U.S. human rights groups have announced before the UN Human Rights Committee that there are perhaps dozens of secret detention centers around the world where Washington is holding an unknown number of prisoners as part of its “war on terror”….. Continue Reading
…..The answer is obvious to anyone who knows a thing or two about control mechanisms, especially colonialist ones. Permits of sorts were imposed by apartheid South Africa, by the Dutch in colonial Indonesia, and elsewhere. The colonizer’s gains are clear: divide-and-rule; destroying national coherence in favor of separate, conflicting local interests; making the colonized too busy with survival to oppose their oppression; and so on. The GSS have a more concrete motivation, well phrased in the sentence that so many Palestinians discretely hear when they apply for a permit: “We’ll help you, if you help us.” After all, collaborators – “stinkers” in Israeli army jargon, “helpers” as the official Israeli Newspeak terms them – are at the heart of every tyranny, and the occupation run by the Middle East’s only democracy is no exception….. Continue Reading