http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22994/1/
PCHR: “Former Israeli Chief Of Staff Moshe Ya'alon spared arrest in New Zealand”
Saed Bannoura - IMEMC - Thursday, 30 November 2006, 17:55

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza reported on Thursday that the Former Israeli Cheif of Staff, Moshe Ya'alon, had to flee out of New Zealand this week after an arrest warrant of war crimes was issued by a New Zealand court after several lawyer contacted the police to urge Ya'alon's arrest.

The warrant was issued on Tuesday when a resident, in cooperation with local and International Human Rights
Organizations filed an appeal to the court to arrest Ya'alon who was on a private visit to the country.

The appeal depended on an incident that took place in 2002, when Yaalon ordered the army to assassinate a Hamas leader, Salah Shihada, by shelling his house.

The shelling caused excessive damage, and 15 civilians, including several children were killed.

The PCHR stated that he Auckland District Court issued a warrant for Ya'alon's arrest on charges of war crimes stating a "suspicion of committing a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention 1949," a criminal offense in New Zealand under the Geneva Conventions Act 1958 and International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000.

The court issued the warrant after several lawyers contacted the police to urge Ya'alon's arrest.

It is worth mentioning that Shaul Mofaz, the former Israeli Minister of Defense, and a senior military officer known as Doron Almog, escaped arrest warrants in the U.K for similar offenses.

The PCHR argues that Ya'alon is responsible for military actions that constitute extensive violations to the principles of Human Rights and are considered war crimes.

The warrant against Ya'alon was cancelled at the last minute by the Local Justice Ministry despite the decision of District Court Judge Avinash Deobhakta, who ordered the arrest of Ya'alon.

Full PCHR report on the issue
http://www.pchrgaza.ps/files/PressR/English/2006/127-2006.htm

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?articleId=d3f4ee4e-1e90-475a-b1b0-bbcd5baedd78
Gingrich raises alarm at event honoring those who stand up for freedom of speech
By RILEY YATES
Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006

MANCHESTER – Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

GINGRICH
Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

Gingrich spoke to about 400 state and local power brokers last night at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner, which fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech.

Gingrich sharply criticized campaign finance laws he charged were reducing free speech and doing little to fight attack advertising. He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens' ability to express themselves and their faith.

Last night's event, held at the Radisson Hotel-Center of New Hampshire, honored a Lakes Region newspaper and a former speaker of the House for work in favor of free expression.

The Citizen of Laconia was given the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award, which is named after the longtime President and Publisher of the Union Leader Corporation, owner of New Hampshire's statewide newspaper.

The Citizen scrutinized the Newfound Area School Board beginning last year over a series of e-mail discussions held before public meetings. It also used the right-to-know law to uncover costly decisions by the town of Tilton this year.

Executive Editor John Howe said the decision to pursue the stories led to at least one advertiser canceling its business with the paper.

"We try to practice what we preach, even if it costs us business," Howe said. "And it has and it will in the future.

Also honored was Marshall Cobleigh, former House speaker and a longtime aide to former Gov. Meldrim Thomson.

Cobleigh introduced an amendment to the state Constitution defending free speech. He also helped shepherd the state's 1967 right-to-know law through the Legislature.

Gingrich's speech focused on the First Amendment, but in an interview beforehand, he also hit upon wide-ranging topics.

Gingrich said America has "failed" in Iraq over the past three years and urged a new approach to winning the conflict. The U.S. needs to engage Syria and Iran and increase investment to train the Iraqi army and a national police force, he said. "How does a defeat for America make us safer?" Gingrich said. "I would look at an entirely new strategy." He added: "We have clearly failed in the last three years to achieve the kind of outcome we want."

Political parties in Presidential primary states should host events that invite candidates from both parties to discuss issues, said Gingrich, who criticized the sharpness of today's politics.

Gingrich said voters unhappy with the war, the response to Hurricane Katrina and pork barrel spending were the main drive behind the GOP's rejection at the polls. But he argued Republicans would have retained the Senate and just narrowly lost the House if President Bush had announced the departure of embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before, instead of after, the election.

Gingrich said he will not decide whether he is running for President until September 2007.

The event last night was sponsored by the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications. The school was founded in 1999 to promote journalism and other forms of communication.

http://nestmannblog.sovereignsociety.com/2006/11/what_will_you_d.html
November 21, 2006
What Will You Do When the Government Demands Your Laptop?
Courtesy of a decision from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. Customs officials can seize and copy the contents of any laptop carried across a U.S. border. There's no arrest, warrant or probable cause required—just "gimme."

If you’re a defense attorney, your most confidential client files may wind up in the hands of government prosecutors. If you’re a political opponent of the Bush administration, your correspondence and the names and addresses of everyone you’ve contacted can now be used against you to support a “terror” investigation.

The ways that this new authority can be misused are too numerous to count—whatever information you carry with you on your laptop—banking records, client data, “adult” videos, you name it—now, in effect, must be shared with the U.S. government.

There is one glimmer of hope—a U.S. district judge in San Francisco recently issued a contradictory ruling on this issue, concluding that Customs has to have "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing in order to search your laptop. That's still a lower burden of causality than "probable cause," but a big improvement over "gimme."

The "reasonable suspicion" standard is now required before Customs agents can conduct a body cavity search, X-rays or other invasive examinations. This ruling is only binding in Los Angeles, so if you're crossing the border anywhere else Customs officials can presumably still apply the "gimme" standard. I suspect that the matter won't be resolved until competing appeals reach the U.S. Supreme Court in a few years.

In the meantime, what can you do to protect yourself? One suggestion is to encrypt all the data on your laptop, or even the hard disk itself, using a program like PGP Desktop 9.5 (www.pgp.com). Just hand the encrypted laptop to the Customs official, smile, and wait.

Unfortunately, that may not be an ideal solution, because border officials are also demanding that travelers decrypt any information on their laptop before they're permitted to cross the border. And even if they don't detain you, they just might hold on to the laptop and try to encrypt it themselves.

A better idea might be to copy everything on your hard drive to a USB stick and send it via a courier service to your international destination. (Encrypt the data, of course, before you send it.) Then securely "wipe" any confidential information off your hard drive, along with the "free space," again using a program like PGP Desktop 9.5. You could also send the entire laptop via a courier service, but that could be expensive and laptops are easily damaged in transit. Plus, there's no assurance that it wouldn't be covertly inspected.

If you carry your laptop through Customs, be sure to sanitize it. The ideal solution would to encrypt and copy your data, send it to your destination and then use a utility like Killdisk (www.killdisk.com) to securely wipe everything on your hard drive. Then reinstall the operating system according to the instructions in Killdisk or whatever utility you use for this purpose. (There are other possible “sanitation” solutions but none as good as this one.) If Customs asks you to inspect your laptop, let them—they won’t find anything but the operating system and standard system files.

Yes, it's a hassle, but that's what life has come to here in the "land of the free."

For more tips on protecting your privacy (and your hard-earned wealth), click on http://www.isecureonline.com/Reports/190SLIFE/E190FB43/?o=191509&u=2309209&l=781497.

While Bush administration members have made a sport of breaking the law, both domestically and internationally, their intransigence will come back to haunt - one way or another.

By Heather Wokusch

11/28/06 "HW" -- -- The Bush Doctrine of taking "the battle to the enemy," for example, is a direct repudiation of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of international force unless in self-defense (after an armed attack across an international border) or related to a UN Security Council decision. And that explains why Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy makes a point to "protect Americans" from "the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution" by the International Criminal Court "whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept."

The whole idea of the US being able to preemptively attack other nations was penned by White House lawyers two weeks after 9/11; former justice department lawyer John Yoo wrote memos for then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales arguing that "no limits" stood in the way of Bush's ability to take military action and that "the president's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."

But giving someone like Bush "unreviewable" and unlimited military powers is reckless; the man can barely construct a sentence, let alone articulate a humane and effective foreign policy.

Besides, a "no limits" approach to foreign policy can't coexist with rule of law, which explains why just last week, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff accused the United Nations and other world bodies of using international law "as a rhetorical weapon against us." Chertoff co-authored the infamous Patriot Act but is best known for his stunning incompetence regarding Katrina. If only he had been as eager to protect Americans from hurricanes as he is to protect them from global treaties...

Chertoff's view of international law as a threat to the US is supported by Rumsfeld's 2005 National Defense Strategy, which notes: "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.

In other words, the Pentagon links "judicial processes" with "terrorism," and sees "judicial processes" as weakening the US "nation state." What kind of nonsense is that?

Now that Rumsfeld has "resigned" and Bush and Co. face their lame-duck years watching the war on terror implode, it's worth considering the aftermath of World War II, when the International Military Tribunal indicted and tried over 20 Nazi leaders for war crimes ranging from waging a war of aggression, killing civilians, mistreating prisoners and plundering property. How eerily familiar those charges seem today.

And how ominous that only weeks ago, German prosecutors began pursuing a criminal investigation into the alleged role of Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and numerous other administration members regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Rumsfeld will lose his legal immunity when he ceases to be Defense Secretary, a fact which must weigh heavily on Bush and others. Unsurprisingly, the administration has taken pre-emptive action against future war crimes charges, including pushing through the scandalous Military Commissions Act, which provides them retroactive domestic protection from prosecution regarding prisoner abuse cases.

On the world stage, the administration's primary battleground for immunity has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), set up in 2002 to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Roughly 100 countries have ratified the ICC Statute, and over 40 others have signed it, but the Bush administration renounced the treaty on grounds it could lead to "frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions."

The administration has done everything in its power to enervate the ICC, including setting up bilateral "Article 98" agreements which arm-twist other countries into not prosecuting US nationals or foreign nationals working for the US. Over 100 nations, mainly poor and dependent on foreign aid, have signed the agreements, but many others have stood firm and lost US aid as a result, including Brazil, Peru and South Africa.

But such bribery will only go so far. The administration's "no limits" approach to foreign policy has alienated global allies, and in many parts of the world, Bush is regarded as a greater danger to world peace than North Korea's Kim Jong-il or Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Continuing revelations of US war atrocities, such as the recent bombing of a Pakistani religious school in which 82 students died, only serve to fuel global outrage. It's hard to imagine administration members getting much sympathy in an international trial.

Bottom line, as calls for impeachment build at home, Bush might heed advice he once gave to Osama bin Laden: "you can run but you cannot hide."

Action Ideas:

1. A number of web sites provide information about human rights abuses linked to the so-called war on terror:

War Crimes Watch

Human Rights First

School of the Americas Watch

Cage Prisoners

2. As After Downing Street notes, this year a national coalition of organizations is making December 10 ''Human Rights and Impeachment Day.'' For related information on everything from Petitions to Dramatic Play Scripts and Yard Signs, check out the site's event resources.

Heather Wokusch has traveled to over 30 countries and lived in eight. She currently works as a journalist. She is author of the book "The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, Vol. 1--US Weapons of Mass Destruction, Women's Issues, Education, Mainstream Media Visit her website http://www.heatherwokusch.com

Copyright Heather Wokusch

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=17605
Peres in the USA: West Bank settlements should mostly be evacuated
Date: 29 / 11 / 2006 Time: 10:49

Bethlehem - Ma'an - Israeli deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, expressed his believe that the truce announced between the Palestinians and the Israelis may lead to a resumption of peace negotiations, leading to a settlement of the conflict.

In a speech at Cornell University in the United States, Peres said that this opportunity should not be lost. He also declared that most of the settlements in the West Bank should be evacuated, and those that are not evacuated, should be consolidated to ensure they cover not more than 8 percent of the West Bank.

Peres added that Israel made a mistake by using cluster bombs in southern Lebanon during the war with Lebanon in the summer.