Blast from the Past

The incomparable Miss Ellen Greene...

It's Sunday

Just Another Day in Palestine

Dozens of Palestinian olive trees and grape vines were destroyed and anti-Arab graffiti was daubed in groves of the West Bank village of Beit Omar, residents said on Saturday.

The villagers said the attack had taken place on Friday night or early Saturday and blamed it on Jewish settlers of nearby Bat Ayin settlement, which lies north of the town of Hebron.

[...]

The Israeli army said it was unaware of the incident.

Elsewhere on the West Bank, Palestinians said settlers from Yitzhar attacked the village of Asira al-Qibliya, near the northern city of Nablus.

[...]

A weekly protest took place in Beit Omar on Saturday against the expropriation of Palestinian farming land by Israel due to the expansion of the settlement of Karmei Tsur.

  Raw Story

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Traditional Marriage (Source: King James Bible)

h/t Marty

It's Sunday

A former Roman Catholic priest was found guilty on Thursday of hiring a hit man to kill a boy who had accused him of sexual abuse.

John Fiala, 53, showed no emotion as a Dallas jury found him guilty of plotting to kill the boy, according to The Dallas Morning News. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison.

[...]

The former priest had claimed that he only hired the hit man because he feared for his own life.

  RAw Story

A Terrible Crime

But the criminals aren't the ones doing the time.

A well-known Columbia [Missouri] businessman and cultural leader was sentenced yesterday to three years in federal prison for illegally siphoning more than $200,000 to family, friends and charities in Iraq during sanctions between 1991 and 2003.

[...]

“I made a mistake, and I am deeply sorry,” [Shakir] Hamoodi told Laughrey before he was sentenced yesterday. “All money sent was used by friends and family.”

Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American former nuclear scientist with the University of Missouri and World Harvest store owner, could have faced up to 71 months in prison. Laughrey said Hamoodi’s efforts to diffuse cultural ignorance toward Muslims and educate local residents about the practice of Islam over the past 20 years weighed heavily in her decision. Hamoodi, through attorney J.R. Hobbs of Kansas City, had requested probation.

[...]

Federal agents in September 2006 searched the Woodberry Court home of Hamoodi, who has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. Investigators found no proof that Hamoodi was aiding the Iraqi government through his financial contributions.

[...]

Hamoodi conspired to help other Columbia residents filter money into Iraq for their families, the court found, but he was the lone defendant.

[...]

Since his home was searched, Hamoodi said, other students have called his children terrorists, his neighbors keep a distance from him and his business has suffered. More than 20 supporters gathered after the sentencing to express their support for the Hamoodi family as their children continue their education and expenses pile up during his absence.

  Columbia Tribune

The man has been an upstanding contributing community member for 20 years. When I was living in Columbia, I met him a few times at his wonderful imported foods store and at a protest march when George Bush declared war on Iraq. He told us at that time about his family in Iraq and his fears for their future under the threat of bombs. He is a lovely person. How many tens of thousands of American citizens from other countries are sending money to families in their home countries? Let them pray that their country doesn't get itself on our enemies list.

(h/t Jean)

And then there's this:

A former Michigan congressman and U.S. delegate to the United Nations was sentenced yesterday to a year and one day in prison for lobbying for a Columbia Islamic charity that had been identified as funneling money to a global terrorist.

Mark Deli Siljander, 60, a Republican who served in Congress from 1981-1987, pleaded guilty in July 2010 to obstructing justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent in connection with his work for the Islamic American Relief Agency, based in Columbia.

In his plea agreement, Siljander acknowledged that he lobbied between March and May 2004 on behalf of the IARA for the organization to be removed from a U.S. Senate Finance Committee list of charities suspected of funding international terrorism. The charity closed in October 2004 after being designated a global terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

[...]

After a short recess, Laughrey said she had no choice but to sentence Siljander to time behind bars.

“I came in this morning with the thought that I would sentence you to a longer time in jail,” she said after announcing the sentence.

Although no real harm had been done by Siljander’s actions, she said, there was the potential for harm, and that’s why a prison sentence was necessary.

“For me, the real harm is that you kept lying to the government,” Laughrey said. However, she added, “This is not a case about somebody aiding a terrorist.”

  Columbia Tribune

He should have been lobbying for the MEK instead.

Ha! Indeed.

I'm sending you over to DR for this one.

Heed the work safe alert.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Just Don't Go There

Muhammad Danish Qasim is a Pakistani student at Iqra University’s Media Science and is also a filmmaker. This year, Qasim released a short film entitled The Other Side, a 20-minute narrative that “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.”

[...]

In particular, “the film identifies the problems faced by families who have become victims of drone missiles, and it unearths the line of action which terrorist groups adopt to use victimised families for their vested interests.” In other words, it depicts the tragedy of civilian deaths, and documents how those deaths are then successfully exploited by actual Terrorists for recruitment purposes.

[...]

[T]his case is similar to that of Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who had sued the CIA on behalf of civilian drone victims and was also denied a visa to travel to the U.S. to attend last month’s Drone Summit in Washington; the Obama administration relented and permitted him to travel to the U.S. only once a serious outcry arose. The Bush administration also routinely excluded Muslim critics of U.S. foreign policy from entering the U.S.

[...]

Just to underscore how extreme is the Obama administration’s reflexive secrecy in such matters: yesterday, ABC News‘s Jake Tapper asked National Security Advisor Tom Donilon whether the U.S. Government compensates the innocent victims it kills outside of Afghanistan, and Donilon simply refused to answer (“I’m just not going to go there”).

[...]

Isn’t it time for another Hillary Clinton lecture to the world on the need for openness and transparency?

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tell Us Something We Don't Know

Under pressure from websites like National Journal and The Raw Story, TED Talks published [multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist Nick] Hanauer’s allegedly “controversial” speech on Thursday.

[...]

TED Talks curator Chris Anderson said a talk given in March by [...] Hanauer was “one of the most politically controversial talks we’ve ever run.”

[...]

Hanauer explained where the true wealth of market societies lies, saying that he’s confident rich people do not create jobs, and neither do businesses.

[...]

Hanauer went on to explain that this feedback loop between capitalists like him and middle class consumers is what’s truly creating jobs, and that growth happens only when tax policies are designed to aid the consumer by taking more from the ultra-rich — and that it all, ultimately, benefits both classes.

“That’s why our current policies are so upside down,” he said. “When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer,” he said.

“Since 1980 the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50 percent.

“If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.”

  Raw Story

Video of the talk is at the link.

The Land of the Free

President Obama issued an executive order Wednesday giving the Treasury Department authority to freeze the U.S.-based assets of anyone who “obstructs” implementation of the administration-backed political transition in Yemen.

The unusual order, which administration officials said also targets U.S. citizens who engage in activity deemed to threaten Yemen’s security or political stability, is the first issued for Yemen that does not directly relate to counterterrorism.

Unlike similar measures authorizing terrorist designations and sanctions, the new order does not include a list of names or organizations already determined to be in violation. Instead, one official said, it is designed as a “deterrent” to “make clear to those who are even thinking of spoiling the transition” to think again.

  WaPo

More of our government's persuasion diplomacy. Fear is such a great tool. Why not use it?

Jeremy Scahill, who has reported extensively from Yemen over the last year, reacted to the news of this Executive Order this morning by writing: ”This Executive Order appears to be an attack on Americans’ 1st Amendment Rights and Yemenis’ rights to self-determination“; he added: ”apparently the 1st Amendment had an exception about Yemen in it that I missed.” He then asked a series of questions, including: “What if a Yemeni citizen doesn’t believe in a one candidate ‘election’ and is fighting to change their government? US sanctions?” and ”How would Obama define an American citizen as ‘indirectly’ threatening the stability of Yemen’s government?” and “what if an American citizen doesn’t support Yemen’s government and agitates for its downfall? Sanctions from US Treasury? Wow.”

[...]

One difference between this EO and the prior one issued for Somalia is that this one exempts U.S. government agencies, which means, as Wheeler puts it, that “while Obama doesn’t want you, or Ali Abdullah Saleh’s leave-behinds, or the AP to destabilize Yemen, he reserves the right for US government employees, grantees, or contractors to do so. Which presumably means, as happened in Afghanistan, we are and plan to continue paying some of the people who are in violation of this EO.”

[...]

Hadi became President as part of an “election” in which he was the only candidate (that little fact did not prevent Hillary Clinton from congratulating Yemen “on today’s successful presidential election”).

[...]

The Post article notes that, as unusual as this Executive Order is, Obama issued a similar one for Somalia in 2009, and it has one other precedent: “In 2006, President George W. Bush issued a similar order regarding Ivory Coast in West Africa.”

[...]

Speaking of ongoing erosions of core liberties: a bipartisan group of House members is attempting to enact a law specifying that the indefinite detention powers vested in the President by last December’s passage of the NDAA does not apply to those arrested on U.S. soil; in other words, they are trying to ban military detention on American soil without charges. Even though President Obama, after he signed the bill into law, said he does not intend to use these powers for that purpose, the sponsors of this bill are concerned that — because the law does vest this power — Obama could change his mind at any time or a subsequent President could use those powers. Unfortunately, they are being opposed by key Democratic Senators such as Carl Levin in close cooperation with standard neocon members of Congress. As one tweeter wrote to me yesterday about this: “The fact that government has to be told NOT to do that is insane.” Indeed, and it’s easy to forget how frequently true that is.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.