TV News LIES

Just weeks after several dozen state-employed rabbis ignited a major controversy by issuing a letter calling on Israeli Jews not to rent or sell their homes to non-Jews, and one day after an anti-Arab demonstration in Bat Yam, Tuesday saw two more incidents in the rising tide of hatred and racism that appears to be sweeping the country.

In Jerusalem, police said on Tuesday they had arrested nine members of a suspected youth gang that has been targeting Arab passersby in the center of the city in recent months. Police officials also released information on the arrests, which were carried out over a two-week period.

Gay rights advocates scored a hard-fought victory at the U.N. on Tuesday when member states restored a reference to sexual orientation, dropped last month from a resolution opposing the unjustified killing of minority groups.

The removal of the reference, at the urging of African and Arab countries last month, alarmed human rights advocates who said gay people are among minority groups that need special protection from extrajudicial and other unjustified slayings. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice at the time said she was "incensed" by the change and announced she would sponsor the measure to restore the language.

The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, U.S. officials said.

The administration has long signaled that the use of prolonged detention, preferably at a facility in the United States, was one element of its plan to close Guantanamo. An interagency task force found that 48 of the 174 detainees remaining at the facility would have to be held in what the administration calls prolonged detention.

Our destination was Jub Al-Dib in the Bethlehem area. We located it on the map but getting there by car was a different story. That’s because the West Bank is very spread out, despite its small area. There are hundreds of sometimes tiny communities strewn across the hills and valleys. And going from Palestinian point A to Palestinian point B in the West Bank has nothing to do with directions, logic, or geography.

It is decided by a very intricate system of rules, restrictions, and checkpoints that Israel has designed to limit Palestinian movement. There are settler-only roads, "shared" roads, and then there are no roads at all … just rugged terrains. So sometimes, to go southwest, Palestinians must first drive northeast, etc. …

Meanwhile, Israel's campaign is unfolding with such breath-taking speed that it is almost impossible to keep up. Today, 20 December, Israeli forces destroyed five shops in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. Further north, they ordered the residents of Khirbet Tana, a tiny Palestinian village to the east of Nablus, to evacuate their homes within 24 hours. Khirbet Tana is located just two kilometres from the illegal Israeli settlement of Mekhora, and this explains in part the ultimatum. The security and comfort of the illegal Jewish settlers must be guaranteed, by any means, regardless of international laws and conventions.

Military officials were instructed not to publicly discuss a decision made in January 2002 to presumptively treat all Guantanamo detainees with a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug that has been directly linked to suicide, hallucinations, seizures and other severe neuropsychological side effects, according to a retired Navy captain who signed the policy directive.

Capt. Albert J. Shimkus, the former commanding officer and chief surgeon for both of the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo Bay and Joint Task Force 160, which administered health care to detainees, defended the unprecedented practice, first reported by Truthout earlier this month, to administer 1250 mg of the drug mefloquine to all "war on terror" prisoners transferred to Guantanamo within the first 24 hours after their arrival, regardless of whether they had malaria or not.