Would You Support A War Against Iran If You Knew The True Facts?

March 8, 2012

Washington’s Blog

By Washington’s Blog

“If the mainstream media reported on this, less people would support a war with Iran. Come to think about it, do you know anyone who wants another war? Besides the government, of course.” –KTRN

Would you support a war against Iran if you knew that:

Iran has one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, and the second-largest in the Middle East behind Israel.

Jews are protected by the Iranian constitution, and are guaranteed seats in the Iranian parliament.

The CIA admits that the U.S. overthrew the moderate, suit-and-tie-wearing, Democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953. He was overthrown because he had nationalized Iran’s oil, which had previously been controlled by BP and other Western oil companies. As part of that action, the CIA admits that it hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its prime minister.

If the U.S. hadn’t overthrown the moderate Iranian government, the fundamentalist Mullahs would have never taken over. (Moreover, the U.S. has had a large hand in strengthening radical Islam in the Middle East by supporting radicals to fight the Soviets and others).

The U.S. armed and supported Iraq after it invaded Iran and engaged in a long, bloody war which included the use of chemical weapons. Here is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in the 1980′s, several months after Saddam had used chemical weapons in a massacre:

Click here for the full report.

America’s Legacy of Forced Sterilisation

June 14, 2011

BBC News

By Daniel Nasaw

More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.

In 1968, Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbour who threatened to kill her if she told what happened.

She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.

While she was in hospital giving birth, the state violated her a second time, she says.

A social worker who had deemed her “feeble-minded” petitioned the state Eugenics Board to have her sterilised.

Officials coerced her illiterate grandmother into signing an “x” on an authorisation form. After performing a Caesarean section, doctors sterilised her “just like cutting a hog”, she says.

“They killed my kids,” Ms Riddick says. “They killed mine before they got to me. They stopped it.”

Nearly four decades after the last person was sterilised under North Carolina’s eugenics programme, a state task force is seeking the 2,900 victims of sterilisation officials estimate are still alive.

The group hopes to gather their stories and ultimately to recommend the state award them restitution. But with public coffers under severe pressure amid a flagging recovery, it is not clear the legislature will agree.

“I know I can’t make it right but at least I can address it,” said North Carolina state legislator Larry Womble. He hopes “to let the world know what a horrendous thing the government has perpetrated on these young boys and girls”.

America’s sterilisation movement was part of a broad effort to cleanse the country’s population of characteristics and social groups deemed unwanted, an effort that included anti-race mixing and strict immigration quotas aimed at Eastern Europeans, Jews and Italians.

Beginning with Indiana in 1907, 32 states eventually passed laws allowing authorities to order the sterilisation of people deemed unfit to breed. The last programme ended in 1979.

The victims were criminals and juvenile delinquents, women deemed sexual deviants, homosexual men, poor people on welfare, people who were mentally ill or suffered from epilepsy. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were disproportionately targeted in some states.

Click here for the full report from BBC News.

A Sex Joke and Other Judicial Bad Behavior

February 8th, 2011

New York Times

By: William Glaberson

One judge who was driving drunk led the police on a half-mile chase, and when he was pulled over, asked for “professional courtesy.”

Another said “good boy” when a man who wanted to file a lawsuit made an insulting comment about Jews.

A third repeatedly jailed people without any trial and talked at length from the bench about how the decoration on a woman’s T-shirt made him think of a male sex organ. “I’m bringing down the house,” said the judge, Gilbert L. Abramson of Family Court in Saratoga County, evidently delighted with his own humor.

Those are a few of the cases that were handled over the last year by a secretive state agency, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, that is at the center of a new dispute about the state’s judicial-discipline system. Last week, the 77,000-member New York State Bar Association called for major changes in the commission’s structure and operations after a Manhattan lawyers’ group criticized the panel as unfair to judges.

The state bar association’s position is expected to set off a campaign in Albany to change the system in ways that could make it more difficult to remove judges, for example by allowing them to question investigators’ witnesses before a hearing. The proposal would also break the commission into two separate agencies, one to prosecute judges and another to rule on the charges. It is also likely to prompt the first detailed review in decades of the way the state handles the roughly 1,800 complaints made against judges every year.

The complaints filed with the 11-member commission vary from nuisance accusations by people who lost cases to sobering claims about judges’ fixing cases and ignoring constitutional rights, the agency’s reports show. Because of the power wielded by the state’s 3,500 full- and part-time judges, any system of policing them would be delicate.

Last year’s cases provide a sample of the kinds of decisions that are now drawing statewide attention. The commission, which operates behind closed doors, removed only one judge in 2010, Judge Abramson of the Saratoga Family Court, who, according to the commission, made comments about the woman’s T-shirt that “were ribald and replete with sexual innuendo.”

Two judges resigned while under investigation, including the town court justice in western New York who said “good boy” after the derogatory comment about Jews and another town court judge who the commission found had failed to sentence more than 100 convicted people.

Twelve judges were censured or admonished last year, including one who delayed resolving cases for up to five years, another who refused to handle cases until he received a pay increase, and one who threatened a man with jail for being rude to the judge’s wife. A Kingston City Court judge, James P. Gilpatric, was admonished after he did not even respond to letters from his administrative judge concerning long delays in deciding cases.

Privately, judges criticize the commission as an arrogant agency willing to destroy careers on flimsy evidence. But cases from last year show that other critics, including some of the commission’s own members, say the agency is far too lenient toward judges.

The judge who asked for special consideration when he was caught driving drunk, Gerard E. Maney, the supervising Family Court judge in Albany, was censured. But one of the commission members, Joseph W. Belluck, a Manhattan lawyer, wrote that it was “mind-boggling” that the judge would be left on the bench after making “a calculated effort” to ensure that the law “would not be applied to him personally.”

Click here for the full report from the New York Times