[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

the only thing that will help this whole bullshut in USA is to cripple special interest groups. elections must be set up to be paid for evenly. how that could be done I have no idea.

Until it is done however, our international policies will be dictated by whichever tiny group has the most money in our politicians wallet.

rrrr... YEs. but HOW?? money is like water, it always finds a way to flow.

i'd be for publicly funded elections, but that would reek of "socializzm" to your average teabagger, and they'd start toting guns in public gatherings. especially now that corporations can give without limit? fuckin supreme court. we're royally fucked.

[tesla69]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff06162010.html
That was when he found the backpack which the soldier had dropped. “I figured I’d look inside and see what he was carrying,” Neish says. “And inside was this kind of flip-book. It was full of photos and names in English and Hebrew of who was on all the ships. The booklet also had a detailed diagram of the decks of the Mavi Marmara.”

Meanwhile, he says, more and more people were being carried down the stairs from the mayhem above—people who'd been shot, and people who were dying or people already dead. “I took detailed photos of the dead and wounded with my camera,” he says, adding, “There were several guys who had two neat bullet holes side by side on the side of their head--clearly they were executed.”

Neish smuggled his photos out of Israel to Turkey despite his arrest on the ship and imprisonment in Israel for several days. “I pulled out the memory card, tossed my camera and anything I had on me that had anything to do with electronics, and then kept moving the chip around so it wouldn’t be found,” he says. “The Israelis took all the cameras and computers. They were smashing some and keeping others. I put the chip in my mouth under my tongue, between my butt cheeks, in my sock, everywhere, to keep them from finding it,” he says. He finally handed it to a Turk who was leaving for a flight home on a Turkish airline. He says the card ended up in the hands of an organization called Free Gaza, and he has seen some of his pictures published, so he knows they made it out successfully.

Neish says that claims that the Israeli commandos were just armed with paint guns and 9 mm pistols are “Bullshit--at one point when I was in the stairwell, a commando opened a hatch above, stuck in a machine gun, and started firing. Bullets were bouncing all over the place. If the guy had gotten to look in and see where he was shooting, I’d have been dead, but two Turkish guys in the stairwell, who had short lengths of chain with them that they had taken from the access points to the lifeboats, stood to the side of the hatch and whipped them up at the barrell. I don’t know if they were trying to hit the commando or to use them to snatch away the gun, but the Israeli backed off, and they slammed and locked the hatch.”

“I never saw a single paint gun, or a sign of a fired paint ball!” he says.
He also didn't see any guns in the hands of people who were on the ship. “In the whole time I was there on the ship, I never saw a single weapon in the hands of the crew or the aid workers,” he says. Indeed, Neish, who originally had been on a smaller 70-foot yacht called the Challenger II, had transferred to the Mavi Marmara after a stop in Cyprus, because his boat had been sabatoged by Israeli agents (a claim verified by the Israeli government), making it impossible to steer. “When we came aboard the big boat, I was frisked and my bag was inspected for weapons,” he says. “Being an engineer, I of course had a pocket knife, but they took that and tossed it into the ocean. Nobody was allowed to have any weapons on this voyage. They were very careful about that.”

What he did see during the IDF assault was severe bullet wounds. “In addition to several people I saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded people. There was one older guy who was just propped up against the wall with a huge hole in his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”
Neish says he saw many of the 9 who were known to have been killed, and of the 40 who were wounded, and adds, “There were many more who were wounded, too, but less seriously. In the Israeli prison, I saw people with knife wounds and broken bones. Some were hiding their injuries so they wouldn’t be taken away from the others.” He also says, “Initially there were reports that 16 on the boat had been killed. The medical station said 16. There was a suspicion that some bodies may have been thrown overboard. But what people think now is that the the other seven who are missing, since we’re not hearing from families, may have been Israeli spies.”

Once the Israeli commandos had secured control of the Mavi Marmara, Neish says the ship’s passengers and crew were rounded up, with the men put in one area on deck, and the women put below in another area. The men were told to squat, and had their hands bound with plastic cuffs, which Neish says were pulled so tight that his wrists were cut and his hands swelled up and turned purple (he is still suffering nerve damage from the experience, which his doctor in Canada says he hopes will gradually repair on its own).

[ilduclo]

why are they continuing to call the ship by the wrong name? Because they don't want anyone to remember Rachel Corrie?

[tesla69]

http://www.counterpunch.org/heller06182010.html
Piracy pays.

"There’s been three or four reports from passengers that Israelis then went out with their credit cards and bought beer with it.” That’s what Greta Berlin of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla told me about what happened with the possessions of people who were on the seven boats of the Flotilla.

The fly in the ointment is the fact that the Flotilla Massacre survivors are speaking out. Or they’re trying to. Several of the survivors are attempting to speak at the U.N. and at events in the U.S. However, a group of powerful NYC politicians are demanding the U.S. State Department keep them out. No, it’s not neo-cons slandering the survivors as having “ties” with terrorists. It’s what passes for New York liberals.

The New York Daily News says Representative Carolyn Maloney has pledged to deliver a petition with more than 23,000 signatures demanding the State Department do visa checks of Mavi Marmara ship passengers planning a speaking tour. The Congresswoman says she’s defending the country from “Hamas”. At the press conference Congressman Jerome Nadler made the claim that the IHH which organized the Turkish ships “has long been known for its ties to Hamas and al-Qaeda”.

The paper quotes Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel as saying, "Use extra caution. Take this threat seriously." What threat, the threat that survivors might rip through the steady stream of Israeli propaganda? What irony. We have the Congressman from Harlem defending the outrageous lies of a country headed by a President (Shimon Peres) who in the heyday of apartheid offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa. This foremost Black Congressman pledges on his website “unwavering support” to a country where racism (against Palestinians) is open and pervasive.