Blackwater’s Youngest Victim: Father of 9 Year-Old Killed in Nisour Square Gives Most Detailed Account of Massacre to Date (full article…)

I mean, I read the article [by HRW founder Richard Bernstein]. The word “occupation” does not appear there even one time. He says that Israel is a democracy of seven-million-point-something Israeli citizens. He forgets four million Palestinians, who have to be registered in the Israeli population registry in order to exist. All the Palestinians are registered. He forgot the four million. So what kind of democracy it is, where four million who are in the Israeli Ministry of Interior have to be registered and Israel decides if they are – if they exist? How can you call it a democracy, when half of – when one-third, not to mention the one million Israeli Palestinians, don’t have rights, the same rights? What kind of democracy it is? (full article…)

One element of the blackmail, which reportedly has been exercised by the Israelis on the Palestinian Authority in order to persuade them not to go forward with consideration of the Goldstone report in Geneva, was a denial of the granting of a license to a second Palestinian cell phone company in the Occupied Territories. (full article…)

Iran’s not in violation of anything. Iran is in compliance and the IAEA has stated this. The IAEA has said that the fact that Iran was in compliance with the old code 3.1 subsidiary agreement – the old safeguards agreements – means that you can’t find them to be in noncompliance with this new set of arrangements. The key here isn’t the technicality of the legal documents. It’s about the diversion of nuclear material and the IAEA has a 100% accounting for the totality of Iran’s nuclear material. So even if Iran produces this new facility – which by the way is not in operation and won’t be in operation for over a year – though nuclear material has been diverted, there still is a full material balance and the IAEA is in complete control of the situation. Iran is not in violation; this is not a reason to panic. This is much ado about nothing. But again, we come back to the original premise: this is about political hype. (full article…)

So that gap, that wealth gap, that race-wealth divide, as it’s often called, is widening in the midst of the crisis. And the Obama administration is absolutely refusing to talk about the need for policies that will look at this specifically, at closing the gap. (more…)

And then the Obama administration invented a brand new radical argument that not even the Bush administration had espoused that says that the government is completely immune from any lawsuits for illegal spying, unless they deliberately or willfully disclose to the public what it is that they learned. So they basically said government officials are immune, when they break the law, from lawsuits, except in the narrowest of cases. (more…)

Somalia Piracy Began in Response to Illegal Fishing and Toxic Dumping by Western Ships off Somali Coast (more…)

We Didn’t Create a Paradise in Iraq, We Created a Hell