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Christian Zionists believe that in order to fulfill Biblical prophecy, Israel must conquer most of the Middle East. They are a growing force in American politics with ties to many powerful pro-Israel groups in Washington. Once considered a marginal doctrine among evangelicals, the dispensationalist theology of Christian Zionism includes a belief in the rapture, when the faithful are to be lifted up to Heaven while the rest of humanity—including most of the Jews—will perish.

The documentary, Torturing Democracy, a collaboration between the National Security Archive and Washington Media Associates, can be viewed in its entirety online.

The website features many quotes including this one by Andrew Sullivan:

Please watch ‘Torturing Democracy.’ It isn’t easy to watch; but what so many innocent (and guilty) individuals were subjected to in your name was unimaginably harder. As readers know, I’ve been fixated on this since Abu Ghraib. But that documentary made me ill by forcing me again to absorb the enormity of what Bush and Cheney have done – and the urgent, urgent task of repairing the damage. If America is to recover, those responsible must be put on trial. Including the president.

Bush and Cheney didn’t usher in an era of U.S. sponsored torture; they attempted to bring it out of the closet. How are pundits able to claim the U.S. has an innocence to recover or represents it now without losing all credibility?

by Teo Ballvé: Is Plan Colombia subsidizing narco-traffickers to cultivate biofuels on stolen lands?

This article appeared in the June 15, 2009 edition of The Nation.

On May 14 Colombia’s attorney general quietly posted notice on his office’s website of a public hearing that will decide the fate of Coproagrosur, a palm oil cooperative based in the town of Simití in the northern province of Bolívar. A confessed drug-trafficking paramilitary chief known as Macaco had turned over to the government the cooperative’s assets, which he claims to own, as part of a victim reparations program.

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Blood on the Palms
Afro-Colombians fight new plantations.
By David Bacon, Dollars & Sense, July/August 2007 | Issue 271

On Sept. 7, 2006, paramilitary gunmen invaded the home of Juan de Dios García, a community leader in the Colombian city of Buenaventura. García escaped, but the gunmen shot and killed seven members of his family.

The paramilitaries, linked to the government of President Alvaro Uribe and to the country’s wealthy landholding elite, wanted to stop García and other activists from the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities, or PCN), who have been trying to recover land on which Afro-Colombians have lived for five centuries. The PCN is a network of over 140 organizations among Black Colombian communities.

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“The Deltas are psychos… You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s.

by James Petras
. 05.17.2009

Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

[Read the article]

By Ali Abunimah, The Nation, 28 May 2009

This article was originally published by The Nation and is republished with permission.

If the Oval Office guest list is an indicator, President Obama is making good on his commitment to try to revive the long-dead Arab-Israeli peace process. On May 18 President Obama received Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; today he met with Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

As this process gets under way, the United States–Israel’s main arms supplier, financier and international apologist–faces huge hurdles. It is deeply mistrusted by Palestinians and Arabs generally, and the new administration has not done much to rebuild trust. Obama has, like President Bush, expressed support for Palestinian statehood, but he has made no criticisms of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip–which killed more than 1,400 people last winter, mostly civilians–despite evidence from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN investigators of egregious Israeli war crimes. Nor has he pressured Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are refugees, are effectively imprisoned and deprived of basic necessities.

Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president’s predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action–perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel–there’s no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective.

On the Palestinian side, Obama is talking to the wrong man: more than half of residents in the occupied territories do not consider Abbas the “legitimate” president of the Palestinians, according to a March survey by Fafo, a Norwegian research organization. Eighty-seven percent want the Fatah faction, which Abbas heads, to have new leaders.

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Video & transcript – Democracy NOW!

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