Robert Parry

False Republican claims about President Barack Obama’s health-care initiative, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s demagogic charge about a “death panel,” are part of a pattern of systematic lying that has marked the GOP’s political tactics at least since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s.

Indeed, to understand how the war against health-care reform is gaining traction, you must look back three decades to the dawn of this Republican era of pervasive deception.

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Kevin Zeese

Holder Warned that Limited Investigation and Selective Prosecution Would Violate the Law and Further Undermine Credibility of DOJ

Washington, DC: Yesterday, the Disbar Torture Lawyer coalition, consisting of more than 150 NGOs representing over a million members, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling on him to appoint a special prosecutor, independent of the Justice Department, to fully investigate the use of torture, and to prosecute all officials and employees who advocated, ordered and committed acts of torture against people held by the United States. The letter, see below, signed by coalition attorney Kevin Zeese, who is Executive Director of Voters for Peace, carefully analyzed the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), which was signed by President Reagan, to underscore that Mr. Holder has no discretion to ignore its mandates. CAT is written in mandatory language, and it requires the investigation of all acts or torture and the prosecution of all those who conspired to and did commit torture.

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by Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

Gaza, August 11, 2009 (Pal Telegraph)-Another hidden but very painful part of the Palestinian sufferings is the story of families scattered around the world, many of whom have settled in different countries, after they fled in 1948. They have different lives and lost many of their childhood memories.

Childhood memories are the events and experiences lived with our sisters and brothers. They are the special moments in time that one cannot ignore or forget; they are experiences bound by the ties of brotherhood. The memories shared with my brothers and sisters are for us, which as a family we ordinarily would enjoy recalling and reliving. Recollection of the dear memories of our childhood would be possible if we were not separated by such a distance.

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by Stephen Lendman

Israel Shahak's (1933 - 2001) "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" argued that while Islamic fundamentalism is vilified in the West, comparable Jewish extremism is largely ignored. In the book's forward, Edward Said wrote:

"....Shahak's mode of telling the truth has always been rigorous and uncompromising. There is nothing seductive about it, no attempt made to put it 'nicely,' no effort expended on making the truth palatable....For Shahak killing is murder is killing is murder: his manner is to repeat. (He) shows that the obscure, narrowly chauvinist prescriptions against various undesirable Others are to be found in Judaism (as in other monotheistic religions) but he always goes on to show the continuity between those and the way Israel treats Palestinians, Christians and other non-Jews. A devastating portrait of prejudice, hypocrisy and religious intolerance emerges."

Shahak's "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel" picked up on the theme in explaining its pervasive, destructive influence in Israeli politics, the military and society. He noted that substituting German or Aryan for Jewish and non-Jews for Jews makes it easy to see how a superiority doctrine made an earlier genocide possible and is letting another happen now.

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By Emily Spence

...some receive adequate care while others are completely cast aside as
discarded members of society much in the way that the homeless
Americans, the street people and the tent-city dwellers, are treated today.

Overview:

The heath-care debate is not about care at all. Instead, it's about the amount of profits that government, HMO and pharmaceutical leaders are personally willing to give up. Accordingly, it's clear that many Congressional representatives have no interest in evaluating even a few of the successful models of universal coverage that numerous other countries can provide. Instead, they are, typically, in collusion with big business to stymie any meaningful reforms.

Upon receipt of a B. S. degree in biology, an acquaintance of mine -- let's call her Linda -- decided to spend the summer in Asia working at a small medical clinic that had a staffing shortage. The clinic was near a major river on whose banks were crowded thousands of families living in small densely packed hovels whose heaped together mass stretched as far as the eye could see.

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Khalid Amayreh

On Monday, 10 August, it was revealed that Fadi Hamadneh, died at the notorious Juneid lockup in Nablus . The circumstances of his death remain unclear as of the time of preparing this report, but his family and relatives are accusing security agents of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) of torturing him to death.

Hamadneh’s brother dismissed the official PA narrative that he committed suicide in his cell as "hogwash" and "blatant lies."

He pointed out that his brother was a religious man and that it was inconceivable that he would embark on committing suicide. Suicide is a grave sin in Islam.

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