July 30, 2014| News | Eric Garris

Wednesday on “The Alan Colmes Show,” Alan spoke to Justin Raimondo, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com to get an alternate take of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Raimondo told Alan that he felt that the far right wing has taken over Israel and that American media has taken a major role in supporting Israel.

Raimondo also said that Israel has become so powerful that it feels it doesn’t even need the US anymore, and then debated a caller who claimed to be in Israel earlier this year and was a eyewitness the conflict there.

Watch the interview here:


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July 30, 2014| Gaza, Israel, Palestine | Dan Sanchez

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You know how sometimes a cop will turn off his dash cam (often “mistakenly,” or it “malfunctions”) right before he brutalizes or executes a victim? That’s what Israel did yesterday, when it knocked out Gaza’s only power plant, killing the power for most of the population. This, besides its economic/humanitarian impacts, will make it much harder for Gazans to convey their plight to the rest of the world.  As smartphone and computer batteries run out, powerful, sympathy-inducing voices from Gaza, like that of the 16-year old Twitter-user Farah Baker (@Farah_Gazan), and the 10-year-old girl in this viral video, will be silenced. And as camera batteries die, we may see fewer heart-rending images of the carnage and wreckage that Israel’s pogrom is inflicting upon civilians, especially children.

Israeli government officials and their cheerleaders will welcome such a development, as one of their chief complaints in interviews has been the “unfair” impact that such images of, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s words “telegenically dead Palestinians,” have had on world opinion. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, recently fretted that, “the pictures look terrible on the TV, and that immediately translates into diplomatic pressure on Israel to accept a far-less advantageous ceasefire.” Oren was particularly worried that the outrage over the images would lead to Israel having its (blood-soaked) “hands tied” by the UN Security Council.

After all, imagine if these pesky personal recording and communication devices had been around in 1947. If its massacres had been broadcast in real time, the Naqba might never have even gotten off the ground!

Surely, Netanyahu and Oren hope that the electricity black-out will result in an atrocity black-out. And with the “telegenically” dead conveniently made invisibly dead, the massacre might become “out of sight, out of mind” enough to world opinion, that Israel can secure a Carthaginian peace, with their precious starvation blockade of Gaza fully intact.

Leaving Gaza with no electricity, and therefore no running water or sewage treatment, also furthers another Israeli aim. Netanyahu has stressed the war objective of stripping Hamas of its rocket-firing ability. We’re not talking centrifuges and IBMs here. The Qassam rockets Hamas uses consist of little more than piping and fertilizer. So, the only way that an assault could make the creation of such primitive devices impossible would be by completely obliterating any remnants of technology and the division of labor left in Gaza: by bombing the Palestinians “back to the Stone Age” and destroying their infrastructure. A chilling expression of such a desire was given by Gilad Sharon, the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the Jerusalem Post in 2012:
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July 29, 2014| News | Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Intelligence on Shoot-Down of Malaysian Plane

U.S.-Russian intensions are building in a precarious way over Ukraine, and we are far from certain that your advisers fully appreciate the danger of escalation. The New York Times and other media outlets are treating sensitive issues in dispute as flat-fact, taking their cue from U.S. government sources. Twelve days after the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, your administration still has issued no coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible – much less to convincingly support repeated claims that the plane was downed by a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of Ukrainian separatists. Your administration has not showed any satellite imagery showing that the separatists had such weaponry, and there are several other "dogs that have not barked." Washington’s credibility, and your own, will continue to erode, should you be unwilling – or unable – to present more tangible evidence behind administration claims. In what follows, we put this in the perspective of former intelligence professionals with a cumulative total of 260 years in various parts of U.S. intelligence.

We, the undersigned former intelligence officers want to share with you our concern about the evidence adduced so far to blame Russia for the July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. We are retired from government service and none of us is on the payroll of CNN, Fox News, or any other outlet. We intend this memorandum to provide a fresh, different perspective.

As veteran intelligence analysts accustomed to waiting, except in emergency circumstances, for conclusive information before rushing to judgment, we believe that the charges against Russia should be rooted in solid, far more convincing evidence. And that goes in spades with respect to inflammatory incidents like the shoot-down of an airliner. We are also troubled by the amateurish manner in which fuzzy and flimsy evidence has been served up – some it via "social media."

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July 29, 2014| News | Eric Garris

At a conference earlier this month, Daniel Ellsberg, the hero who revealed the Pentagon Papers, spoke about another hero, Edward Snowden.

Conor Friedersdorf writes about Ellsberg’s talk and introduces the talk at his Atlantic column.

Watch the video below (83 minutes):

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July 28, 2014| News | Jason Ditz

Over the weekend, Professor David Bernstein penned an article for the Washington Post accusing the media of “journalistic malpractice” for using Gaza Health Ministry figures on civilian deaths in the Israeli onslaught, insisting they were inflated. And I quote

Contrary to early reports that 80% or so of the early casualties were civilians, Al-Jazeera published names and ages, and about 3/4 were men of fighting age (16-50), compared to a rough estimate of 20% of the Gazan population (40% to 50% of which is fourteen and under). Some of those men were undoubtedly civilians, but it strains credulity to believe that 80% of the casualties were civilian but just-so-happened to be overwhelmingly fighting-age men.

Does it strain credulity? Not at all. Let’s go to the mother of all civilian-centric incidents in recent history, 9/11, and do a similar calculation of the “military-aged” victims among the 2,977 slain there. Since this is America, and women are in the military here too, we’ll count both just to be fair. We’ll also use Bernstein’s age group of 16-50, even though 50-year-old men in blockaded Palestine probably aren’t really healthy enough to still be fighting.

We go to CNN’s memorial, sort by age, do a little math and we get:

2,500 “military-aged” / 2,977 victims = 84%.

84% of the victims of 9/11 were “military-aged,” but would it “strain credulity” to say they were overwhelmingly civilians when census data shows “military-aged” Americans only account for a hair over 40% of the overall population? Of course not!

In fact, there’s a very good reason that “military-aged” people, by which we really mean “able-bodied” people, are disproportionately hit in such incidents. It’s because those people are more active, out and doing stuff. Israel is leveling a lot of houses full of children in Gaza, but the deaths are doubtless primarily from people who are out-of-doors hit by shrapnel, and able-bodied people are more apt to be out-of-doors, especially mid-war.

Professor Bernstein seems to be trying to imply that “military-aged” is tantamount to an antonym for “innocent civilians.” As a law professor he surely knows that is not the case, yet efforts to gloss over the humanitarian calamity of the Gaza war is getting the better of common sense for many people.

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July 27, 2014| News | Chris Ernesto

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today, with 49 countries having a predominantly Muslim population. Of these countries, 4 have been bombed by Israel, and 4 have been bombed by the US this year alone.

Here are the four countries bombed by Israel in 2014

1. Sudan (35.4 million people, 96.7% Muslim)
On July 21, Israel dropped bombs on a suspected weapon warehouse in Sudan. Israel alleged that the site stored weapons that were bound for Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has carried out other bombing attacks inside Sudan in recent years. In 2009, Israeli warplanes bombed a convoy of trucks in Sudan that was believed to be carrying arms to be smuggled into Gaza. And in 2012 eight Israeli planes struck a giant military factory outside of the capital, Khartoum.

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