The military showdown in the Persian Gulf seems even more inevitable, with the UK foreign secretary not ruling out military action against Iran. Applying even more pressure to the country, Europe may ban Iranian oil imports by the end of the month.

The UK will continue to pursue a diplomatic solution to bringing Iran to the negotiating table, although, according to the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, his country has not “ruled out any option, or supporting any option.” 

“We believe all options should be on the table, that is part of the pressure on Iran, but we are clearly not calling for or advocating military action,” Hague said.

European foreign ministers are expected to meet on January 23 and Hague believes that the EU will come to an agreement on the measures against Iran. His remark of a military action still being on the table is the latest play in the game of threat and counter-threat unfolding around Iran.

“We are advocating meaningful negotiations, if Iran will enter into them, and the increasing pressure of sanctions to try to get some flexibility from Iran,” Hague said.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said that the new sanctions would help to cut off funding to Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

“So with new sanctions that we want to approve this month, we are now targeting the heart of the Iranian nuclear program: its oil and, with that, its sources of financing,” Westerwelle said as cited by the Associated Press. “But the door to dialogue with Iran remains open at the same time.”

Iran is OPEC’s second-largest oil producer and the third-largest crude oil exporter in the world, according to US Energy Information Administration.

Such countries as the UK and Germany have only about 1 per cent of Iranian oil in their total imports at the moment. Meanwhile, debt-stricken Italy, Spain, and Greece depend quite significantly on exports from Iran, with Iranian oil constituting around 13 per cent of total crude imports to each of these countries in 2011.

As a whole, Iran’s export volume to the EU countries had decreased to 18 per cent of total crude exports by the middle of 2011. At the same time, China, India, and South Korea have increased their imports of Iranian oil. Iran exports 22 per cent of its oil to China alone, with Japan, India, and South Korea consuming 14, 13 and 10 per cent of Iran’s total exports respectively.

In 2010, Iran’s total oil export revenues amounted to approximately US$81 billion, according to the IMF, and in 2011 Iran’s revenues are estimated to have risen to around $100 billion.

Iran’s oil exports have already been affected by sanctions. In 2011, Iran experienced significant problems with receiving payments from India, when the Reserve Bank of India halted a clearing mechanism. And with the latest round of US sanctions targeting Iran’s financial sector, Iran is expected to have even more troubles receiving payments from most of his clients.

Meanwhile, a group of UN experts has identified that Iran violated the arms embargo set up by UNSC by exporting military equipment to the Syrian regime among other things, the French Foreign Ministry said on Monday. Iran is forbidden from importing or export weapons or ammunition under the terms of UN Security Council resolutions dating 2007 and 2010.

“These arms deliveries are illegal and deeply shocking because they benefit a regime that has chosen a kind of repression that the UN rights council has repeatedly said constitutes ‘crimes against humanity’,” said spokesman Romain Nadal.

Washington is beefing up its naval presence in waters just outside the Gulf in response to Iran’s threats to block the crucial strait if the West places sanctions on its oil exports.

The first encounter of between Iranian and US ships already happened on January 6, when US Navy amphibious ship New Orleans was heading through the Strait of Hormuz to the Persian Gulf. Three Iranian boats approached it at high speed, but turned away after a radio warning. The incident was considered “routine” according to US military officials.

Iran has received a letter from the US government about the Strait of Hormuz and will respond “if necessary.” On Sunday, Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of Iran’s armed forces, claimed that any US aggression in the region would fail.

“Despite their propaganda, the United States knows that it does not have the ability to halt the Islamic Republic’s activities in certain areas, notably in closing the Strait of Hormuz,” Jazayeri said as cited by the Fars news agency.

Source.

The political press has been abuzz over the much anticipated signing of the NDAA by Barack Obama on Saturday: this move was not surprising because Obama had already made it clear he would go ahead and enact the law, even though he added some ‘stern’ language that is supposed to legitimize what some say is a precursor to the establishment of martial law in the US. To wit: “The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.” And yet he signed it (full text of Obama’s statement on the NDAA, sent while on vacation in Hawaii, can be found here). Perhaps the reason for that unpopular move were some of the more nuanced contents of the Bill, among which is the decision to fully boycott not only Iran, but any bank, including central bank, and other financial institution found to deal with Iran. Which incidentally means most of Russia and China, and probably half of Europe, as all petrodollars generated by the country’s petroleum export industry first have to make their way via the international financial community back into the country. The history buffs out there will realize that this form of couched antagonism is nothing short of the US approach to Japan during World War II, which was essentially provoked into attacking Pearl Harbor – read the details of the October 7, 1940 McCollum Memo here, and especially bullet point 10. And unfortunately, it appears that within 24 hours or so, Iran may have already taken the bait. As Reuters and BBC report, Iran has both test-fired a medium-range SAM during the ongoing wargames exercise previously discussed here, as well as made a formal announcement it has made and tested domestically made nuclear fuel rods: precisely the event that the Israel or US-borne Stuxnet was designed to prevent. So as the tennis match of escalation keeps on growing the ball is now once again in the US’ court.

Here are some details on the wholesale Iranian financial boycott via Reuters.

U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law on Saturday a defense funding bill that imposes sanctions on financial institutions dealing with Iran’s central bank, while allowing for exemptions to avoid upsetting energy markets. The sanctions target both private and government-controlled banks – including central banks – and would take hold after a two- to six-month warning period, depending on the transactions, a senior Obama administration official said.

Under the law, the president can move to exempt institutions in a country that has significantly reduced its dealings with Iran and in situations where a waiver is in the U.S. national security interest or otherwise necessary for energy market stability. He would need to notify Congress and waivers would be temporary, but could be extended.

Sanctioned institutions would be frozen out of U.S. financial markets.

“Our intent is to implement this law in a timed and phased approach so that we avoid repercussions to the oil market and ensure that this damages Iran and not the rest of the world,” the senior U.S. official told Reuters.

Iran’s central bank is the main conduit for Tehran’s oil revenues.

Obama signed the bill during his vacation in Hawaii, just hours after Tehran said it had delayed planned long-range missile tests in the Gulf and signaled it was ready for fresh talks on its disputed nuclear program.

Senior U.S. officials said Washington was consulting with its foreign partners to ensure the new sanctions can work without harming global energy markets. They stressed the U.S. strategy of both isolating and remaining open to engagement with Iran was unchanged.

Ah yes, the precious energy markets. We can’t have some unprecedented volatility there, not now when it is now officially an election year. What however we can have, is control over the supply of one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. Kind of what happened in Iraq a few years back to stunning success…

So what was Iran’s response?

Iran has successfully produced and tested fuel rods for use in its nuclear power plants, state television reported on Sunday, in a snub to international demands that it halt sensitive nuclear work.

The rods, which contain natural uranium, were made in Iran and have been inserted into the core of Tehran’s research nuclear reactor, the television reported.

Nuclear fuel rods contain small pellets of fuel, usually low-enriched uranium, patterned to give out heat produced by nuclear reaction without melting down.

“This great achievement will perplex the West, because the Western countries had counted on a possible failure of Iran to produce nuclear fuel plates,” the Tehran Times newspaper said.

The development was announced at a time of growing tension between Western powers and Iran after the U.N. nuclear agency reported in November that Tehran appeared to have worked on designing a nuclear weapon. Secret research to that end may be continuing, it said.

The United States and its European allies have increased the sanctions pressure on Iran, one of the world’s largest oil producers, to push Tehran to halt the enrichment.

U.S. President Barack Obama signed more sanctions against Iran into law on Saturday, shortly after Iran signalled it was ready for new talks with the West on its nuclear programme and said it had delayed long-range missile tests in the Gulf.

But wait, there’s more. From the BBC:

Iran has successfully test-fired a medium-range surface-to-air missile during military exercises in the Gulf, the official Irna news agency reports.

Iranian naval commander, Mahmoud Mousavi, was quoted as saying the missile was equipped with the “latest technology” and “intelligent systems”.

The test comes a day after he denied earlier state media reports that Iran had test-fired long-range missiles.

He said on Saturday missile launches would take place “in the coming days”.

Iran’s 10 days of naval exercises began last week and are taking place in international waters to the east of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

They come at a time of increased tensions between the West and Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

Tehran reacted angrily last week to reports that Western nations were planning to impose further sanctions targeting Iran’s oil and financial sectors.

So little by little the US will escalate pressure on Iran to commit increasingly more glaring acts of outright ‘insanity’, until finally it does the one thing that according to the US media, which will likely be needed to wash-rinse-spin cycle the newsflow, will push the  American people, who are just not going to take such ‘vile’ proocations any more, over the edge. At least according to Santorum’s Meet the Press interview from this morning which made precisely that point all too clear.

Source.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, says Ankara has rescinded an agreement allowing French military planes to land, and warships to dock, in the country. This brings the conflict over a “genocide bill” proposed in France to the NATO level.

“We are re-evaluating our relations with France. We will take step-by-step measures, depending on how the situation unfolds“, said PM Erdogan, accusing French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party of “politics based on racism, discrimination, xenophobia.”

Turkey has frozen all contacts with France, and canceled any joint political, economic and military projects with the EU country. This includes joint maneuvers and an economic committee meeting in Paris in January.

Access to Turkish airspace and military bases has been reduced to case-by-case scheme.

Erdogan has confirmed Ankara is withdrawing the country’s Ambassador to France. The ambassador, Tahsin Burcuoglu, is to leave on Friday.

French Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Juppe has called Turkey not to “overreact” to the outcome of the vote, urging for “good sense and moderation,” reports Reuters.

The sanctions follow a vote in France’s lower house of Parliament in favor of a law that would deem denial of genocide a crime.

Though the proposed bill cites genocides in general, Ankara believes the law targets the 1915 ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire – which Ankara denies to qualify as genocide.

The bill, proposing a penalty of up to one year in jail and a fine of 45,000 euro ($58,870) to those who deny or “outrageously minimize” sufferings due to genocide, now awaits ratification in the French Senate. The law may just as well die there, as was the fate of an earlier draft this year.

Before the vote in the French Parliament, Turkey warned of “grave consequences” for France if the law is adopted. As both countries are members of NATO, the row could complicate relations within the bloc.

France and Turkey have  been cooperating on dealing with the Iranian nuclear stand-off, and crises in Syria and Afghanistan. Paris still considers Ankara a key partner in the NATO bloc, despite frictions between the two during the Libyan campaign, when Turkey contested France’s leadership over the operation.

France is Turkey’s fifth biggest export market and the sixth biggest source of its imports, so the effects of a breakdown in relations could be major both for politicians and businessmen.

Source.

Exactly 220 years to the date after the Bill of Rights was ratified, the US Senate today voted 86 to 13 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, allowing the indefinite detention and torture of Americans.

After a back-and-forth in recent days between both the Senate and House yielded intense criticism from Americans attempting to hold onto their Constitutional rights, NDAA FY2012 is now on its way to the White House, where yesterday the Obama administration revealed that the president would not veto the legislation, cancelling out a warning he offered less than a month earlier.

Obama has finally brought about change to America, but it’s nothing to be hopeful about.

Speaking before the Senate this afternoon, Sen. Lindsey Graham (Rep-SC) told his colleagues, “I hope you believe America is part of the battlefield.” The United States is at war, he insisted, and anyone alleged to be in opposition to the US government’s game will now be subjected to military-style detention indefinitely.

As RT reported earlier, one provision in NDAA FY2012 will allow for the reinstatement of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” essentially making waterboarding and forms of psychological torture a very possible reality for anyone America deems to be a threat, including its own citizens who, prior to the ruling, had the US Constitution on their side.

Among the corporations which have lobbied in support of NDAA FY2012 are several military contractors, including Honeywell and Bluewater Defense, who together have received millions of dollars in Pentagon guarantees this year alone.

In his remarks Thursday afternoon, Senator Graham attacked America’s current legal system, critiquing it for allowing suspected terrorists to be treated as “common criminals.”

“We think al-Qaeda operatives, citizens or not, are not common criminals. We think they are crazy people,” he said.

“If you’re an American citizen and you want to help…destroy your own country, here is what’s coming your way,”cautioned the senator. The threat he went on to impose involved indefinite military detention for everyone.

“What this legislation does,” lectured Levin, “says from the Congress’ point-of-view, that we expressly authorize the indefinite detention” of someone deemed a threat. “We recognize the authority of this president and every other president to hold an enemy combatant indefinitely, whether they are captured home or abroad, because that only makes sense.”

Under the Act, those suspected of “belligerent” crimes can be subjected to the treatment. Graham tried to calm fears by insisting that suspected criminals will all be allowed a day in federal court, but made it clear that as long as a judge deems someone a suspect in a crime, that indefinite detention can begin without the help of any legal counsel for the defense.

“How long can you hold them? As long as it takes to make us safe,” said Graham.

The senator added that, “when you join the enemy…we aren’t worried about how we’re going to prosecute you right away.” Because of this, Miranda Rights should not be read to suspected criminals and additionally the right to an attorney is also suspended under the act.

In his closing marks, Graham ironically recited that in respect to “civil liberties and the American way of life,” US citizens must fight. “If we don’t fight for it, we’re going to lose it.”

Before the Senate came to their final vote today, Sen. Levin asked that a remark from the White House yesterday insisting that the president’s aides will no longer recommend a veto be added to the record.

Opposition in the Senate was thin but existent today. Senator Mark Udall (Dem-CO) cautioned lawmakers that these provisions will “deny American citizens their due process rights,” and thus not only “make us less safe, but would serve as an unprecedented threat to our constitutional liberties.”

“If we start labeling our citizens as enemies of the United States without any due process, I think we will have done serious damage” to the Constitution, he added, before also calling the legislation politically expedient.

Despite his reservations, Senator Udall reluctantly stated that he was voting in favor, noting that America’s military depends on a quick passing of the act. Still, he said of the dangerous provisions to the act that will allow for the indefinite detention, “I remain unconvinced of their benefit.”

“Now we may be jeopardizing entire cases by adding new layers of bureaucracy and questionable legal processes,” added Udall. He said the legislation will present “numerous constitutional questions” and will go against a counterterrorism community he described as “already nimble.”

“For those of you who join me in voicing opposition to the detention provisions, I want to thank you,” said Udall.

“Though I intend to vote for the final passing of the bill…I want to make clear that I do not fully support this bill. I sincerely believe that this debate is not over and there is much work to do.”

Udall waved a copy of the US Constitution from the Senate floor before his colleagues as he made his closing remarks, reminding them that they all took an oath to uphold it. In the first ten amendments, collectively called the Bill of Rights, the Constitution grants Americans freedoms against searches, arrests and seizure without a probable cause. That legislation would have turned 220 years old today, had Congress not crushed it on the Senate floor.

Source.

Americans denied their First and Third amendment rights…

by Devon DB

Many in America still believe that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that politicians, both Republican and Democrat alike, still hold that view and ensure that any and all legislation passed does not violate it. However, in today’s America, the Constitution is effectively a null and void document, nothing more than a symbol politicians pay lip service to.

The destruction of the Constitution began soon after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress. In the heat of the moment it seemed as if the legislation was meant to protect us from terrorism, however it was later revealed that certain provisions blatantly violated the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments. [1] Interestingly enough, however, this didn’t stop the Senate from to extending the Patriot Act earlier this year [2]. In doing this, the government revealed just how much they respect the Constitution.

The next unconstitutional act to take place was under President Obama. Despite his “hope and change” rhetoric during the campaign, the only thing Obama changed was to further erode the Constitution and the power of checks and balances in government. Obama argued that the UN mandate gave him the right to bombard Libya, however the mandate has nothing to do with the fact that such an action was unconstitutional [3] as the power to declare war in held solely by Congress, not to mention the fact that it violated the War Powers Act. In carrying out this action, Obama did even more to expand the imperial presidency and showed his blatant hypocrisy as in 2007 he clearly stated that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” [4] (emphasis added) However, in later months he would take this disregard of the Constitution to the extreme.

Just two months ago, Obama authorized the assassination of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. While al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, he was still a US citizen at the time of his death [5] and thus he still had rights as a citizen, specifically the right due process. This never occurred with al-Awlaki. Due to al-Awlaki’s assassination, it sets a legal precedent which allows the current and future Presidents to assassinate US citizens and withhold damning evidence- if there even is any- from the public under the guise of “national security.”

Today, we see due to the brutal crackdown of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Oakland, New York, and most recently Los Angeles, that Americans are being denied their First and Third amendment rights. Mayors are sending the message that if one decides to pose a serious challenge to the status quo, they will be violently crushed.

The Constitution is dead and with it the beliefs and ideals America was founded on have also passed away. The most terrifying occurrence, however, is that Americans are seeing their freedoms eroded are still in denial that a police state is slowly, but surely on its way.

Notes

1: http://www.scn.org/ccapa/pa-vs-const.html
2: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/25/senate-moves-patriot-act-extension/
3: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/24/obama_s_unconstitutional_war?page=full
4: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/CandidateQA/ObamaQA/
5: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen

Source.

Free Republic – The controversial PROTECT IP Act unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee today. When the PROTECT IP Act becomes law U.S. authorities and copyright holders will have the power to seize domains, block websites and censor search engines to prevent copyright infringements. Introduced just two weeks ago, the bill now heads over to the Senate for further consideration and another vote.

The U.S. Government continues to back legislation that opens the door to unprecedented Internet censorship.

Two weeks ago a group of U.S. senators proposed legislation to make it easier to crack down on so-called rogue websites, and today the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously approved the bill.

When the PROTECT IP Act becomes law the authorities can legitimately seize any domain name they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. All that’s required to do so is a preliminary order from the court. But that’s just the start, the bill in fact provides a broad range of censorship tools.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to remove the website from its search results, order ISPs to block the website, and order ad-networks and payment processors to stop providing services to the website in question.

Backers of the bill argue that the PROTECT IP Act is needed as an extension of the already controversial domain seizures. As reported previously, it is now relatively easy for a seized website to continue operating under a new non-US based domain name.

Not everyone agrees with this stance. Yesterday several Internet giants including Google, Yahoo, eBay and American Express asked the Senate Committee not to adopt the bill, warning it would “undoubtedly inhibit innovation and economic growth.”

However, the concerns raised by the companies did not affect the vote today.

“Today the Judiciary Committee took an important step in protecting online intellectual property rights. The Internet is not a lawless free-for-all where anything goes,” commented Senator Orrin Hatch. “The Constitution protects both property and speech, both online and off.”

“The PROTECT IP Act targets the most egregious actors, and is an important first step to putting a stop to online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods,” Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said commenting on the importance of the bill.

“Both law enforcement and rights holders are currently limited in the remedies available to combat websites dedicated to offering infringing content and products. These rogue websites are often foreign-owned and operated, or reside at domain names that are not registered through a U.S.-based registry or registrar,” Leahy added.

Similar comments were made by the other Committee members and the various entertainment industry lobby groups.

For Hollywood and the major record labels the PROTECT IP Act is the legislation they have dreamed of for a long time. It allows for copyright holders to obtain a court orders to seize a domain, or prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement. All without due process.

The PROTECT IP Act will now move on to the Senate where it’s expected to be opposed by Senator Ron Wyden, who also stopped the bill’s predecessor COICA, fearing it would stifle free speech. Whether it will be enough to prevent the legislation from becoming law has yet to be seen.

Antiwar – 600 days after the March 21 informing of Congress of the attack, President Barack Obama has missed his legal deadline to obtain Congressional approval for the Libyan War. NATO insists the war will continue, but under US law, it is now completely illegal.

The administration was perfectly aware of the requirement to obtain such approval under the War Powers Act of 1973, even using the act as justification for their lack of authorization during the 60 day grace period. Despite this, no authorization was even sought until late Friday afternoon, literally hours before the deadline slipped.

Which of course meant Congress had no time to even consider holding a vote on the conflict. An successful authorization vote is the actual requirement of the law, not simply a last second request for one.

The law was an attempt to settle what many presidents at the time saw as a loophole in the Constitutional requirement for Congress to declare all wars – granting only a short grace period for conflicts of any size so presidents could no longer claim a fight was too small to be a real war.

And indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates brought this age-old claim out early this week, claiming the Libya War was technically just a “limited kinetic action.” Unfortunately for him and the rest of the administration, the act provides no exemption for such an “action.” Whether war, kinetic action, or any other term is applied, there is one label that fits quite neatly – federal crime.

60 per day
1,800 per month
21,600 per year
216,000 per decade
2,160,000 every 100 years

A call is mounting in Russia to introduce chemical castration for pedophiles. Activists say the current laws are slack and allow criminals to re-offend. But there are those who believe castration is far from a quick fix to such a complex problem. Elvina is a mother of three. Last summer, her four-year-old daughter was raped. Once Elvina learned what happened, she found the man responsible — and beat him to death. “Now, looking back, I can only say that I just wanted to be sure that this animal was punished and would never again do such a terrible thing as he did to my little girl,” Elvina told RT. Sadly, Elvina’s case is not an isolated one in Russia. In a country where 70 per cent of pedophiles are paroled, with the opportunity to re-offend, “vigilante justice” is often used as an alternative to a court of law.

Yet nobody asks about the cause.

Nobody asks about the source of the problem.

And definitely nobody talks about the victims and what they become as a result of the abuse…

False Rape Society – Currently, rape law adheres to a contract law standard of consent, where consent may manifested in any way that it actually occurs. In matters of romance, people typically toss formalities to the winds and generally express consent in body language, smiles, nods, caresses, and in a thousand other ways that wouldn’t be appropriate in a commercial setting. There are, in fact, an infinite variety of ways people signal consent. Many, perhaps most, couples establish routines where unspoken conduct cues responses in a willing a partner.

A law that recognizes that consent may be evidenced in whatever ways parties actually manifest it can’t possibly be unfair, right?

Well, wrong.  Criminal law professor and feminist Michele Alexandre wants to junk all of that and severely limit the way consent may be legally manifested. She insists that the contract theory of consent treats women’s bodies as goods and proposes to change criminal law so that all the non-verbal manifestations of assent are invalid to show legal consent. Specifically, “express consent entails verbal or written assent that leaves no doubt as to the victim’s agreement to the sexual interaction. . . .” (The other-worldly reference to “written assent” is a dead giveaway that this professor is operating in a different universe than the typical bedroom where real couples are getting it on.)

She would make the sex act a presumed crime whenever a woman cries rape. The burden would be on the defendant to prove “that express and present consent was explicitly obtained at the time of the actual sexual interaction, not before or after . . . .” Only if the defendant is able to establish “express, present, and uncontroverted consent to the sexual interaction at issue” does the burden shift to the prosecution to prove withdrawal of consent, and “withdrawal of consent can happen at any time during the sexual interaction.”  (The latter point about withdrawal is not objectionable under the contract law theory of consent.)

In this professor’s world, past sexual behavior –  those routines a couple has established over the course of months or years, that private and unspoken language they’ve developed – none of it may be cited as evidence of present consent. Sex that occurs as a result of such flawed consent is rape.

See M. Alexandre, ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and Rape Law: Revising the Contractual Concept of Consent & Ensuring an Unbiased Application of ‘Reasonable Doubt’ When the Victim is Non-Traditional, 17 American Univ. Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 1, 41, 55-56 (2009).

Presumably, the jury would have to be instructed that even if they find there was consent — a real, honest-to-goodness agreement to have sex — if such consent wasn’t manifested in the “correct,” narrowly prescribed manner outlined here, then there was nolegal consent. It was rape.

If the goal is to establish certainty about whether the woman consents to the sex act, there already exists a sure-fire way to insure that the male understands whether she consents: she can say “no.”  Uttering “no” means there is no consent. Before or during the act – ”no” means “proceed no further.” Yet, for unfathomable reasons, in the past few years there’s been a movement to insist that uttering that two-letter word puts too much burden on the woman.

So what good would this law accomplish?  None. The proposed new law would force innocent men and boys to testify at trial, contrary to the Sixth Amendment’s prohibition, because the sex act would be a presumed crime if a woman cried rape; the only way to rebut that presumption would be for the man or boy to testify.

Real rapists would do what they’ve always done: lie. Only now, they’d claim consent was obtained in the new, narrowly prescribed way even though it wasn’t.

Women in divorce and custody battles would have a powerful new weapon in their arsenals to hold over their ex-husbands’ heads.

Troubled college girls would have even more power to get attention or revenge.

Men and boys would be punished by ex-mates they’ve pissed off by having rape claims lodged against them because, even though there was actual consent, the guys failed to obtain consent in the new, correct manner.

And most couples in a healthy relationship would ignore the new law altogether.  But if the couple ignored the new law, only the male would do so at his peril.

Press TV – Those who think that Europe is a “beacon of freedom” and “heaven of liberty” should give themselves an opportunity to reconsider what they had simplistically believed for so long.

Tens of people, including high-ranking academicians and authors from various nationalities who simply dared question the veracity of Holocaust accounts as described by the Jewish and Zionist historians, are spending their life in the underground jails and prisons of the European countries which we are conventionally told to know as beacons of freedom and heavens of democracy.

There are many people around the world who have come to the conclusion that “political prisoner” is an unknown and strange phenomenon in the Western world. They have credulously believed that West gives them the unconditional freedom of speech and action they want and allows them to express whatever they think.

The Western world, through its powerful state-owned mouthpieces, has made intense efforts to institutionalize this notion that absolute freedom and unconditional democracy “must” be sought in the West because it’s impossible to realize and implement freedom and democracy in the rest of the world.

But has anybody ever challenged this straw man argument? There’s hard evidence which demonstrates that the West, including the United States and its European allies, give the least importance to freedom and democracy. They advertise and propagandize that freedom and democracy are the intrinsic values which they first exported to the rest of the world, while the reality behind the scenes is that they only export their distorted and falsified democracy when they want to destabilize the position of the so-called villains, such as the independent nations which don’t want to remain under the domination and pressure of them.

One of the red lines of the European nations which few people dare cross is Holocaust, which is described to be a historical event which claimed the lives of six million Jews. Regardless of the reliability and truthfulness of the claim that the Nazi regime of Germany massacred six million Jews during the World War II, what should be noted by astute and wise people is that even conducting a scientific research on the authenticity of Holocaust is forbidden in the European countries and those who boldly cross this red line will be punished severely.

Aside from the unlawfulness of conducting research on Holocaust, Western media outlets, including the independent media which want to go in a direction which is different from the conventional and traditional trajectory of the mainstream media, put a self-imposed prohibition on themselves with regards to Holocaust and refrain from publishing sensitive materials which may cause problems for them when renewing their publication license as a result of questioning the Holocaust.

You can try! It’s free. Write a piece about Holocaust and put a simple sentence in it, “Perhaps the number of the Jews who were killed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War is exaggerated,” and you will receive a response by the frustrated, flabbergasted editor shortly, “We are unable to publish this article due to some technical issues.”

Holocaust is the forbidden zone of the Europe. Several people have so far sacrificed their liberty in order to reveal the concealed and obscured realities of what is claimed to be the massacre of Jews by the Nazi regime.

One of these people is Dr. Fredrick Toben, a graduate of Oxford’s Exeter College and a German-born Australian philosopher, sociologist and author. For his critical views regarding Holocaust and the researches which he conducted, Fredrick Toben has been so far imprisoned five times in five different countries.

Toben founded Adelaide Institute in 1994. This institute was aimed at investigating issues which the mainstream media and research organizations are afraid of questioning. Toben was tried for “offending the memory of the dead” in Germany in 1999 and sentenced to seven months in prison.

In April 2009, Toben was found guilty of contempt of court for breaching a court order to refrain from publishing materials which “questions the 6 million deaths, existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and vilifies Jewish people.”

Toben who had spent 11 months in an Austrian prison for the same crime — denying the Holocaust — was arrested by the London Heathrow Airport’s Metropolitan Police extradition unit using an EU arrest warrant issued by the German authorities.

In a disclaimer posted on his website, Dr. Toben wrote following his release by the German priso, “If you wish to begin to doubt the Holocaust-Shoah narrative, you must be prepared for personal sacrifice, must be prepared for marriage and family break-up, loss of career, and go to prison.”

Dr. Toben shared the destiny of several Holocaust deniers who were brutally sent to prisons and tortured for simply questioning the genuineness of a “historical event” which the Zionists claim to have taken place without any doubt.

Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel and Sylvia Stolz in Germany; Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium; and Wolfgang Frohlich and Gerd Honsik in Austria were among the people who were sent to European prisons for denying or questioning the Holocaust.

Anyway, the liberal West, which always blames the independent nations for the “violation of human rights” and “suppression” of political activists, has a black record when it comes to the freedom of expression and democracy. They only want to use democracy as a leverage to harass the countries with which they are at odds; otherwise, the real essence of their democracy people such as Fredrick Toben have experienced.

KZ/AKM