Secret Prisons and Other Familiar Things

News from Civilianism for December 21-22

• Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs // Current – Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of  their families.  The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of  Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charges. (The photo is from Current and did not contain a description of the men.)

CHANGE we can believe in Files –

• Hell No, We Won’t Go … Again– After years of war and occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, with the sacrifices of battle borne by less than one percent of the American people, and with no real indication that President Obama has a legitimate plan or a sincere intention to end combat operations anytime soon, increasing numbers of people from both sides of the political spectrum are calling for reinstatement of the draft. The focus of this article is not to respond to those whose argument for the draft is the inadequacy of the all-volunteer army to fulfill our current military responsibilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan while maintaining the capability to respond effectively were our nation confronted with another crisis, perhaps from North Korea or Iran.. . . .
• Iraq initials deal on prized oil field – Iraq has initialed a deal with a consortium led by European giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Malaysia’s state-run Petronas to develop one of Iraq’s most prized oil fields… Iraqi officials initialed the deal Sunday during a signing ceremony at Iraq’s Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The contract still must be approved by Iraq’s Cabinet. The two companies won the right earlier this month to develop the 12.5 billion barrel southern Majnoon field.
• Lithuania ‘hosted at least two secret CIA prisons’ – A Lithuanian inquiry has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency set up and used secret prisons on its soil following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US. Lithuania’s intelligence agency assisted the CIA-run secret prisons, which were used to hold at least eight al-Qaeda suspects, the parliamentary panel in charge of the probe said in a report on Tuesday. What country HASN’T hosted secret prisons for Bush?
• Taliban Claim Control over 80% of Afghanistan – Rejecting as baseless the US allegations about the presence of Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas, a militant commander said they did not need to flee to the neighbouring country when the Taliban controlled major parts of Afghanistan. Mulla Sangeen, a key commander of the Afghan Taliban, claimed there was no truth in the US charges, as the Taliban were holding 80 per cent of the territory in Afghanistan. What’s the point of this?

• NASA, Google eye tracking climate gases – The question is a potential deal-killer: If nations ever agree to slash greenhouse gas emissions, how will the world know if they live up to their pledges? NASA, the wonder agency of the 1960s, and Google, the go-to company of the early 21st century, are trying to give the world the ability to monitor both the carbon dioxide pollution and the levels of forest destruction that contribute to global warming.
• US Silent About Taliban Guarantee Offer on al Qaeda – The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated Dec. 4 and e-mailed to news organizations the following day, said the organization has “no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan”.  The statement did not mention al Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by “legal guarantees” against such “meddling”, but it was an obvious response to past U.S. insistence that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again.