TV News LIES

Three Spanish activists who were aboard a humanitarian aid convoy raided en route to the Gaza Strip will file a law suit against Israel on Friday for alleged crimes against humanity.

The 83-page document takes aim at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his forum of top six cabinet ministers and the Israel Navy, whose commandos stormed the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara on May 31 and killed nine activists.

A federal judge ordered the immediate release of a Yemeni man who has spent long periods of captivity in the Guantánamo psych ward in split decisions Wednesday that upheld the indefinite detention of another Yemeni.

The U.S. District Court rulings left the so-called habeas corpus scorecard of government-detainee wins at 15-38. That means that judges have ruled more than twice as often for the release of detainees at Guantánamo, rather than holding them.

The U.N. Economic and Social Council voted Monday to accredit the U.S.-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission after strong lobbying by the Obama administration.

Obama, in a statement issued by the White House, welcomed the vote as an "important step forward for human rights." With the group's inclusion, he said "the United Nations is closer to the ideals on which it was founded, and to values of inclusion and equality to which the United States is deeply committed."

Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live?

It's hard to say. But while the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions are attracting interest in Israel and elsewhere, hardly anyone notices or protests what's going on in the Jordan Valley.

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron.

In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."

CIA interrogators exceeded legal limits on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees during the Bush administration, according to a former top Justice Department official who was interviewed by congressional investigators.

House Democrats said Thursday that Jay S. Bybee, who headed the department's Office of Legal Counsel, told them in May that he never approved a number of interrogation techniques used on detainees in CIA custody. Techniques his office did approve -- such as waterboarding, the simulated drowning of terror suspects -- were used too many times on detainees, Bybee told investigators.