"GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba - The U.S. government is blocking the American Civil Liberties Union from paying attorneys representing suspected terrorists held here, insisting that the ACLU must first receive a license from the U.S. Treasury Department before making the payments.
ACLU director Anthony Romero on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of “obstruction of justice” by delaying approval of the license, which the government argues is required under U.S. law because the beneficiaries of the lawyers’ services are foreign terrorists.
“Now the government is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans’ private dollars to be paid to American lawyers to defend civil liberties,” Romero said. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/09/10230/
--- >Although the NY Times has published stories about Guantanamo, this example of US attempting to subvert justice must have seemed to anti- American. The NY Times did not publish the story.
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"Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation is not succeeding (in the West Bank) because of U.S. support for Israel - not the case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy. Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa. "Talk about the 'promised land' and the 'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have."
Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. "When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.
"The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible - and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also knew that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The end of the tunnel is blacker than black. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1000976.html
--- >The NY Times hardly prints any news critical of human rights abuses by Israel. A story like this would never get by the pro-Israeli censors. True to form, this visit to the West Bank by black South Africans was never covered.
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"A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were traveling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.
Another nine people were wounded in Sunday's attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.
Fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province, but one missile went off course and hit the wedding party, said the provincial police chief spokesman, Ghafor Khan.
"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate. "They were all civilians and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/11/afghanistan.usa
--- >The NY Times covers this story slightly differently. Instead of the head of the Afghan government's investigation (and member of the Afghan senate) being quoted, it is "local officials." Maybe that is why the NY Times reported 27 civilians killed rather than 47.
