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How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan

By Glenn Greenwald | April 5, 2010

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).  The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions.  But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim).  The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”

What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact.  Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was “reported” by CNN on February 12:

Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an “honor killing.”  The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an “unnamed senior military official said” about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:

An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.

The U.S. official said it isn’t clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.

“It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .

The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity.  A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.

Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were “varying accounts of what happened” among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon’s false version of events with no questioning.  Here’s the NYT‘s February 12 article in its entirety:

Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed,” the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said the dead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.

CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYT simply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village — notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning.  Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon’s claims were true before “reporting” them as fact; this is what Shah found:

However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.

A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as “U.S. special forces” surrounded the compound.

When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.

“Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him,” he said.

Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.

A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.

“Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry,” he said.

The Pentagon’s version of events was vehemently disputed from the start.  But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT “reporting,” which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces.  That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that “a combined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province’s Gardez district,” and “members of the combined force found the bodies inside.”  Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way:  “‘ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,’ ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said.”  On March 16 — more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London — the NYT ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media’s original claims about what took place.

Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting  by Afghans.  Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):

US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official’s residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney’s office, and three women. . . .

But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night.  “The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed,” the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .

When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.  “The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room.”

Note the crucial difference:   the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon’s version of events.   Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

* * * * *

All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically.  Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad.  The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers’ claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity:  until a video emerged proving the villagers’ claims were true and the Pentagon’s false.  Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points:  “to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”  And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.

At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this.  Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail:  (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war.  Starkey wrote under this headline:

In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO’s claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:

The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.

NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .

It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.

There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.

Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims:  resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the “embed culture.”  But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims.  Illustratively, in response to Starkey’s March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was “categorically false.” As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming — falsely — that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise.

There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets.  It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative report by the NYT‘s Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon’s false claims.  But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American “journalism.”  And no matter how many times this process is exposed — from Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight to Pat Tillman’s death by Al Qeada — this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.

April 5, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Global Food Reserve Needed to Stabilize Prices, Researchers Say

By Rudy Ruitenberg | Bloomberg | March 29, 2010

A global crop reserve system is needed to reduce price volatility, curb speculation and prevent a food crisis, said researchers from Germany and France.

Centralized global stocks could bring “peace and quiet” to world food markets, said Joachim von Braun, director of Germany’s Center for Development Research, at a conference on agriculture research in Montpellier, France, yesterday.

World food prices started rising in 2007 and climbed to a record in June 2008. Surging prices of wheat, rice and corn sparked riots from Haiti to Ivory Coast. Von Braun said IFPRI research has shown fund investment in agricultural commodity futures added to price volatility.

“The world is no more food secure today than three years ago, when the world food-price crisis hit,” said von Braun, a University of Bonn professor and former head of the Washington- based International Food Policy Research Institute. We need “an efficient, global, coordinated reserve policy which brings peace and quiet to the world food market,” von Braun said.

A global reserve would make it “difficult to manipulate the market,” said Marion Guillou, the head of France’s Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, at the conference.

Von Braun said a food-stabilization system should consist of three parts, including a physical stock managed by the World Food Programme that would allow the agency to respond to a humanitarian crisis more speedily, as well as a reserve based on countries setting aside some of their stocks.

“In a price spike situation, this group could decide, like the International Energy Agency, to release from stock,” von Braun said. “Not a general stabilization fund, but a price- spike stabilization mechanism.”

The third instrument would be a virtual financial fund that could counter speculators by taking positions in the agricultural futures market, he said.

“We have good analysis that speculation played in role in 2007 and 2008,” von Braun said. “Speculation did matter and it did amplify, that debate can be put to rest. These spikes are not a nuisance, they kill. They’ve killed thousands of people.”

–Editor: Will Kennedy, Doug Lytle.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stuart Wallace in London at swallace6@bloomberg.net.

April 5, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Leave a comment

NATO Admits Killing Civilians in February Afghan Raid

By Jason Ditz | April 04, 2010

Nearly two months after the high profile night raid in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province and after several official denials, NATO has finally admitted to killing all five civilians, including two Afghan government employees.

NATO’s first official acknowledgement of the raid claimed they engaged in a “fire fight” with insurgents known to be hiding at the house and made a “gruesome” discovery of three slain women bound and gagged in an adjacent room of the house. Two of the women were later revealed to be pregnant at the time.

Though the family initially disputed the claims, the real holes in the official story began to develop a month later, when Rear Admiral Greg Smith admitted they had no evidence the “firefight” involved a single shot fired by anyone but the NATO forces, and all the arrested “insurgents” were released. NATO also attempted to pay them “compensation” for the slain civilians, but were rebuffed.

But all of this still leaves an enormous loose string to tie up. If there was no “gruesome discovery” as claimed, then the US special forces responsible for the raid not only killed those pregnant women, but bound and gagged their corpses to try to cover it up (which is what the family claimed the day after it happened, to the dismissal of everyone).

Incredibly, however, NATO is still insisting that they have no evidence that the soldiers acted “inappropriately” in the slaughter, and even though Afghan government officials confirmed that the troops were removing evidence from the scene for seven hours before letting the Afghan security forces in to inspect it they maintain that nothing resembling a cover-up has occurred.

April 5, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Leave a comment

The Palestinians are winning the legitimacy war: will it matter?

Richard Falk | 5 April 2010

Ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917 gave the formal approval of the British government to the establishment of “a Jewish homeland”, profound issues of legitimacy were present in the conflict recently known as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This original colonialist endorsement of the Zionist project has produced a steady erosion of the position of the Palestinian people on historic Palestine, which dramatically worsened over the course of the past 43 years of occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. It has worsened due to an oppressive military occupation by Israel that involves fundamental denials of rights and pervasive violations of international humanitarian law, and because Israel has been allowed to establish “facts on the ground”, which are more properly viewed as violations of Palestinian rights, especially the establishment of extensive settlements and a separation wall constructed on occupied Palestinian territories in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. These developments have been flagrantly unlawful, and made the whole treatment of the Palestinian people illegitimate, as well as the occasion of continuous intense and pervasive suffering.

For decades, Palestinian political forces have exercised their right of resistance in various ways, including the extraordinary non-violent Intifada of 1987, but also engaging in armed resistance in defence of their territory. The Palestinians definitely enjoy a right of resistance, although subject to the limits of international humanitarian law, which rules out deliberate targeting of civilians and non-military targets. Such tactics of resistance challenge Israel at its point of maximum comparative advantage due both to its total military dominance, achieved in part by large subsidies from the United States, and to its ruthless disregard for civilian innocence.

In recent years, especially beginning with the brutal experience of the Lebanon war of 2006 and even more dramatically in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008-09 (27 December 2008-18 January 2009), there has been a notable change of emphasis in Palestinian strategy. The new strategy has been to initiate what might be described as a second war, “a legitimacy war” that is essentially based on the reliance on a variety of non-violent tactics of resistance. Armed resistance has not been renounced by the Palestinians, but it has been displaced by this emphasis on non-violent tactics.

The essence of this legitimacy war is to cast doubt on several dimensions of Israeli legitimacy: its status as a moral and law abiding actor, as an occupying power in relation to the Palestinian people, and with respect to its willingness to respect the United Nations and abide by international law. Those that wage such a legitimacy war seek to seize the high moral ground in relation to the underlying conflict, and on this basis, gain support for a variety of coercive, but non-violent initiatives designed to put pressure on Israel, on governments throughout the world and on the United Nations to deny normal participatory rights to Israel as a member of international society.

These tactics also aim to mobilize global civil society to exhibit solidarity with the Palestinian struggle to achieve legitimate rights, taking the principal form of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) that operates throughout the entire world, which serves as a symbolic battlefield.

But there are other forms of action as well, including the Free Gaza Movement and Viva Palestina that aim specifically at symbolically breaking the blockade of food, medecine and fuel imposed in mid-2007, a form of collective punishment that has caused great suffering for the entire 1.5 million population of the Gaza Strip, damaging the physical and mental health of all those living under occupation.

Although the UN has been a failure so far as offering protection (beyond its essential role in providing humanitarian relief in Gaza) to the Palestinians under occupations or even in relation to the implementation of Palestinian rights under international law, it is a vital site of struggle in the legitimacy war. The whole storm unleashed by the Goldstone report involves challenging the UN to impose accountability on the Israeli political and military leadership for their alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity associated with the Gaza attacks at the end of 2008. Even if the United States shields Israelis from accountability pursuant to the procedures of the UN, including the International Criminal Court, the confirmation by the Goldstone report of allegations of criminality is a major victory for the Palestinians in the legitimacy war, and lends credibility to calls for non-violent initiatives throughout the world.

The Goldstone Report also endorses “universal jurisdiction” as a means to gain accountability, encouraging national criminal courts of any country to make use of their legal authority to hold Israeli political and military leaders criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Tzipi Livni, the current Kadima opposition leader in Israel, who had been foreign minister during the Gaza attacks, cancelled a visit to Britain after she received word that a warrant for her arrest upon arrival had been issued. Even if Israeli impunity is not overcome, the authoritativeness of the Goldstone report lends weight to calls around the world to disrupt normal relations with Israel by boycotting cultural and academic activities, by disrupting trade relations through divestment moves or through refusals to load and unload ships and planes carrying cargo to or from Israel, and by pressuring governments to impose economic sanctions.

The historic inspiration for this legitimacy war is the anti-apartheid campaign waged with such success against the racist regime in South Africa. Undoubtedly, the Palestinian political motivation to focus their energies on waging a legitimacy war came from a variety of sources: disillusionment with efforts by the UN and the United States to find a just solution for the conflict; realization that armed resistance could not produce a Palestinian victory and played into the hands of Israeli diversionary tactics by making “terrorism” the issue; recognizing that the events in Lebanon and Gaza generated throughout the world widespread anger against Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians, which is gradually weakening earlier European and North American deference to Israel due to Jewish victimization in the Holocaust; and a growing sense that the worldwide Palestinian diaspora communities and their allies could be enlisted to join in the struggle if its essential nature was that of a legitimacy war.

Israeli official and unofficial support groups have recently recognized the threat posed to their expansionist settler colonial grand strategy by this recourse by Palestinians to a legitimacy war. Israeli think tanks have described “the global justice movement” associated with these tactics as a greater threat to Israel than Palestinian violence, and have even castigated reliance on international law as a dangerous form of “lawfare”. The Israeli government and Zionist organizations around the world have joined in the battle through a massive investment in public relations activities that include propaganda efforts to discredit what is sometimes called “the Durban approach”. As with other Israeli tactics, in their defensive approach to the legitimacy war, there is an absence of self-criticism involving an assessment of Palestinian substantive claims under international law. For Israel a legitimacy war is a public relations issue pure and simple, a matter of discrediting the adversary and proclaiming national innocence and virtue. Despite its huge advantage in resources devoted to this campaign, Israel is definitely losing the legitimacy war.

Even if the Palestinians win the legitimacy war there is no guarantee that this victory will produce the desired political results. It requires Palestinian patience, resolve, leadership and vision, as well as sufficient pressure to force a change of heart in Israel, and probably in Washington as well. In this instance, it would seem to require an Israeli willingness to abandon the core Zionist project to establish a Jewish state, and that does not appear likely from the vantage point of the present. But always the goals of a legitimacy war appear to be beyond reach until mysteriously attained by the abrupt and totally unexpected surrender by the losing side.

Until it collapses the losing side pretends to be unmovable and invincible, a claim that is usually reinforced by police and military dominance. This is what happened in the Soviet Union and South Africa, earlier to French colonial rule in Indochina and Algeria, and to the United States in Vietnam.

It is up to all of us dedicated to peace and justice to do all we can to help the Palestinians prevail in the legitimacy war and bring their long ordeal to an end.

Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and author of Crimes of War: Iraq and The Costs of War: International Law, the UN and World Order after Iraq”. He is also current UN Rapporteur for Palestine.

April 4, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israeli occupation troops round up 1,400 Palestinians in 3 months

Palestine Information Center – 04/04/2010

GAZA — The higher national committee in support of prisoners on Sunday said that the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) had detained more than 1,400 Palestinians in the first quarter of 2010 including 90 from the Gaza Strip.

Riyadh Al-Ashkar, the head of the committee’s information office, said in a press release that the number of detainees from Jerusalem and the West Bank was on the rise, noting that 400 citizens were rounded up in Jerusalem alone.

Ashkar said that 18 fishermen were among the 90 detainees from Gaza Strip along with many other workers who were detained while collecting scrap near the northern crossing.

He said that there are seven women among the detainees, three of whom were released while four others are still detained including Muntaha Al-Tawil the wife of El-Bireh mayor who was held in administrative detention for three months.

He added that 225 of the detainees were children less than 18 years old, noting that the IOF soldiers were increasingly detaining children less than 12 years old and mentioned a number of cases where 9 year olds were detained.

Ashkar said that many prisoners were suffering as a result of deliberate medical neglect on the part of the Israeli prisons authority (IPA) and as a result of the escalating attacks on their wards and the humiliating strip searches that even expanded to include relatives visiting them.

He said that the IPA was threatening 15 prisoners with deportation and has turned 9 captives into open-ended detention after considering them “unlawful combatants”.

The committee appealed to the international organizations to pressure Israel into halting the rabid campaign against prisoners and to apply the fourth Geneva Convention in this issue.

April 4, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Tibi: Barak responsible for Palestinian death at checkpoint

Ma’an/Agencies – 04/04/2010

Bethlehem – Palestinian Knesset Member Ahmad Tibi said Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak bears responsibility for the death of a diabetic at a West Bank checkpoint, Israeli media reported.

“Ehud Barak is personally responsible for his cruel death. The orders at roadblocks require the humiliation and oppression of a civil population, and the person who issued the order is responsible for the death of a Palestinian-French civilian,” said Tibi according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth.

Mohammad Damen Abed Al-Karim E’lieyat, 62, from the village of Dir Abu Da’eef in Jenin, was en route to the Jordan Valley but was barred from transit for several hours at the Al-Hamra checkpoint in Tubas. E’lieyat, diabetic with high blood pressure, died of a severe heart attack shortly after being allowed to cross.

E’lieyat made several attempts to cross but was turned back by Israeli authorities who said that he was unable to pass because he held French citizenship.

An Israeli military spokesman told Ma’an that a complaint was filed with the Jericho DCO following the death.

April 4, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

“You’re Such a Good Guy, Mr. President”

What About the War, Mr. Moore?

By CHARLES DAVIS | April 2, 2010

Dennis Kucinich, while denouncing the president’s decision to send another 33,000 troops to Afghanistan and questioning the constitutionality of the conflict, confessed to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that though the surge would undoubtedly be a waste of lives and resources, “You know what? To me this isn’t even about the personality of the president, whom I admire.” Speaking later to Esquire on why he was voting for a healthcare bill he had ripped to shreds on policy grounds just days before, Kucinich cited a “a higher responsibility” to “my president and his presidency.” The Ohio congressman went on to say that a victory on healthcare was essential so that the power of the president would not be “weakened,” arguing that with passage the “president will have a stronger hand in domestic and international affairs, and that will be good for the country.” Nowhere in his 2,300-word remarks on the need to boost the president’s popularity did he mention any of the ongoing wars and military occupations for which his friend Obama is responsible.

At the signing of the bill, he not just figuratively but, with a smile on his face, literally embraced the president.

Michael Moore, meanwhile, in a letter to Obama on the eve of his decision to expand the Afghan war declared that with that one move he would “destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics.” But at the same time, and after the president had already expanded the war soon after taking office by nearly 20,000 troops, Moore implored Obama to “listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking,” adding: “We the people still love you.”

After the decision to expand the war, which brings weekly tales of the atrocities that always accompany military occupations and counter-insurgency operations, there probably are a few more Obamaphiles turned disillusioned cynics — but Moore isn’t one of them. “You’re such a good guy, Mr. President,” he writes in a more recent correspondence.

The tradeoff seems to be this: in exchange for a president that can speak in complete sentences and not embarrass Americans in front of Western European audiences, and who is willing to throw a few more crumbs to the middle and lower classes, liberals will accept a little murder abroad. Oh, there might be an open letter or two, but few are willing to call the current occupant of the White House what he is — a war criminal with a million dollar smile — instead going to great lengths to defend this administration, working earnestly to support Obama’s agenda even when it’s entirely at odds with their own stated views.

This isn’t something new, by the way. When the U.S. military was killing Vietnamese by the tens of thousands in the 1960s, many rank-and-file Democrats and the whole of the liberal establishment were willing to put up with a little senseless murder abroad in exchange for Lyndon Johnson’s promise of a “Great Society” at home. Even after pressure from the antiwar movement forced LBJ to give up his reelection bid, the Democratic nominee in 1968 nonetheless was Hubert Humphrey, a bland pro-war liberal. And given the orgiastic glee with which today’s liberals and progressives greeted the passing of a healthcare bill whose proponents are lukewarm about, can you imagine how much murder they’d put up with in return for something like Medicare?

Of course, this probably isn’t the trade-off the president’s liberal supporters imagine they’re making, and I don’t doubt that people like Moore and Kucinich are sincere in their opposition to the Afghan war, if misguided in how to end it. But their view of the president as a man, or rather what they imagine him to be, colors — distorts — their views of his policies, resulting in some embarrassing attempts to excuse Obama, The Man We Thought We Voted For, for the policies enacted by Obama, The Man You Actually Got. Sadly, all too many liberals and progressives remain captivated by the former Obama ™, the persona they’ve been marketed these last couple years: the philosopher-king.

While Obama might seem like a nice, smart guy who tucks his kids in and gives them a kiss on the forehead good night, remember that because of his decisions there are Pakistani and Afghan fathers who will never get to do the same. And remember too that Obama chose to escalate the war on terror within mere days of taking office, signing off on a drone strike in Pakistan that killed 18 people before even moving his orthopedic chair into the Oval Office. As documented by the New America Foundation, Obama has continued the bombing ever, dramatically increasing the use of drones in Pakistan — a country, mind you, with which the U.S. is not officially at war — killing more than 500 people since taking office, likely many more, a third of them civilians. Weeks later Obama sent another 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, bringing his escalation of that war since taking office to roughly 50,000 troops and at least that many private contractors.

Getting on my soapbox: Once you come to grasp the basic moral truth that murder does not become acceptable simply because a majority of registered voters lucky enough to be born in the world’s most powerful country sanction it, nor is one’s complicity in it lessened by the fact that some 18 year old kid pulls the trigger for you — that politician’s deserve to be held to the same standard of accountability to which you’d hold a casual acquaintance — then it becomes a lot harder to maintain the fiction that Obama is not stained with blood shed by his wars. But then I haven’t been reading Daily Kos lately.

Charles Davis is a journalist based in Washington, DC. More of his work may be found on his Web site.

April 4, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Activists support rehabilitation of historic natural springs destroyed by settlers

International Solidarity Movement | 02 April 2010

Repairing the historic natural springs in Wadi Qana

Repairing the historic natural springs in Wadi Qana

A group of internationals, including two ISM activists, joined supporters from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank in assisting the villagers of Qarawat Bani Hassan repair and rehabilitate the historic natural springs which lie in the nearby Wadi Qana. The springs which issue at the base of the wadi feed into a series of reservoirs cut into the stone, said to date from Roman times. From time immemorial they have been the source of water for those villagers without their own wells. Today the springs and their surroundings, a location of outstanding natural beauty, are the most important cultural heritage for the village.

Situated between Ramallah and Nablus, Qarawat Bani Hassan has the misfortune to be surrounded by a number of settler colonies, including Nofim, Yaqir, Revava and Kiryat Netafim. Settlers routinely trespass onto village lands and two weeks previously, in an act of deplorable vandalism, emptied sacks of cement and steel mesh into one of the Roman-era tanks. This followed upon the previous dynamiting of a nearby cave which, too, contained a natural spring and pool.

On this Friday the villagers and their supporters labored under a hot sun to clean out the reservoirs, build dry stone walls nearby and bring the site back to its original condition. They were interrupted twice by groups of settlers attempting to access the area. A confrontation was avoided only when the villagers returned to their work and ignored the presence of the intruders who, after a short time, returned to their colony on the overlooking hilltop. The presence of international and other observers armed with cameras undoubtedly deterred the settlers, on this occasion, from any further acts of vandalism.

Qarawat Bani Hassan is a village of approximately 4,000 Palestinians, located in the Salfit District. The village owns 9,684 dunams of land (approximately 2,421 acres) which includes the Ein Enwetef natural springs that serve the locality as a primary source of water for agricultural and herding purposes. Eighty-nine percent of this land is in Area C, under total Israeli control.

April 4, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Destruction of Gazan cheese factory continues pattern Goldstone found illegal

By Alex Kane on April 2, 2010

Israeli warplanes bombed areas across the Gaza Strip early Friday, injuring at least three children, according to news outlets. Although the Israeli military claims that the targets were weapons-manufacturing plants and arms caches, Ma’an, Al Jazeera, Haaretz, and YNet are reporting that the Israeli air force struck civilian sites, including a metal factory in a refugee camp and the Daloul cheese and dairy factory in Gaza City.

The targeting of the means of sustenance for the civilian population in Gaza is an area that Judge Richard Goldstone focused on in his United Nations report on the Israeli assault on Gaza. I assume the crude logic behind the targeting of a cheese and dairy factory in the heart of Gaza is part of putting “Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” as Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said, in explaining the suffocating blockade that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip.

Goldstone reported on the destruction of the el-Bader flourmill and the Sawafeary chicken farms. The section where Goldstone deals with these attacks can be found on pages 199-206 of his report.

On the destruction of the flour mill, the report states, “that the destruction of the mill was carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population, which is a violation of customary international law as reflected in article 54 (2) of Additional Protocol I and may constitute a war crime.”

More broadly, the report found, “as a result of its actions to destroy food and water supplies and infrastructure, Israel has violated article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and article 12 (2) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.”

I wonder what the esteemed jurist would say about this attack on the cheese and dairy factory.  We know what Israel will say:  “Cheese and dairy factories are part of the Hamas terror infrastructure,” or “cheese and dairy can be used to make bombs,” or “rockets with cheese and dairy attached are particularly dangerous.”

April 3, 2010 Posted by | War Crimes | Leave a comment

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