TV News LIES

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end".

Vandals set fire to a mosque in the West Bank on Thursday and defaced it with Hebrew graffiti a day after a similar arson attack on a Jerusalem mosque. Suspicion fell on Jewish extremists widely assumed to be behind stepped-up violence against Palestinians and the Israeli military.

The governor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Laila Ghanam, said arsonists doused the mosque in the village of Burqa with gasoline, then set it on fire.

It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

For more than a decade, Emal Abu Aisha has run a women's center in the Gaza Strip that provides women with training and classes to improve their education. But Abu Aisha, 42, said she'd been denied that opportunity herself.

In 2000, a new Israeli policy that banned Palestinians from the Gaza Strip from studying in the West Bank cut short her own education, in gender studies in the West Bank's Birzeit University.

The producers of weapons such as rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray are quick to point out that it is not the weapons themselves that are the cause of fatalities, but rather it is their misuse through faulty training.  The Orwellian nature of such a statement is staggering, as the admission of lethality is actually buried in the justification.  In fact, one of the main manufacturers, NonLethal Technologies Inc., states in their own search description that they are a "Manufacturer of Less-Lethal riot and crowd control products."  Less-lethal is not non-lethal.  Moreover, it seems disingenuous that major players in the military-industrial complex, which has been quite lethal to a large number of nations and peoples, should themselves be developers of supposedly non-lethal technology.

Israel claims human rights laws don't apply in Palestine. In fact, they're more important there than anywhere because occupied people are vulnerable. International human rights and humanitarian laws protect them, or they should.

It's especially unreasonable for a population occupied and denied basic rights long-term to be quiescent about it. It's their right to demonstrate and speak freely for liberation and justice.