Tutu: Gaza blockade illegal
05.29.08 (8:23 am) [edit]Tutu: Gaza blockade illegal GAZA (Agencies) UN envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu yesterday called the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip illegal and urged Palestinian militants to halt cross-border rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory. Tutu said the blockade was “a siege” and a “gross violation to Human Rights”, echoing rights groups which accuse Israel of collective punishment. Former US President Jimmy Carter last month referred to the blockade as an atrocity. Tutu, in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, said he was also sympathetic to “the people of Sderot those who suffer from the Qassam rockets, we care about them too”, a reference to a southern Israeli town frequently targeted by Gaza militants. The South African cleric, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 over his non-violent struggle against apartheid, heads a UN fact-finding commission investigating the deaths of 19 Palestinians in a 2006 Israeli artillery attack. Israel has said a technical problem caused shells to mistakenly hit two homes in an area used by militants to fire rockets at the Jewish state. The investigative team will present a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Israel, which regards the group as biased against it, denied Tutu a visa, forcing him to cross into the Gaza Strip through Egypt. Israel tightened its restrictions at Gaza border crossings after Hamas took over the territory last June. Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza Strip killed two Hamas fighters during a military raid yesterday, the resistance group said. Israeli troops have been operating in the area since Monday to try to halt Palestinian fighters from firing rockets into nearby Israeli army bases and communities. The airstrike also wounded four fighters who were firing mortars at Israeli forces, Hamas said. An earlier Israeli hit wounded four militants from Islamic Jihad, a smaller resistance group. The army confirmed both airstrikes, saying it was targeting fighters firing mortar shells. The latest violence undermines faltering Egyptian efforts to mediate a ceasefire between Palestinian resistances and Israel in the Gaza Strip. Israel and Hamas have each refused to accept the other’s conditions for calm.
US academic deported and banned for criticising Israel
05.29.08 (8:18 am) [edit]Norman Finkelstein, the controversial Jewish American academic and fierce critic of Israel, has been deported from the country and banned from the Jewish state for 10 years, it emerged yesterday. Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has accused Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians, was detained by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, when he landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Friday. Shin Bet interrogated him for around 24 hours about his contact with the Lebanese Islamic militia, Hizbullah, when he travelled to Lebanon earlier this year and expressed solidarity with the group which waged war against Israel in 2006. He was also accused of having contact with al-Qaida. But Finkelstein rejected the accusations, saying he had travelled to Israel to visit an old friend. "I did my best to provide absolutely candid and comprehensive answers to all the questions put to me," he told an Israeli newspaper in an email exchange. "I am confident that I have nothing to hide. Apart from my political views, and the supporting scholarship, there isn't much more to say for myself: alas, no suicide missions or secret rendezvous with terrorist organisations. I've always supported a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. I'm not an enemy of Israel." Finkelstein is one of several scholars rejected by Israel in the increasingly bitter divide in academic circles, between those who support and those who criticise its treatment of Palestinians. Last year, Israel's most contentious "new historian", Ilan Pappe, left his job as senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa after he endorsed the international academic boycott of Israeli institutions, provoking the university president to call for his resignation. Finkelstein was also refused tenure last year at Chicago's DePaul University for attacking several staunch Israel supporters and academics such as Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deportation of Finkelstein was an assault on free speech. "The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime," said the association's lawyer, Oded Peler. "A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate." Finkelstein said he was held in a cell and encountered "several unpleasant moments with the guards" and that eventually he borrowed the mobile phone of another detainee and called a friend who in turn called a lawyer. Although entitled to appeal against the entry ban, Finkelstein said he would not contest it.
VIDEO: Jerusalem camera catches brutal attack by Jewish teens on Arab youths
05.29.08 (8:16 am) [edit]Dozens of Jewish teens were caught on camera outside a Jerusalem mall carrying out a brutal attack on two Arab youths on Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month. Some two weeks ago, indictments were filed against 11 youths, eight of them minors, suspected of having perpetrated the attack in the Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood. According to the indictment, the boys responded to a message on the ICQ instant messaging internet program calling for "Jewish blood" to "put an end to Arabs running around the Pisga." According to the indictment, the Jewish teens gathered outside the local shopping center armed with knives, sticks and bats and attacked two Arab teens, aged 16 and 18, from the nearby Shuafat refugee camp. One of the Arab youths, Ahmed Abu Camal, was stabbed in the back, but managed to escape. His friend was described by one of the suspects during questioning as a "trampoline and a punching bag." The suspect recounted how "everyone jumped, kicked and stepped on him." In the video footage, a group of teens can be seen waiting outside the shopping mall. At around 11 P.M. the two victims can be seen walking past the group. After a short dialogue, the video shows one of the victims being hurled into the street, pushed toward the railing and then viciously attacked. In his testimony, the victim told police officers that "a group of children, numbering more than 80, pounced on us and they had bats and knives in their hands and they attacked us. All I remember now is that I passed out and woke up in the hospital." The video shows Abu Camal fleeing the scene chased by a number of Jewish teens. In a recent conversation, he said "when I passed by the entrance there was a large crowd of young men who just stood there while I walked between them on the shoulder of the street. I heard them talking among themselves and they said something like 'are those them? Are they them?' and then someone stuck a knife in my back and knocked me down and continued to beat me. One guy bit my ear. I don't know how I managed to get up, but I got up and ran away." The video footage shows the Jewish teens fleeing the area after a car passes by. The unconscious Arab teen can be seen left on the side of the road until he is taken away by what appears to be shopping mall security staff. On Sunday, the Supreme Court decided to release all the suspects that remained in custody to house arrest. Attorney Yehuda Shushan, who represented three of the suspects, said "there is no doubt that this incident must be dealt with from an educational point of view, but at the same time each suspect should be judged according to his individual level of involvement. It is doubtful that those who were present but did nothing should be charged, otherwise 200 indictments should be filed against each child that was at the scene."
MK Eldad: Anyone ceding Israeli territory should be sentenced to death
05.29.08 (8:13 am) [edit]MK Arieh Eldad (National Union-National Religious Party) said Monday that "anyone who gives away Israeli territory, under Israel's law, deserves the death penalty." Eldad spoke after Israel and Syria announced last week that Jerusalem and Damascus had renewed indirect peace talks via Turkey, which sparked speculations that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised Syria an Israeli pullout from the Golan Heights in the run-up to the announcement. Eldad, speaking at the first meeting of the Golan Lobby at the Knesset Monday, quoted the chapter of the penal code applying to treason, saying "he who purposefully causes any territory to cease being under Israel's sovereignty or to be under the sovereignty of a foreign country, or any act that results in this, must be sentenced to death or life imprisonment." Advertisement Eldad went on to say that the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War, was a part of Israel, and anyone who intends to give any part of it away must be put to death. Fellow National Union-National Religious Party member MK Effie Eitam responded to Eldad's comments, saying that the remark could be interpreted as incitement to act against the prime minister. Eldad explained that he intended only to act within the confines of the justice system. Acting coalition leader MK Yoel Hasson said in response that Eldad is a provocateur of the basest variety, and that he had turned into an unacceptable person. Meretz MK Ran Cohen submitted an official incitement complaint against Eldad to Attorney General Menachem Mzuz. According to Cohen, Eldad's remarks were reminiscent of the days leading up to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, which must never again be heard. The Prime Minister's Bureau issued an official response, saying "the man and the remark are not worthy of a response."
Big Brother Is Watching You...
05.29.08 (8:09 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend Big Brother Is Watching You... ...but luckily he's overstretched and has underestimated the job of keeping track of us all By Phil Hendren 27/05/08 "The Times" -- 22/05/08 - -The Government is planning to introduce a giant database that will hold the details of every phone call we have made, every e-mail we have sent and every webpage we have visited in the past 12 months. This is needed to fight crime and terrorism, the Government claims. The Orwellian nature of this proposal cannot be overstated. However, there is one saving grace for people who fear for their civil liberties. The probability of the project ever seeing the light of day is close to zero. This proposal - like so many grandiose government IT schemes before it - is technologically unfeasible. The current levels of traffic on the internet alone (including e-mail) would require storage volumes of astronomical proportions - and internet use by the public is still growing rapidly. Meanwhile, the necessary processing capabilities to handle such a relentless torrent of information do not bear thinking about. Modern computer processors are fast, but writing data to disks will always be a serious bottleneck. Take a quick sample from the London Internet Exchange, the UK's hub and one of world's largest points at which each ISP exchanges traffic. Yearly LINX carries at the very least 365 petabytes of data - that is the equivalent of the contents of about 26 million iPod Nanos that have the capacity to hold nearly 2,000 songs each. There is no commercial technology that is capable of writing at those kinds of speeds. It's not just writing that would be problematic, but the reading of the data too. It would be immensely difficult to pinpoint in such a massive database an e-mail sent by a particular person at a particular time. It's all too familiar in large-scale government projects that the technological expectations of civil servants gallop far ahead of reality. The Ministry of Defence's requirements for the Nimrod radar project was a classic example of overspecification. The result was a system that was unable to process data because the technology Whitehall assumed would exist in the future, when the planes would finally take to the skies, simply never materialised. The planes, after hundreds of millions were spent, had to revert to the traditional Awacs system instead. The men who gave us the new NHS database, likewise, severely underestimated operational realities. The good news is that we will not be robbed of our privacy by this latest database because it will remain just a pipedream. We taxpayers will, however, be robbed of billions of pounds as the IT consultancies draw up their bids to design and deliver the undeliverable. Phil Hendren is a Unix systems administrator. He blogs at www.dizzythinks.net
Imagine This! - Super NAFTA
05.29.08 (8:08 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend America is in un-chartered waters Imagine This! - Super NAFTA Video 27/05/08 Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Are You A Coward Like Me?
05.29.08 (8:02 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend Are You A Coward Like Me? By Ibrahim Turner 27/05/08 "ICH" -- - From time to time I receive from my friends in the Middle East, horrific photographs of the atrocities perpetrated on the Palestinians by the IDF. (Israel Defence Force) Apparently these photographs are never ever distributed in the western media; they are in fact, censored. Additionally, any essays or discussions about the Israel/Palestinian situation also never see the light of day in the Western media. Why is that? There are on the Internet at least, some articles about the Israel Lobby, and even books and articles appear in the mainstream press, most notably the writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. And there is the book by the former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, with his book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which was fiercely attacked by the foot soldiers of the Israel Lobby. Witness also the vociferous ongoing war of words between Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, which has resulted in Professor Finkelstein not being offered tenure at the DePaul University. While I was checking the spelling of his name I came across this breaking news. BREAKING NEWS: "Israel Arrests Outspoken Academic Norman Finkelstein" (Democracy NOW! "And the American academic Norman Finkelstein has been arrested and ordered deported from Israel. Finkelstein arrived in Tel Aviv earlier today on his way to the Occupied Territories. He was immediately detained and told he is banned from Israel for ten years. He's expected to be deported tomorrow. Finkelstein is known as one of the most prominent academic critics of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He was detained by the Interior Ministry and Shin Bet.") NEW! 05.23.2008 So these people and many others, have stood up to the torrent of criticism directed at them from the Israel Lobby and their cohorts, even though the criticism is usually nothing to do with their message, but an attack on the messenger, denigrating the character, outright lies about the slightest error in their work, and so on. So I ask you, are you brave enough to take on the almost complete control of the media and public opinion that has grown up in the United States and also in Europe? And if you are so inclined, in what way? Writing articles on blogs and websites isn’t very brave really; it never has a chance of getting into the mainstream press or on radio and TV. Of course there are a few radio and TV stations that do publish such things, but are they largely preaching to the choir? I do get email alerts and messages to my inbox, from quite a few of these, and of course welcome the information. But what do I do with it? And I sometimes get photographs of things happening in Gaza and the West Bank, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are heartbreaking and bring tears to my eyes. But what do I do with them? Very often the sender requests that I forward the photographs to as many people as possible. I hesitate to forward them to my friends because although my friends may be, in some ways quite open, my hesitation either stems from my cowardice in not standing up for what I profess to believe in, human rights, etc and rationalizing that perhaps they are too busy, are already working to help people in other ways. I’m sure that face to face, my friends would probably agree with me about these things happening in Gaza and the West Bank, Iraq and so on, but would they do anything about it? I’m not sure. This brings me to the realization that most people abhor such things but would prefer not to be disturbed from their comfortable lives, especially as they get older. It always seems to be the young that go on marches and protests. That’s not to say there are no older people in those marches, far from it. But by and large people have other personal worries, like keeping their jobs, making mortgage payments and bringing up their kids, the numbers in the protests speak for themselves. And then there is the recent history of such protests. I was in Istanbul at the time, but in England there was the largest protest against the war in Iraq just before Tony Blair and George Bush gave the orders to invade. What effect did that protest have? Nada, zilch, nowt. This lack of power leads to despair for many people and they give up. Quite often in the comments of progressive sites people actually say, we are preaching the choir and unless we get out there on the streets, nothing will change. Others try to counter this despair by enthusiastically advocating meet up groups, as in the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’, and although that is remarkable and commendable, will that lead to Ron Paul being elected as the next President of the United States. The best one can say is that the jury is still out on that one. So while there are plenty of advocates for change both in the United States and Europe as well as in Israel, when you stand back and look at it, there is no communication between the different groups and no organization. They all seem to be waiting for the White Knight in shining armour to come and rescue them all and perhaps also with the Palestinians. But my contention is that there will not be a White Knight and the ‘Age of Aquarius’ is characterized by group co-operation. The character of the preceding age of Pisces was the cult of the individual. Anyone who knows the astrological signs knows that the sign of Pisces is the last of the twelve signs and that there is a great new beginning with the start of the next cycle. Part of the despair felt by people who advocate change is based on the seemingly large intractable forces involved. One elite group sends its working class cannon fodder to fight the working class cannon fodder of the elites of another group or nation. How can one individual or small group of people change anything in that scenario? Witness the many dual nationality Neocons who have infiltrated the United States government and their ideology of perpetual war, for the sake of Israel, marrying Israel’s interests with the USA’s interests in the area, and the complete complicity of the ruling class of America to standing by Israel, right or wrong. The common people seem to have no chance of overturning this situation. Yet these people are just that, people, who have banded together to achieve their goals, and very successfully. The forces and people who appose this ideology are successfully marginalized, ridiculed and nullified because of the complete take over of the means of communication, the mainstream press, radio and TV. The only medium left to the others is the Internet, and the Pentagon has indicated that it would like to shut it down. And on the Internet there are many trolls, publishing disinformation and distractions, some of them very clever, but most are easily spotted and ignored. There are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to see the Zionist regime disappear from the pages of time, as Ahmadinejad said, and who is consistently misquoted, and I’m sure you all know the phrase that is repeated time and again. But are you going to stand up for justice and human rights in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere? Will you forward articles and photographs that are sent to you? Will you add your pen to others in advocating change in America, Europe and Israel? Everyone reading this should, at the very least, contemplate their own complacency and cowardice in the face of the undoubted strong entrenched groups that want to keep you in their control, devoid of real information, and the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. Will you reach out to others of like mind? Will you put your pet project aside for the greater good? Will you agree with what I have written and then go on to the next thing? When will you make a stand and act like Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter and many others, taking the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and return again and again to the fray, the greater jihad of struggling with your weaknesses? From today, with my limited resources and indifferent health, I will not despair, will not roll over and play dead, hoping to avoid the fight that we must all undertake – to rid the world of tyrants and not allow ourselves to be corrupted by their ideology. Ibrahim Turner - If you wish to see the photographs that were sent to me send me your email address and I will forward them. inkyfingers007@hotmail.com
The Holocaust Industry
05.29.08 (7:59 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend The Holocaust Industry Video Norman Finkelstein talks about his book, The Holocaust Industry, and on the on the Israel Palestine Conflict on CSpan Norman Finkelstein CSpan on the Israel Palestine Conflict March 18th 2004 Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals
05.27.08 (2:51 pm) [edit]The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports. The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted that the actions of the Bush administration—the launching of wars of aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture—constitute war crimes under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding international statutes and treaties. To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have engendered within the US government and America’s ruling elite as a whole. The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up. There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG’s report continues to this day. “There’s nothing new here,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained in the report as “pretty vague.” Pretty vague? One can’t help but wonder what the spokesman would consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at Guantánamo. In one section, the report states: “[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at some point during the interrogation, the military officer ‘put water down’ a seated detainee’s throat. He said he guessed that the purpose of the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was drowning, so that he would provide the information that the interrogator wanted. [The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging and spitting out water. He said that the detainee appeared to be uncomfortable, and assumed that he had trouble breathing.” Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned over to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002: “He was left alone in a cold room known as ‘the freezer,’ where guards would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him... “He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by means of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music, forced intake of water, and forced standing. “He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator; “Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual statements to him; “Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten.” In addition, the document says, he was “led to believe he was going to be executed, and urinated on himself,” and was told that his mother and family would be detained and harmed. Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and abuse against detainees. In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances of beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the use of extreme temperatures in order to “break the detainees’ resolve to resist cooperating” and 50 agents reporting the use of extended isolation to “wear down a detainee’s resistance.” In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged shackling in a standing position. The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the iceberg. They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the fall of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty. First taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then transferred to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded that Kurnaz had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until the middle of 2006 and released only because of pressure from the German government. Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week. “I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster,” he said. He told how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his wrists for hours and subjected to the ‘water treatment,’ in which his head was stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the stomach, forcing him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department Inspector General’s report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last form of torture did not constitute “waterboarding,” but did represent “an effort to intimidate the detainees and increase their feelings of helplessness.”) “I know others have died from this kind of treatment,” said Kurnaz. “I suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times.” “There was no law in Guantánamo,” Kurnaz concluded. “I didn’t think this could happen in the 21st century.... I could never have imagined that this place was created by the United States.” The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and the CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An estimated 27,000 people are being held without charges, much less trials, many of them simply having disappeared into Washington’s global gulag. Some are held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons run jointly by the CIA and regimes to which it “outsources” detainees, like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, where other, cruder forms of torture—being buried alive, given electric shocks or slashed with scalpels—are employed. The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light four years ago—naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and sexual humiliation by US guards—were no aberration. The methods described in the report—forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in interrogations, chaining detainees in “stress” positions, leading them around on dog leashes, draping them in women’s underwear—were identical to those officially blamed on a “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib. Sadistic torture “orchestrated” from the White House The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is evidence that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon those detained by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top. Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials on the so-called Principals’ Committee—Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice—conducted detailed discussions on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, according to ABC, “were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Bush subsequently told ABC that he was “aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials advised the White House National Security Council of their concern that the practices witnessed by the agents were “gravely damaging ... the rule of law” at Guantánamo. In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied, thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up. The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant protests or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for that matter from the party’s presidential contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue in their campaigns. The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, “What the FBI agents saw,” which laid out the details of the report and stated that it “shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.” The paper’s conclusion: “The Democrats must press for full disclosure” through hearings to uncover “the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions.” This, they tell their readers, “is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.” Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism. The extent of the Bush administration’s outright criminality has been thoroughly exposed over the course of several years. The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war crimes—just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution of a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington and Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted the pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted as well, together with those military and intelligence officials who directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other CIA and military camps and prisons. The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such a reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice president is “off the table.” They have no interest in pursuing the administration on the issue of torture because they themselves are complicit, with Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having been briefed extensively on the criminal methods employed at Guantánamo, which they approved and concealed from the American people. On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a policy of global militarism and aggression—carried out under the mantle of a “global war on terrorism”—which is directed at using armed force to further the interests of America’s ruling oligarchy. It is this criminal strategy—resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi lives—that has given rise to the crime of torture itself. Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating the conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the dock as war criminals. Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against political opposition within the US itself and politically educating the American people.
Palestinians reject Israeli offer to hand over 91.5% of W. Bank
05.27.08 (2:47 pm) [edit]Palestinian officials close to peace talks said Sunday that Israel has offered a West Bank withdrawal map that leaves about 8.5 percent of the territory in Israeli hands, less than a previous plan but still more than the Palestinians are ready to accept. Also Sunday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted as telling backers that the negotiations have achieved no progress since they were restarted last November with a pledge to U.S. President George W. Bush to try for a full peace treaty by the end of the year. The Palestinian officials said Israel presented its new map three days ago in a negotiating session. The last map Israel offered had 12 percent of the West Bank remaining in Israel. Israel wants to keep West Bank land with its main settlement blocs, offering land inside Israel in exchange. The land would be between Hebron in the southern West Bank and Gaza - at least part of a route through Israel to link the two territories. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are being conducted behind closed doors, said Palestinians were ready to trade only 1.8 percent of the West Bank for Israeli land. Israeli officials refused to comment. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that progress has been made in several areas, but he refused to give details out of concern for harming the negotiations. The differences in evaluations have a wide range of possible explanations. Abbas needs to show quick concrete results from the talks to persuade his skeptical people that the negotiations are worthwhile - but he complained that while the talks drag on, Israel continues construction in its West Bank settlements and maintains its network of security roadblocks and checkpoints that have choked off economic and social life there. On the Israeli side, Olmert needs success to shore up his sagging domestic popularity, stung by his inconclusive war in Lebanon in 2006 and harmed further by a string of corruption cases. He was interrogated in the latest one on Friday. Olmert insists that at least a declaration of principles is attainable by the target date. One of the Palestinian officials said the 8.5 percent figure of West Bank land Israel would retain with its new map does not include east Jerusalem, where Israel has built a string of Jewish neighborhoods it intends to keep. Israel wants to put off dealing with Jerusalem, possibly the touchiest issue on the table, until the end of the process. Israel's previous proposal to keep 12 percent did not include east Jerusalem, either. Abbas indicated skepticism about the prospects of the renewed talks. Nothing has been achieved in the negotiations with Israel yet, Abbas told a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, according to a report Sunday in the Fatah-associated al-Ayyam daily and confirmed by meeting participants. "Domestic issues in both Israel and the U.S. are diverting attention from peacemaking," Abbas told Fatah leaders. "I fear the (corruption) probe against Olmert and the American preoccupation with the (presidential) elections will negatively affect the negotiations," Abbas said, according to a member of the council, Salah Taameri
Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons
05.27.08 (2:42 pm) [edit]Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions. His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern. Carter, whose presidency was dominated by the 444-day siege in which Iran held 52 American diplomats hostage, said "my advice to the US would be to start talking to Iran now" to persuade it to drop its nuclear work. But he cited Israel's nuclear arsenal - and those of the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - in arguing that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop, in secret, many weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
Carter Urges 'Supine' Europe To Break With US Over Gaza Blockade
05.27.08 (2:38 pm) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend Carter Urges 'Supine' Europe To Break With US Over Gaza Blockade Ex-president says EU is colluding in a human rights crime By Jonathan Steele and Jonathan Freedland 26/05/08 "The Guardian" -- Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU's position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as "supine" and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as "embarrassing". Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: "Why not? They're not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US." The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia - the so-called Quartet - after the organisation's election victory in 2006, was "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth," since it meant the "imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees". "Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing," Carter said. He called on the EU to reassess its stance if Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. "Let the Europeans lift the embargo and say we will protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, and even send observers to Rafah gate [Gaza's crossing into Egypt] to ensure the Palestinians don't violate it." Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory. Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week. Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said. While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said. Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers. "The Quartet's final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed," he said. Earlier, Carter, told Sky News that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle to become Democratic presidential candidate after the last round of primaries in early June. Like many superdelegates, he has yet to declare his support for either Clinton or Barack Obama, but he suggested the outcome of the race was a foregone conclusion. "I think that a lot of us superdelegates will make a decision ... quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3," he said. "I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up." Last night, before a packed crowd at Hay, Carter spoke of his "horror" at America's involvement in torturing prisoners, saying he wanted the next US president to promise never to do so again. He left an intriguing hint that George Bush might even face prosecution on war crimes charges once he left office. When pressed by Philippe Sands QC on Bush's recent admission that he had authorised interrogation procedures widely seen as amounting to torture, Carter replied that he was sure Bush would be able to live a peaceful, "productive life - in our country". Sands, an international legal expert, said afterwards that he understood that to be "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely".
A Picture Worth A Thousand Words
05.26.08 (11:19 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend A Picture Worth A Thousand Words Newspaper Criticized For Publishing Photo By Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist 07/05/08 "Hearst Newspapers" -- -- WASHINGTON -- Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the true horrors of this war. Click here to find out more! Neither side is immune from the killing of Iraqi civilians. But Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting death and pain on the innocent. The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained about the photo, while a few readers praised the Post for publishing the stark picture on page one. Some mothers said they were offended that their children might see the picture, though one wonders whether their youngsters watch television and play with violent videos in a pretend world. From the start of the unprovoked U.S. “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, the government tried to bar the news media from photographing flag-draped coffins of American soldiers returning from Iraq. A Freedom of Information lawsuit forced the government to release pictures of returning coffins. Howell said some readers felt the photo of the Iraqi boy was “an anti-war statement; some thought it was in poor taste.” Well, so is war. Howell said her boss, Executive Editor Len Downie, “is cautious about such photos.” “We have seldom been able to show the human impact of the fighting on Iraqis,” Downie was quoted as saying. “We decided this was a rare instance in which we had a powerful image with which to do so.” It’s unclear to me why this was deemed to be “rare.” After five years of war, there is finally one photo that is supposed to say it all? Howell said she checked hundreds of U.S. front pages on the Internet but saw the AP photo nowhere else. This makes me wonder why the media have shied away from telling the story about Iraqi civilian casualties. News people and editors were more courageous during the Vietnam War. What are they afraid of now? Who can forget the shocking picture of the little Vietnamese girl running down a road, aflame from a napalm attack? And who can forget the picture of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan putting a gun to the temple of a young member of the Viet Cong and executing him on a Saigon street? I don’t remember any American outcry against the press for showing the horror of war when these photographs were published. Were we braver then? Or maybe more conscience stricken? Of course, the Pentagon did not enjoy such images coming out of Saigon in that era. Most Americans found them appalling, as further evidence of our misbegotten venture in Vietnam. Americans rallied to the streets in protest and eventually persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to give up his dreams of reelection in 1968. Some Americans believe the media were to blame for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Nonsense. Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, especially after the 1968 Tet offensive and the request by Army Gen. William Westmoreland for 200,000 more troops, in addition to the 500,000 already in Vietnam. The Pentagon made a command decision after the Vietnam War to get better control of the dissemination of information in future wars. This led then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to create an office of disinformation at the start of the Iraqi war. It was later disbanded after howls from the media. More recently we have seen the Pentagon’s propaganda efforts take the form of carefully coaching retired generals about how to spin the Iraq war when they appear on television as alleged military experts. The New York Times’ revelations about these pet generals have cast a pall over their reputations. Too often in this war, the news media seem to have tried to shield the public from the suffering this war has brought to Americans and Iraqis. It’s not the job of the media to protect the nation from the reality of war. Rather, it is up to the media to tell the people the truth. They can handle it. Helen Thomas can be reached at hthomas@hearstdc.com Copyright 2008 by Hearst Newspapers
State’s Creation Had Ugly Side
05.26.08 (11:13 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend State’s Creation Had Ugly Side Palestinian refugee problem cannot be ignored By Ehab Lotayef 07/05/08 "The Gazette" -- - Abou-Yasser was still hoping to return to his house in Tel-es-Safi when I met him in the Dehaishah refugee camp in the occupied West Bank in 2005. He still had the keys to a door that might not exist any more. He left that house fleeing Israeli occupation in 1948, and now lives under that same occupation but as a refugee. When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Abou-Yasser refused to flee again and become a double refugee. As he was telling me his story I was wondering, what kind of refugee is he now? In May of 1948, Abou-Yasser was in his late teens training in a British “police academy” in Bethlehem. The “cadets” were a mix of Jews and Arabs, Abou-Yasser told me. They studied together to become colleagues in the police force under the British mandate government of Palestine or in the new country that would be founded when the mandate ended. One morning, the Arab cadets arrived for class to find none of the Jews there. On the blackboard there was writing in Hebrew, which most of the Arab cadets couldn’t read, addressing the Jewish cadets. But Abou-Yasser had enough knowledge of Hebrew to translate what was written. “Rise up! The Jewish state is born,” it read. The state of Israel was declared. The Palestinians refused to accept it or the UN partition plan (which allocated approximately half the land of Palestine to a Jewish state when the Jewish population was about 30 per cent and owned less than six per cent of the land) upon which it was based. Soon after, the Jewish militias, which were better equipped and prepared than any Palestinian forces, surrounded Tel-es-Safi as they did many other Arab villages and towns. Outgunned, the villagers decided to surrender. Most of the villagers took whatever belongings they could carry, locked their doors and fled. The same was the case of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from hundreds of villages. Stories of the massacre of Deir-Yaseen, where more than 100 Palestinians — many of them women and children — were murdered by the Stern Jewish militia, made staying under occupation a risk most did not want to take. A few weeks ago, I had Passover dinner in Montreal. We Jews and Muslims of different ages and genders gathered together and followed the traditional Jewish Passover rituals remembering the plight of the Jews in my own native Egypt, and their escape from injustice thousands of years ago. But at a certain point our hosts deviated from tradition and read from the “Rabbis for Human Rights Pesach Seder Supplement,” which included questions that very closely touches Abou-Yasser’s hopes and right to return: “Is the vision of Israel as a democratic state and a Jewish state ultimately reconcilable?” “Can there be equality in some areas and not in others?” “What are some ways in which Israel can resolve the tensions between being a democratic state and a Jewish state?” As I reflected on the singing of Dayenu (It would have been enough for us), and how God’s bounties are so gratefully remembered by the Jewish people generations after the Exodus, I wondered when Abou-Yasser or his descedents will be able sing a song of thanks. The creation of Israel had an ugly side to it which shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored. It is the destruction of a people and the creation of the world’s largest refugee population and longest-lasting refugee crisis. Albert Einstein commented on these events, which are at the core of this problem, 60 years ago. In a letter he wrote on April 10, 1948 to the executive director of American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, in response to a request for a meeting, he wrote, “When the real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with these misled and criminal people.” Abou-Yasser, then soon to be at the receiving end of the actions of Einstein’s “terrorists,” was probably not seeing things as clearly as Einstein did. I don’t know if Abou-Yasser is still alive. Maybe it is too late for him to return to Tel-es-Safi anyway but his granddaughter, a child with an angelic face who I met in 2005 and whose photo with her innocent gaze hangs in my living room, has a lot to look forward to. I am hoping that, for her sake, the plight of the Palestinian refugees would be remembered while many cheer Israel’s 60th anniversary and that she, one day and in her own way, would sing, “If it would be only for rebuilding my ancestral home in Tel-es-Safi, Dayenu! If it would be only for seeing Tel-es-Safi with my own eyes, Dayenu!”
General Petraeus: Zionism’s Military Poodle
05.26.08 (11:06 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend General Petraeus: Zionism’s Military Poodle From Surge to Purge to Dirge By James Petras General Petraeus: “President Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders promised to end their support for the special groups but the nefarious activities of the Quds Force have continued.” Senator Joseph Lieberman: “Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?” General Petraeus: “It certainly is…That is correct.” General Petraeus testimony to the US Senate, April 8-9, 2008. “The Israeli flag is proudly displayed above the Sacred Ark alongside the American flag…”( in an orthodox synagogue in wealthy Georgetown, Washington DC. The entrance fee to the synagogue is $1000 for a single holiday.) “On each Sabbath the prayers include the benediction for the Israeli Jewish soldiers and the prayer for the welfare of the Israeli government and its officials. Many Jewish American Administration pray there. They not only don’t try to conceal their religious affiliation, but go to great lengths to demonstrate their Judaism since it may help their careers greatly. The enormous Jewish influence in Washington is not limited to the government. In the Washingtonian, medias a very significant part of the most important personages and of the presenters of the most popular programs on the TV are warm Jews…and let us not forget,in this context, the Jewish predominance in the Washingtonian academic institutions.” Avinoam Bar-Yosef (the Israeli daily newspaper) Ma’riv September 2, 1994 (translated by Israel Shahak) 05/05/08 ICH" -- - - When President Bush appointed General David Petraeus Commander (head) of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, his appointment was hailed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post as a brilliant decision: A general of impeccable academic and battlefield credentials and a warrior and counter-insurgency (terrorist) intellectual. The media and the President, the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and Congress, described his appointment as ‘America’s last best hope for salvation in Iraq’. Senator Hilary Clinton joined the chorus of pro-war politicians in praise and support of Petraeus’ ‘professionalism and war record’ in Northern Iraq. In contrast, Admiral William Fallon, his predecessor and former commander, had called Petraeus’ briefings ‘a piece of brown-nosing chicken shit’. In theory and strategy, in pursuit of defeating the Iraqi resistance, General Petraeus was a disastrous failure, an outcome predictable form the very nature of his appointment and his flawed wartime reputation. In the first instance Petraeus was a political appointment. He was one of the few high military officials who shared Bush and the Zioncons’ assessment that the ‘war could be won’. Petraeus argued that his experience in Northern Iraq were replicable throughout the rest of the country. Moreover Petraeus, unlike most military analysts, was willing to ignore the heavy costs of multiple prolonged tours of duty on US troops. Petraeus willingness to ignore the larger costs of prolonged military engagement in Iraq has weakened the capacity of the US to sustain its world-wide imperial interests. For Petraeus, sacrificing the overall cohesion and structure of the US military in Iraq, the global interests of the empire and the US domestic budget were worth securing Bush’s appointment as ‘Commander of the Forces in Iraq’. Shortly after taking office and in the face of massive domestic, international and Iraq demands for the withdrawal of US troops, Petraeus took the path dictated by the US and pro Israeli militarists in the Bush Administration and their powerful ‘Lobby’. He escalated the war, by calling up more troops, what he euphemistically referred to as ‘the surge’ – a massive call-up of 40,000 more mission-weary infantry and marines. An analysis and critique of the failure of military-driven imperialism and its militarily dangerous consequences requires an objective critical analysis of Petraeus’ media-inflated military record prior to taking command. Equally important Petraeus close ideological and political linkages with Israel’s militarist approach toward Iran (and the rest of the Middle East countries opposing it) dates back to his close collaboration with Israel’s (unofficial) military advisers and intelligence operatives in Kurdish Northern Iraq. Petraeus’ Phony Success in Northern Iraq Petraeus’ vaunted military successes in Northern Iraq – especially in Nineveh province in Northern Iraq was based on the fact that it is dominated by the Kurdish warlord tribal leaders and party bosses eager to carve an independent country. The relative stability of the region has little or nothing to do with Petraeus’ counter-insurgency theories or policies and more to do with the high degree of Kurdish ‘independence’ or ‘separatism’ in the region. Put bluntly, the US and Israeli military and financial backing of Kurdish separatism has created a de facto independent Kurdish state, one based on the brutal ethnic purging of large concentrations of Turkmen and Arab citizens. General Petraeus, by giving license to Kurdish irredentist aspirations for an ethnically purified ‘Greater Kurdistan’, encroaching on Turkey, Iran and Syria, secured the loyalty of the Kurdish militias and especially the deadly Peshmerga ‘special forces’ in eliminating resistance to the US occupation in Nineveh. Moreover, the Peshmerga has provided the US with special units to infiltrate the Iraqi resistance groups, and to provoke intra-communal strife through incidents of terrorism against the civilian population. In other words, General Petreaus’ ‘success’ in Northern Iraq is not replicable in the rest of Iraq. In fact his very success in carving off Kurd-dominated Iraq has heightened hostilities in the rest of the country and provoked Turkish attacks in the region. Petraeus: Armchair Strategist His theory of ‘securing and holding’ territory presumes a highly motivated and reliable military force capable of withstanding hostility from at least eighty percent of the colonized population. Petraeus, like Bush and the Zionist militarists ignore the fact that the morale of US soldiers in Iraq and those scheduled to be sent to Iraq is very low. The ranks of those who are seeking a quick exit from military service now include career soldiers and non-commissioned officers – the backbone of the military (Financial Times, March 3-4, 2007 p.2) The soldiers being recruited include convicted felons, mentally unstable young men, uneducated and impoverished immigrants and professional mercenaries. Unauthorized absences (AWOLs) have shot up – 14,000 between 2000-2005 (FT ibid). In March 2007, over one thousand active-duty and reserve soldiers and marines petitioned Congress for a US withdrawal from Iraq. By April 2008, a record 69% opposed Bush’s war strategy and economic policy (USA Today, April 22, 2008). The opposition of retired and active Generals to Bush’s escalation of troops percolates down the ranks to the ‘grunts’ on the ground, especially among reservists on active duty whose tours of duty in Iraq have been repeatedly extended (the ‘backdoor draft’). Demoralizing prolonged stays or rapid rotation undermines any effort of ‘consolidating ties’ between US and Iraqi officers and certainly undermines most efforts to win the confidence of the local population. If the US troops are deeply troubled by the war in Iraq and increasingly subject to desertion and demoralization, how less reliable is the Iraqi mercenary army. Iraqis recruited on the basis of hunger and unemployment (caused by the US war), with kinship, ethnic and national ties to a free and independent Iraq do not make reliable soldiers. Every serious expert has concluded that the divisions in Iraqi society are reflected in the loyalties of the soldiers. The attempt by Petraeus and US puppet Prime Minister Maliki to invade Basra in Southern Iraq turned into a military fiasco as thousands of Iraqi soldiers joined the insurgents. General Petraeus could not count on his Iraqi troops, because scores were defecting and perhaps thousands will in the future. An empty drill field or worse a widespread barracks revolt is a credible scenario. The continued high casualty rates among US soldiers and Iraqi civilians, during his 18 months as Commander suggests that ‘holding and securing’ Baghdad failed to alter the overall situation. While the addition of 30,000 US troops saturating Baghdad initially reduced civilian and military casualties there, fighting intensified in other regions and cities. More important, the decline of violence had less to do with Petraeus’ ‘surge’ and had more to do with the temporary political cease-fire reached with the anti-occupation forces of Muqtada al Sadr. This was clear when the US and its client Prime Minister Maliki launched an offensive against Sadr’s forces in March-April 2008 and casualties shot up, and even the US ‘Green Zone bunker’ came under daily rocket attacks. After 18 months under Commander Petraeus, the Iraqi troops showed little willingness to fight their own compatriots engaged in resistance. Thousands turned their arms over to the anti-colonial popular militias and several hundreds joined them Petraeus ‘rule book’ prioritizes “security and task sharing as a means of empowering civilians and prompting national reconciliation.” ‘Security’ is elusive because what the US Commander considers ‘security’ is the free movement of US troops and collaborators based on the insecurity of the colonized Iraqi majority. They continue to subject the civilian Iraqis to arbitrary house-to-house searches, break-ins and humiliating searches and arrests. While the death toll of civilians declined from ‘hundreds a day’ to ‘hundreds a week’, it demonstrated Petraeus’ failure to achieve his most elementary goal. ‘Task Sharing’ as defined by Petraeus and his officers is a euphemism for Iraqi collaboration in ‘administrating’ his orders. ‘Sharing’ involves a highly asymmetrical relation of power: the US orders and the Iraqis comply. Petraeus defines the ‘task’ as informing on insurgents. The Iraqi population is supposed to provide ‘information’ on their families, friends and compatriots, in other words betray their own people. The concept sounded more feasible in his manual than in practice. US troops still are ambushed on a daily basis and insurgents, operating among the population, bomb their armored carriers. ‘Empowering civilians’, another prominent concept in Petraeus’ manual, assumed that those who ‘empower’ give up power to the ‘others’. In other words, that the US military cedes territory, security, financial resource management and allocation to a colonized people or to the local armed forces. During his 18 months in command, it is the ‘empowered’ people who protect and support insurgents and oppose the US occupation and its puppet regime. In fact what Commander Petraeus really meant was ‘empowering’ a small minority of civilians who were willing collaborators of an occupying army. They were frequently the deadly target of the insurgents. The civilian minority ‘empowered’ by the Petraeus formula requires heavy US military protection to withstand retaliation. In practice no neighborhood civilian collaborators have been delegated real power and those who were delegated authority, are dead, hiding or secretly allied with the resistance. Petraeus’ goal of ‘national reconciliation’ has been a total failure. The Iraqi regime is paralyzed into squabbling sects and warlords. Reconciliation between warring parties is not on the horizon. What Petraeus fails to recognize, but even his puppet allies publicly state, is that US colonization of Iraq is a blatant denial of the conditions for reconciliation. Commander Petraeus and his army and the dictates of the Zionist White House play off the warring parties undermining any negotiation toward ‘conciliation’. Like all preceding colonial commanders, Petraeus fails to recognize that Iraqi popular sovereignty is the essential precondition for national reconciliation and stability. Military imposed ‘reconciliation’ among warring collaborator groups with no legitimacy among the Iraqi electorate has been a disaster. Former Clintonite, Sarah Sewall (ex-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Harvard-based ‘foreign affairs expert’) was ecstatic over Petraeus’ appointment. Yet she claimed the ‘inadequate troop to task ratio’ would undermine his strategy (Guardian March 6, 2007). The ‘troop to task ratio’ forms the entire basis of Israel and the Zioncon Democratic Senators’ Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer’s’ ‘critique’ of Bush’s Iraq policy. Their solution is ‘send more troops’. While Petraeus did increase the troops with the surge, it is militarily and politically unable to mobilize 500,000 more to meet Sewall’s ‘troop to task ratio’. This argument begs the question: Inadequate numbers of troops reflects the massiveness of popular opposition to the US occupation. The need to improve the ‘ratio’ (greater number of troops) is due to the level of mass Iraqi opposition and is directly related to increasing neighborhood support for the Iraqi resistance. If the majority of the population and the resistance did not oppose the imperial armies, then any ratio would be adequate – down to a few hundred soldiers hanging out in the Green Zone, the US Embassy or some local brothels. Petraeus’ prescriptions borrowed heavily from the Vietnam War era, especially General Creighton Abram’s, ‘Clear and Hold’ counter-insurgency doctrine. Abrams ordered a vast campaign of chemical warfare spraying of thousands of hectares with the deadly ‘Agent Orange’ to ‘clear’ contested terrain. He approved of the Phoenix Plan – the systematic assassination of 25,000 village leaders to ‘clear’ out local insurgents. Abrams implemented the program of ‘strategic hamlets’, the forced re-location of millions of Vietnamese peasants into concentration camps. In the end Abram’s plans to ‘clear and hold’ failed because each measure extended and deepened popular hostility and increased the number of recruits to the Vietnamese national liberation army. Israel’s brutal occupation policies in the West Bank have followed the same strategy with equally disastrous results, which doesn’t prevent its advisers from selling it to the US military. Petraeus is following the Abrams- Israeli doctrine with the same disastrous civilian casualties. Large-scale bombing of densely populated Shia and Sunni neighborhoods has taken place since he took command. Mass arrests of suspected local leaders accompanied by the tight military encirclement of entire neighborhoods. Arbitrary, abusive house-to-house searches turn the poor sectors of Baghdad into one big shooting gallery and concentration camp. Paraphrasing his predecessor, General Creighton Abrams, Petraeus wants to ‘destroy Iraq in order to save it’. In fact his policy is merely punishing the civilians and deepening the hostility of the population. In contrast, the insurgents blend into the huge slum neighborhood of Sadr City population or into the surrounding provinces of Al-Anbar, Diyala, and Salah and Din. Petraeus was able to ‘hold’ a people hostage with armored vehicles but he has not been able to rule with guns. The failure of General Creighton Abrams was not due to the lack of ‘political will’ in the US, as he complained, but was due to the fact that ‘clearing’ a region of insurgents is temporary, because the insurgency is founded on its capacity to blend in with the people and then re-emerge to fight the occupation army. Petraeus’ fundamental (and false) assumptions are based on the notion that the ‘people’ and the ‘insurgents’ are two distinct and opposing groups. He assumed that his ground forces and Iraqi mercenaries could distinguish and exploit this divergence and ‘clear out’ the insurgents and ‘hold’ the people. The four-year history of the US invasion, occupation and imperial war, including his 18 months in command, provides ample evidence to the contrary. With upward of 170,000 US troops and close to 200,000 Iraqi and over 50,000 foreign mercenaries, Petraeus has failed to defeat the insurgency. The evidence points to very strong, extensive and sustained civilian support for the insurgency. The high ratio of civilian to insurgent killings by the combined US-mercenary armies suggests that US troops have not been able to distinguish (nor are interested in the difference) between civilians and insurgents. Even the puppet government complains of civilian killings and widespread destruction of popular neighborhoods by US aerial bombing. The insurgency draws strong support from extended kin ties, neighborhood friends and neighbors, religious leaders, nationalists and patriots: these primary, secondary and tertiary ties bind the insurgency to the population in a way which can not be replicated by the US military or its puppet politicians. Early on General Petraeus’ plan to ‘protect and secure the civilian population’ was a failure. He flooded the streets of Baghdad with armored vehicles but was quickly forced to acknowledge that the ‘anti-government…forc es were regrouping north of the capital’. Petraeus was condemned to play what Lt. General Robert Gaid un-poetically called ‘whack-a-mole: Insurgents will be suppressed in one area only to re-emerge somewhere else’. General Petraeus made the presumptuous assertion that the Iraqi civilian population did not know that the ‘special operations’ forces of the Occupation, which he directed, is responsible for fomenting much of the ethno-religious conflict. Investigative reporter Max Fuller in his detailed examination of documents, stressed that the vast majority of atrocities…attributed to ‘rogue’ Shiite or Sunni militias “were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos of ‘special forces’, trained by the Americans, ‘advised’ by Americans and run largely by former CIA agents” (Chris Floyd ‘Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War’,http://www.informationclearin... Petraeus’ attempt to play ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’ in order to ‘divide and rule’ has been unable to weaken the opposition and has instead destabilized and fragmented the Maliki regime. While Petraeus was able to temporarily buy the loyalty of some Northern Sunni tribal leaders, their dubious loyalties depends on multi-million dollar weekly payoffs. In theory Petraeus recognized the broader political context of the war: “There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency… In Iraq, military action is necessary to help improve security…but it is insufficient. There needs to be a political aspect” (BBC 3/8/2007). Yet the key ‘political aspect’ as he put it, is the reduction, not escalation, of US troops, the ending of the endless assaults on civilian neighborhoods, the termination of the special operations and assassinations designed to foment ethnic-religious conflict, and above all a timetable to withdraw US troops and dismantle the chain of US military bases. During his 18 month tenure, Petraeus increased the number of troops, increased the bombing of the very people he was supposed to win over and fortified the 102 acres of US bases. General Petraeus was not willing or in a position to implement or design the appropriate political context for ending the conflict because of his blind implementation of the Bush-Zionist ‘war to victory’ policy. The gap between Petraeus’ ‘theoretical’ discourse on the centrality of politics and his practice of prioritizing military victory can be explained by his desire to please the Bush-Zioncons in Washington in order to advance his own military career (and future political ambitions). The result was an exceptionally mediocre military performance, underwritten by dismal political failures and the achievement of his personal ambitions. In April 2008, the Bush Administration named Petraeus as head of the US Central Command, overseeing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the reast of the Horn of Africa. Petraeus replaced Navy Admiral William Fallon who was forced to resign his command by the White House and the Zioncons over his opposition to their war plans against Iran. Even prior to his retirement Fallon had expressed his contempt for Petraeus’ shameful truckling to the Zionists in Northern Iraq and the Bush ‘ Know Nothings’ in charge of Iraq and Iran policy planning. It is clear that Petraeus ensured his promotion on April 16, 2008, through his senate testimony, one week earlier (April 8-9, 2008) with his bellicose speech implicating Iran in the fighting deaths of US troops in Iraq. With the purge and intimidation of military officials not willing to act as White House/Zionist poodles, Petraeus had few competitors. Petraeus’ promotion to the top military post, just days after his senate testimony pointing to war with Iran could not be attributed to his( failed) military performance, but to his slavish adherence to Bush’s and Israel’s push for heightened confrontation with Iran. Blaming Iran for his failed military policies served a double purpose – it covered up his incompetence and it secured the support of leading Zionist Senators like Joseph Lieberman. Petraeus reference to the “need to engage in talks with some groups of insurgents” fell on deaf ears. His proposal was seen by the insurgents as a continuation of the divide and conquer (or ‘salami’) tactics. The only ‘talks’ Petraeus secured were with tribal leaders who demanded millions of dollars up front. Otherwise he failed to attract any sector of the insurgency. Petraeus proved to be an armchair tactician, wise on public relations ‘techniques’, but mediocre in coming to grips with the ‘decolonization’ political framework in which tactics might work. Petraeus Double Discourse Commander Petraeus was quick to grasp the difficulty of his colonial mission. Just a month after taking command, he engaged in the same sophistry and double discourse of any colonial general confronted with an unwinable war. To keep the flow of funds and troops from Washington he talked of the “reduction of killings and discontent in Baghdad”, cleverly omitting the increase of civilian and US deaths elsewhere. He mentioned ‘a few encouraging signs’ but also admited that it is ‘too early to discern significant trends’ (Aljazeera 3/8/2007). In other words the ‘encouraging signs’ he expressed to the White House were of no military importance! From the beginning Petraeus gave himself an open-ended mission by extending the time frame to secure Baghdad. He shifted the goal posts from days and weeks to ‘months’ and years. Playing with indefinite time frames in which to evaluate his performance , was a coy way to prepare the US public for prolonged warfare – with few positive results. There is nothing like a failed general acting as a political panderer covering his ass in anticipation of military defeat. As a military intellectual Petraeus surely has read George Orwell’s ‘1984’ because he was so fluent in double-speak. In one breath he spoke of “no immediate need to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq’, on the other he called for 30,000 additional troops as part of what he called ‘the surge’. In March 2008, he spoke of big advances in security and one month later he demanded a ‘pause’ because the puppet regime and army were not capable of defending themselves without US backing. Petraeus’ political manipulation of troop numbers and his blatant lies about the security situation in Iraq prepared the ground for a greater military escalation in the region. “Right now we do not see other requests (for troops) looming out there. That’s not to say that some emerging mission or emerging task will not require that, and if it does then we will ask for that (my emphasis)” (AlJazeera, 3/8/2006). First there’s a ‘surge’ then there is an ‘emerging mission’ and suddenly there are another fifty thousand troops on the ground and in the meat-grinder that is Iraq, seven battleship and aircraft carriers off the Persian and Lebanese coasts, thousands more troops in Afghanistan and $175 billion dollars in military spending added to the 2008 federal budget. Petraeus Political Ambitions The General is a fine master of ‘double speak’. Yet despite superb media performances before his colleagues in the White House and Congress, Petraeus’ military strategy is doomed to go down the same road of political-military defeat as his predecessors in Indo-China. His military police have jailed tens of thousands of civilians and killed and injured many more. They were interrogated, tortured and perhaps some were ‘broken’. But many more took their place turning the Green Zone into a war zone under siege. Petraeus real security policy through intimidation ‘held’ only as long as the armored cars patrolled each neighborhood, pointing their cannons at every building. That proved to be a temporary solution. As soon as the troops moved on, the insurgents returned. The insurgents re-emerge after a week because they live and work there, whereas the Marines do not and neither do the Iraqi collaborators dare. Petraeus ran a costly colonial army, which suffers endless casualties and, which is not politically sustainable. Petraeus knows that, so he chose a political route upward and out of immediate command in Iraq, shifting the burden for failure to his replacement Lieutenant General Ray Odierno. General Petraeus realized his long-term political ambitions exceeded his military abilities. Militarism is a stepping-stone to a higher post in Washington. Since only winning generals or draft dodgers are elected President, Petraeus, like McCain, must present failure as success. In his Senate testimony of April 8-9, 2008, Petraeus lied to Congress and the American people about the US military failures, fabricating accounts of progress, in order to bolster the sagging fortunes of his political patron, President Bush. His Senate testimony and press conferences were designed to bolster Bush’s total loss of credibility: he claimed that the war was being won, Iraq was stabilized, security and peace were ‘around the corner’ and that we should go to war with Iran. If the media uncritically swallowed Petraeus testimony, the public didn’t and a host of former generals and admirals were chagrined, embarrassed and outraged that he was advancing his career by sucking up to President Bush and Israel at the expense of the troops serving under him. Petraeus Panders to Israel’s Fifth Column: The Iran Threat By the spring of 2008, as the war turned from bad to worse, as the insurgency grew in power and his leadership and strategy was transparently a sham, Petraeus played his last formidable political card. To sustain his position and cover up his defeats in Basra, and his inability to lower US casualties or even defend the Green Zone, he blamed Iran. It was Petraeus who charged Iranian weapons were blowing up US armored carriers; Iranian agents were training the Iraqi resistance and defeating his army of 200,000 Iraqi collaborators. Petraeus could not face the fact that he was losing Iraq. He deflected attention from the failure of his entire military-political strategy in Iraq by dragging in Iran as a key military player. In pointing to Iran, Petraeus played the dangerous game of echoing the Israeli line and providing support for a military attack on Iran promoted by the leadership of the Major American Jewish Organizations. Even while Petraeus was covering up his failure by blaming Iran, the Iraqi puppet government was praising the Iranian government for helping to stabilize the country, using its influence on the Shia militias to hold their fire. Puppet Prime Minister Maliki invited the Iranian President to Baghdad, signed trade agreements and praised their co-operation and efforts to stabilize the country. The only organized group, which took up Petraeus’, campaign to blame Iran for the US defeats was the Zionist Power Configuration in the US. In the Congress, media and public forums, Zionists amplified and backed Petraeus. They see him as a critical ally in countering the National Intelligence Report absolving Iran of having a program to develop nuclear weapons. No other high military commander, in Europe or the US, took up Petraeus call to arms against Iran…except the Israeli military command. It is a sad commentary on the state of the US military when generals advance to the highest posts by flattering and propagandizing for the most discredited American president in memory and advance the agenda of power brokers for a foreign power. General Petraeus, in his advance from Commander of US and ‘allied’ forces in Iraq to head of the US Central Command overseeing current US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and overseeing future wars with Iran, Lebanon and Syria, has left behind a bitter legacy of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, an unreliable Iraqi ‘quisling’ army, a failed client regime and a vast US bunker under constant attack. Every military official and most experts know that he was ‘Bush’s man’ and his advances were very much a product of the White House and its pro-Israel backers in the Congress. Conclusion The advance of Petraeus is a victory of the Zionist Power Configuration in its quest for American military leaders willing to pursue Israel’s agenda of sanctions and war against Iran. That is why the ZPC was a factor in the ousting of Admiral William Fallon, and why the main propaganda bulletin (the Daily Alert) of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations worked for and hailed his promotion to military overseer of the Middle East wars. AIPAC and their bought and bonded Senators ensured Petraeus an easy time during his confirmation hearing and his unanimous endorsement. His appointment marks the first time that the Zionist Power Configuration has trumped the views and opinions of the majority of active and retired American military officers. How far Petraeus will go in ‘paying back’ his debt to his long-term Zionist backers for his meteoric rise remains to be seen. What is certain is that they will demand that he line up with the State of Israel in pushing forth toward a war with Iran. It is neither military honor, nor patriotism, which will restrain Petraeus from pursuing the Zionist War for Israel agenda – but his future presidential ambitions. He will have to calculate whether a second Middle East war, which will please Israel and billionaire American (?) Zionist political fundraisers can offset voter discontent resulting from a war in which the price of oil will rise to $300 dollars a barrel and cost several tens of thousands of American casualties, will further his political ambitions. The US has degenerated into a sorry state of affairs when its future course depends on the political calculus of a feckless General, a failed counter-insurgency ‘expert’ and ambitious politician pandering to billionaire political contributors working for a foreign colonial power. James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). His latest book is "The Power of Israel in the United States" (Clarity Press, 2006).
Israeli army ‘exonerated’ in Gaza family deaths
05.26.08 (10:49 am) [edit]B'Tselem’s probe raised doubt on Israeli army’s investigation Israeli army ‘exonerated’ in Gaza family deaths Internal probe claims Palestinian woman, her four children killed by ammunition blast carried by militants. JERUSALEM - A military inquiry into the deaths of a Gaza woman and her four children claimed on Friday they were killed by the explosion of ammunition carried by militants targeted by an Israeli missile. "The family was hit during the explosion of the second missile that ignited secondary explosions or from objects that flew towards them because of the force of the blast," the army said in a statement on the conclusions of the full investigation. The military also released aerial footage of Monday's incident in the town of Beit Hanun in the north of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, which showed several large explosions which the army said were secondary detonations. According to the statement, an Israeli aircraft fired a first missile at four militants it identified as "carrying backpacks loaded with ammunition." One gunman was hit in the strike, which was followed by a strong secondary explosion. "Immediately after the explosion a second gunman was targeted and hit as well, causing an even bigger explosion. "Both explosions were significantly stronger than those caused by the IDF attacks against them," the Israel Defence Forces statement said. On Wednesday the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said its own investigation cast doubt on the army's initial account of the killing of Meissar Abu Maateq and four of her children, aged one to five. "The material (B'Tselem) has collected, including an analysis of the area, photographs of bodies, and eyewitness accounts, raise doubt about the IDF spokesperson's contention that a secondary explosion is what killed the family," the group said. Palestinian witnesses also disputed the Israeli account, insisting that the house was more than a kilometre from the scene of the clashes and that the explosion was caused by an Israeli missile fired by an aerial drone. No armed men were killed or wounded in the explosion at the house, and an AFP correspondent who arrived at the scene shortly after the strike saw shrapnel from an Israeli missile amid the wreckage inside. At least 444 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed since the restart of formal peace talks under US auspices at an international conference in November.
Israel minister rejects Gaza truce as Hamas chief killed
05.24.08 (1:32 am) [edit]JERUSALEM (AFP) - A senior Israeli minister rejected on Thursday a proposed truce in the Gaza Strip, as the air force killed a Hamas commander suspected of involvement in the 2006 capture of an Israeli soldier. Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit insisted that Israel could not accept an Egyptian-brokered proposal on Gaza, claiming it would only give the Islamist movement Hamas the opportunity to boost its military capabilities. "No deal whatsoever should be reached with Hamas because this terrorist movement would exploit any truce to gain strength, perfect its weapons and prepare for the next confrontation," the security cabinet member told public radio. Sheetrit's comments came as the air force "targeted and identified hitting Nafiz Mansur, a Hamas terror operative who was involved in terror attacks against Israel," the military said. The military said Mansur had been involved in the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, seized by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid from Gaza claimed by Hamas and two other militant groups. It said Mansur was also responsible for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a July 2006 attack, and took part in setting up a suicide assault on a border post on April 19. Hamas confirmed Mansur's death and said it would "respond to this crime at the appropriate time and place." Mansur, 40, was killed near his home in Rafah, according to Muawiyah Hassanein, who heads the Gaza emergency services. Three more people, including a child, were wounded in the air strike, he said. Following the strike, Gaza militants retaliated, firing at least eight rockets and three mortar rounds at southern Israel. The attacks caused some damage to property but no casualties, a military spokeswoman said. Sheetrit, who is also a deputy prime minister, said Israel's goal should be to break up Hamas, which European Union and the United States join with Israel in blacklisting as a terror group. "We must break Hamas, not hold negotiations with them, because their demands are unacceptable," he said. "The armed forces must attack those terrorists night and day to break their arms and their legs." Public radio said several other ministers had also opposed a Gaza truce at Wednesday's security cabinet meeting. In the face of the near-daily violence on its doorstep, Egypt has again stepped in as a mediator in the impoverished Palestinian territory. It brought together Hamas, the Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and nearly a dozen other factions, hammering out with them a proposal for a "comprehensive, simultaneous and reciprocal period of calm to be applied progressively, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank." The pointman in the talks, intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, is expected to deliver the offer to Israel in the coming days. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has already said that "to be sustainable and real, the calm must contain three vital elements -- total absence of fire from Gaza against Israel, complete cessation of terrorist attacks and the end of arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip." Hamas has insisted that, as part of any truce, Israel must lift the blockade it imposed after the Islamists seized power in Gaza in June. Israel allows only very limited humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza. It says the blockade is intended to put pressure on the Hamas authorities to stop militants firing rockets on its territory. In another Israeli military operation in Gaza on Thursday, a Palestinian civilian in his sixties, Mohammed Abu Daqqa, was killed and three other people wounded, Palestinian medics said. The deaths brought to 447 the number of people killed since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched peace negotiations at a US-hosted conference in November, according to an AFP tally.
'Israel must be decisive'
05.24.08 (1:26 am) [edit]'Israel must be decisive' Opposition Chairman Netanyahu tells local press in southern Israel ‘government's blindness' to blame for Israel's inability to curtail incessant Qassam barrages Tova Dadon "There will be no choice but to overthrow Hamas. They are essentially Iranian offshoots sitting within us. It's intolerable that Israel allows its cities to be fired upon; we must move from a war of attrition to a war of decisivness," said Opposition Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday in a meeting with local journalists in Netivot as he addressed Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza. Netanyahu asserted that less than 500 Qassams were fired towards Israel prior to the disengagement in 2005, whereas since the pullout there have been over 4,000 rockets. "This is a result of the government's blindness and erroneous political decisions, which led to the strengthening of the Hizbullah in the North," added Netanyah. Netanyahu also criticized Israel's conduct during the Second Lebanon War, saying that the forces were scattered and that therefore the outcome of the campaign was not as expected. "Both the Arab world and the West expected focus - and for us to prevail, but it has become apparent that Israel failed to defeat Hizbullah because our efforts were not focused." Netanyahu also discussed the situation in southern Israel, saying that there was no room in so small a nation for any part to be disregarded as simply 'the periphery.' "We will make sure this happens and it will prove beneficiary to the Negev and its underprivileged residents in particular." Netanyahu confirmed the Likud has decided to conserve its funds for a time of national elections rather than the upcoming municipal ones, saying he prefers one more Knesset member to one more councilmember in any given community.
Israel is suppressing a secret it must face
05.24.08 (1:14 am) [edit]NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN Send Page To a Friend Israel is suppressing a secret it must face How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians? By Johann Hari 30/04/08 "The Independent" -- 28/04/08 -- -When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover. She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes. She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality. But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison. Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage. Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions". So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population? The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons. They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews. When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had? If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on? It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl. Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.