TV News LIES

More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantánamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America's controversial prison camp in Cuba.

The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called "worst of the worst", many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.

The 759 Guantánamo files, classified "secret", cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there.

Five out of six men convicted of gang-raping a Pakistani woman were acquitted by Pakistan's Supreme Court on Thursday, in a highly watched decision that critics say will set back the struggle for women’s rights.

The Supreme Court's verdict upholds a previous High Court judgment to acquit the alleged rapists of Mukhtaran Mai. It also commutes the death penalty of a sixth man convicted of raping her to life imprisonment. Ms. Mai became a national and international symbol of a then almost nonexistent women’s rights movement in Pakistan when she spoke out against her attackers following her ordeal in 2002. Today's verdict highlights the bumpy road ahead for that movement.

Israel's Channel 2 TV station has released video footage showing Palestinian detainees being tortured by Israeli troops in the regime's desert prison of Naqab (Negev) back in 2008.

The footage showed one Palestinian died and several others sustained injuries due to the torture by the Israeli soldiers, Qodsna news agency reported.

The shift is most obvious, perhaps, in Eilat, the small city in the south where Anei and several thousand African asylum seekers live. Here, refugees find their children barred from municipal schools.

And in a move that has alarmed both human rights organisations and the local branch of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the municipality has hung red flags throughout the city as part of a municipal campaign against African migrants - initiated by employees of the state of Israel and financed with public funds.

It becomes clearer every day that Binyamin Netanyahu's government is terrified by the prospect that the Palestinians are planning to unilaterally declare a state later this year. In fact, it is safe to say that no other proposed Palestinian action has ever shaken up any Israeli government the way that the idea of a unilateral declaration has.

According to Haaretz, Prime Minister Netanyahu is so frightened at the prospect of a Palestinian declaration that he is considering withdrawing Israeli forces (not settlers, of course) from the West Bank as an inducement to prevent the Palestinians from acting:
Netanyahu is weighing a withdrawal of Israel Defence Forces troops from the West Bank and a series of other measures to block the "diplomatic tsunami" that may follow international recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

An Israel Defense Forces soldier from a unit made up exclusively of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men was convicted on Wednesday in the Central Military Court of illegal use of a weapon and disgraceful conduct.

The soldier, a member of the Nahal Haredi Brigade unit, was found guilty as a result of photos taken on his cellular phone, in which a Palestinian prisoner was shown tied up. The pictures were discovered when a military criminal investigation team conducted a search for drug use in the unit.