The U.S. Justice Department named a special prosecutor this week to investigate CIA interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States under then-President George W. Bush.

By Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters

GENEVA – The U.S. prosecutor’s investigation into alleged criminal CIA interrogation techniques must go right to the top political level, the chief UN rights official said on Thursday.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, 67, in a wide-ranging interview with Reuters, urged European and other countries to resettle Guantanamo detainees so that President Barack Obama can close the U.S.-run prison in Cuba by year-end.

Read More »Cia probe must go to highest level un rights head

The two are radically different – the position of the democratically elected Hamas is about land, not religion, creed or race

By  Anas Altikriti

(source:guardian.co.uk)

The exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, speaking at a press conference in Damascus in 2008. Photograph: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty

The New Statesman’s interview with Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, was one of the most significant interviews with the leading figure in a movement that has been demonised and excommunicated by most of the western world and its media. The fact that Meshal realises that his words will be scrutinised by his allies and supporters as closely as his adversaries confirms that he speaks of the official position of Hamas on a number of crucial issues which the pro-Israel propaganda apparatus has managed to manipulate for so long.

Arguably, the most important assertion made in the interview, conducted by Ken Livingstone, is that in which Meshal clearly stated that the Palestinian struggle was anything but a conflict between Muslims and the Jewish people. He insisted that the Palestinians were fighting against the occupier who had dispossessed them of their homes and lands, regardless of religion, creed or race. He also went on to confirm that the concept of coexistence was largely present in the Palestinian psyche, and that genocide, as suffered by Jews in Europe (and which he described as "horrible and criminal") was alien not only to the Palestinians but to the inhabitants of the region as a whole.

Read More »Hamas is not al qaida

Palestine Film Festival!

Cape Town

Friday 02 October  to

Sunday 04 October 2009

Read More »Palestine film festival

By Robert Fisk

(source:Robert Fisk’s World-The Independent)

Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we’re losing Afghanistan

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president’s critics – indeed, for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan – are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates – once more the Secretary of Defence – and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." There was no more talk of Obama as a "house Negro" although it was his "weakness", bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters wold wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan "like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed". Funny, that. It’s exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan – four years before 9/11 and the start of America’s 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river.

Read More »Everyone seems to be agreeing with bin laden these days