by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 11, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Ma’an News Agency
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Amnesty International on Wednesday urged Israel to cancel plans to forcibly displace around 2,300 Bedouin residents from a Jerusalem district.
“Thousands of Bedouin living in some of the most vulnerable communities in the West Bank are facing the destruction of their homes and livelihoods under this Israeli military plan,” Ann Harrison, interim Deputy Director for Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program, said.
“Many are registered refugees and some have been displaced multiple times since 1948,” she added.
In July 2011, Israel’s civil administration officials first told UN agencies of a plan to evict some 2,300 residents of 20 Bedouin communities in a Jerusalem district to a site approximately 300 meters from the Jerusalem municipal garbage dump, an Amnesty statement said.
The communities are all currently located near illegal settlements in the Maale Adumim settlement bloc, many of them in areas targeted for settlement expansion.
Community representatives told Amnesty International that they reject the plan because it would be impossible for them to maintain their traditional way of life if they were moved to a restricted area near the garbage dump.
Israeli officials have emphasized that the displacement plan envisions connecting relocated Bedouin communities to the electricity and water networks. They have not explained why Israel can provide such services to illegal settlements and unrecognized settler outposts in the West Bank, but not to longstanding Bedouin communities.
“Israeli military officials are putting a gloss on their plans by portraying them as a way of providing Bedouin with basic amenities such as water and electricity, but in fact such forcible relocation of Bedouin would merely perpetuate years of dispossession and discrimination and could constitute a war crime,” said Ann Harrison.
Building in illegal Israeli settlements increased by 20 per cent in 2011, according to the Israeli monitoring group Peace Now, and the Israeli authorities moved to recognize 11 new settlements, home to some 2,300 settlers, by legalizing outposts built without governmental authorization.
Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank forcibly evicted almost 1,100 people in 2011, an 80 per cent increase over 2010 and more than any year since the UN began keeping comprehensive records in 2005.
Ninety per cent of the demolitions occurred in vulnerable farming and herding communities in Area C, including demolitions in several of the Jahalin Bedouin communities.
From Ma’an News Agency: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=458823
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 10, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Peter Van Buren
On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.
Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.
The Obama administration has already charged more people — six — under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history.)
Kiriakou, in particular, is accused of giving information about the CIA’s torture programs to reporters two years ago. Like the other five whistleblowers, he has been charged under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act.
That Act has a sordid history, having once been used against the government’s political opponents. Targets included labor leaders and radicals like Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs, a union leader and socialist candidate for the presidency, was, in fact, sentenced to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the Act to bar the New York Times from continuing to publish the classified Pentagon Papers.
Yet, extreme as use of the Espionage Act against government insiders and whistleblowers may be, it’s only one part of the Obama administration’s attempt to sideline, if not always put away, those it wants to silence. Increasingly, federal agencies or departments intent on punishing a whistleblower are also resorting to extra-legal means. They are, for instance, manipulating personnel rules that cannot be easily challenged and do not require the production of evidence. And sometimes, they are moving beyond traditional notions of “punishment” and simply seeking to destroy the lives of those who dissent.
The well-reported case of Thomas Drake is an example. As an employee, Drake revealed to the press that the National Security Agency (NSA) spent $1.2 billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer when the work could have been done in-house for $3 million. The NSA’s response? Drake’s home was raided at gunpoint and the agency forced him out of his job.
“The government convinced themselves I was a bad guy, an enemy of the state, and went after me with everything they had seeking to destroy my life, my livelihood, and my person — the politics of personal destruction, while also engaging in abject, cutthroat character assassination, and complete fabrication and frame up,” Drake told Antiwar.com. “Marriages are strained, and spouses’ professional lives suffer as much as their personal lives. Too often, whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted, and bankrupted,” said the attorney who represents Drake.
In Kiriakou’s case, the CIA found an excuse to fire his wife, also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave. Whistleblower Bradley Manning, accused of leaking Army and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks, spent more than a year in the worst of punitive conditions in a U.S. Marine prison and was denied the chance even to appear in court to defend himself until almost two years after his arrest. Former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Morris Davis lost his career as a researcher at the Library of Congress for writing a critical op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and a letter to the editor at the Washington Post on double standards at the infamous prison, as did Robert MacClean for blowing the whistle on the Transportation Security Administration.
Four employees of the Air Force Mortuary in Dover, Delaware, attempted to address shortcomings at the facility, which handles the remains of all American service members who die overseas. Retaliation against them included firings, the placing of employees on indefinite administrative leave, and the imposition of five-day suspensions. The story repeats itself in the context of whistleblowers now suing the Food and Drug Administration for electronically spying on them when they tried to alert Congress about misconduct at the agency. We are waiting to see the Army’s reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who documented publicly this week that senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled the American people and Congress on the conduct and progress of the Afghan War.
And this remains the most partial of lists, when it comes to recent examples of non-judicial government retaliation against whistleblowers.
Government bureaucrats know that this sort of slow-drip intimidation keeps people in line. It may, in the end, be less about disciplining a troublemaker than offering visible warning to other employees. They are meant to see what’s happening and say, “Not me, not my mortgage, not my family!” — and remain silent. Of course, creative, thoughtful people also see this and simply avoid government service.
In this way, such a system can become a self-fulfilling mechanism in which ever more of the “right kind” of people chose government service, while future “troublemakers” self-select out — a system in which the punishment of leakers becomes the pre-censorship of potential leakers. At the moment, in fact, the Obama administration might as well translate the famed aphorism “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to remain silent” into Latin and carve it into the stone walls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, or the main office of the State Department at Foggy Bottom where I still fight to keep my job.
The rest of the article is available at AlterNet: http://www.alternet.org/news/154086/obama%E2%80%99s_unprecedented_war_on_whistleblowers/?page=entire
