US – Features

Badil Resource Center Organizes Exchange between South Africa Trade Unionists and Palestinian Civic Leaders

Bethlehem – BADIL Resource Center – South African anti-Apartheid leader and union official Ziko Tamela is in the Israeli occupied West Bank this week to gain insight into the Palestinian reality on the ground and to forge stronger links for solidarity work. Tamela is the international secretary for the South African Transport and Communications Workers Union, which gained international attention during Israel’s recent 22-day war on Gaza by refusing to off-load Israeli cargo. In doing so, it consciously sought to replicate the boycott activity of European dockworkers who refused to handle South African goods during the dark days of the apartheid regime.  Badil Resource Center organized a day’s activity for Tamela including a tour of Deheisheh refugee camp led by members of its popular committee; a tour of Aida refugee camp, including the surrounding apartheid wall; an exchange with the  children of Laji’ cultural center, also in Aida refugee camp; and a visit to the Church of the Nativity. Read More »Badil resource center organizes exchange between south Africa trade unionists and palestinian civic

Full account of Muhammed Omer’s hair-raising encounter with the Shin Beth 
 
from Khalid Amayreh in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

From his hospital bed at the European Hospital in Gaza  and with barely audible voice,  award-winning  Palestinian journalist Muhammed Omer has given a  full account of  the  hair-raising encounter  he had  last week with  Shin Beth agents at the Allenby Bridge border-crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.

Omer, a co-winner of the 2008 Martha Gelhorn Prize for Journalistic Excellence,  said  he was abused, assaulted , humiliated, ridiculed, kicked, and strip-searched at gunpoint by undisciplined Shin Beth officers until he had a nervous breakdown in which case he lost consciousness for at least 90 minutes.

Read More »Full account of muhammed omers hair raising encounter with the shin beth

Picture: (AFP/DDP/File/Roland Magunia)
British legend Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, performs during the Live Earth concert in Hamburg in 2007. A flight from London with Yusuf Islam on board was diverted and forced to land in Maine when US officials became aware that Islam was on board. The ACLU says the US government’s terrorist watch list has swollen into a catalogue of a million names in the after 9/11.

A commercial airline pilot and convert to Islam who says his name is on the U.S. government’s secret terrorist watch list has fought back, filing a federal lawsuit against the Homeland Security Department and various other federal agencies.

Erich Scherfen says that unless his name is removed from the list, he faces losing not only his job but the ability to make a living in his chosen profession.

Scherfen told reporters yesterday after his lawyers filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, that "his livelihood depends on being off this list."

He alleges that the government’s actions have violated his and his wife’s constitutional rights. The suit seeks a hearing and a decision before he is scheduled to lose his job on Sept. 1.

Read More »Us pilot says hes on terror watch list sues to save job

By Patrick Martin

(source: World Socialist Website.org)

While the American corporate media has given little attention to it, an official British inquiry into the war with Iraq has brought to light damning testimony about the Bush administration’s deliberate launching of an invasion to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein and subjugate Iraq to American domination.

Former British diplomats and security officials from the 2001-2003 period began testifying this week under oath before a panel headed by Sir John Chilcot, charged with examining the entire course of the war, from its origins to the final British pullout in June 2009.

More than enough evidence has already been produced to indict top Bush administration leaders, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice, on the same charge for which Nazi leaders were convicted at the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal—deliberately waging an aggressive war.

Read More »Us imperialism 9 11 the Iraq war