served as a convenient, perfectly timed proof of the wickedness and danger of Islam. His tiny organization of no more than 300 men, as this writer saw firsthand, had been devoted to fighting the Afghan Communists, suddenly morphed into a mortal danger for the United States.

Al-Qaida was vastly exaggerated into a worldwide menace. Housewives in Peoria, Illinois, voted for George Bush because they feared Osama bin Laden was about to come and snatch away their children. Paranoia gripped the United States and made it do terrible things that violated its own laws, ethics and values.

Muslims under our mattress replaced the old bogeyman of the 1950's, reds under our beds.

When Bush declared a "crusade" against terrorism, he really meant it. Like all crusades, this ostensibly religious mission quickly became a scramble for plunder – in this case, Iraq's vast troves of oil and gas.

Thanks to Washington's anti-Islamic spin over 9/11, Americans were able to steep themselves in righteous indignation and victimhood, free of any inconvenient questions that their policies in the Muslim world may have contributed to the 9/11 attacks.

The British used to call such attacks, "the cost of empire." But Americans were simply not aware their nation had an empire. This writer calls it the "American Raj."

Blaming fanatical Muslims for 9/11 may have been a tactical success for the Bush White House. But in the longer run, laying off the blame on Islam has proved strategically disastrous for the US and just as dishonest as blaming World War II on Christianity.

Poll after poll is now showing that a majority in Muslim nations, even so-called "moderate" ones like Egypt, Indonesia and Morocco, mistakenly believe the US is out to destroy Islam.

The fire and brimstone anti-Muslim hate fulminations of mountebanks like Rev. Hagee, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are amplified at full volume across the Muslim world.

Pakistanis now regard the United States as their nation's leading enemy. Old foe India has fallen into second place. Anti-Americanism is now raging across the Muslim world. The next explosion will come in long-repressed Egypt.

Washington has fallen into Osama bin Laden's last and deepest trap. First, two wars that have so far cost up to $4 trillion and thousands of US military casualties. Next, the undermining of the US economy by reckless deficit spending on the military and intelligence. Under Bush, and now Obama, the runaway deficit has reached an astounding $1.4 trillion.

Finally, the so-called "war on terror," that has earned America the searing hatred of much of the Muslim world.

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

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[wvns] Israeli High Court to reverse Nakba Law

2011-09-13T22:40:00.000-05:00

Palestinian rights group submits petition to Israeli High Court to reverse "Nakba Law"
http://electronicintifada.net/node/9911

Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has submitted a petition to the Israeli High Court demanding that the government overturn its recent decision to criminalize commemoration of the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians before, during and after Israel declared itself a state in 1948.

Every 15 May, Palestinians all over the world — inside the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, those who hold Israeli citizenship, those in refugee camps outside Palestine, and millions more in the global diaspora — hold commemorative events and protests to remember and reflect on their collective history since the purging began more than six decades ago.

In an article in The Electronic Intifada in March, Jillian Kestler-D'Amours reported — just after the so-called "Nakba bill" was passed in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) — that the Israeli government would "deny funding to any organization, institution or municipality that commemorates the founding of the Israeli state as a day of mourning." The Israeli Finance Minister would be the one charged with investigating and slapping fines on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and civil society organizations taking part in Nakba day commemorations.

Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported this morning that:

Adalah and the Union for Human rights submitted the petition along with the parents of students from a mixed Arab and Jewish school, a non profit alumni organization for former students at an Arab high school in Haifa and Professor Oren Yiftahel from Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva.

The petition claims that the Nakba Law will unjustly permit Israeli authorities to fine individuals for holding events commemorating the Nakba not only on Israel Independence Day, but throughout the year as well.

The drafters of the petition claim that the law is an infringement upon citizens' legal rights, compromising individuals' political, academic and artistic freedoms. They added that the law detracts from basic human entitlement to equality, education, and employment as well.

The petitioners' major allegation is that the law will harm the basic rights of Israel's Arab minority, and may detract from the budgets of many public institutions including cultural and education facilities, as well as Arab municipalities throughout Israel.

Those who submitted the petition have demanded that the Knesset, and the Finance Minister, suspend implementation of the bill until it rules on the petition. Members of the Knesset who are opposed to the Nakba Law have denounced it as a racist attack on Palestinian identity and heritage.

Haaretz continued:

MK Afu Aghbaria (Hadash) said … "We will continue activities marking Nakba Day with the aim of presenting the historical facts, which are not subject to interpretation when it comes to a people uprooted from its land, many of whose members were made refugees."

CONTINUED: http://electronicintifada.net/node/9911

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[wvns] Vanunu: "Revoke my Israeli citizenship"

2011-09-13T22:37:00.000-05:00

Vanunu: "Revoke my citizenship"
http://www.youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc?feature=mhum
http://www.vanunu.com/

Morderchai Vanunu demands to apply a recently passed law and revoke his Israeli citizenship. "I have no interest in Israeli citienship, I don't want to go on living here".

To Mr. Eli Yishai, Minister of the Interior, 2 Kaplan Street, Hakirya, Jerusalem

Re: Revocation of Citizenship

I am Mordechai Vanunu, who was kidnapped in Rome on September 30, 1986, by the security services of Israel.

I was tried by the Jerusalem District Court, convicted of espionage, treason and assistance to the enemy and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, following a newspaper interview to the London "Sunday Times" where I told of the production of materials for nuclear arms in Israel.

I have enacted the democratic principle of the public's right to know.

I have spent 18 years at the Ashkelon Prison, mostly under conditions of complete isolation. On April 21, 2004 I was released, under severe restrictions.

Seven years have passed and the restrictions are renewed again and again, every year, on the basis of the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations. Now these restrictions are about to be renewed for yet another year.

Since my release I lived for six years in East Jerusalem. Since September 2010 I have lived in Tel Aviv.

On June 1986 I have converted to Anglican Christianity.　
Recently, the Knesset passed a law authorizing the revocation of Israeli citizenship for those convicted of espionage and treason.

For 25 years I am waiting and demanding the restoration of my complete freedom.

I am asking the State of Israel to revoke my citizenship.

This wish for revocation of citizenship is neither new nor recent.

Now, however, it is supported by the new Citizenship Revocation Law, passed on March 28, 2011.

I am asking and expecting that this law be enforced to the letter, and that my citizenship be revoked here and now, under the spirit of the law.

I have no other citizenship, but I can easily get one, even during my enforced sojourn in Israel, and certainly if I leave the country.

After the treatment and "care" which I got from this country and its citizens, I cannot feel myself a wanted citizen here.

In the Israeli media and on the Israeli streets I am called "The Atomic Spy" and "A traitor", harassed and persecuted as an Enemy of the State for 25 years.

I feel myself still imprisoned, still a prisoner of war and a hostage, held by the state and the government.

After 25 years of getting various harsh penalties from the state, I would like to see an end to punishments and the realization of my basic human right to freedom.

I wish to exercise my right to the Freedom of Conscience and the Freedom of Choice, by choosing not to be a citizen of Israel.

I have no interest in Israeli citizenship, I do not want to live here.

I ask that you revoke my citizenship here and now.

I request that you set me free of Israel, since Israel does not want me nor do I want Israel.

All that I knew I told, already in 1986, to the English newspaper. I have no further confidential information.

The time has come to let me leave Israel, after 25 years of imprisonment, a full quarter of a century!

Mordechai Vanunu
(c/o Att. Avigdor Feldman, 10 Huberman Street, Tel Aviv)

Copies: The President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Foreign Minister and Justice Minister

http://www.youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc?feature=mhum
http://www.vanunu.com/

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[wvns] The Libyans' Threat

2011-09-13T22:21:00.000-05:00

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
by Mike Whitney
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/36009/the-greatest-purveyor-of-violence-in-the-world-today

The greatest threat to Libyan sovereignty and independence is the United States of America. Nothing else comes close.

Gaddafi hasn't been targeted because he's a tyrant, but because he sits on an ocean of petroleum. That's what this is all about, right? If Libya's main source of wealth was car parts or coconuts, there never would have been a war.

The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to dispute. If we apply the same standard to the demonstrations in Wisconsin, then the teachers and other union members would be entirely justified in grabbing their hunting rifles and handguns and storming the capital in Madison. Can you see how stupid this is? And yet this is pretext that's being used to wage war on Libya.

""The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government." That was true when Martin Luther King uttered those words more than 40 years ago, and it's true today. Just ask anyone who lives in Baghdad.

Sure, no one wants to talk about Iraq anymore. It's more fun to watch while some dissolute sitcom star, like Charlie Sheen, has an emotional breakdown on national TV. Or listen to the endless blabbering of some clownish real estate mogul as he claws a path to the 2012 elections. But Iraq is still front-and-center on every Arabs mind. And, it should be. It's the prime example of US foreign policy at work.

Don't worry, I won't bore you with all the stats about the 1 million killed, the 4 million displaced, the lack of electricity, clean water, hospitals, schools etc., etc., etc. You've heard it all before. But there is one clip from an article in the New York Times that I will share with you because it perfectly summarizes how life has changed for many Iraqis since the invasion. The article is titled "City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq". Here's an excerpt:

"At the bottom of the economy here, life revolves around that humblest of commodities, garbage.....

On a recent morning, Hamad Tarish dropped down a bag of cans and scrap metal, showing off blackened hands that rarely touched running water. For Mr. Tarish, 22, garbage is his capital. Every night around 3 a.m. he leaves his home to scavenge in a neighborhood to the south before the sanitation trucks come, hustling to avoid the police and to compete with other collectors.

In front of a stretch of makeshift cinder-block houses he threw his haul onto a scale. Seventeen pounds of aluminum cans, worth $6. A hunk of scrap metal and a pound of wire from which he had burned the rubber insulation, each good for $2. In all, $10 to buy food for himself, his wife and their two children.

For Mr. Tarish, who said he usually earned about $4 a day, it was a good harvest. Tomorrow might not be as good, he said. You could never tell. His eyes were bloodshot, his limbs hung heavy with exhaustion.
"A kilogram of meat is $15," he said. "It's impossible. I don't buy sugar for tea."

As Iraq's economy languishes, Mr. Tarish has found his livelihood in an underground economy that sustains and organizes whole neighborhoods. Around him were his fellow foot soldiers in this new marketplace — the nocturnal scavengers, the middlemen who bought the scrap for cents on the pound, the dirty horse-drawn carts bringing in more debris from more remote parts of the city. And around these were piles and piles of garbage, sorted by type and swarmed over by flies.
"People here are living on garbage and animals," said Ali Hasun, 27, a middleman, gesturing around him at a horizon of improvised houses pressed one against another as far as the eye could see — a midsize city subsisting on refuge....

Mr. Hasun and Mr. Tarish live in a vast slum named Naser City, or Victory City, one of dozens of squatter settlements that have sprung up around Baghdad since the American invasion of 2003. Naser City, one of the largest, grew exponentially through the waves of sectarian violence that displaced people from other areas, and more recently because unemployment has forced others to leave their homes. With Baghdad experiencing a housing shortage, the squats — where land is free but illegal, and housing is whatever a family can erect — are in a construction boom.

Residents of Naser City believe that as many as 500,000 people live here, but that is just guesswork. The governor of Baghdad estimates that 600,000 people live in 42 squatter encampments around the city — roughly the population of Boston. But in a country without a census, where few government agencies venture into the squats, this, too, is more belief than fact.

"Those people need to pick up garbage because there are no chances to work," said the governor, Salah Abdul-Razzaq.

Because the communities were not legal, he said, the province did not provide services like education, medical care, security, electricity, sewage and clean water. "The neighborhoods become places for criminals, thieves, terrorists, kidnappers. But we can't move them out because there are no alternatives."......(""City Upon a Hill of Scraps: Surviving on Scavenging in Iraq", John Leland, New York Times)
This is what US "liberation" looks like up-close-and-personal, a half a million people foraging through garbage dumps to feed their kids and stay alive. Isn't that worth thinking about the next time Obama beats the war drum and tries to rally the masses to action?

The United States will never atone for what it did to Iraq. There's no making up for the lives that were lost or ruined. There's no making up for the blood that was spilled.

Here's a poem by the insightful Iraqi author, Layla Anwar, who asks Americans to consider what's been done in their names and to take a fresh look at the death and destruction we've left behind. The poem is called "Flying Kites":

"Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us...

You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you...

Come and search for them in the rubble of your "surgical" air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head...pleading for your attention.

Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food...

Half of them are under-nourished or dying from disease. Cholera, dysentery, infections of all sorts....

Come and see, come...." ("Flying Kites" Layla Anwar)

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[wvns] Ode to an Unfortunate Mass Murder

2011-09-13T22:03:00.000-05:00

Ode to an Unfortunate Mass Murder
Karin Friedemann
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
http://karinfriedemann.blogspot.com/2011/09/ode-to-mass-murder.html

Originally, I was not planning on writing a 9/11 article. Why not treat 9/11 the way Americans treat Hiroshima Day? Nobody cares that the US incinerated an entire city in Japan, it was not just one building. Let's be fair. On 9/11, between 2,000 and 3,000 people perished according to varying reports. Only God knows if they were innocent or not. Some of them probably beat their wives or bought lottery tickets. Anyway they were non-combatants, who are protected in war by moral standards. I knew someone who was working in the banking industry in the World Trade Center. He was a Muslim. But I never understood why he would work at a bank, let alone at America's Ribaa Center. I feel horribly for his family. No matter who bombed the World Trade Center in New York, Allah willed it though. He willed all of those people killed, the same way He willed you to lose your wallet one day. Maybe you underestimated your Zakat. Maybe your reaction of alhamdulillah will protect your future losses and gains.

Nobody who ever met Osama bin Laden ever said a bad word about him. Therefore I am inclined to disbelieve ongoing news reports that he was connected to 9/11. Just before the Americans started bombing Afghanistan, the US told the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. The Taliban said if he had committed such a crime, they would be happy to hand him over since according to Islam, the targeting of non-combatants is illegal. What was the evidence that bin Laden had committed the crime, they asked? The US refused to answer. We just mass murdered thousands of starving people for no apparent reason. Same as Iraq. The US just decided that certain people shouldn't have food.

I'm sorry my fellow travelers, but that's just Satanic. An illiterate could see this. The Salafis held the American flag high totally clueless while Shias blamed the Salafis for 9/11, also waving the American flag. Hello? Can we just get something straight? Muslims don't fight like 9/11. The WTC attack was a made-for-TV event. It was seized by all the networks to promote an agenda. They said they knew who did it within 30 seconds of the first report and yet ten years later, they have not produced a shred of evidence. Muslims don't do one-time, glamorous, perfectly photographed at every angle events!

9/11 cannot be considered as part of any jihad right or wrong, for the simple reason that it was clearly a symbolic show of smoke and flames and not an act of an ongoing war. When Muslims fight a war, they don't mess around with one-time events. If there was an Islamic Jihad in America, people would be dying every day. If there was such thing as al-Qaeda declaring war on the US the way the Taliban declared war on the Soviet Union, five to six policemen would die a day. Civilians would rarely be targeted. But the death toll would be steady, small, and relentless. Not a week would go by when the Muslims didn't hurt you so deep by targeting your men in uniform on your own soil. Muslims fight to win.

If Muslims had declared war on the US and they had truly committed 9/11, don't you think they would have capitalized on that event? They would have followed that explosion with another explosion and another one after that, if they had that much money and power. Not. The Muslims' main claim to fame is the car bomb. How come there are no car bombs going off every few days in America like in most Muslim countries? How come I got some pizza at Sbarro's no problem? Why is Boston's World Trade Center still standing?

9/11 was not committed by any extremist Muslims on an anti-American Crusade. If they were, we'd have heard about follow up explosions on 9/12, 9/13, and every week including this week just like Palestine or Pakistan just between political parties. Look at every war involving Muslims. It just goes on and on and on with agonizing detail. One person at a time is targeted and the person who shot him may or may not get away unharmed. To say that 9/11 bears any characteristics of Islamic warfare is a JOKE. At no time in history have Muslims ever created one single successful attack staged for television that ruined a nation. They never ever got all TV stations to agree who did it within 30 seconds of their grandiose measure. This is absurdity! If the Muslims could do this, why are they not doing it every week? They would have their own station just for terrorizing skittish Americans with 9/11 footage around the clock. They don't.

9/11 was a mass murder for which no perpetrator has ever been convicted. No one has ever had a fair trial and answered our questions. It has never happened. There are people on Wall Street who know why.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based freelance writer.

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[wvns] Police attacked Muslims at amusement park in Westchester, New York

2011-09-02T12:08:00.001-05:00

Articles from mainstream & rightwing newspapers.

'Muslims, police scuffle at Rye Playland over amusement park's head scarf ban; 15 arrests made'

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2011/08/31/2011-08-31_muslims_cops_scuffle_at_rye_playland_over_amusement_parks_head_scarf_ban.html

by Corrinne Lestch and Bill Hutchinson, New York Daily News

Rye Playland was shut down Tuesday after cops scuffled with Muslims upset that women wearing head scarves were barred from the rides, witnesses said.

Fifteen people, including three women, were charged with disorderly conduct and assault in the chaos, authorities said.

The Westchester County park was packed with Muslims celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr - the holiday marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

One woman, Entisai Ali, began arguing with cops over the amusement park's head scarf, or hijab, rule, said Dena Meawad, 18, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The ban, which is not Muslim specific, was imposed about 3 years ago mostly to prevent hats from falling onto the tracks of roller coasters and other rides, park officials said.

"The cops started getting loud with her and she started getting loud, too. They pushed her on the ground and arrested her," Meawad said.

Her cousin, Kareem Meawad, 17, went to try to protect the woman and was beaten by cops and also arrested, she added. Her brother, Issam Meawad, 20, was pushed to the ground and taken into custody when he tried to help his cousin, she said.

"She just wanted to get on a ride. That was it," Dena Meawad said of the initial confrontation. "It's clear, this all happened because we're Muslim."

John Hodges, chief inspector of Westchester County Public Safety, insisted that police did not use excessive force.

He said up to 100 cops from surrounding departments converged on the park.

Two park rangers were injured in the melee, prompting felony assault charges against two people arrested, officials said.

The ugly incident happened just after 1 p.m. The event was organized by the Muslim American Society of New York, and attracted 3,000 Muslims from Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Westchester County.

Ali's sister, Ayman Alrabah, 24, of Brooklyn said her husband, brother and father were all tackled by cops and put into handcuffs when they tried to help her sister.

Alrabah said she was unaware of the head-scarf rule until she and her sister tried to get on the park's Dragon Coasters.

"We requested a refund and all of a sudden an argument became a riot," Alrabah said. "Cops came. They were hitting my brother, my dad. My husband was on the floor and they were handcuffing him.

She said her 4-year-old son was "traumatized" by seeing his father arrested.

"They treated us like animals, like we were nothing," Alrabah said. "They came with their dogs and sticks. We came to have fun."

'It's clear, this all happened because we're Muslim,' says Dena Meawad.

The park was closed for about two hours because of the fracas. It reopened at about 6 p.m.

Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was warned in advance of the rule barring head scarves on rides for safety reasons.

"Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear," Tartaglia said. "It's a safety issue for us on rides, it could become a projectile."

Many Muslims were given refunds as they left the park disappointed.

"In this heightened state of Islamaphobia, a woman wearing a hajib is an easy target these days," said Zead Ramadan, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations - New York. "Unfortunately, this turned ugly due to a lot of miscommunication."

---------------------------------------

'Teen talks of role in Playland melee over head scarves'

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110901/NEWS02/109010375/Teen-talks-role-Playland-melee-over-head-scarves

Written by Ned P. Rauch and Rebecca Baker, The [Westchester] Journal News

[Longer video interview with Ola Salem at above website]

RYE, N.Y. — Ola Salem says it was her refusal to take off her head scarf to go on a ride that sparked Tuesday's fracas at Playland Amusement Park.

"I started the whole thing," the 17-year-old Brooklyn resident said Wednesday.

Salem and her family were among 3,000 Muslims who were participating in a promotional day at Playland to celebrate the end of Ramadan when a melee broke out among 30 to 40 people upset at enforcement of a longstanding rule.

Salem's father and 14 other people were arrested after tempers flared when Salem was told by a ride attendant she would have to remove her "headgear" — her hijab — if she wanted to get on a fast-moving ride.

"This has nothing to do with headgear," Salem recalled saying to the ride attendant. "This is my religion."

Salem took her complaint to a manager, who supported the attendant's position, telling her that the scarf could get caught in a wheel.

"Muslims wouldn't allow it to get caught," Salem said Wednesday. "It's worn low and tight."

Salem began telling other Muslim women what had happened, and, as word spread, anger built. Attendees said they had not known beforehand about the park's rules — ultimately leading to the melee, a massive police response and the arrests of 15 park-goers, two were charged with felony assault and most others with disorderly conduct.

Email correspondence shows Playland officials were clear about the ban on hijabs and other "headgear" to leaders of the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing.

The string of emails obtained by The Journal News between Playland event coordinator Adam Harvey and MAS New York president Hatem Gawaly included questions about the head scarves women wear.

"I need to get more details please about whether a burka/hijab constitutes as a head gear," Gawaly wrote to Harvey on July 19. "There will be a lot of commotion about this."

Harvey responded on July 23: "The head gear RULES are there for safety and they will not change them even for a big group. I am sorry about this."

-------------------------------------------------------------

Wed, Aug. 31 2011
'Muslim Veil Controversy: Islamic Women Rejected From NY Theme Park Ride'

http://m.christianpost.com/news/ramadan-brawl-as-muslim-women-rejected-from-ny-theme-park-ride-for-wearing-hijabs-54837/

By Fionna Agomuoh
Christian Post

A brawl between police and a group of Muslims at a theme park has left two park rangers injured and 15 people arrested, including three women.

Approximately 3,000 members of the Muslim American Society were visiting New York's Rye Playland theme park on Tuesday for the end of Ramadan.

A number of women within the group were denied entry to certain rides in the park unless they removed their hijab headscarves. The grounds given were for security reasons.

After several men and women in the group became upset and began to argue among themselves, police were called and a scuffle between police and the guests ensued.

One woman, Entisai Ali was pushed to the ground and arrested after arguing with police.

The altercation escalated as the woman's brother and male cousin attempted to intervene. The men were also beaten and arrested, a friend has claimed.

Ayman Alrabah told the Daily News that her male family members were also arrested for attempting to diffuse the situation, adding that witnessing his father getting arrested has traumatized her four-year-old son.

"We requested a refund and all of a sudden an argument became a riot," Alrabah said. "Cops came. They were hitting my brother, my dad. My husband was on the floor and they were handcuffing him."

According to Rye Playland policy, guests are not permitted to wear headgear on certain rides because of various safety risks.

"If somebody wears some kind of a scarf, it could be a strangling situation. On a track of a roller coaster, it could cause that ride to stop and cause injury," said a Rye Playland official.

Rye Playland insists that the Muslim American Society was properly briefed on the regulations of the park and were offered refunds.

Guests however say they were treated unfairly because they are Muslim.

"They said no because my of my 'headgear'," Ola Salem told the New York Times. "I said: `It's not my headgear, it's my religion'."

The two, first responding park rangers were injured in the scuffle and hospitalized. Afterwards, back up was called and in what some are saying was an over-reaction, approximately 60 patrol cars and 100 police arrived on the scene.

The park entrance was closed for two hours.

------------------------------------------------------------

'Muslim Leaders Criticize Police Response to Scuffle'

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/nyregion/muslims-criticize-police-over-playland-fight-about-hajibs.html

By Dan Bilefsky. New York Times, August 31, 2011

Muslim civil rights leaders on Wednesday accused the authorities of using excessive force after a Westchester County amusement park's restrictions on head coverings provoked a scuffle a day earlier that led to the arrest of 15 people.

About 3,000 visitors from a Muslim tour group were at Playland park in Rye on Tuesday afternoon celebrating the end of Ramadan when a dispute erupted after women wearing traditional hijabs, or head scarves, were told they could not wear them on certain rides, for safety reasons.

Among the rides that headwear is prohibited on is the Dragon Coaster, on which riders plunge 128 feet before being hurled into the mouth of a smoke-emitting dragon. However, headwear, including the hijab, is allowed on the Double Shot, in which passengers, harnessed in cars, are rocketed up an 85-foot tower in less than two seconds before being shot back down at a nausea-inducing force of what the park says is "negative-one G."

Park officials said Wednesday that the women were offered admission refunds, but that an altercation ensued when clutches of displeased visitors became agitated and began to argue among themselves and then with park officials, including two rangers who were hospitalized with injuries.

Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of the County Parks Department, said that two people were charged with assault and that 13 were charged with disorderly conduct. All had been released by Tuesday night.

Mr. Tartaglia said the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing, had been warned of the headwear rule, which he said was a safety precaution to ensure that items like caps and head scarves did not get entangled in mechanical parts. On Playland's Web site, he noted, rides that allow what the park calls headgear are clearly indicated with the letter H.

"This is all about safety, not about religion," he said.

Mr. Tartaglia recalled an April 2010 episode in Sydney, Australia, in which a 26-year-old mother wearing a hijab was strangled after her head scarf became tangled in the wheel axle of a go-kart. In another incident, in Buena Park, Calif., in 2000, two dozen people were stranded on a roller coaster for about three hours after a rider's jacket flew onto the track and became wedged under the train.

Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager at the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that the authorities had overreacted. He said 60 patrol cars and 100 police officers from nine departments had responded to the disturbance, which he said had involved 40 people at most. He said video taken during the episode showed the police pushing at least one Muslim woman to the ground.

"There seems to have been a disproportionate response in which police used excessive strength and force to subdue female protesters," Mr. McGoldrick said. "That had a snowball effect on the antagonism and aggression that ensued."

Sharif Aly, vice president of the Muslim American Society of New York, said it was investigating the episode to determine whether the group had been singled out for being Muslim.

Mr. Tartaglia said that nearly 6,000 people were at the amusement park at the time, and that police intervention had been necessary to ensure public safety. "The incident was very quickly escalating," he said, "and the police had no choice to interfere, or it could have turned into a riot."

David Mandt, spokesman for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, whose members include Disney World and the company that operates the attractions at Coney Island, said it was not unusual for amusement parks to require guests to remove or secure loose articles, including head scarves or hats of any kind.

Kristin Siebeneicher, a spokeswoman for Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., said that for safety reasons, no loose articles were allowed on rides. But hijabs, which are typically securely wrapped around the head, are allowed, she said.

Ms. Siebeneicher said that those wearing the hijab were advised to exercise caution on Six Flags' most "extreme" ride, the Kingda Ka, a 45-story roller coaster that she said was the tallest in the world and the fastest in North America, going from zero to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds.

"Because that roller coaster is so extreme, we require that head scarves are tightly fastened," she said. "But we are more than happy to have them along on the ride."

----------------------------------------------------------
'HIJAB WELL DONE. Many parks allow Muslim scarves, unlike Rye

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hijab_well_done_FY1qRw4lfNx763qDHCcdnL

By Kate Sheehy, Jennifer Bain and Colin Mixson, New York Post

Six Flags Great Adventure has the biggest, fastest roller coasters in the world, and even that park doesn't have the religious head-scarf ban that sparked a massive brawl at Rye Playland between Muslim guests and local cops.

"We don't allow hats like baseball caps, but we do allow headdresses," said Kristen Siebeneicher, spokeswoman for the massive amusement park in Jackson, NJ.

They even allow them on the monster ride Kingda Ka -- which is 456 feet high and goes 128 mph -- but "we tell our guests . . . that they must have their headdresses very tightly fastened," Siebeneicher said.

Fifteen people were busted during a wild fistfight at Rye Playland in Westchester County on Tuesday afternoon after some hijab-wearing women -- part of a group of 3,000 Muslim parkgoers, mainly from Brooklyn -- were denied access to more than half the adult rides.

County Parks Deputy Commissioner Peter Tartaglia, whose agency runs the park, said the brawl began when frustrated Muslim families lining up for refunds got into a shoving match with each other.

A security guard trying to break things up touched one of the garbed women and her husband got furious.

"All of a sudden, everyone started running to the entrance . . . I just saw flailing arms and punching," said one parkgoer from Teaneck, NJ.

The woman said her three sons wear yarmulkes and that they had been asked to take them off for certain rides as well.

"What's the issue?" she shrugged. "They did not ask in a negative or offensive way."

Tartaglia insisted that the head-scarf ban was "a black-and-white safety issue."

"We look at every individual ride," he said.

"It's just common sense," he said, noting that some of the rides go up to 40 mph.

A rep for Coney Island's amusement rides said he wasn't clear on his park's policy, although a hijab-wearing woman was spotted riding a roller coaster there yesterday. Water parks such as Splish Splash in Long Island don't ban the headgear, a representative said.

New York personal-injury lawyer Jim Reed said Playland is within its rights to ban the scarves as long as "it would promote greater safety and . . . as long as consistency is applied" so as not to discriminate.

Ali Shibah of Yonkers, who was part of the Muslim group, said, "I understand the point that this could be a safety issue."

"But they have to learn how to deal with certain groups," he said of the park. "You can't tell a woman who's been wearing this their whole life to take it off suddenly. This is a sensitivity issue.

"What would they say if the Virgin Mary wanted to go a ride -- to take off her hijab?"

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[wvns] Pakistan-Iran Gas Pipeline Under Way

2011-07-18T17:33:00.000-05:00

Zardari meets Khamenei, Ahmadinejad: Gas pipeline to reach border next year: Iran

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/17/zardari-meets-khamenei-ahmadinejad-gas-pipeline-to-reach-border-next-year-iran.html

TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that Tehran was hopeful of completing its section of the Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline by the end of next year.

"Construction of the pipeline to export Iranian gas to Pakistan is under way, and we hope it will reach the frontier by the end of 2012," he said of the multi-billion-dollar project after a meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari.

President Zardari, who arrived in Tehran on a day-long visit, held two rounds of talks with President Ahmadinejad — first delegation-level talks and then a one-on-one meeting.

The two leaders also reviewed progress on a proposal for the transmission of electricity from Iran to Balochistan.

They expressed confidence that joint efforts would prove helpful in countering terrorism, terming the menace a common enemy for the region and the world.

Mr Ahmadinejad said his country looked forward to a new era in relations with Pakistan.

"Iran is ready to reinforce its cooperation with Pakistan in every field," the Iranian president said.

Mr Zardari said relations between the neighbours should be strengthened, and proposed that "trade between the two countries be conducted in local currency, and not the dollar, to curb smuggling". He also proposed a bilateral free trade agreement.

The President said Pakistan was already in negotiations with Turkey, Sri Lanka and China for the currency swap arrangement.

He denounced "efforts by our enemies who seek to show that the Pakistan government is unstable by provoking trouble," saying that those responsible would face justice.

President Zardari praised Iran's constructive engagement in the trilateral process, recalling last month's Pakistan-Iran-Afghanistan summit hosted by Tehran.

He urged the Iranian government to consider the creation of an integrated border management regime for tackling militancy and extremism. He said Pakistan and Iran had vital interests in stability and peace of the region.

Mr Zardari called for developing coordination between governments to curb narcotics and human trafficking in the region. He said Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan faced a common menace of drug trafficking and expressed the hope that a trilateral initiative would help counter the curse.

The President said Pakistan and Iran had the potential to undertake joint economic projects in Afghanistan to enhance connectivity, build infrastructure, rail and road links.

Mr Zardari said there was a need to raise bilateral trade to four billion dollars from one billion dollars. He called for working together to identify impediments to implementation of the Pakistan-Iran Preferential Trade Agreement, signed in 2006.

The Iranian president agreed to take full advantage of geo-strategic locations for "ushering in a new era of progress".

About the Afghanistan issue, President Zardari said Pakistan supported the process initiated by President Hamid Karzai for reconciliation and peace. He said Pakistan supported a reconciliation process which must be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned, adding that Islamabad was ready to provide all possible assistance to Kabul in reconstruction efforts.

It was Mr Zardari's second visit to Iran in less than a month. He visited Tehran last month to attend the counter-terrorism summit, on the sidelines of which the two countries and Afghanistan reached an agreement to augment cooperation in the fight against militancy.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Water and Power Minister Syed Naveed Qamar, Petroleum Minister Dr Asim Hussain and presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar accompanied Mr Zardari.

KHAMENEI LAMBASTS US: Later Mr Zardari called on Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Fars news agency quoted Ayatollah Khamenei as telling the President: "The principal enemy of the Pakistani people and the unity of the country is the West, headed by the United States."

Iranian officials have been vocal in their criticism of the prolonged US troop deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which are now set to be drawn down.—Agencies

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[wvns] Africa to Gaza convoy

2011-07-18T17:27:00.001-05:00

An interview with Sheik Walid el-Saadi, the head of the Africa to Gaza Aid Convoy, from Zambia

'Gaza or bust for Africa to Gaza convoy'
Mon Jul 4, 2011
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/187582.html

The Africa to Gaza Aid convoy is continuing on its way to the besieged Palestinian territory, despite all the difficulties, the head of the convoy says.

Sheik Walid el-Saadi made the remarks in an interview with Press TV.

Africa's first overland aid convoy to the Gaza Strip started its journey in Durban, South Africa in late June and is expected to reach the Palestinian territory by the end of July.

The 21 activists of the convoy are riding a dozen vehicles carrying essentials such as medical supplies, milk powder, generators, and construction materials.

Following is the text of the interview with Sheik Walid el-Saadi:

Press TV: Mr. el-Saadi, if you could kindly first tell us the stages that the first Africa aid convoy to Gaza has been through and is set to go through now before reaching Gaza.

El-Saadi: Thank you very much for having me on your program. As you all know, we left the city of Durban last Sunday [June 26] and we moved to Botswana.

We had two programs in Botswana, one in Gaborone and the other one in Francistown, where we had a rally and we approached the people and spoke to them about the difficulties of the Palestinian people and the atrocities that are happening to them.

After that we proceeded to Zambia. We started in Zambia, we went to Lusaka. We spent two nights in Lusaka, and we had two awareness programs on Palestine and what is happening in Palestine.

We also delivered some food aid for the people in the villages because our path is not only to reach the people of Gaza but to pass by the people of Africa. We are also giving to the people in Africa on our way. We put them in our program also. We distributed some books, some holy Qurans to the people.

And after Lusaka, we went to Serenje last night. We spent one night there, and we had one Palestinian awareness program, and we also met the community, where we delivered some groceries, some aid, and we also distributed some books, Islamic books, Islamic literature, and the Holy Quran translation.

We left Serenje for Mpika this afternoon. And from Mpika we are on our way to Mbeya, which is at the border of Tanzania.

Press TV: Mr. el-Saadi, we are hearing that the main concern now for the Africa aid convoy is the announcement from the Egyptian authorities that they will not allow this convoy onto Egyptian thoroughfares. Is there any plan being made by this aid convoy and how will things develop if Egypt does not allow them to move forward?

Of course, you have heard and may suspect of the threats that are being made by Israel, as well, against the Freedom Flotilla II. So what are you planning if you are not allowed into Gaza?

El-Saadi: It is a possibility because, you know, we cannot predict [whether] the Israelis will put pressure on the Egyptians to allow us [in] or not. But we have done all that we can.

We have informed the Egyptian government. For six months I've been preparing for this convoy. I've been to the Egyptian Embassy, we've sent them letters, and we've explained to them exactly what we're doing.

I myself went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo and I explained to them exactly what we are doing, how many trucks, how many people are coming… and hopefully, they will give us the go ahead.

It's possible to stop us. We are talking about a journey of 10,000 kilometers with the most difficult roads in the world. This morning we are traveling about 20 to 30 kilometers an hour because of narrow roads and huge potholes in the road, which the whole tire would go in and won't come out.

It is a very difficult journey and I [hope] that the Egyptian government won't stop us because it is going to be a disaster if they do that. A lot of people and organizations are involved with us in this.

We have got the support of our government. The South African government supported our mission.

Let's pray that from now and until we reach them, the Egyptian government will change their mind and will understand that they should allow us [in]. They gave visas to all the 21 members and they know that these members are going on this convoy in that mission.

So that is annoying for me and for all the people to understand that this is trouble for our convoy to go to Gaza.

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[wvns] Hungary destroys all GMO maize fields

2011-07-18T17:26:00.001-05:00

Hungary destroys all GMO maize fields
13 Jul 2011
http://www.allaboutfeed.net/news/hungary-destroys-all-gmo-maize-fields-11994.html

Some 400 hectares of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said.
The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added. Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary.

Authorities have been checking for GMO crops since the beginning of this year as a new regulation came in force this March which stipulates GMO checks before seeds are introduced to the market.

The checks will continue despite the fact that seed traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

Compensation unlikely
Controllers have found Pioneer and Monsanto products among the seeds planted. The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said.

Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to thousands of hectares in the country.

Local farmers complain that the use of GMO seeds has only been revealed now when it is too late to sow again and the entire year's harvest has been lost.

Another problem is that the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation, therefore if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company's creditors, rather than the farmers.

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[wvns] 'Little Gitmo'

2011-07-18T17:25:00.000-05:00

When an upstate imam named Yassin Aref was convicted on a suspect terrorism charge, he was sent to a secretive prison denounced by civil libertarians as a Muslim quarantine.

'Little Gitmo'
By Christopher S. Stewart
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28539.htm

[Photos on above website.]

July 11, 2011 "New York Magazine" -- - On August 4, 2004, Yassin Aref was walking along West Street in a run-down part of downtown Albany. It was about 11 p.m., and he had just finished delivering evening prayer at the storefront mosque around the corner, where he had been the imam for nearly four years. Caught up in his thoughts, he might not have noticed the car parked across from his two-story building if a man hadn't called out his name.

Aref instantly recognized the FBI agents inside the darkened vehicle. They had been monitoring him for years now, maybe longer. Sometimes they stopped and asked questions about his views on Saddam Hussein or the mosque. As part of Bush's war on terror, the FBI had been talking to other Muslims in Albany, too. When Aref climbed into the back seat, he figured that the agents simply wanted to talk some more. Instead, they told him he was under arrest.

It took a long time for this to settle in. Aref was silent as they drove to FBI headquarters, a fortlike concrete-and-glass building on the south side of town. The agency has spoken only vaguely about what happened when they questioned him, and there are no recordings, though Aref would later describe the time as the "hardest, darkest, and longest night of my life"—scarier, he said recently, than the hardships he and his wife suffered as Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

His hands and feet were chained. One of the agents spoke some Kurdish. Aref heard questions about terrorism, money laundering, a missile launcher. He refused a lawyer, believing that he had nothing to hide. "It is against my religion to lie," he told them. The interrogation lasted much of the night. He says he never heard specific charges. At some point they told him his house and mosque were being raided, and all he could think about was his wife and three children, who had arrived in Albany with him as U.N. refugees in 1999.

When morning broke, he was loaded into another car, bleary-eyed and weakened, and taken to the federal courthouse. As the vehicle moved through the streets, Aref was astonished by the sudden commotion. Helicopters swarmed overhead. There were scores of local and national news reporters, cameras angling to get his picture. He saw snipers.

During his three-week trial in 2006, he learned that he was the target of a controversial FBI sting, which involved a Pakistani informant with a history of crime. In the end, he was convicted of, among other things, conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He spent weeks in solitary confinement, days shackled in different vehicles, which shuffled him from prison to prison. Time coalesced, became unrecognizable, until, in the spring of 2007, Aref landed at a newly created prison unit in Terre Haute, Indiana, that would change his life again. It already had a nickname: Little Gitmo.

Aref didn't know anything about Little Gitmo, or a Communication Management Unit (CMU), as it's formally called. Once a death-row facility where Timothy McVeigh was executed, the Terre Haute CMU was quietly opened by the Bush administration in December 2006 to contain inmates with links, in particular, to "terrorist-related activity." A year later, another unit opened in Marion, Illinois.

Although inmates and guards refer to CMUs as Little Gitmos, the comparison to Guantánamo is imprecise: The units are not detention centers, and the inmates inside have already been convicted of crimes in the U.S. legal system. But what differentiates CMUs from all other facilities in the U.S. are the prisoners. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) estimates that 66 to 72 percent of them are Muslims, a staggering number considering that Muslims represent only 6 percent of the entire federal-prison population.

As of June, there are 82 men in the two CMUs, according to federal-prison officials, including a man convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, and the lone survivor of an EgyptAir hijacking in 1985. All inmates are kept under 24-hour surveillance in near-complete isolation. "If the government has intelligence that links you to terrorist activity, then that's something that the prison authority should be able to take into account," says Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, in defense of the measures. "We give them an array of privileges that most other places in the world are shocked by."

Legal activists agree that restrictive rules can be applied to high-security prisoners, but many in the CMUs, they say, are low-security inmates. One Muslim man was placed in a CMU for perjury, while another was locked up, in part, for violating U.S. sanctions by donating to a charity abroad without a license. According to CCR, many don't fully know why they ended up in the segregated units or how they might appeal their placement. In the words of Kathy Manley, one of Aref's defense attorneys, the CMUs are a "quarantine," and Alexis Agathocleous, a lawyer at CCR, calls them "an experiment in social isolation." "There is this story being told in this country now about the threat of homegrown terror and of radicalization related to Muslim prisoners, and the CMU is a story about law enforcement controlling that dangerous threat," says Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at CCR. "An allegation that someone is somehow connected to terrorism, without evidence and without an actual conviction [for terrorism], allows them to be treated in this whole different system of justice."

The federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where a Communication Management Unit is located.
(Photo: AFP/Newscom)

To gather intelligence from CMU inmates, correspondence is combed through by a counterterrorism unit in West Virginia. Regular group prayer is prohibited, and communications must be in English unless there's a live translator. Phone calls are limited to two fifteen-minute conversations a week (most maximum-security prisoners get 300 minutes a month). Immediate families of CMU inmates can visit only twice a month for a total of eight hours (general-population prisoners at Terre Haute get up to 49 hours of visits a month), and those conversations are monitored, recorded, and conducted through Plexiglas. Physical contact is forbidden, a permanent ban not imposed on most violent felons in maximum-security prisons.

As a result, critics say, those familiar markers—family, language, and religious identity—are being stripped away. "This is more than just being cut off from the world," says Nina Thomas, a psychologist-psychoanalyst at NYU who has studied the CMUs. "Inmates are being shut into a very narrow universe."

While the stated purpose of the CMUs, according to prisons spokesperson Traci Billingsley, is to "protect the public," Meeropol thinks that they "spread fear." Shamshad Ahmad, a physics lecturer at the University of Albany and president of Aref's mosque, says that CMUs "send a message that the whole justice system [is] geared to take revenge of the events of 9/11 on anyone belonging to the Muslim community"—a message that, essentially, any Muslim could become Aref.

And especially because Aref's conviction is itself a matter of controversy, CCR has chosen the imam to become its lead plaintiff in a case against the CMUs, one of the major lawsuits, including the ACLU's in Indiana, meant to challenge the units and change the way they operate. Along with five other plaintiffs, Aref now sits at the center of a civil-liberties battle against the prison system. To a growing number of supporters in Albany—who have rallied to get him out; have published his pre-CMU memoir, Son of Mountains; have raised money for his family—he is a symbol of the inequities Muslims still endure as collateral damage in the war on terror.

Aref was born in a mountain village in northern Iraq, where he lived through Saddam's genocide on the Kurds and met his wife, Zuhur. They fled to Syria, where he finished his religious studies, worked at the office of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), and had three kids. Under a U.N. asylum program, the family learned in 1999 that they were going to Albany, a place the 29-year-old Aref had never heard of.

Although he couldn't speak or understand much English, he managed to support his family as a hospital janitor for more than a year before he became the imam of Masjid As-Salam, the city's only mosque. During his four years as imam, Aref regularly discussed his anti–Iraq War sentiments and grew to represent the spiritual voice of many Albany Muslims. "People hesitated to criticize the government publicly," says Ahmad. "But he didn't."

It is believed that the FBI decided to target Aref in the summer of 2003, after the American military stormed an armed camp in Iraq and discovered a notebook with his name and number in it, along with the word kak, which the FBI translated as "commander" (the prosecution would later admit that the term actually translates to "mister"). The camp was alleged to be affiliated with Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist organization founded by Mullah Krekar, who was once a member of the IMK, where he had met Aref. Aref's backers argue that the camp was filled with refugees and that the notebook could have belonged to anyone. Aref claims that he met Krekar only in passing and that he left for Albany long before the mullah founded Ansar al-Islam.

That Aref had a past connection to Krekar was perhaps enough to attract the FBI's attention, though likely not enough to mount a legal case against him. So, working with expanded surveillance powers, the FBI went about setting up an operation.

Since 9/11, the FBI had begun relying more heavily on informants, under a controversial policy of preemptive prosecution—taking down those thought to possibly become terrorists in the future. It has resulted in the conviction of more than 200 individuals, including four Muslims in Newburgh convicted of plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues; a 19-year-old Somali charged with attempting to blow up a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon; and a man caught plotting an attack on Herald Square. "These types of operations have proven to be an essential law-enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks," Attorney General Eric Holder said at a dinner this winter in defense of the tactics.

Critics, however, point out that in many operations, it's difficult to determine whether anyone is truly culpable—or inherently dangerous. And intentionally or not, it's very easy to round up Muslims. "There is a massive ideological, military, and intelligence infrastructure committed to the domestic and international wars on terror. These wars depend on maintaining Muslims as the primary threat to national security," says Amna Akbar, a senior research scholar at NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. "The U.S. government seems to rely on widespread use of informants … sending them into mosques and other community spaces without any concrete suspicion of criminal activity."

Yassin Aref's wife with an Albany police officer the day after her husband's arrest.
(Photo: Ron Antonelli/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images)

In order to pursue Aref, the FBI employed a Pakistani informant named Shahed Hussain, known as Malik, the same informant later used in the Newburgh trial and a man once described by the defense in that case as "an agent provocateur who earned his keep by scouring mosques for easy targets." Malik had made a deal to avoid years in jail and deportation for helping people cheat on driver's-license exams. He was also arrested in Pakistan on a murder charge. The operation, scripted by the FBI, started with Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who owned a local pizzeria and helped found Aref's mosque.

Over several months, Malik moved into Hossain's life, bringing his kids toys and expressing interest in religion. Malik, who claimed to be working for the Islamic terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JeM, eventually said he was buying a shoulder-firing missile launcher to kill then–Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf during a visit in New York City. To complete the purchase, he needed Hossain to launder $50,000 for him. In return, Hossain, whose business was on the skids, would earn $5,000.

Hossain then asked Aref to be the witness to the loan, a tradition in Islamic culture (as the only imam in Albany, Aref had notarized many loans). There were additional months of transactions where Aref documented Hossain's loan payments to Malik. During those months, Malik would occasionally mention the missile, using the code word chaudry. The government argued that this was evidence that Aref knew about Malik's terrorist connection, and the jury agreed. Aref was charged with ten of the 30 total counts, and the jury found him guilty of money laundering and supporting a known terrorist organization. "Did [Aref] actually engage in terrorist acts?" William Pericek, assistant U.S. Attorney, asked during a post-sentencing press conference. "Well, we didn't have the evidence of that. But he had the ideology."

"Family, language, and religious identity are being stripped away."

o outside observers of the case, the details that emerged during the trial were troubling. The FBI testified that Aref knew the code word, linking him to the conspiracy, but according to recorded conversations, there was no evidence that either Malik or Hossain informed him of the term. And though Malik had shown a fake missile to Hossain, the FBI decided against showing it to Aref because they worried that he would be "spooked."

The case, observers noted, ultimately lacked definitive evidence that Aref knew the true nature of the transaction, and the jury was directed to ignore the motives of the FBI's investigation. As Judge Thomas J. McAvoy instructed them, "The FBI had certain suspicions, good and valid suspicions for looking into Mr. Aref, but why they did that is not to be any concern of yours."

"I'm not only surprised that the jury convicted him, but I'm sure the judge was surprised too," says Stephen Gottlieb, a professor at Albany Law School and author of Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. "They basically turned two decent men into criminals."

Manley believes he lost on emotional grounds. "I think the fear got to [the jury]. They ended up convicting him out of fear that he might be some kind of shadowy bad guy." Steve Downs, another member of Aref's legal team, attributes it to what he calls "the Muslim exception." The emotion and politics of 9/11 had, they argue, altered the threshold for what constituted reasonable doubt.

In the years since Aref's trial, critics have identified a pattern. "A whole range of policing, prosecution, and incarceration policies seem to take as a starting point that Muslims pose a particularly uncontainable threat meriting extreme and exceptional treatment by the government," says Akbar. "Because national security has become an area in which the government is granted an extraordinary amount of deference, these policies are often allowed to stand without much scrutiny."

After the jury reached a verdict, two local papers published editorials asking for leniency. The editors at the Albany Times Union called the case "unsettling," with no clear answer to why the men were targeted, and wondered what lives Hossain and Aref would have "continued to lead if they had never been lured into a sting operation."

The judge sentenced Aref to fifteen years and recommended a local federal prison. Instead, he was sent to the CMU, with little explanation, no hearing, and no obvious way to appeal.

The first time Aref wrote to me, in a heavily monitored e-mail exchange, he said, "I am not spending my time, time is spending me. My family's situation is driving me insane and eating my patience." His world was falling apart at the CMU. "It's really hard for me to talk about what happened," he wrote.

When Aref was sent to the Terre Haute CMU in May 2007, he was 37 years old. "I arrived to find a small Middle Eastern community," he said. There were about twenty others inside. The idea of being called a terrorist sickened Aref. Every day he wondered why he was there, and he hoped someone would eventually realize that a mistake had been made. "I don't understand how the jury found me guilty," he wrote at one point.

His cell unlocked at 6 a.m., and he could circulate through the small unit comprising a few dozen cells and a common room. At 9 p.m., he'd be locked in for the night. On occasion, he heard screaming, and one day he saw a grown man drop to the floor and begin uncontrollably shaking and sobbing. When Aref asked a nurse later what had happened, she told him, "It's all fear and stress."

A peculiar loneliness consumed him. As an imam, Aref was naturally social. He helped solve people's problems and guide them through their tangled lives. But at Terre Haute, he became reticent, curled inside himself. It was hard to know whom to trust. The FBI was sending agents to the unit to ask questions, and new inmates came every few weeks or so.

All along, he felt his family drifting away. That one fifteen-minute phone call a week (a second call per week was added in January 2010) was never enough. What could you really say in fifteen minutes divided up among at least four people? He tried to be upbeat, avoiding talk of the CMU. With the kids, he spoke about school, a kind of dinner talk. When his wife got on, the reality of their separation was oppressive.

Zuhur "almost lost her mind," as Aref put it. The case had turned her upside down. Worried about wiretaps, she had disconnected the Internet, TV, and phone. She didn't have a job and relied on friends and the mosque to pay her rent and buy food. She rarely interacted with strangers, afraid that they might be informants setting her up.

Talking to Aref was a project that required a friend to lend a cell phone to the family on the days he called. And when he spoke to Zuhur, she mostly cried. In the four years that he has been at the CMU, she has cried during every single call.

One of the hardest things was thinking about his young daughter, Dilnia. She was born while Aref was in jail. All he was to her was an abstract concept. "Whenever anyone asks her, `Where is your daddy?' she will point or run to the phone and say, `That is my daddy,' " Aref said.

His two boys visited that first summer. With surveillance cameras zeroing in on them, it was difficult to be intimate. Salah was 10, Azzam 7. As Aref spoke through the Plexiglas, every word, every gesture was being mined for information.

His demeanor changed dramatically when his boys stepped away and Downs stepped in. Downs had made the two-day car trip with the kids from Albany. "They abuse me," Aref said. When Downs asked him to explain, Aref wouldn't. Then suddenly the meeting was terminated. According to Downs, a guard falsely claimed that he was using a pen "as a secret recording device."

"I'm convinced that they understood I was trying to get info about the CMU," Downs says. "And they did what [the CMU] was set up to do—prevent information [about the CMU] from getting out."

The entire family arrived in a minivan the next summer, in 2008. It had been roughly four years since they'd all been together. But seeing his 2-year-old girl on the other side of the glass gave Aref tremendous pain. She didn't recognize him.

The family spent a total of four hours together, and all seemed well until Zuhur suddenly snapped. In front of the kids, she made an announcement: She wanted to go back to Kurdistan. She felt her safety was at risk in America, even more than in the region from which she had fled.

Aref didn't want to argue. A part of him understood. "I am not dead in order for them to forget me," he said to me, "and not really alive to benefit them." That was the last time he saw his family. They didn't visit again. Zuhur wouldn't let them.

On March 27, 2009, at about 4 a.m., a guard entered Aref's cell and told him to pack. He was being transferred to the second CMU, at the state penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which had opened a year before. Until recently, Marion had been one of the nation's only supermax facilities, replacing Alcatraz in 1963.
The move came at a particularly fraught moment for the CMUs. When President Obama came into office in 2009, many hoped the units would be shut down. The Bureau of Prisons wouldn't say if the new administration had reviewed the units, but they remained open, and their expansion soon inspired a fierce legal battle. In the summer of 2009, the ACLU's National Prison project filed a lawsuit on behalf of an inmate that disputed the legality of the creation of the units, among other things. Soon after, the ACLU of Indiana filed another lawsuit, about the restrictions on Muslim prayer.

In the meantime, "balancers," as CMU guards call them, were reportedly blended into the population—environmental activists, sexual predators, bank robbers, people who, prison officials claimed, "recruit and radicalize"—in order to address the criticism that CMUs were housing only Muslims. The Bureau of Prisons says it doesn't use race or religion to decide placement, and it rejects claims of adding balancers, though Muslim inmates continue to be in the majority.

In April 2010, CCR, with Aref, filed its suit, challenging the constitutionality of the place: the harsh restrictions on phone calls and visits, the ban on physical contact, the alleged absence of due process, and cited growing evidence suggesting that prisoners were being targeted for their religious and political beliefs.

To CCR, Aref's case was especially poignant. "Aref came to the United States as a refugee and was then subject to a dubious conviction," says Agathocleous. "Despite the fact that he engaged in no violence, that the prosecution acknowledged at trial that it was not seeking to prove he was a terrorist, and that his conduct in prison was spotless, he has been subject to these incredibly restrictive conditions at the CMU … It just doesn't make any sense."

In Marion, Aref's single cell was just as small as the former one, and his family was just as far away. But something had changed. He began to dread the phone calls with his family. "For many prisoners, the phone call is a big relief, and they get strength from it," he said. "But each time I call and hear my wife crying and I learn what my children are going through, it stresses my mind."

"I am not spending my time, time is spending me."

After a motion for a new trial was dismissed and the appeal to his original case was rejected, a part of him became resigned to the situation, friends say.

Then on April 13, I received a surprise e-mail from Aref. "How are you doing?" he asked. And then he told me the news. "For real, I am no longer in CMU!"

"My father is a very religious man," Aref's 15-year old daughter, Alaa, says one recent summer night. "He has a beard and wears Arab clothes and has an accent. But when you talk to him"—she pauses as if conjuring her father—"you know he's not a terrorist." She has trouble saying this word. Terrorist. It doesn't sound right in her mouth. And she tries it another way. "Baba didn't hate anyone."

On this June night, Aref's four kids sit barefooted on the carpet of a classroom on the second floor of the Central Avenue mosque in Albany, where their father was once the imam. Some of the doors are still broken from the FBI raid almost eight years ago.

The two boys, Salah, 14, and Azzam, 11, sit on either side of Alaa. Dilnia, who is now 5, sits off to the side, reading a book with a family friend. Zuhur stayed home. "She sometimes is depressed and doesn't go out," Alaa says.

Friends of the family say that Zuhur still talks about returning to Iraq, though she doesn't have the money for a plane ticket or travel documents. Her crying hasn't abated. When she does leave the house, she occasionally visits Aref's lawyers and asks, "What did Yassin do wrong?" or "When is he coming home?"

Since being placed in a general-population prison, Aref remains cautious. Without much explanation, he was moved out of the CMU, where he had been separated from the world for four years, and he could just as easily be moved back, like officials had done recently to an environmental activist named Daniel McGowan. Aref's lawyer speculates that my requests to visit Aref in a CMU and the CCR lawsuit had placed pressure on prison officials, which might have had something to do with his sudden transfer out. (It's a tactic that's worked for CMUs in the past. With one of the ACLU lawsuits, a plaintiff was moved from a unit to a general-population prison and the case was dismissed.)

Last April, four years after the first CMU opened and days following CCR's suit, the Bureau of Prisons began a public discussion of the units, a move, advocacy groups say, the prison system was legally obligated to make before the CMUs ever opened. Many of the comments that flooded in focused on the lack of meaningful appeal—that inmates are stuck in the units—and in particular, how the units were ruining the men and their families.

Once Aref entered the general-population prison, he assumed that things would get better—that he would be able to embrace his wife and hug his kids, and that he might even be transferred again to a prison closer to home.

But so far, none of that has changed.

The FBI investigation and the CMUs have so alienated his family, especially Zuhur, who has still not visited her husband since his transfer. She hasn't allowed the kids to go, either—though supporters are working to set up a trip for this summer.

None of Aref's kids know exactly why their father is in jail.

Azzam, playing with the yellow gum in his mouth, says, "Money laundering or something, right?"

"It was an FBI sting," Alaa says. "They kind of set him up for missiles or something."

Salah, who looks most like his father in his long white shirt, nods.

"I miss him," Alaa says. Turning to Steve Downs, who has been sitting quietly against the wall, she asks, "When my father gets out, they can deport him right away?"

Downs nods. Aref will be deported the day he is released from prison. Among them, Dilnia is the only American citizen, which means that all the others could be deported on that day too, or shortly after. Zuhur was recently denied citizenship.

Alaa will turn 18 before her father is released, and she could apply for citizenship. If it's granted, she could become the guardian of the others.

I ask whether what's been done to their father makes them angry. The boys are silent. "I'm upset," Alaa says. "But my dad taught us never to hate."

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[wvns] Precious Cargo

2011-07-18T17:21:00.000-05:00

Precious Cargo
By Sumayyah Meehan
The Muslim Observer
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=8309

You can see them popping their heads through an open car sunroof as it speeds down the highway or bouncing up and down in the back of a car in motion. No, they're not animals such as a cat or dog traveling with its master. They are unrestrained children living in some of the world's richest nations. It's a startling phenomena given that America's legal system has gone to great lengths to protect American children traveling in motor vehicles in the United States by making seat belts and car seats for young children a part of the law. However, the utter disregard for the safety of children traveling in motor vehicles in the Middle East is alarming. In fact, it is an epidemic that threatens entire generations of children.

This past winter a father in Kuwait paid dearly for his lesson in passenger safety. A family trip to the desert turned tragic as the SUV the father was driving jostled under the bumpy desert terrain. His son was standing upright inside the car as his upper body was outside. All it took was a single bump to throw the son from the car and into the path of his father's vehicle. With no time to regain control of the vehicle, the father ran over his son and crushed him to death. Stories like this are common all across the Middle East as many parents take the road less traveled by not securing all passengers before turning that ignition key.

The problem is widespread and, while most countries in the Middle East pay lip service to restraining children inside of motor vehicles and do have laws requiring car seats and seat belts on the books, there is no enforcement of vehicular laws meant to protect children. It is up to parents to decide whether or not to restrain their children inside the vehicle. Unfortunately, most parents pay little attention to the safety of their children inside the car.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, has one of the worst records for unrestrained children in the Middle East. According to recent research, car accidents are the number one killer of children in the sheikhdom with 63% of child deaths last year alone being linked to car or roadway accidents. Further, UAE authorities have determined that an estimated 98% of children in the country are not restrained when traveling by motor vehicle.

There is little data regarding children and road safety in other regions of the Middle East as research over the issue in scarce. However the problem will most likely continue to deteriorate, as countless children will undoubtedly pay for the negligence of adults with their very lives.

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[wvns] Giving frozen assets to rebels is piracy--Libya

2011-07-11T22:22:00.000-05:00

Giving frozen assets to rebels is piracy--Libya
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFLDE7442GP20110506

* Legal obstacles prevent release to rebels of frozen funds
* Anti-Gaddafi nations set up fund for rebel administration

TRIPOLI, May 5 (Reuters) - The Libyan government rejected on Thursday U.S. plans to unblock its frozen assets and give them to rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi, saying such a move was piracy and would undermine the global financial system.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told anti-Gaddafi countries meeting in Rome that Washington would try to pass legislation to unblock frozen Libyan assets and hand them to the rebels who have seized eastern Libya.

Washington has frozen about $30 billion in such assets since the Libyan revolt began in February, but there are legal obstacles to enabling the money to be used.

"Any use of the frozen assets is like piracy on the high seas," said Libya Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim.

"They (the rebels) are not a legal entity. They are not a country.

The country is not divided according to a referendum or to a United Nations resolution," he told journalists. "This is illegal ... If we stay silent about it, I think we will be living in a jungle."
Kaim said handing Libyan assets to the rebels would discourage wealthy countries from investing abroad, for fear their cash would be seized and handed to rebel groups at the first sign of domestic unrest.

He said that Libya had more than $140 billion invested abroad and that the Libyan central bank had transferred 700 million Libyan dinars ($571 million) to its Benghazi branch in February to pay for six months of salaries and other expenses. He condemned pledges by Western and Arab countries opposed to Libyan leader Gaddafi to set up a fund to help the rebels, who are desperately short of cash, saying the mechanism was illegal and there was no way to monitor the way the money was spent.

"Where was the 700 million spent?" he said. "On arming rebels or dividing among the nine people on the self-appointed council?" (Reporting by Lin Noueihed, editing by Tim Pearce) ($1=1.226 Libyan Dinar)

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[wvns] Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

2011-07-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

19 killed on second day of violence
----------------------------------------------------------------
By S. Raza Hassan

KARACHI, July 6: After the loss of ten lives on Tuesday in a new upsurge in violence in the city, another 19 people, including five passengers of a minibus, were killed and dozens others injured on Wednesday, taking the death toll to 29 in two days.

The violence which broke out in Orangi Town spread to Lyari, Baldia Town, Site and Gulshan-i-Iqbal areas...

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/07/19-killed-on-second-day-of-violence.html

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[wvns] Greece arrests Gaza-bound boat captain

2011-07-11T22:20:00.000-05:00

Watch: Greek authorities arrest captain of Gaza-bound Audacity of Hope, to charge him with endangering lives of passengers. Meanwhile officials cite unprecedented preparations for flotilla: Turkel would be proud

Greece arrests Gaza-bound boat captain
Associated Press
07.02.11, 20:35 / Israel News
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4090042,00.html

Greek authorities have arrested the captain of a boat that was to be part of a Gaza-bound flotilla trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territory, officials said Saturday.

The 60-year-old captain, whose name was not released by authorities, was being held at Piraeus police headquarters and will remain there until a court hearing Tuesday.

Greece's coast guard said the captain of the "Audacity of Hope" faces charges of trying to leave port without permission and of endangering the lives of the boat's passengers. The latter charge is a felony.

===

French boat successfully sails for Gaza
Tue Jul 5, 2011
Ramin Mazaheri, Press TV, Paris
http://www.presstv.com/detail/187756.html

Freedom Flotilla 2 has never really pushed away from Greece's shores. Israeli diplomatic pressure has persuaded the Greek government to apprehend nearly ten ships by using force and making arrests.

The main French boat is still docked in Athens, but a second, smaller boat, carrying 8 French nationals, has succeeded in avoiding Greek authorities and is expected to reach Gaza no later than Thursday. One passenger spoke to the international media from the boat.

Two ships were not refused permission because they were victims of sabotage, which could have led to dozens of deaths at sea. In all, some 350 activists from 22 countries are stuck in port.

About 20 activists from a Spanish boat responded by occupying their nation's embassy in Athens to demand their government's support. In Paris, the main delegation of French sailors has returned, joyful over the news that their compatriots' boat had eluded capture.

Attention now turns to another high-profile event on July 8th, when hundreds of activists will converge at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Aiport. Israeli officials have called the group, mostly women and children, "hooligans" and threatened them with immediate deportation.

The more than 1.5 million impoverished inhabitants of Gaza live in what is often described as an "open-air prison", while scarcity and unemployment are almost as endemic in the West Bank.

Regardless of the outcome of Freedom Flotilla 2 and the Ben Gurion Airport Arrival, many activists say they have already achieved one of their main objectives: drawing the world's attention to the Palestinian crisis.

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[wvns] Egypt detains former agricultural minister

2011-07-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

Egypt detains former minister over pesticides
Sun Jul 10, 2011
http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFLDE7690DQ20110710

CAIRO, July 10 (Reuters) - An Egyptian investigating judge ordered a former agriculture minister detained for questioning over accusations that he allowed the import of cancer-causing pesticides, the state news agency MENA reported on Sunday.

The agency said Youssef Wali, who served as agriculture minister under former President Hosni Mubarak from 1982 to 2004, was also suspected of squandering 200 million Egyptian pounds ($33.6 million) of state funds by selling a plot of land to businessman Hussein Salem for less than the market price.

MENA said Wali is accused of "bringing in 37 brands of pesticides that were proven to cause cancer". It said the chemicals had been banned from entering the country in 1996, but were allowed entry in 1998 under Wali until 2004.

Wali has denied the charges.

Prosecutors have been investigating business transactions of officials under Mubarak since mass protests forced him to resign on Feb. 11.

A prosecutor froze Wali's assets in April in connection with the sale of 100,000 feddans (420 million square metres) of land to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in a deal which Egyptian authorities suspected had also violated the law.

Salem, a close aide to Mubarak, was arrested in Spain last month on an international warrant, suspected of squandering public funds by selling gas to Israel below market prices.

(Reporting by Ahmed Tolba, Writing by Sami Aboudi) ($1=5.955 Egyptian Pound)

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[wvns] Killing Gaddafi's Grandbabies

2011-07-07T17:06:00.000-05:00

Killing Gaddafi's Grandbabies
Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/killing-gaddafis-grandbabies

When the U.S. and Europeans needed a way to get on the "right" side of the Arab Awakening – and thereby crush it – they chose to re-demonize Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi as the evil from which the Euro-Americans would rescue North Africa. "Gaddafi was perfect, having long existed in cartoon form for western consumption." Killing Gaddafi's son and three grandchildren was no crime, since "in American eyes they are no more than satanic versions of Daffy Duck's cartoon nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie."

The ceremonial slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi and his family lurches forward like some savage white cult ritual. Death to the demon and his seed! shout the priests, banshees and ice-smile oracles of the U.S. corporate media. The American (or "western") manifest mission must be sanctified in the blood of caricatures. Like the Christ-crazed hordes that surged out of Europe's far western dankness to annihilate whole cities of strangers – including tens of thousands of fellow Christians that did not speak, eat or smell as the French and English did – these modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.

When the Arab world awoke at the beginning of the year, the highly paid presenters and rapid-vapid quippers of CNN and competing reality-creation companies were caught pitifully mission-less. Absent direction from the official scenario-producers at the White House and the State Department, there could be no coherent newsreader script, no simple theme for quipping. But direction would not be forthcoming from the Obama administration until a way could be found to put the U.S. on the "right" side of the Arab Awakening.

"Where was the consummate Arab evil?"

In the first days of the Egyptian rebellion, CNN and its ilk were largely on their own and visibly confused – reflecting the confusion and desperation in Washington. Then, after the White House, having no other choice, pretended to empathize with the young demonstrators at Tahrir Square, the corporate media commenced its love affair with the "new" Arab. But where was the consummate Arab evil, in the battle against which the corporate media could fulfill its role as chronicler of America's glorious, civilizing saga in the world? Who is the caricature, to be ritually tormented and slain?

Moammar Gaddafi became the foil for the Euro-American military response to the Arab Awakening. Instantaneously, CNN got its mission back. Gaddafi was perfect, having long existed in cartoon form for western consumption. With Gaddafi's gradual accommodation with the West, in the early 2000s, Iraq's Saddam Hussein became the Great Cartoon Satan, even appearing as the Devil in Comedy Central's South Park cartoon show. Gaddafi, the vintage cartoon, inevitably became conflated with Saddam (all Arab strongman cartoons look alike).

A general on CNN's retainer repeatedly named the long dead Saddam as the ghoul to be obliterated by righteous American firepower. More than once, the general apologized to the audience, but he needn't have since, to the mass of CNN's viewers, Gaddafi has no more claim to his own life, history and death than did Saddam Hussein. The are both little voodoo dolls to be stuck with needles and burned and torn to pieces, along with their children.

"Vaunted American "compassion" does not extend to the grandbabies of evil Arab cartoon-men."

Americans, who consume packaged lies like hot dogs, and then revere these items of consumption as sacred culture (as "American" as hot dogs), have been ready to kill Gaddafi's sons ever since Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were gunned down in 2003. In American eyes, these Arab strongmen's sons are no more than satanic versions of Daffy Duck's cartoon nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. In Gaddafi's case, two of his sons were named Saif. If Col. Gaddafi didn't distinguish sufficiently between them, why should NATO bombers? As it turned out, the Saif that died along with three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, Saif al-Arab, the youngest of the brothers, was also the least political. The grandkids, ages 6 months to two years, were, of course, totally apolitical and, presumably, quite cute. But vaunted American "compassion" does not extend to the grandbabies of evil Arab cartoon-men. CNN and other U.S. corporate outlets, all of which have reporters in Tripoli, chose to quote rebel leaders in Benghazi who cast doubt on whether the children of Gaddifi sons Mohammed and Hannibal and daughter Aisha were really dead. The rebels advised that it was likely a trick, and U.S. corporate media treated the vile slander as simply another competing factoid.

The killer couple in the White House offered no condolences or apologies, presumably on the assumption that the elder Gaddafi had invited his family to his residence to act as human shields, and was therefore responsible for their deaths.

It would not occur to most Americans that Gaddafi and his family were entitled to feel safe under international law and American law, which bar assassinations of heads of state, and that United Nations resolution 1973 does not authorize NATO to hunt down the Libyan leader or kill those around him. But he's only a cartoon, and cartoons have no rights. Neither do the countries these cartoons come from, as every American knows.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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[wvns] NATO bombings immoral: Archbishop

2011-07-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

AFRICA/LIBYA-"I have the duty to say that bombings are immoral acts, " says the Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli
Agenzia Fides
http://www.fides.org/aree/news/newsdet.php?idnews=28931&lan=eng

Tripoli (Agenzia Fides) - "I am surprised that statements were made on the fact that I should deal only with spiritual matters and that the bombings have been authorized by the UN. But this does not mean that the UN, NATO or the European Union have the moral authority to decide to bomb " says Archbishop Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli, Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli to Fides. "I certainly do not want to interfere with the political activity of anyone, but I have a duty to declare that the bombings are immoral, " insists Bishop Martinelli.

"Let me stress - continues the Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli - that bombing is not an act dictated by social and moral conscience of the West or humanity in general. Bombing is always an immoral act. I respect the United Nations, I respect NATO, but I must also declare that war is immoral. If there are violations of human rights , I cannot use the same method to stop them. As a Christian I have to use peaceful methods, first of all dialogue."

"I remember that Pope John Paul II established diplomatic relations with Libya, while it was under embargo. This is to demonstrate that the method to solve the problems are not even embargoes and wars, but diplomatic dialogue, " concluded Bishop Martinelli, expressing full support regarding the comminication of the Episcopal Mixed Commission Mediterranean-Maghreb-Europe, on the war in Libya and on the issue of migrants.

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[wvns] Jury Duty in the US

2011-07-07T16:57:00.000-05:00

Jury Duty in the US
Karin Friedemann
Monday, July 04, 2011
http://karinfriedemann.blogspot.com/2011/07/jury-duty-in-us.html

This week I served on a jury for the first time. It was an extremely boring and annoying experience, but at the same time surprisingly pleasant. I am happy that I live in a country where a jury of one's peers decides your guilt or innocence, not just the arbitrary decision of a judge. The jury system dates back to Islamic history – it was a basic Muslim belief that a group of people deciding about the truth and falsehood of various testimonies would be less likely to be in error than a single person. "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time," to quote Bob Marley. The more people you have observing a situation, the less likely that the general opinion will be in error, especially when the group is given an opportunity to discuss what they saw.

In this case, a black man was accused of dealing a very small amount of drugs to a couple white men from out of town. If true, he was a very stupid drug dealer doing his business in front of the train station which is swarming with police cars and undercover police officers. The police were watching the car for a long time, which was parked with two white men inside. These men were clearly waiting for someone, for one of them kept getting out of the car and walking to the corner, using his cell phone. Eventually a black man arrived, got into the car, and the white men drove him to a restaurant a mile away. The undercover police followed the car. After the white men drove away, the police stopped them and arrested the white men for possession of crack cocaine. Then the police went to the restaurant, pulled the black man out of line, and arrested him under suspicion of having sold them the drugs. He had on his person $227 dollars in cash and two cell phones. He was cooperative with the police and maintained his innocence.

The prosecution however, went overboard to the point of annoying the jury. They brought so many expert witnesses to testify on irrelevant topics, in order to enhance the credibility of the police. We learned about how government spies working with FBI informants gain access to the drug world. We learned how drugs are packaged. We learned how the chemistry labs analyze drugs to determine what they are. They totally avoided the central question, which was: did this particular man sell drugs to those particular individuals? Clearly it was not an important case in the minds of the police. No fingerprints were taken, the cell phone calls were not even traced. There was zero evidence other than the hearsay of the police about what they saw. The men parked. Someone got in. They drove him to a restaurant. The police never witnessed any drug transaction. They just assumed. By the end of the day, listening to hours and hours of boring expert testimonies, the members of the jury themselves were joking that they themselves needed to do some drugs to cope with the torture!

What struck me was the dishonesty of the prosecuting attorney in his excitement to win this case. While the police officers testified that they saw the car parked for 5-10 minutes, the attorney in his closing argument embellished this time to 25 minutes. One of the expert witnesses estimated the worth of the drugs at up to $200, to match the amount of money in the man's pocket, even though I am pretty sure that two rocks of crack cocaine are worth maybe $20-40. The prosecuting attorney claimed that the man was coming out of the train station but the police only claimed he was walking from that general direction. The police said they saw from a distance, in the dark of night, a large black man. But this man was not large. As a jurist, I felt that the prosecuting attorney was trying to insult my intelligence.

It is very probable that this man did do what he was accused of doing. However, there was no evidence. Not enough to convict him without a "reasonable doubt." How do we know the white policemen even got the right guy? After observing the black man in the dark from a distance, they arrested him inside a Jamaican restaurant filled with black men with the same hairstyle. I was anticipating a heated argument among the jury, because on face value the man did seem guilty. I was surprised.

I had reservations about white police officers following a car just because there were black people and white people in the same car. I had doubts about whether this is even the police's job description, to follow people around who didn't disturb the peace nor bother anybody in any way. I personally feel disturbed when I see white police officers arresting an entire group of young black teenagers who were just sitting there for "loitering" in front of the train station. On a personal basis, as long as it doesn't disturb nor hurt anyone, it doesn't bother my day if someone gets into a car and the car drives off. The aggressive police presence in my neighborhood is far more annoying.

The jury voted unanimously "Not Guilty." We all privately thought he probably was guilty, but there was no evidence other than the hearsay of the police about what they saw. I am proud of my fellow Americans. I feel good that we were able to keep one man, who had no previous convictions, out of prison. We were able to put the Constitution first. The Constitution guarantees the right of free public assembly. If there was no obvious crime being committed, the police should not follow people around.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based freelance writer

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[wvns] Torture Wrong: Former CIA Interrogator

2011-07-07T16:56:00.000-05:00

Torture "Does Not Work, And Is Wrong":
Former CIA Interrogator Glenn Carle Speaks Out
5.July.11
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/07/05/torture-does-not-work-and-is-wrong-former-cia-interrogator-glenn-carle-speaks-out/

In the US media, there's a little bit of a buzz right now about the use of torture by the Bush administration, and much of it is the right sort of buzz — openly involving reminders that torture is a crime, and that, in addition, using torture is worthless if the aim is to produce reliable information. Also mentioned, though not, in general, with the prominence it truly deserves, is the fact that those who authorized the use of torture still walk free, and are allowed to publish books and appear on chat shows, even if their opportunities for foreign travel are severely curtailed, as with George W. Bush, because the world is full of countries in which the appropriate respect is given to the UN Convention Against Torture — to which, of course, the US, under Ronald Reagan, became a signatory.

The buzz about torture has been created because of the publication of a book entitled, The Interrogator: An Education by Glenn L. Carle, a former CIA operative and Arabic speaker who was sent to an undisclosed country, to a "black site" known as Hotel California, to interrogate a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative.

Carle's book s important for two reasons: firstly, because it is the first example of a US interrogator's first-hand account of a "black site," and secondly, and crucially, because Carle refused to engage in the torture techniques that the Bush administration arranged for lawyers in the Justice Department to authorize, preferring instead to interrogate the prisoner using rapport-buiiding methods and psychological insight, and also because he is openly critical of those methods.

While I can recommend reviews of the book by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan in the Wall Street Journal, and Laura Miller on Salon.com, as well as Carle's appearance on Democracy Now!, I'm cross-posting below Carle's interview with Spencer Ackerman of Wired, which succinctly captures all the key points. Carle describes how the objectives of the techniques he was supposed to use were to "dislocate psychologically" a prisoner, explaining how "noise, temperature, one's sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one's senses are all distorted. Reality disappears, and so do one's reference points." He adds, "It is shockingly easy to disorient someone" but also explains how "that is not the same as making someone more willing to cooperate," adding, "The opposite is true — as the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual cautions will occur, as I predicted and forewarned and as occurred in my and other officers' experiences."

Refusing to use these methods, Carle explains how, instead, he used traditional rapport building techniques and psychological insight: "The methods that worked were the same ones that work in classic intelligence operations: establishing a rapport with the individual, understanding his fears, hopes, interests, quirks. It is a psychological task, very similar to what one should do when establishing any human relationship."

His conclusions about the techniques favoured by the Bush administration are stark. At first, he explains, he accepted that "psychological dislocation induced cooperation, and would not be lasting or severe, [and] therefore could be acceptable in certain circumstances." He adds, however, "I came quickly to conclude that this was founded on erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation. [It] did not work, was counterproductive and was, simply, wrong in every way. So, I came to oppose it."

The mention of "erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation" reminded me of the apologists for the torture program who did so much to justify the use of torture — James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the former instructors in the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) taught in US military schools to help US personnel to resist torture if captured, who perversely recommended that their program could be reverse-engineered for real world interrogations in the "War on Terror." I have discussed their terrible contribution to the Bush administration's torture program in my articles, Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against Torture Architect James Mitchell, The Torture of Abu Zubaydah: The Complaint Filed Against James Mitchell for Ethical Violations and The Dark Desires of Bruce Jessen, the Architect of Bush's Torture Program, As Revealed by His Former Friend and Colleague.

However, beyond the role of Mitchell and Jessen, the object of Carle's disdain are even more significant individuals: essentially, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, the lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who cynically attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA (and who were excused in a whitewash last year that followed a damning internal investigation), and those at the very top of government: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the lawyers who clustered around Cheney in particular, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and William J. Haynes II.
"Some Will Call Me a Torturer": CIA Man Reveals Secret Jail
By Spencer Ackerman, Wired, July 1, 2011

Admitting that "some will call me a torturer" is a surefire way to cut yourself off from anyone's sympathy. But Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative, isn't sure whether he's the hero or the villain of his own story.

Distilled, that story, told in Carle's new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle — like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator — to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA's new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.

But CAPTUS doesn't divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to "Hotel California" — an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.

Carle goes with him. Though heavily censored by the CIA, Carle provides the first detailed description of a so-called "black site." At an isolated "discretely guarded, unremarkable" facility in an undisclosed foreign country (though one where the Soviets once operated), hidden CIA interrogators work endless hours while heavy metal blasts captives' eardrums and disrupts their sleep schedules.

Afterward, the operatives drive to a fortified compound to munch Oreos and drink somberly to Grand Funk Railroad at the "Jihadi Bar." Any visitor to Guantanamo Bay's Irish pub — O'Kellys, home of the fried pickle — will recognize the surreality.

But Carle — codename: REDEMPTOR — comes to believe CAPTUS is innocent.

"We had destroyed the man's life based on an error," he writes. But the black site is a bureaucratic hell: CAPTUS' reluctance to tell CIA what it wants to hear makes the far-off agency headquarters more determined to torture him. Carle's resistance, shared by some at Hotel California, makes him suspect. He leaves CAPTUS in the black site after 10 intense days, questioning whether his psychological manipulation of CAPTUS made him, ultimately, a torturer himself.

Eight years later, the CIA unceremoniously released CAPTUS. (The agency declined to comment for this story.) Whether that means CAPTUS was innocent or merely no longer useful as a source of information, we may never know. Carle spoke to Danger Room about what it's like to interrogate a man in a place too dark for the law to find.

Wired.com: Do you consider yourself a torturer? At the end of the book, you wrestle with the question.

Glenn Carle: According to Justice Department lawyer John Yoo's August 2002 memo on interrogation, the answer is no. As one can see from the entire book, I opposed all these practices and this approach. I was involved in it, although I tried to stop what I considered wrong. I feel I acted honorably throughout my involvement in the CAPTUS operation, and tried to have him treated properly, but much of it was disturbing and wrong.

Wired.com: You're maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a "black site" prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?

Glenn Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.

"How did I restrain myself" implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.

Wired.com: You came to believe that the man you call CAPTUS "was not a jihadist or a member of al-Qaida." Well, even so, was he still dangerous? Did you ever feel he duped you? You write that he lied to you, after all.

Glenn Carle: CAPTUS himself was not a terrorist, or a dangerous man. He had been involved in activities of legitimate concern to the CIA, because they did touch upon al-Qaida activities. That's a fact. But he was not a willing member of, believer in, or supporter of, al-Qaida. He was not a terrorist, had committed no crimes, had not intentionally supported jihad or terrorist actions.

Did he dupe me? He evaded and lied on occasion, yes. And I always wrestled with the question of whether he was duping me. In the end, I had to decide, though, and I decided he was, fundamentally, straight with me. Never totally, but fundamentally, yes. This is not a black and white-hat situation. I try to make that as clear as can be in the book. Little was simple — thus, my descriptions of the "gray world" in which knowledge is imperfect, motivations and actions are sometimes contradictory — in which CAPTUS, perhaps, was truthful, innocent, disingenuous, and complicit simultaneously.

Wired.com: Did you ever feel, at Hotel California or before, that interrogating CAPTUS put you in legal jeopardy down the road?

Glenn Carle: I think everyone was concerned with this, at every level, and at every second of one's involvement in interrogation operations. We all worked very hard to act legally.The challenges are how to reconcile contradictory laws, which are morally repugnant, perhaps, and which leave room for broad interpretation and abuse.

No one consciously broke the law, ever, in my experience or knowledge. But what should one do? How could one follow one's orders and accomplish one's mission, when it was flawed, objectionable, and perhaps itself legally, albeit "legally" ordered. That's the supreme dilemma I wrestled with, and others did, too.

Wired.com: When you first interrogate CAPTUS, you write that you tried to establish a rapport with him — even as you kept him fearful that you controlled his fate. When that didn't get the intelligence CIA HQ wanted, they shipped the both of you to Hotel California. Did CIA consider the possibility that he wasn't who they thought he was?

Glenn Carle: I had slow, partial, success during my time of involvement in bringing colleagues and the institution to see him more as I did. But I failed, ultimately. The view that he was a senior al-Qaida member or fellow-traveler remained decisive for a long, long time. The agency or U.S. government didn't change its views for eight years. Perhaps it never did.

Wired.com: Run me through how CAPTUS was treated at the Hotel.

Glenn Carle: The objectives are to "dislocate psychologically" a detainee. This is done through psychological and physical measures, primarily intended to disrupt Circadian rhythms and an individual's perceptions. So, noise, temperature, one's sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one's senses are all distorted. Reality disappears, and so do one's reference points. It is shockingly easy to disorient someone.

But that is not the same as making someone more willing to cooperate. The opposite is true — as the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual cautions will occur, as I predicted and forewarned and as occurred in my and other officers' experiences.

Wired.com: In 2003, according to declassified documents, your old boss, George Tenet approved the following "enhanced interrogation techniques" for use on high-value detainees: "the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, the use of diapers for prolonged periods, the use of harmless insects, the water board." Were any of these used on CAPTUS? Did you take part in any of their use?

Glenn Carle: No. These measures were formally set out, I believe, after my involvement in interrogation. And in any event, from my first second of involvement in the CAPTUS operation I simply would not allow or have anything to do with any physical coercive measure. I would not do it. That point I was certain of instantaneously. I also had literally never heard of waterboarding until the story about it broke in the media.

Wired.com: Did you get any useful intelligence out of CAPTUS? If so, what interrogation techniques "worked"?

Glenn Carle: Oh, yes, CAPTUS definitely provided useful intelligence. The methods that worked were the same ones that work in classic intelligence operations: establishing a rapport with the individual, understanding his fears, hopes, interests, quirks. It is a psychological task, very similar to what one should do when establishing any human relationship.

The plan was to be a perceptive, and sometimes manipulative, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and purposeful individual who understood the man sitting opposite him, and earn his trust.

Wired.com: You came to question whether even the mild psychological disorientation you induced on CAPTUS was too severe an interrogation method. Why? Did you sympathize with CAPTUS too much?

Glenn Carle: There is always a danger for a case officer to "fall in love" with his "target." That's the term we use. Any good officer guards against that, and always questions his own perceptions. Always. But I was the one who looked in CAPTUS' eyes for hours and hours and days and days. It was I who knew the man, literally. I'm confident in my assessment of him.

And yes, I at first accepted my training: that psychological dislocation induced cooperation, and would not be lasting or severe, therefore could be acceptable in certain circumstances. I came quickly to conclude that this was founded on erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation. [It] did not work, was counterproductive and was, simply, wrong in every way. So, I came to oppose it.

Wired.com: How did the CIA react to you publishing this book? Huge sections of it are blacked out.

Glenn Carle: The agency redacted about 40 percent of the initial manuscript, deleting entire chapters, almost none of which had anything to do with protecting sources or methods. Much of it was so the agency could protect itself from embarrassment, or from allowing any description of the interrogation program to come out. One would infer, obviously, that large segments of the agency would have preferred to leave CAPTUS' story in the dark, where it took place.

Wired.com: David Petraeus, the incoming CIA director, suggested to Congress that there might be circumstances where a return to "enhanced interrogation" is appropriate. What would you say to him?

Glenn Carle: That there is almost no conceivable circumstance in which the enhanced interrogation practices are acceptable or work. This belief is a red herring, wrong, and undoes us a bit. We are better than that. Enhanced interrogation does not work, and is wrong. End of story.

Wired.com: The Justice Department decided on June 30 to seek criminal inquiries in two cases of detainee abuses — out of 101. Was that justice, a whitewash or something in between?

Glenn Carle: It wasn't a whitewash. It's in general better not to seek retribution, but to seek to inculcate correct values and behavior going forward.

Wired.com: Did you ever learn what happened to CAPTUS' treatment after you left at Hotel California? Why was he was released? Have you tried to find him? What would you tell him if you saw one another?

Glenn Carle: No. I left the case and knew nothing about him for years. I presume he was released because the institution, at last, accepted what I had argued as strongly as I had been able to do so. He was ultimately let go, I hope, because the institution and U.S. government, at last, came to accept my view of CAPTUS. His release validates — substantiates — everything I argued.

I came to respect CAPTUS. We are from such different worlds, and his and my circumstances — he a detainee and I one of his interrogators — are so radically different that conversation would be awkward if we ever met again. It is natural that he feel resentment. And little was ever clear in the entire operation. That's the nature of intelligence work. He is not a total innocent, I don't think. But his rendition was not justified by the facts as I came to learn them, which was at odds with the agency's assessment of him.

Wired.com: Finally, how many CAPTUSes — people you believe to be innocent men swept up in the CIA "enhanced interrogation" system — are there?

Glenn Carle: I do not know.

Note: For more on secret prisons, see my articles transcribing the sections dealing with US secret detention after 9/11, which were part of a UN report on secret detention that was published last year: UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA's "High-Value Detainee" Program and Secret Prisons, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries' Complicity, and Obama's Record.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo" (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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[wvns] Drugs and Medicines in Historical Context

2011-07-06T22:12:00.000-05:00

Drugs and Medicines in Historical Context
By Karin Friedemann
The Muslim Observer
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=8519

medical_marijuanaDid you know that George Washington used to grow marijuana on the White House lawn? America's first president often spoke fondly of "female plants," pointing obviously to marijuana's medicinal uses. Benjamin Franklin, who avoided alcohol, was an ardent marijuana smoker. Did you know that up until World War II, American farmers could pay their taxes with hemp? Hemp, the mother of marijuana, is a native plant of every continent, and has been used during all periods of history to create rope, paper, cloth, oil, fuel, fiber, and medicine. Avicenna, the medieval Arab author of medicinal textbooks recommended marijuana, the hemp flower, for stomach ailments and many other health problems.

American, European, Asian and Arab-Islamic civilizations combined efforts during the 19th century to upgrade the standard of using drugs. The American Indians introduced the idea of smoking tobacco in a pipe to the world. Until then, Muslims had been using medicinal plants including hashish and opium by cooking them in food. The Arabs were so inspired by the New World to invent the water pipe. Using American tobacco, the Orient supplied the herbs, and a new world culture, a new economy began.

What does Islam say about drugs? According to hadith, if a person is ill, there is no sin on him whether he takes medicine to feel better, or if he chooses not to do so. During the 4th Caliphate, Muslims were introduced to drugs in the far regions of the expanding Islamic empire. But because of the deep fear of the sin of misinterpreting or over-interpreting scripture, there was no punishment for any medicinal plant other than fermented alcoholic beverages. Muslim governments never even destroyed vineyards. Even while wine is haram, grapes are not haram. Plants are protected by God.

Obviously, we have to give the Muslims credit for this. The use of the syrup from the poppy flower could kill a person's pain making an amputation without huge physical trauma possible. Smoking marijuana could give a person dying from cancer the strength to write a book about his life. There is nothing more precious in this world than the ability to physically kill pain or nausea. God gave these things to us. Sometimes we can copy these medicinal effects in pill form. But the fact is, human beings want and require medicine. God gave us plants to reduce suffering. It is a crime against God to make a plant illegal. These plants save lives. These plants save the quality of people's lives as well.

During World War II, the US used hemp fuel for their airplanes and tanks. Henry Ford actually created a car that was made entirely of cellulite from the hemp plant as well as ran on hemp fuel. It is an amazing idea, that American farmers could actually attain financial security growing the fuel that runs our cars! However, after the oil companies won the war, plant-based fuel became obsolete. The reason was because of Lobbyists.

Around the world today, you will still find many countries such as Canada, Indonesia and Malaysia growing hemp for industrial purposes such as oil or textiles. And it is an unspoken fact that marijuana is the top cash crop in the United States, year after year. People might pay up to $90 for 1/8 of an ounce of these flower buds. That is way more than any farmer could ever hope to get from parsley or chives.

When the Roman Emperor offered Maria and her sister to the Prophet Mohammed (s) as gifts, also included in the gift was some medicine. The hadith does not say what kind of medicine but it was probably opium or hashish given the time period. The Prophet Mohammed (s) returned the drugs and kept the girls. He freed from slavery and married Maria the Copt, who became his youngest wife, and he married her sister to one of his companions. This is the only hadith translated into English that specifically mentions drugs. In this hadith, the Prophet (s) said, "My Sunna is the best medicine."
In a true Islamic society based on historical norms, drugs would not be illegal. They would be used for positive purposes. We would not distinguish between herbal vs. chemical versions of a medicine. People should be allowed to have access to whatever drugs make them feel better. This is a human right. Modern laws making all drugs illegal are neither halal nor beneficial to society. God gave us so many plants to help alleviate our suffering. It would be a rejection of His Mercy not to fully explore the medicinal properties of all the plants we have on earth.

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[wvns] Man sentenced to death for blasphemy -------------------------------------------

2011-07-01T15:44:00.000-05:00

Man sentenced to death for blasphemy
By Nabeel Anwar Dhakku
http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/22/man-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy.html

Investigating police official said Sattar had confessed to have committed the crime. "The accused behaved quite normally when arrested," the SP added. – File Photo

CHAKWAL: An additional district and sessions judge in Talagang sentenced a man to death on Tuesday for committing blasphemy.

Judge Rana Zahoor Ahmad also imposed a fine of Rs50,000 on 29-year-old Abdul Sattar, a resident of Larkana, who was sent to prison in Jhelum.

Mohammad Saeed, of Talagang town, had filed a complaint with the city police station on Feb 5 last year. He said he had been receiving derogatory text messages and calls from a wrong number for several days. He told police that contents of the messages and conversation of the caller blasphemed Holy Quran, Prophet (PBUH) and Sahabas (companions of the Prophet).

A case was registered and District Police Officer Syed Ali Mohsin set up a special inquiry committee, headed by then Superintendent of Police (Investigation) Malik Matloob.

The committee collected data of calls and text messages sent by a cell number belonging to Abdul Sattar.

"We took permission from the home department for a raid in Larkana and arrested the accused," SP Matloob told Dawn on phone from Rawalpindi.

He said Sattar had confessed to have committed the crime. "The accused behaved quite normally when arrested," the SP added.

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[wvns] Michiganians Sue Over Emergency Law

2011-07-01T15:37:00.000-05:00

Michigan Residents Sue Over Law on Emergency Management
of Struggling Cities
By MONICA DAVEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/us/23michigan.html?_r=1&ref=us

More than two dozen residents of Michigan filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against top officials in the state, contending that a new law broadly expanding the powers of emergency managers in the most financially troubled cities violates Michigan's Constitution.
The lawsuit, filed in Ingham County Circuit Court, contends that the law approved by Michigan lawmakers this year improperly allows the state to place new costs on municipalities without paying for them and, in essence, bars local residents from picking their own elected representatives.

In March, leaders in Michigan — whose legislative chambers and governor's office have been controlled by Republicans since last fall's election — approved the measure granting more control to those sent into local governments and school districts by the state to avoid allowing such places to go bankrupt or fail entirely.

Leaders of labor unions, in particular, were outraged by the provision because it allows such state-appointed emergency managers to, in some cases, undo provisions of the contracts that towns and cities had already agreed to. Some appeared for rallies in opposition in Lansing, the capital, this spring. But others had broader complaints; how, they asked, can a state-assigned official simply step into the role of an elected local leader and do whatever he or she wishes?

"What you're saying is that an emergency manager now controls all, including the right to enact or repeal local ordinances," said John Philo, the legal director of the Sugar Law Center in Detroit, one of several groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, that is representing the plaintiffs in the suit. "What you're saying is that one individual now without any sort of legislative process gets to enact a law."

Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who is named as a defendant in the suit, along with the state's treasurer, has strongly defended elements of the law in the past. The point is not to take over cities, Mr. Snyder said in an interview this spring, but to spare the state more financial distress and gauge fiscal distress in cities before they wind up in need of an emergency manager.

The increased control by an appointed manager would make rehabilitation of the most miserable places possible, without the crushing, ratings-lowering possibility of bankruptcy.

"It's not an assault on collective bargaining, the way I viewed it," Mr. Snyder said in the interview. "It's about helping communities and municipalities do the best they can to survive during difficult economic times."

The notion of an emergency manager is not uncommon. States have tried a variety of approaches, including appointed receivers, to step in to spare cities from default, and the results have been mixed.

Only four places in Michigan — including Detroit's public school system — are now considered in such grave financial shape as to require oversight by emergency managers. But those numbers are expected to grow, as local budgets shrink further.

Detroit's pension funds had already filed suit challenging the measure, which they say presents emergency managers with "czarlike powers," and more suits have been threatened.

In the suit filed on Wednesday, 28 Michigan residents, including some community activists, expressed dismay, even astonishment, over the reach of the new law.

"We have the right to vote and elect people and hold them accountable," said Edith Lee-Payne, a plaintiff who is 59 and an activist who has grandchildren in Detroit's public school system. "We don't have that right with an emergency manager."

A version of this article appeared in print on June 23, 2011, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Michigan Residents Sue Over Law on Emergency Management of Struggling Cities.

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[wvns] Ron Paul, Barney Frank Back Pot

2011-07-01T15:35:00.000-05:00

Reps. Paul, Frank to Unveil Bill to Decriminalize Marijuana
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43499917

In an unlikely alliance, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Barney Frank (D-MA) plan to introduce a bill on Thursday that would end the federal prohibition on marijuana.

The bill by the conservative Paul and liberal Frank would allow states to determine their own marijuana laws —including medical marijuana laws - without federal interference.

see video at link above.

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[wvns] Aref Yassin: Iraqi Birthday Today

2011-07-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

Birthday
by YASSIN MUHIDDIN AREF (12778052)
Marion, IL

What privileges are better than being human and born healthy? For parents, what joy is equal to the joy of having children? What feeling is stronger then the human feeling of having a successor who can inherit? Yet poverty and an unstable situation cause many people to stay single and many couples to avoid having children. Kurds#150;#150;as a nation, despite their horrible situation and uncertain future#150;#150;have always liked children and want to have as many children as they can. When Kurds would learn that their sons were killed in an army attack or were disappeared by security forces, I have heard from many people that their response was to proudly read the Kurdish proverb, BARKHI NER BO SARBRINA, which means, "The lamb is for sacrifice, to be slaughtered." It was never a surprise that our youths died and disappeared; the amazing miracle for them was to survive.

For many of us who survived, life was not really a life, and for sure it was not fun. As children, we grew up in fear and poverty, and as teenagers we were always targets of the army and the government's intelligence#150;#150;not because we committed any crime or broke any law, but rather that we were born into a Kurdish family. I think this is one of the reasons we Kurds never celebrated our birthdays, and until the end of the 20th century #147;birthday#148; was not part of our culture. In fact, tens of thousands of us don#146;t know our exact birthdays. When we were young we used joke about our birthdays, and whenever someone asked us about them, our answer was always, "I don't know, I wish that my dad had missed that night." Tyranny, injustice, terror, poverty, joblessness, and hopelessness turned our lives into pain, suffering, hardship, and meaninglessness; there was no >trust< or beauty in life for us, and no one ever felt his existence enough to celebrate his birthday.

These are some reasons why many Kurds like me don't know their exact day of birth:

1- Until the First World War and the birth of many new states in the Middle East, many people, especially in villages and remote mountain areas, never had any identification. They simply belonged to their families and tribes. Their language and culture were their identities, and their experience and knowledge were their honor and respect.

2- From World War 1 until World War 2, many Kurds who lived in the villages and high mountains and depended on their farm and cattle for all their life's needs never received any government help or support. There were no services in their areas, like roads, schools, clinics, or government offices, because they lived outside of the state's boundaries. Even the government's forces and security were not able to reach and control their areas. They belonged to their mountains and did not carry any other identification.

3- From World War 2 until 1991, there were always conflicts between Kurdish revolutionaries and the states that occupied Kurdish lands. Some Kurds simply did not acknowledge those states, and refused to register or carry any identification that they belonged to such states. Instead, they dreamed and struggled for their own state, Kurdistan.

4- Because of continual fighting between Kurds and the states they lived in, many Kurdish, especially in the mountain areas, did not register their children, so they could avoid government harassment. And they didn#146;t want security forces to follow their children. Others documented their sons under their daughters#146; names so the sons could avoid mandatory army service when they grew up. That#146;s why there was never a correct count of Kurdish citizens. Sometimes the difference between our numbers and the government#146;s numbers was in the millions!

Because all the states where Kurds lived (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria) ignored the Kurdish areas, many of these areas were poor and the people were uneducated; therefore they were not able to document and register the birth of their children. My parents were an example: both were illiterate, and none of us children know our exact birthdays.

5- Based on Iraqi law, for those whose birthdays were unknown, the government registered their birthdays as July 1 (the middle of the year). That#146;s why I, all my brothers and sisters, and millions of Iraqis in my generation and previous generations have the same birthday, July 1!

My children are always amazed at the fact that my wife and I have the same birthday. But I have not told them that all their uncles and aunts and many of their relatives all have the same birthday too (they were too young before my arrest to understand, and there was no chance after my arrest to tell them).

Based on what I heard from my mother, and compared to a cousin#146;s birthday (which I know is accurate), I have no doubt that my year of birth, 1970, is correct. But I am not sure about the month (July), and I am certain that the first of July is not correct. Most likely my real birth date is in the middle of May, 1970.

However, I am still not sure whether I should celebrate my birthday, or whether I should repeat what we used to say as teenagers back in my country: "I wish my dad had missed that night." I left the Middle East entirely and traveled 15,000 miles to have a real life and live free, but I ended up in prison. Not because I committed any crime or broke any law, but because of who I am.

So, not for myself, but for all the Iraqis who have July 1 birthdays, I say: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU ALL.

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[wvns] Drones and the CIA

2011-06-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

Metal Allies: The new face of a faceless global war: drones and the CIA.:

In the next decade, our reliance on drones and the spies who support them may increase for a different reason: We're losing friends.
http://www.slate.com/id/2297383/

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Makeheadline.com

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[wvns] Drugs and Medicines in Historical Context

[wvns] Man sentenced to death for blasphemy -------------------------------------------

[wvns] Michiganians Sue Over Emergency Law

[wvns] Ron Paul, Barney Frank Back Pot

[wvns] Aref Yassin: Iraqi Birthday Today

[wvns] Drones and the CIA

[wvns] Torture Wrong: Former CIA Interrogator