Sybille Fuchs

The building used by CIA as a secret prison used by
the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
agents to torture "suspects" in Bucharest, Romania.

Journalists from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German television magazine “Panorama” have uncovered the location of one of the chain of notorious secret torture prisons run by US Central Intelligence Agency in Europe. The prison is situated in a residential area of the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

The prison in Bucharest began operations following the closure in 2003 of a similar torture centre in Poland. The prison was located in a building housing the Romanian National Registry Office for Classified Information (Official Registrului National al Informatiilor Secrete de Stat) authority. The transport of prisoners to the prison from Bucharest’s airport was carried out in inconspicuous minibuses.

The cells were located in the basement of the ORNISS building. The cells were mounted on springs in order to disorientate the prisoners, who were also subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding, beatings or being forced to adopt excruciating positions for long periods of time. Former employees of the CIA told journalists that after the initial round of “interviews” the prisoners were given medical and dental examinations.

Some of the prisoners were held there temporarily prior to being switched and tortured in other locations or transferred to Guantánamo. The CIA’s code-name for the secret prison in Bucharest was “Bright light”. The centre was located at Mures Street 4. The prisoners held at the facility included Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of carrying out the attack on the US warship Cole in Yemen and now sits in Guantánamo where he faces trial by a military commission.

Al Nashiri was brutally tortured in 2002 and 2003. According to CIA documents, he was allegedly threatened with execution by a gun and a drill. He was also stripped naked, beaten and subjected to water boarding. Some of the abuse is alleged to have taken place in Poland. It is likely that he was transferred from Poland to Bucharest and then to Guantánamo. He apparently made confessions under torture, which he has now revoked. His case was the subject of an investigation by the EU parliamentary commission, which urged the US not to execute him.

Stephen Lendman

Palestinian children sit on a pile of dirt at the war-battered
refugee camp of Nahr Al-Bared.

December 11 marks the 63rd anniversary of UN Resolution 194(III)[Paragraph 11], mandating that:

"the (Palestinian) refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."

International law enshrines this right, including:

• Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
• Article 5(d)(ii) of the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination;
• Article 12(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and
• the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (the Apartheid Convention).

Denying this right constitutes apartheid. Nonetheless, Israel refuses to let diaspora Palestinians return home. It calls doing so an "act of suicide," disruptive of its tenuous majority.

It cites UN Resolutions 242 and 338. They mandate political solutions for Palestine's refugee problem, exclusive of international law, human rights, equity and justice. As a result, durable solutions are blocked.

Israel calls right of return issues a privilege, not a right. Palestinian self-determination is thus severely compromised. Millions are left unprotected.

Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

In a cheap effort to procure Jewish votes and money, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has claimed that the Palestinian people is "an invented people".

"I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places and for a variety of reasons we have sustained them against Israel now since the 1940s. It is tragic."

Asked whether he considered himself a Zionist, the highly opportunistic and morally duplicitous republican leader said "I believe that the Jewish people have the right to a state…Remember, there was no Palestinian state. It was part of the Ottoman empire until the early 20th century."

There is no doubt that Gingrich's claims are an obscene gallimaufry of errors, half-truths and outright lies.

Let us begin with the issue of an "invented people." Well, if we discuss the matter academically, e.g. honestly and objectively, we will reach the ineluctable conclusion that the American people themselves are an invented people. After all, the only true and "un-invented" people are the native Americans, most of whom were exterminated by White immigrants, presumably including Gingrich's forefathers, who called the genocide "manifest destiny."

In comparison, the Palestinian people have stronger claims to originality and authenticity.

In fact, Palestinians predated the Israelites by thousands of years. Remember, even Abraham, the patriarch, had to purchase a burial place for his wife Sara from a local Palestinian. The story is mentioned in the Bible.

Gilad Atzmon

Newt Gingrich is no doubt a revolutionary political thinker.

He has managed to offer an adequate solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In an interview with Steven Weiss of The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an ‘invented people’:

"I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go to many places.”

Such an approach to world affairs is consistent with both Walt Disney’s phantasmic vision of reality and Zionist Golda Meir who back in 1969 announced that there was “no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."[1]

No doubt, Gingrich’s/Meir’s ‘genius’ visionary idea should be applied to every American war and conflict. I guess that it is just a question of time before Gingrich announces that the Iraqi people are also ‘invented’, like the Palestinians they were also part of the Arab community. They may also have to schlep around and leave their beloved country to America and its Zionist rulers.