Pakistan’s anti-drone campaigner Imran Khan removed from US airline for interrogation

 

Pakistani politician Imran Khan (AFP Photo / A Majeed)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/news/us-immigration-drone-strikes-398/

US immigration authorities have taken Pakistan’s former cricket superstar-turned-politician Imran Khan off a flight to New York and interrogated. Khan is known for his anti-drone campaigning.

Khan, who is now a popular political figure in Pakistan and ahead of the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI), was removed from an American Airlines flight heading from Canada to New York and interrogated. Immigration officials asked him whether he was planning to protest in the US, as well as demanding to know his views on drone strikes and jihad.

Earlier this month, the former cricket star led thousands of Pakistani protesters, together with some US anti-war advocates, on a march from Islamabad to the tribal region of South Waziristan in opposition to US drone strikes. About 15,000 of his supporters joined him in the high-profile march, which focused attention on the strikes that have killed large numbers of civilians. Islamabad recently said that 80 percent of drone-related deaths were civilians.

“I was taken off the plane and interrogated by US Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop,” Khan wrote in a tweet after being questioned on Friday. Khan had been on his way to the US to give a speech and attend a fundraiser organized by his political party, which the delay caused him to miss.

“Missed flight and sad to miss the fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance,” he tweeted.

Furthermore, Khan said the official who was questioning him did not seem to understand drone warfare himself. He also expressed confusion over why he was granted a visa to visit the US given if his stance on drones was a problem.

Khan heads a political party that was founded in 1996 and ignored for years. The PTI was called “Pakistan’s one-man party” by the US Department of State. Today, it is rapidly growing, with electable officials joining. The Pakistani leader believes the War on Terror “has been devastating for Pakistan,” he said in an interview with Julian Assange in June.

“Basically, our army was killing our own people,” he said.

He is an avid opponent to US presence on Pakistani soil – even when it came down to the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011. The US mission to kill the former terrorist leader in Pakistan shows that “our ally did not trust us,” the politician said.

Rather than employ Pakistan as “a hired gun, being paid to kill America’s enemies,” Khan believes the US should trust that there will not be terrorism coming out of Pakistan.

Several Canadian commentators have suggested that groups protesting Khan’s entrance to the US may have influenced Immigration to pull him off the flight. The American Islamic Leadership Coalition last week requested that Hilary Clinton attempt to revoke his visa due to what they believe are sympathetic views towards the Taliban.

“The US Embassy made a significant error in granting this Islamist leader a visa,” the group said in a statement reported by the Sun. “Granting individuals like Khan access to the US to fundraise is against the interest of the people of Pakistan and the national security interests of the US.”

Ali Zaidi, a senior PTI party leader, demanded an apology from the US government for removing Khan from the plane. So far, no apologies have been made, and Immigration officials have only restated their policies.

“Our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,” Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Joanne Ferreira told the Toronto Sun.

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Clashes erupt near besieged Bahrain village

 

Bahrainis shout anti-government slogans during a march on the outskirts of Manama, October 19, 2012.

Source: Press TV

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/22/268091/clashes-erupt-near-besieged-bahrain-village/

Clashes have erupted between Saudi-backed regime forces and protesters trying to enter a besieged village in eastern Bahrain, Press TVreports.

Activists say security forces on Sunday fired tear gas to disperse people heading to the village of al-Eker which is under clampdown since late Thursday when a policeman was killed in a bomb blast there.

Some reports say at least three human rights activists including Zainab al-Khawaja were arrested by security forces during the protest rally that started from the island town of Sitra, south of the capital Manama.

Khawaja, the daughter of a jailed opposition leader Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, said earlier that the protesters were carrying food and medical supplies for the residents of the besieged village.

Authorities have detained seven people in relation to the deadly blast.

On Saturday, several protesters were also arrested during a demonstration in Eker.

Bahrain’s revolution began in mid-February 2011, when the people, inspired by the popular revolutions that toppled the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt, started holding massive demonstrations.

The Bahraini government promptly launched a brutal crackdown on the peaceful protests and called in Saudi-led Arab forces from neighboring Persian Gulf states to help crack down on the demonstrations

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A Hungry War Machine Ignited by Gangster Bombers

By: Cynthia McKinney

Source: Global Research

http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-hungry-war-machine-ignited-by-gangster-bombers/

Open Letter on the Occasion of the Seating of the

New York Session of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine

This weekend, anti-war protests are taking place all over the world.

I do believe that the position of the vast majority of the world’s people is one that is utterly tired of a hungry war machine ignited by gangster bankers concomitantly devouring the money resources of the world’s people.

There is a growing awareness of exactly where the problem lies: it is not in the millions of working people who struggle every month just to make ends meet; it is not in the immigrant fleeing the intentional destabilization of her homeland; it is not in the descendants of Africans imported from Africa for enslavement; it is not in the right-wing White person misled to believe that individuals from the foregoing groups are his enemy; it is not in the group of people who pray to Allah; it is not in the people on the street this weekend demanding peace and an end to war. It is clear that those who helped construct this current society and now preside over it are also the ones who benefit from having things as they are today. Increasingly, more and more of us are paying an even higher price for them to continue their privilege because enough is never enough for them. Real change, then, requires not only changes in the names, color, ethnicities, languages spoken, religion, or gender of those who preside over the current political state of affairs. Real change requires dismantling the current political, economic, and social structures that serve only the interests of an elite to whom current elected office holders answer. In short, the kind of change that people thought they were voting for in 2008. I have consistently drawn attention to the need for this kind of deep, structural change. Therefore, this Open Letter addresses what is happening to me as I challenge a system that no longer serves the interests of the people and push for the kind of change that will really make a difference.

As I write this, I note the irony that I am currently conducting research in order to write a paper on the violent repression carried out by individuals acting on behalf of the United States government against certain political actors of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was during this research that I came across the notion of “soft repression” and immediately recognized myself in what I was reading. I said to myself as I read, “Hey, that’s me.” So, I decided to write this Open Letter in order to blow the cover off a secret that I have walked with for years.

“Soft repression” tactics include ridicule, stigma, and silencing. I have experienced and continue to experience each one of these types of targeting. I routinely receive hate mail and withstand very active organized attempts to ridicule, stigmatize, and eventually silence me. I routinely experience strange occurrences with my computer (typing by itself) and telephone (answered by someone before it even rings on my end), and more. Strange things happen to my friends and to the friends of my friends (like police stops for nothing, and worse, calls to remote immigrant acquaintances asking for information about me).

Not too long ago, I received a call from a lawyer with the ACLU who tracks politically-inspired civil liberties violations and he told me that my name came up in a Texas Fusion Center of the Department of Homeland Security document as someone, associating with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and traveling to Lebanon with him, who should be surveilled for any attempts engaged in by me to push Sharia law for the U.S. It’s ludicrous, I know. It’s even more ludicrous that U.S. tax dollars are being spent to surveil people for this stupidity. But there it is.

More recently, Congresswoman Maxine Waters courageously asked the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Robert Mueller, at a Congressional Hearing if the FBI was surveilling me because she had documents that suggested that due to my political beliefs and inflammatory words uttered by others after my 2006 campaign election theft that placed blame for the unfortunate election results on Jewish Israel partisans inside the U.S.

I have been stalked (unfortunately, the prosecution occurred under a false identity as a Muslim Pakistani) and thank goodness to local authorities, the perpetrator spent time in jail until his high-priced lawyer bailed him out, and the individual with the false identity was convicted of stalking. Upon my return to the U.S. from Cape Town, South Africa at which the Russell Tribunal found that Israel practices its own unique form of apartheid, I was notified by my local FBI office that I was the subject of a terroristic threat, along with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, by some poor hillbillies from the north Georgia mountains. The FBI offered to protect me from any other hillbillies who might get funny ideas.

Well, I’ve been through this before with the FBI, when a journalist called for my lynching on my way to vote. My alarmed

Congressional staff alerted the FBI–only for us all to learn, years later, that this particular “journalist” was on the FBI payroll at the time that he made those reprehensible remarks.

I have lived with this “soft repression” since, as a Member of Congress-elect in 1992, I refused to sign the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pledge of support for Israel. I will begin to document and make public what has heretofore been covert activity carried out by bullies who pick on the weak. The members of my inner circle and I are extremely weak compared to the power and resources of those orchestrating and carrying out this “soft repression.”

What could they possibly be afraid of?

I will answer my own question: values whose time has come—truth, justice, peace, and dignity. Not only for the elite few, but also for the rest of us: everybody’s truth and everybody’s dignity.

I am honored to serve as a juror on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I am honored to serve with Angela Davis and Alice Walker and Dennis Means as the U.S. contingent of jurors here in New York City. Davis, Walker, and Means are giants in U.S. activism, demonstrating self-sacrifice, dignity, and great love for community. I have been with this Tribunal from its opening Session in Barcelona, where I was the only U.S. member. At these New York Sessions so far, we have spoken of colonialism, oppression, murder, and war with impunity. Therefore, I in no way want to equate the unusual events occurring around me with the violence of the situation faced by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the particular focus of this Tribunal. I seek merely to expose covert actions directed at me, and people close to me, that constitute bullying and soft repression that would otherwise go unnoted and whose purpose I surmise is to punish me for my values and political beliefs that favor justice and peace, and, most probably, to dissuade me from future political activities.

Their plan will not work. I believe in hearing everyone’s truths, especially from those whose voices have been shut down. I believe that we can only achieve justice when we are willing to face everyone’s truths. I believe that peace is achievable when justice is prevalent. And I believe that human and planetary dignity will exist during such time as we all live together in peace. My work, every day, is to advance this cause in the best way that I know, using the tools at my disposal at this time.

I have already received some requests for these documents that have been made available to me; I will make them available to anyone who asks.

Cynthia McKinney
Sunday, 7 October 2012

Read more Articles by Cynthia McKinney at the link below

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/cynthia-mckinney/

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Olympic police state lingers in UK

 

Source: Press TV

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/09/13/261312/olympic-police-state-lingers-in-uk/

There were speculations before the Olympics that the British government is using the games as an excuse to impose a police state in London that would be otherwise impossible; now that seems to have come true as the ‘un-free zones’ remain after the sports event.

British councils and police retain powers to single out public spaces and suspend certain freedoms, including handing out leaflets and protesting there that means one will be punished in those zones for doing a perfectly legal thing.

According to a map published on September 11 by Manifesto Club freedom campaign group, there are a dizzying 435 such zones in London that cover almost half of the whole area of the city, mostly in its central parts.

Citizens can be fined or prosecuted in the restricted zones, now also imposed on some other cities, for leafleting, walking a dog, using alcohol, just being there, and in London, for protesting.

There are 110 leafleting zones in London where you should have a license if you want to hand out leaflets -- that is you will not be free to even campaign for a human rights or relief cause unless the government sees it fit.

There are also 32 active “dispersal zones” as well as many inactive ones in the British capital.

In a dispersal zone you must leave the area if a police officer orders you to do so for a specified time, and you are not allowed to return to that area before the time designated by the officer or you face the consequences.

The euphemism of a dispersal zone in effect authorizes the security forces to impose a curfew in a region without openly announcing it for a particular group of people if the officers have “reasonable grounds for believing that [the group’s] presence or behavior has resulted, or is likely to result, in a member of the public being harassed, intimidated, alarmed or distressed.”

London is also decorated with a special restricted protest zone around the parliament buildings, where demonstrators, or even a single demonstrator, should also gain authorization if they want to hold a rally.

People are banned from making a speech without written permits, while the Westminster Council has approved a new bylaw that expands the ban to a larger area in the vicinity of the parliament square.

The five restriction zones provide the government with greater room to further squeeze civil liberties as the powers to implement them are open-ended, meaning officers can decide on where and how to use them at their own discretion, effectively giving them the power to make law in the restricted areas.

The government can also crack down on the undesirables that possibly include certain race groups or people with certain beliefs.

Officials made it clear before the Olympics that in the newly-introduced “exclusion zones” protesters face police with enhanced powers, including the right to use force to enter private properties and seize political posters.

There were fears that London will follow suit on other Olympic hosts, including Athens, which did not remove the new restrictions after the games.

Now such fears have partly materialized and the government can easily justify the continuation of the draconian measures, saying Britain faces threats from unwanted elements lurked inside its own cities and increasingly bigger surveillance would be needed to predict and contain such threats

 

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US Congress approves extension of secret surveillance under FISA

 

U.S. Capitol.(AFP Photo / Win McNamee)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/usa/news/congress-surveillance-act-fisa-980/

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to extend the government’s power to warrantlessly wiretap Americans for another five years by reauthorizing the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers in the House agreed from Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a polarizing legislation that has been challenged by privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations alike around the country. The extension was approved by a vote of 301 to 118.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was first signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, but amendments added two decades later under the George W Bush administration provide for the government to conduct widespread and blanketing snooping of emails and phone calls of Americans. The FISA Amendments added in 2008, specifically section 702, specify that the government can eavesdrop on emails and phone calls sent from US citizens to persons reasonably suspected to be located abroad without ever requiring intelligence officials to receive a court order.

If the US Senate echoes the House’s extension of the act, the FAA will carry through for another five years until 2017, ensuring the federal intelligence community that they will be able to conduct surveillance on the correspondence of the country’s own citizens well into the future. If no action is taken, the FAA is slated to expire at the end of 2012.

Earlier this year, a plea from two US senators to see how many times the FAA has been used was refused by the National Security Administration. Last month, San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the US Justice Department for failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to the program.

“The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explained in an official statement made after the suit was filed. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions unconstitutional.”

Sen. Wyden, a Democratic lawmaker from Oregon who has also sit on the Senate intelligence committee for several years, originally asked for Senate to place a hold on the vote this past June. This week, Sen. Wyden tells Reuters, "My hold is on and it will stay on," although that plea does not apply to the House, however, where lawmakers appeared eager on Wednesday to power through the vote.

So determined were some lawmakers to proceed, in fact, that the rules of the debates preceding Wednesday’s vote called for no more than one hour of discussion before ballots were cast. Several congressmen, including lawmakers that planned to vote yes on the FAA extension regardless, proposed a two year extension as a compromise, but no new amendments were allowed to be tacked on before Wednesday’s vote.

Despite opposition on and off the Hill, the FAA has received praise from some of Washington’s most elite members of the government, including Attorney General Eric Holder and long-standing lawmaker Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the FAA renewal who also infamously urged Congress to approve the since-defeated Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a broad and dangerous Internet legislation that threatened to reshape the Web as we know it.

In his address at Northwestern University School of Law this past March, Mr. Holder said section 702 of the FAA “ensures that the government has the flexibility and agility it needs to identify and to respond to terrorist and other foreign threats to our security,” but emphasized the fact that only persons thought to be outside the US — not Americans — can be targeted. When Sens. Wyden and Udall asked to know how often that snooping involved Americans at all, however, they were told by the NSA’s Inspector General that a “review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of US persons.”

On his part, Sen. Wyden has written, “that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act . . . Then it is possible that this number could be quite large.”

“Since all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting surveillance of that American,” the lawmaker wrote in an official press release earlier this year.

Rep. Smith, the sponsor of both this bill and SOPA, has said, “We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country.”

On Thursday, Rep. Smith claimed, “Foreign nations continue to spy on America to plot cyber-attacks and attempt to steal sensitive information from our military and private sector industries,” and that Congress has “a solemn responsibility to ensure that the intelligence community can gather the information” necessary to hinder these attempts.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California) added on Wednesday from the Hill that reauthorizing the FAA is “critical to the protection of the American people,” claiming that the United States, “as a nation had not done enough to connect the dots to warn us sufficiently to protect” against another terrorist attack on par with the ones that devastated America on September 11, 2001.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, also used the attack on the Twin Towers to justify the necessity of extending the FAA.

“If we could come together to remember 9/11, surely we can come together to prevent another one,”

said Rep. Gowdy.

Opponents of the act, however, say that the attempts to do as such come at a cost too great for civil liberties.

“We’ve been told that we can’t even tell how many people are being subjected to this process located in the United States, and that we don’t know and they can’t tell us,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan ) pleaded earlier this year in opposition to the act. “I think we can get a little bit closer. There can be some reasonableness. It’s this kind of vagueness that creates in those of us in the Congress, suspicions that are negative rather than suspicions that are positive.”

“Why can't we know how many people are affected by FISA amendment act in the US?” Rep Conyers asked. “This kind of vagueness creates suspicions.”

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said on his own part that those suspicions are even more validated since the Justice Department has declined to adhere to a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the FAA, explaining on Wednesday, “Everyone becomes suspect when big brother is listening.”

Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) also threw his weight behind efforts to reject the act on Wednesday, saying it the FISA amendments allow for “illegal surveillance of an untold number of American citizens” with absolutely no oversight.

“Not even the NSA knows the extent to which FISA amendment acts have potentially been approved,” Rep Earl Blumenhauser (D-Oregon) added from the House floor before the vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, “that’s equivalent to 138 million books, every 24 hours.”

“After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t,” says Michelle Richardson, a counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.Sen. Ron Wyden — who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA.”

“Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information?” she asks.

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