TV News LIES

Gaza "the giant open prison" are not the words of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Nor were they scripted by Hamas' Khaled Mishaal or Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas. They belong to David Cameron, the young and charismatic British prime minister.

Since the imposition of the Gaza blockade nearly four years ago, no single European leader has voiced moral outrage over the sanctions with such alacrity, simplicity and forcefulness. His words have reverberated widely in Gaza as well as elsewhere in the Arab world.

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

Daniel Pines, an assistant general counsel at the CIA, has asserted in a law journal that the abduction of terrorism suspects abroad is legal under U.S. law, even when the suspect is turned over to countries notorious for torture. “There are virtually no legal restrictions on these types of operations,” Pines asserts in the current edition of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.

“Indeed, U.S. law does not even preclude the United States from rendering individuals to a third country in instances where the third country may subject the rendered individual to torture. The only restrictions that do exist under U.S. law preclude U.S. officials from themselves torturing or inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on individuals during rendition operations, or rendering individuals from a place of actual armed conflict or occupation -- all of which prove to be narrow limitations indeed,” Pines writes.

Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name "Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill," the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee this week finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If indeed this legislation is approved by the Knesset plenum, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law.

Ten years ago, the High Court of Justice ordered the town of Katzir to accept the family of Adel and Iman Kaadan, Arab citizens of Israel, as members of the community. Seven years later, the court issued a similar ruling against the Galilee village of Rakefet, which, like Katzir, is Jewish. Now, however, the legislature has come up with a proper "Zionist" response to the justices: If it becomes law, the amendment will give acceptance committees of communal villages the authority to limit residence in their towns exclusively to Jews.

Shin Bet prisoners are often incarcerated and interrogated under unsatisfactory conditions, according to a report to be released on Tuesday by the rights groups B'Tselem and Hamoked.

The report - based on interviews with 121 Palestinians detained in the security service's Petah Tikva detention facility last year - indicates that 645 detainees had filed complaints over the nature of their incarceration and/or interrogation, but that none had led to the opening of a criminal investigation.

Omar Khar was sentenced today to 40 years in prison for murder, terrorism and spying by a military panel unaware that the confessed Canadian war criminal had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence capped at eight years and the chance to return to Canada after one more year in Guantanamo.

The shorter, plea-deal sentence will be the one imposed. The panel deliberated for nearly nine hours over two days. Tabitha Speer, widow of the special forces medic murdered by Mr. Khadr, then a 15-year-old, cheered when the 40-year sentence was read to the courtroom by panel’s president.