The Papers 25th Jan '09
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The Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research has issued a report which rebuts and debunks the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that “61, in all, former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.”
Professor Denbeaux of the Center for Policy & Research has said that the Center has determined that “DOD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong—this last time the most egregiously so.”
Denbeaux stated: “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there.

“I’m going to do to you what my daddy did to me, I’m going to teach you to hate spending money, I’m going to make you so sick of spending money that the very sight of it will make you want to throw up. You have 30 days to spend $4 bn bucks, if you can do it then you get a bailout.”
The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.
But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.
The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”
What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.
Israeli supremacy is taken as proof of its intellectual, cultural and moral superiority. This has always been a mainstay of Zionist colonial ideology: Palestinian Arabs were seen as a negligent, backward race of peasants who had failed to properly develop the land, and therefore must give way to their sophisticated European overlords who, with all the grandiose pretensions of Paul Bert wooing the natives of Annam and Tonkin, entreated locals to see the colonization as a civilizing mission...Read the whole thing.
According to Abba Eban's contemptible maxim, they "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Palestinian attempts to resist the usurpation of their land and resources are in this light irrational acts of aggression.
A unilateral Israeli ceasefire takes effect in Gaza but a fresh volley of rockets fired by militants triggers an Israeli air strike.At least four out of seven rockets landed near the town of Sderot, with no reports of injuries. Israel launched an air strike on Gaza in response.
The exchange puts an immediate strain on the ceasefire, which followed three weeks of fighting.
Israel says it will not set a timetable for withdrawing its troops, but Hamas said it would not accept any Israeli presence in Gaza.
"We can't talk about a timetable for withdrawal until we know the ceasefire is holding," said the Israeli prime minister's spokesman, Mark Regev.
"If there is a danger Hamas is going to deliberately torpedo the ceasefire, and we will have to reinitiate offensive actions against Hamas, for that reason we have to be reticent about withdrawing our forces," he said.
The stopping of rocket-fire had been a chief aim of the military campaign.
The Gaza ceasefire has already been broken, just hours after the unilateral truce took hold, as Hamas militants fired a volley of rockets into southern Israel.This is announced as 'Breaking News' by the Times. But the truth is that there is no ceasefire, Israel has decided to stop it's incessant bombardment of Gaza, claiming as it's reason, that it has crippled Hamas and destroyed it's military capabilities. Whoops! But having listened to Israel telling the world that they had been crushed would Hamas have done anything BUT fire rockets at Israel if they still had the capacity to do so?