A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.

An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorised genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients unable to give informed consent or without obtaining health ministry approval.

At one hospital, staff pierced children’s eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.

Israel’s health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was “shocked” at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel’s hospitals.
Full: guardian.co.uk

I will not mention the obvious.

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) – South American and Arab countries gave support for the Palestinians in their fight for an independent state but condemned terrorism on Wednesday at the end of the first summit of leaders of the two regions.

A final summit declaration — seen as having little serious effect other than showing symbolic unity between two regions of the developing world — offered backing to the new Iraqi government led by Jalal Talabani in its struggle to rebuild the country and defeat insurgents.

Leaders also said the Middle East would only achieve peace and South America would only cut widespread poverty if developing nations resisted the supremacy and hegemony of rich countries and traded among one another.

“It’s a declaration that points out the path we must follow if the relation between South America and Arab countries is to be changed forever,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has led the gathering of 34 nations representing more than 600 million people.
Full:nytimes.com

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 11 – Four Afghan protesters were killed and more than 60 were injured today in the eastern city of Jalalabad in the worst anti-American demonstrations Afghanistan has seen in the three years since the fall of the Taliban. At least a dozen buildings were ransacked and burned, including the governor’s office, several government buildings, the United Nations mission compound, and a number of offices belonging to aid groups.

Afghan police and army troops, along with American forces, were deployed in the town and eventually quelled the riots, but not before running clashes with protesters. Foreign nationals were evacuated from the city as their offices came under attack and the air filled with smoke and gunfire. Government officials said the violence appeared to be planned and that religious hardliners and armed men had usurped what started as a student protest.

It was the second day of demonstrations by students in Jalalabad who were angered at a report in Newsweek magazine that United States interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center had desecrated the Holy Koran by placing it on toilets, and even in one case, flushing a Koran down the toilet. The students carried banners condemning the action, chanted anti-American slogans and burned effigies of President Bush. The protest passed peacefully Tuesday, but violence erupted today with hundreds of stone-throwing and stick-wielding demonstrators spreading across town. They broke into compounds, smashed cars and set fire to offices of the government and of foreign organizations.

The governor’s office and the office of the Central Statistics Office were set afire, destroying all the census records, said a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Lutfullah Mashal. The Pakistani consulate, the city library and the regional television and radio station were also attacked, he said. The United Nations’ main office and two guesthouses were attacked, forcing the staff to evacuate, a United Nations spokeswoman said. Such aid organizations as the Red Cross; Acbar, an umbrella group of nongovernmental organizations; and a French medical agency, Aide Médicale Internationale, were attacked, along with offices of the Women’s Affairs Ministry and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, residents said.

Demonstrations were also reported in several other towns in eastern and southern Afghanistan. High school students in Wardak province blocked the main road south from Kabul for an hour but were persuaded to disperse peacefully, said the local police chief, Basir Salangi.

“The students were peaceful and were shouting,” said Mr. Mashal, the Interior Ministry spokesman. “But there were some specific, hard-line religious groups involved. From their activities it looks like it was pre-planned.” He added that the violence may have been influenced by religious or extreme elements across the border in Pakistan, whether Taliban influence or Pakistani groups.

President Hamid Karzai, on a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels, said that while protests were a sign of democracy, the violence and destruction were an indication of how much Afghanistan still needed foreign assistance.

“Afghanistan’s institutions, the police, the army, are not ready to handle protest and demos,” he said.
Full: nytimes.com

The Army will halt its recruiting efforts for one day this month to allow commanders to emphasize proper conduct following apparent excesses, Army officials said Wednesday.

The stand-down will take place May 20, said Douglas Smith, an Army spokesman. Army officials said it would affect almost all 7,500 recruiters at 1,700 stations around the United States.

In at least two instances, recruiters are facing disciplinary action for their dealings with potential recruits.

In Houston, a recruiter allegedly threatened to have a wavering would-be recruit arrested if he backed out, according to Army officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The recruiter has no such authority.

Officials confirmed a second inquiry in Colorado, pointing to news reports about recruiters who allegedly offered information on fake diplomas and ways to get around drug tests and physical fitness requirements.
Full: news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AP) – A small plane strayed within three miles of the White House on Wednesday, leading to frantic evacuation of the executive mansion and the Capitol with military jets scrambling to intercept the aircraft and firing flares to steer it away.
A pilot and student pilot, en route from Pennsylvania to an air show in North Carolina, were taken into custody after their flight sparked a frenzy of activity that tested the capital’s post-Sept. 11 response system.
The government decided not to press charges after interviewing the men and determining the incident was an accident. “They were navigating by sight and were lost,” said Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden.
Officials had been concerned because the plane appeared to be “on a straight-in shot toward the center of the Washington area,” said Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer.
The White House raised its threat level to red – the highest – for eight minutes, said spokesman Scott McClellan. Vice President Dick Cheney, first lady Laura Bush and former first lady Nancy Reagan, overnighting at the White House for a special event, were moved to secure locations.
President Bush, biking with a high school friend at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., was unaware of the midday, 15-minute scare as it was occurring.
At the Capitol, lawmakers, tourists and reporters raced out of the building, dodging the speeding motorcades of Latin American leaders who had been meeting with members of Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., was hustled to a secure location. Police, rushing to get House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi out of the building, lifted her out of her shoes.
Full:apnews.com

Well they’re terrifying the crap out of the rest of the world, so it’s not surprising that they regularly scare the pants (or the shoes) off themselves.

by Joe DeRaymond
“This movement is national and anti-imperialist. We fly the flag of freedom for Nicaragua and for all Latin America. And on the social level it’s a people’s movement, we stand for the advancement of social aspirations.”
Augusto C. Sandino

In 1911, Nicaragua was occupied by a force of United States Marines that invaded to protect United States interests. This was just the next of a series of US “interventions” and invasions of Nicaragua. The marines remained till 1925, then returned again in 1926, to quell a rebellion organized by a Nicaraguan, Augusto C. Sandino, who grew up under this US occupation. His guerrilla forces were never defeated, despite the deployment of 12,000 troops and the use of aerial bombardment. The Marines left Nicaragua in 1933, after the US had trained a Nicaraguan security force, The National Guard. In 1934, Sandino was assassinated by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a United States-trained officer who was the head of the National Guard, in a treacherous act of betrayal after a negotiated disarmament of Sandino’s forces. Hundreds of disarmed Sandinista fighters were slaughtered at this time by the forces of Somoza. This massacre ushered in the brutal 45-year reign of the Somoza dictatorship. Anastasio ruled till 1956, when poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez ended his life with four bullets delivered as the ruler was drinking the night away at a party. His elder son, Luis Somoza Debayle ruled till 1967, when his heart gave out – his brother Anastasio Somoza Debayle took the reins. When he was forced from power in 1979, he owned one fifth of the farmland of Nicaragua, two meat packing plants licensed for export, three of the six sugar mills, 168 factories comprising one quarter of the national output of the nation, the national airlines, a radio and television station, and the Mercedes Benz dealership. He financed his enterprises with his own banks and the national treasury. He had bankrupted a nation for his personal benefit. During the rule of the Somozas, the National Guard quelled dissent with assassination, torture and imprisonment. The United States took the position that this family dictatorship was acceptable because the Somozas were ever-staunch defenders of US interests. “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch”, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described Anastasio, the father of the dynasty. The Nicaraguan people paid with their lives.
Full: counterpunch.org

by Robert Fisk
Two years after “Mission Accomplished”, whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein’s brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards and prison commanders.

But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the Americans’ Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously, General Janis Karpinski, the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanamo Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations – which seems very odd.

A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram – by Americans, not by Afghans.

Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo – the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or, in one case, pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner’s face) – are increasingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.

At the American camp outside Fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break, cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib, prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.
Full:counterpunch.org

by Louis Proyect
Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” is best understood as the environmentalist cousin to recent books and articles by Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs that warn about the dangers of globalization. For the economists, the present world economic system is a ticking time-bomb that might destroy rich and poor alike. For Diamond the environmentalist, the refusal to husband resources such as forests, fish and clean water will lead to the collapse of modern-day societies just as surely as they led to Mayan or Easter Island collapse. Since Diamond and the economists all believe in the inviolability of the capitalist system, there is a certain cognitive dissonance at work in their writings. They harp on the symptoms, but stop short at identifying the root cause. It is what psychologists call denial.

But hope for the future arrives like a man on horseback in the concluding section of “Collapse.” Our survival depends on corporations like Chevron who have proved that capitalism and sustainable development can co-exist. During an ornithological expedition in Papua New Guinea, Diamond discovered that the corporation had created a “bird-watcher’s dream.” Descending toward the local airport, he saw virginal rain-forest and scant evidence of the devastation typical of oil exploration and drilling.

What is more, Chevron demonstrated that it really cared about *him*. After stepping several feet onto a company road shortly after his arrival to inspect local birds, he was chastised by company officials that this was a hazard not only to himself but to the environment. A truck could smack into him or a pipeline next to the road, causing a spill of blood or oil. So his conversion took place on a road just like Paul’s on the way to Damascus. The chastened ornithologist and prophet of doom promised company officials that henceforth he would wear a hardhat and stay on the side of the road.
Full:counterpunch.org

It’s called psychological warfare. I dutifully read Guns, Germs, and Steel and got a really queasy feeling. Diamond wrote a book about conquest without mentioning imperialism and the capitalist pillage of the past 500 years! His analysis of the confrontation between the Incas and the Spanish was nauseating. I haven’t read Collapse because I don’t want to give old boy any money but I read reviews: he chalks up the catastrophes in Haiti and Rwanda to poor land management! Not only a greenwasher but a whitewasher too. In effect, an apologist for empire.
(more…)

by Tafataona P. Mahoso
Those who grew up during the peak years of the Cold War are struck by an emerging pattern in US foreign policy. The pattern suggests that throughout those Cold War years, the US projected on the Soviet Union its own intentions and inclinations, accusing the latter of seeking to set up a world government, seeking to spread the Soviet version of communism to every corner of the globe, when in fact it was the US which sought to impose its form of corporate cannibalism on the whole world.

Now that the US and its allies succeeded in subverting and causing the collapse of the Soviet Union itself instead, they now boast of having achieved what they once accused the Soviet Union of trying to achieve. And it seems clear to historians of the Cold War that it was the US and its allies who sought world domination after tasting it during the fight against Hitler.

A re-reading of the book called Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbgniew Brzezinski is telling in this regard.

However, we start with recent stories in the Press which provide immediate indicators of this historical reality.

l The top of the list should be John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which was summarised in the interview which the US “economic consultant” had with a US radio station called Democracynow which The Sunday Mail reprinted under the title “Economic ‘hitman’ bares all” on May 1 2005.

Essentially, Perkins is saying that as a US economic “consultant” for the last 50 years, his real function was that of an economic saboteur and manipulator on behalf of the US transterritorial empire. Perkins says in the interview:

“Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country (the US), to our corporations, and our government and, in fact, we’ve been very successful . . . This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through economic hitmen.”

But the most revealing part of Perkins’ interview is about the ladder of escalation of subversion methods used by this empire. At the lowest level it looks benign and friendly. It uses “civil society” means such as missionaries, NGOs, volunteers and other apparent do-gooders to soften up the society ideologically.
globalresearch.ca
(more…)

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) – The Israeli-Palestinian conflict took to the Latin American stage on Monday on the eve of an unprecedented summit in Brazil between Arab and South American nations.

But Arab nations were also looking for solidarity over the Palestinian cause, terrorism and other political issues.

“We should not have two-faced policies in areas where we see crises cropping up. Topping this list is the need of the Palestinian people,” said Algerian presidential adviser Abdel Aziz Bel Khadem, speaking for the Arab nations.

“There is a lack of respect for the international rights of people to determine their own fate and there’s a need for us to continue to reject occupation.”

The summit brings together leaders from 12 South American and 22 Arab nations, the first time that such an event has been held.

It was proposed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva after his visit to the Middle East in 2003 and forms part of Brazil’s drive to forge a role as a regional diplomatic power and leader of the developing world.

US, ISRAELI CONCERNS

The inevitable political aspects have already caused Israel and the United States concern. A draft of the final declaration contained passages supporting the right of people to resist occupation, a sign of support for the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.

And while condemning terrorism, it also calls for a global conference to define the meaning of terrorist. Washington and the Israelis believe this could offer support to anti-Israeli militant groups such as Hezbollah, whom they deem terrorists.

The final declaration was unlikely to be changed, a Brazilian diplomat told Reuters.

The pre-summit politicking was also marked by Brazil turning down an informal request by the United States to send an observer. Amorim said they could watch it on television.
Full:nytimes.com