TV News LIES

With a new round of Guantanamo prosecutions on the horizon, a senior Pentagon official has ordered war court defense lawyers to sign freshly minted ground rules that not only gag what they can say to their alleged terrorist clients but also to the public.

Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald issued the 26-page "protective order and procedures" for military and civilian lawyers who already have obtained special security clearances to work at the war court called Camp Justice.

The United States was attacked for its human rights record on Friday as opponents including Cuba and Iran slammed its failure to close Guantanamo Bay and its decision to maintain military trials for terror suspects.

The Obama administration, which two years ago joined the U.N. Human Rights Council shunned by the Bush White House, was in the dock at the Geneva forum, whose 47 member completed an examination of the U.S. record begun last November.

Immigration enforcement in the United States is plagued by unjust treatment of detainees, including inadequate access to lawyers and insufficient medical care, and by the excessive use of prison-style detention, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States said Thursday.

The group, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, issued those findings in a report that also took aim at a federal program that allows county and state law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws.

Bradley Manning is accused of humiliating the political establishment by revealing the complicity of top US officials in carrying out and covering up war crimes. In return for his act of conscience, the US government is torturing him, humiliating him and trying to keep him behind bars for life.

The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You're better off committing a war crime than exposing one.

Gentrification is happening all over the world. But, like everything in Israel, here it comes with historical baggage and deep political implications.

In 1948, Israel forced some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Villages and houses were destroyed. And some of those that remained standing were Hebraicised. The city of Jaffa, for example, was given the Hebrew name Yafo. Salame became Kfar Shalem.

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

The soldier, who has only been identified as “Captain R”, was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.