Guardian UK:
“The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified. Guantánamo Diary, the first book written by a still imprisoned detainee, is being published in 20 countries and has been serialised by the Guardian amid renewed calls by civil liberty campaigners for its author’s release.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760. US military officials told the Guardian this week that despite never being prosecuted and being cleared for release by a judge in 2010, he is unlikely to be released in the next year.
The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/16/-sp-guantanamo-diary-exposes-brutality-us-rendition-torture
—>The NYT did not report this as a news story, but rather as a “Culture At Large” feature in the Arts Section. All references to how Mohamedou was brutalized were removed. No need for the CIA to redact any text of the memoir; our newspaper of record does it for them. Go to the Guardian to read excerpts of Mohamedou's story.
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972 Blog:
“In denying that Israel limits academic freedom in Palestine, the Israeli embassy in Washington seems to forget about the Palestinian students and academics whose movement it restricts.
The Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. recently decried as baseless ‘the accusation that Israel arbitrarily limits the entry of foreign nationals who seek to lecture, teach and attend conferences at Palestinian universities.’ The embassy appears to be responding to protests and calls by American academics to boycott Israeli academic institutions, in response to restrictions on students and scholars accessing Palestinian universities. And yet in explaining Israeli travel policy, the embassy’s statement misleads, seemingly willfully. …
Arab lecturers and students are unlikely to obtain access to the West Bank and Gaza, because Israeli rules on entry to the Palestinian territory bar most people holding travel documents from Arab or Muslim countries and even some American or European citizens of Arab descent or those who have spoken out against Israel.“
—>The NYT doesn’t do stories like this. Doesn’t fit the public relations image of Israel that the NYT likes to promote.
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972 Blog:
“Two years ago this week, 15-year-old Palestinian Salih al-Amarin was shot in the head by Israeli forces with live ammunition. He died several days later. Al-Amarin, a resident of Azza Refugee Camp in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, was taking part in clashes with Israeli forces stationed on the separation wall that cuts deep into Bethlehem.
“Those soldiers sitting in their towers behind the wall, are they really in danger?” Bethlehem governor Abdi Fatah Hamayel told Sky News at the time. “There is no excuse to shoot the kids with live bullets.”
According to the same report, this and other killings at the time ‘prompted then Israel’s commander of operations in the West Bank, Brig.-Gen. Hagai Mordechai, to call for an immediate review of its rules of engagement.’ But in the months and years that followed, use of live ammunition on the streets of Bethlehem and throughout the West Bank only increased - typically 0.22 caliber bullets known as ‘two-twos’ fired from an integrally suppressed (silenced) 10/22 Ruger rifle.”
—>More Israeli human rights violation covered up by the NYT. The 972 Blog, created by a Green Party grant from Germany, seeks honest and unbiased reporting from Israel and Palestine, something our media seems incapable of.
