TV News LIES

When Jerce Reyes Barrios first got to el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), he tried to keep track of how much time had passed. He reminded himself that nothing was forever. Even trapped without charge inside a Salvadoran prison infamous for brutal conditions and indefinite detention, he believed he would, someday, somehow, go home.

But as days turned into weeks, and then months, the time passed more slowly. In between routine beatings from guards, he read the Bible, the only book permitted to detainees. He asked God to give him as much patience as Job, whose faith is tested through a series of horrible disasters. Eventually, Reyes Barrios stopped counting the days.

“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”

Reyes Barrios is one of 252 Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S., wound up in immigration detention, and were flown by the Trump administration in March to CECOT for indefinite detention without charge, under a multimillion-dollar deal between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments. Most of the men had no criminal history, but U.S. officials claimed, with scant evidence, that they were linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

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More than 1,000 rabbis and other Jewish leaders from around the globe, including in Israel and the U.S., have signed a public letter urging Israel to allow extensive humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The letter denounces Israel's "mass killings of civilians" and "the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war." The Jewish leaders say Israel's actions damage not just the country's reputation, but Judaism itself.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied reports of starvation in Gaza. However, the letter calls upon Netanyahu and the Israeli government "to respect all innocent life."

Rabbis from several denominations in the U.S., Canada, Israel and across Europe have signed the letter, which focuses on starvation and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but does not denounce the war. The signatories clearly state that they support Israel's battle against Hamas.

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Hundreds of protesters on Friday staged a sit-in at the Manhattan building that houses offices of both of New York’s U.S. senators, prompting dozens of arrests, including those of a state assembly member and a city councilor.

A federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday blocked the Trump administration, for now, from terminating Temporary Protected Status for people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal.

Judge Trina Thompson's decision postpones the terminations until November, when a hearing to discuss the merits will take place. It affects about 60,000 immigrants whose temporary protected status was set to expire beginning August 5. Most of them have been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

In her ruling, Thompson chided the actions of the Trump administration.

"The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek," Thompson wrote. "Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood. The Court disagrees."

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A retired U.S. Army officer who worked as a subcontractor for the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is sounding the alarm over the atrocities he said he saw Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries carry out against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.

Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, who served 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, was hired as an independent subcontractor by UG Solutions to serve as armed security for the private, U.S.-funded GHF, which launched its so-called aid delivery sites in May.

“When I first went into this, I was excited. I felt it was a noble cause,” he told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “Within hours of being in Israel and seeing how this was going to unfold, I immediately had dire concerns as to the intentions, as to the execution, and what was going to happen when this fails.”

Aguilar said he ended his contract on June 14 after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.

The IDF has maintained that soldiers only use their guns to deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped, armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.

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Dozens of rabbis were arrested Tuesday morning after staging a protest at the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, calling for aid in Gaza and an end to what they called the Israeli government’s “blockade” of the enclave.

The arrests come a day after eight rabbis were arrested at a separate demonstration in New York City, in a sign of surging Jewish concern about the condition of Gaza civilians.

In Washington, the group of 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Thune’s office at around 11:10 a.m. Tuesday morning, and displayed banners reading “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.”

The demonstration called to mind some of the protests by rabbis and other Jews in favor of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war that took place regularly in the war’s first year, and some of the rabbis arrested were involved in those protests as well. But it comes as calls for an end to the war and relief for Gazan civilians grow more mainstream, amid a hunger crisis that has captured headlines around the world.

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