TV News LIES

If you thought it was a done deal that US aid to the Palestinians would be cut off in punishment of the Palestinian application to join the International Criminal Court, think again. Opponents of Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Kentucky) boneheaded proposal to punish Palestinians for embracing the rule of law just got some powerful reinforcements.

Yes, Virginia, the cavalry is here: Israeli military officers.

Defense News reports:

Israeli military officers and experts are warning against funding freezes and other punitive acts against the Palestine Authority (PA) that they insist will jeopardize security coordination with Ramallah.

Two protesters were arrested at the McLean, Virginia, home of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday after 20 demonstrators, some in orange prison jumpsuits, walked onto his property to mark the 13th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay prison.

The protesters from the anti-war group Code Pink walked up to the house before police arrived and asked them to leave, said Fairfax County police spokesman Roger Henriquez. Two members who refused to go were arrested on trespassing charges, he said.

Indefinite detention without trial is illegal under international law, but that’s slim comfort for the 35 men being held at Guantánamo with no prospect of release or a day in court. (A further two dozen men remain in legal limbo, having been recommended for trial by a federal task force five years ago, but not yet charged.)

The 35 “forever prisoners” are men the U.S. deems too dangerous to release, but is reluctant to try in court. As law of war detainees, goes the official line in Washington, these men are not entitled to a trial.

Life as a salt-farm slave was so bad Kim Jong-seok sometimes fantasized about killing the owner who beat him daily. Freedom, he says, has been worse.

In the year since police emancipated the severely mentally disabled man from the remote island farm where he had worked for eight years, Kim has lived in a grim homeless shelter, where he has been preyed upon and robbed by other residents. He has no friends, no job training prospects or counseling, and feels confined and deeply bored.

Three Yemenis and two Tunisians held for more than a decade at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo have been flown to Kazakhstan for resettlement, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of prisoner transfers aimed at closing the facility.

The transfer of the five men followed a recent pledge by President Barack Obama for a stepped-up push to shut the internationally condemned detention center at the U.S. naval base in Cuba where most prisoners have been held without being charged or tried.

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.

The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.