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Visit Abu Dis– site of the future Palestinian capital?

By Tom Suarez on August 5, 2010

abudis4

Philip Weiss writes: In order to be taken seriously in U.S. Establishment discourse, you must swear that you believe in two states existing side-by-side. This proposition (which has been held out to the stateless Palestinians for many decades now in one form or another without any consequence but further dispossesssion) today involves a Palestinian capital in the village of Abu Dis, which is just east of Israel’s expanded Jerusalem border

I’ve never been to Abu Dis, but lately I was reading Tom Suarez’s striking book of essays and photos of Palestine, Palestine Sixty Years Later, when I came on the photo above of the Dome of the Rock as viewed from the village of Abu Dis. The whole reason for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the connection to this holy site and the Old City, which means not only the religious connection but the commercial/tourist benefits. What kind of connection exists between Abu Dis and the Old City far beyond the separation wall?

Suarez sent me two other photographs of Abu Dis from his book, and I asked him what he thinks of the idea of Abu Dis as a capital:

When in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, the West raced to Kuwait’s defense and punished the Iraqi people with crippling sanctions for their leader’s aggression. But in response to Israel’s equally illegal and more brutal 1967 invasion and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West amplified its policy of rewarding Israel, punishing the Palestinians, and blocking any attempt to hold Israel to UN Resolutions and international law.

Although East Jerusalem is no more part of Israel than is Paris or Tahiti, in 1980 Israel “annexed” East Jerusalem and claimed an “undivided” Jerusalem as the country’s capital. The UN responded by reaffirming that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied Palestinian territory and that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital. Israel simply defied international law, as it has done with every UN resolution addressing the Palestinian issue since 1948.

But Palestinians have long envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of their as yet unrealized nation, and so Israel had to dampen the appearance that their illegal seizure of East Jerusalem was an impediment to peace. The answer was to propose a nearby West Bank village as the future capital of a Palestinian state. At the same time, Israel strangled that very same village by dissecting it into two with the apartheid Wall, annexing the area on the west of the wall into its illegal “greater Jerusalem,” and suffocating what was left with ever-growing Israeli settlements. Thus Israel is not only accelerating its ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, but also crippling the very town it claims should be the capital of the Palestinian state it never allows to exist. Welcome to Abu Dis.

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The apartheid Wall severed Abu Dis’s historic link with Jerusalem and crippled much of the little economic life that had thus far survived the Occupation. Not only was the social fiber of the village torn in two, but indeed families were broken up, family members permanently separated by the Wall. In some cases even fathers and mothers were torn apart, their ID cards placing them on opposite sides of the Wall. Shepherds and their flocks were completely cut off from thier grazing land, farmers from their fields. And further exacerbating the population squeeze, Bedouin whose villages Israel had razed in the Jordan Valley were brought to Abu Dis and left there.

Palestinian leaders — including Abbas, who commonly rubber-stamps whatever the West dictates — have refused to accept Abu Dis as a future capital.

August 5, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

International solidarity under attack

Mike Marqusee, The Electronic Intifada, 5 August 2010

From small beginnings and with few resources, the international movement in solidarity with the Palestinians has grown into a force that Israel perceives as a major threat. The assault on the Gaza aid flotilla was a lethal escalation in what has become an increasingly bitter campaign against that movement, whose constituents now range from dockworkers in South Africa refusing to offload Israeli goods to students at Berkeley demanding divestment.

The brutality of the flotilla attack was a measure of the extent to which the Israeli polity has grown to fear and loathe this global grassroots movement. In a way, the violence was a perverse tribute to a band of voluntary campaigners who are massively outstripped by Israel in money, institutional resources and access to the media, but who nonetheless have put more pressure on Israel than the world’s most powerful governments. Indeed, it’s the long-term collusion of those governments with Israel that has prompted the growth of citizen’s initiatives, such as the Freedom Flotilla, to redress the balance. People from very differing societies have come to the politics of international solidarity with Palestine via many routes. Nearly always, their commitment to the cause, the commitment that led the passengers on the boats to take such risks and suffer such punishment, is an expression of a wider aspiration for social justice, and above all a belief that this justice must be global in nature if it is to mean anything. One of the primary objects of the Israeli media barrage that followed the assault was to discredit and divide this movement. In particular, it sought to isolate and demonize an “Islamist” or “jihadi” element among the activists. (This was presaged by the especially vicious treatment meted out to those passengers identified by Israeli armed forces as Muslims.) The “Turkish boat” was said be the source of all the trouble. At one point it was claimed that an “al-Qaeda” team had been on board. The Turkish charity Isani Yardim Vakfi or IHH was traduced. People in the West with sympathies for the Palestinians were being warned: there was a type of person involved here with whom they would never want to make common cause.

Unfortunately, in France, a section of the left, driven by a misconceived interpretation of secularism, seemed to agree. They refused to join a protest against the assault on the flotilla on the grounds that other participants would include Muslim clerics. Under the guise of a dedication to universal values, this refusal was actually a restriction of those values: the expression of human solidarity was subjected to ideological conditions. Elsewhere the movement has prospered by its embrace of pluralism. This pluralism has been forged not by making a special case for the Palestinians but by universalizing their struggle: founding it on a commitment to human rights and common standards of justice. Far from “singling out Israel,” as is routinely claimed, the movement has begun, at long last, to expose how Israel singles itself out, demanding (and receiving) exemptions from those standards.

The diversity of the passengers on the flotilla was always its greatest strength. It meant that a much wider circle of people felt some kind of connection with the events in the Mediterranean, and also that they would have access to sources of information not trammeled by the Israeli state line. Transcending the boundaries of nation, religion and language, the passengers represented a growing global public that feels itself compelled to act because its governments will not. Like the motley delegation of foreigners who pledged their support for the French Revolution to the National Assembly in 1790, they were “ambassadors of the human race.” Of course, far from deterring Israel, this status made them a threat which had to be countered with a show of extreme violence.

True to form, Israeli spokespersons described the killings on board the Mavi Marmara as “self-defense” by Israeli soldiers threatened with “lynching.” The ensuing arguments about “violence” and who was responsible for it recapitulated a long history in which Israel has identified every denial of Palestinian rights or annihilation of Palestinian life as “self-defense.” Conversely, every assertion of those rights and every attempt to preserve those lives is deemed illegitimate, denounced as “aggression” or “terrorism.”

Here the Israelis tapped into a long-established bias in the Western media. A study by Arab Media Watch of the mainstream British press from January to June 2008 found that violent Israeli actions were almost always portrayed as “retaliating” to Palestinian aggression. Rocket attacks were represented as a “provocation” to Israel five times more often than the Gaza blockade was represented as a “provocation” to Palestinians. Forty years of occupation were portrayed as a provocation to Palestinians on only one occasion and settlement building twice. Where debate arises within the mainstream media, it tends to revolve around the “proportionality” of Israeli action, thus evading the underlying questions of Palestinian rights and Israeli domination.

Unlike the solidarity movements which grew up in response to the struggles in Vietnam or South Africa, the Palestine movement faces an opponent with its own international network, preaching its own form of solidarity (with Israel), very much a movement in its own right, however reliant on state support. Its rhetoric and tactics may be cynical in the extreme, but there’s no denying its emotional fervor. Building opposition to South African apartheid never involved the kind of on-the-ground contest with ideologically motivated, well-resourced opponents that pro-Palestinian activists routinely engage in. Just as the Palestinian cause is a global magnet for victims of discrimination and dispossession, so the cause of Israel is a magnet for the privileged, the entitled, the beneficiaries of Western and white supremacy. The rich and powerful see themselves as under siege from the poor and powerless and in Israel’s self-portrayal they recognize themselves. The gated communities of the world rally around the gated nation. The increasingly wealthy Indian elite — which has vigorously pursued governmental and business exchanges with Israel — sees in Israel not only an ally in a struggle against “Islamic terror” but a stepping stone to a closer relationship to the United States, and in a wider sense an entry into the exclusive club of the affluent and powerful.

Thus the highly particularist ideology of Zionism — which rests on the assertion of eternal ownership of a specified territory by a specified people — becomes a broader “civilizational” cause. This ideology underpins the ever-widening Israeli definition of “self-defense.” To those for whom the maintenance of a Jewish supremacist state in Palestine is the sine qua non of Jewish survival, any assertion of Palestinian rights is an “existential” threat — a negation that must itself be negated. As a state for all Jews, Israel embraces a global mission and enjoys special prerogatives. In the contemporary world only the US claims a wider remit of self-defense, insisting that it can strike anywhere to protect its perceived interests. Israeli exceptionalism finds a mirror and enabler in US exceptionalism, which in turn has its roots in the long history of Western colonialism, whose stock-in-trade was, for centuries, acts of piracy on the high seas. Through many years of grassroots education, agitation and organization, not to mention a steadfast defiance of intimidation, the solidarity movement has begun at last to have a real effect on the balance of power. But there is so much further to go. Governments around the world joined in the condemnation of the Israeli attack on the flotilla, but many of these same governments continue to provide essential means for Israel to pursue its destruction of the Palestinian people. In that context, those who consider themselves, in Thomas Paine’s words, “citizens of the world” are called upon to redouble their efforts to secure boycott, divestment and sanctions. If Israel continues to act with impunity, if Palestine instead of Israel is subject to isolation, then the powerful everywhere will have their options strengthened.

This essay is excerpted from Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, exclusively available from OR Books.

August 5, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Venezuela and Labor

The Big Lie

By DANIEL KOVALIK | August 5, 2010

The biggest obstacle to the attempt first by the Bush Administration, and now by the Obama Administration, to achieve passage of the long-stalled Free Trade Agreement with Colombia is that country’s long-standing shameful reality as “the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists,” to use the words of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the largest union confederation in the world, representing 176 million workers in 156 countries and territories.

Since 1986, over 2800 unionists have been assassinated in Colombia. The clear and ever-present danger to organized labor in Colombia is the most salient and undeniable fact about the U.S.’ favorite nation in the region.

Incredibly, it appears that adherents of the FTA may have commenced an effort to smear Venezuela with the same “danger to labor” brush in order to advance the prospects of the Colombia agreement by using bare statistics without elaboration or explanation to suggest that Colombia is no different. Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to the ITUC’s 2010 Annual Survey, of the 101 unionists assassinated in the world last year (2009), 48 (almost half) were Colombian. And, a recent, July 8, 2010 press release from the AFL-CI0 indicates that another 29 Colombian unionists were assassinated in the first half of 2010.

It is well-known that the assassination of unionists in Colombia is largely carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups linked to the Colombian government or by Colombian security forces themselves. Indeed, according to a 2007 report by Amnesty International on Colombia, “around 49 percent of human rights abuses against trade unionists were committed by paramilitaries [themselves linked to the Colombian state] and some 43 percent directly by the security forces.” And, the Colombian government up to its highest reaches, including President Alvaro Uribe himself, regularly (and quite falsely) stigmatizes unionists as “guerillas,” thereby knowingly setting up union leaders for paramilitary murder. Indeed, when I personally met with President Uribe as part of an AFL-CIO delegation in February 2008 at the Presidential Palace in Bogota and confronted him about this stigmatization, his proffered “defense” was that, when he was a student (presumably decades ago) his experience was that union leaders, student leaders and members of the press were in fact “guerillas.” In other words, in trying to fend off the claims that he stigmatized trade unionists, he merely repeated the stigmatization.

In light of all of this, the ITUC concluded in its 2010 Annual Survey that “[t]he historical and structural violence against the Colombian trade union movement remains firmly in place, manifesting itself in the form of systematic human and trade union rights violations. On average, men and women trade unionists in Colombia have been killed at the rate of one every three days over the last 23 years.”

This conclusion is in stark contrast to its conclusion about what is happening in Venezuela. Thus, while hardly uncritical of the situation confronting unionists in Venezuela, the ITUC, in its 2010 Annual Survey, concluded nonetheless that “[v]iolence linked to the fight for jobs continued to be the main reason behind the killing of trade unionists.” The ITUC explains this phenomenon in more detail in its 2009 Annual Survey. There, it states that “[a] delicate issue for the labour world in Venezuela is the persistent disputes over the right to work, which have cost the lives of at least 19 trade unionists and 10 other workers . . . . The situation is particularly acute in the construction and oil industries, where various interest groups and mafias have clashed over the negotiation and sale of jobs, which is affecting trade union activity per se.” The 2009 report goes on to note that “there has been a fall in the number of murders to the fight over jobs in comparison with the previous year (from 48 to 29 for the period from October 2007 to September 2008….”

In other words, the ITUC, which is recognized as the foremost authority on anti-union violence, views the killings of unionists in Colombia and Venezuela very differently – with the violence against unionists in Colombia being “structural” and “systematic,” almost invariably with government sanction; and the violence in Venezuela, on the other hand, stemming from mafia-like corruption largely within the union movement itself. This is a distinction with a huge difference. As the ITUC itself reported in 2008, the trade union movement in Colombia has been brought to the point of near extinction by violence specifically designed to wipe out the union movement as a whole, with only 4% of workers represented by unions; while in Venezuela, approximately 11% of workers are represented by unions – just under the rate of unionization in theUnited States (12.3%).

Now enters Juan Forero in the Washington Post (and in a condensed piece for NPR), who, in a very misleading and many times self-contradictory story, is claiming that Venezuela should now be considered “the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists,” pushing Colombia out of the number one spot. This piece, which is getting a lot of attention, could not be better timed as far as policy-makers in the U.S. and Colombia are concerned. Thus, it came out just as Obama has announced a renewed interest in the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (despite his campaign pledge to oppose it based upon trade union considerations) as well as the recent attempt by Colombia to censure Venezuela at the OAS for allegedly harboring FARC guerillas on its territory.

In his July 15, 2010 Washington Post piece entitled, “Venezuelan union clashes are on the rise as Chavez fosters new unions at odds with older ones,” Forero first acknowledges the fact that Venezuela considers itself “the most labor-friendly government in Latin America,” having “repeatedly increased the minimum wage, turned over the management of some nationalized companies to workers and fostered the creation of new unions.” In regard to the latter, Forero explains later in his piece that there are now “4,000 new unions, up from 1,300 in 2001” – a fact supporting Venezuela’s claim of being labor friendly.

However, the meat of Forero’s piece is to say that there is a sinister side to all of this – the killing of unionists, albeit by rival unions [as opposed to state or quazi-state forces as in the case of Colombia]. According to Forero, 75 unionists lost their lives in the past two years to such violence, 34 in the 12 months ending in May. Of course, in Colombia, 77 unionists have been killed in merely the past 1.5 years with 29 killed in the past 6 months, and this in the context of a country with much lower union density that Venezuela.

Still, Forero presses on, attempting to suggest that the killings in Venezuela are in fact politically motivated, and somehow the fault of the Chavez administration.

A close examination of Forero’s own piece, however, belies this claim. The most concrete example Forero gives of these “intra-union killings” is by way of an interview with Emilio Bastidas, a leader of the UNT, who talks of the murder of 8 union activists from the UNT in recent years. Bastidas himself is quoted in the story as saying that “We believe it is political to debilitate the UNT and cut us off from projecting ourselves.” While Forero explains that the UNT represents 80 unions, what he fails to tell the reader is that the UNT is a pro-Chavez union formed after the coup against Chavez in 2002. This is an incredible omission, for this obviously cuts against Forero’s premise that Chavez is somehow responsible for the violence. After all, why would Chavez want to interfere with the growth of a pro-Chavez labor federation?

From my own discussions with unionists in Venezuela, which I visited at the end of July and where I attended the third annual “Encuentro Sindical de Nuestra America” (Union Meeting of Our America) pro-Chavez unionists are much more often the target of the violence described in Forero’s piece than anti-Chavista unionists. As Jacobo Torres de Leon, Political Coordinator of the Fuerza Bolivariana de Trabajadores Dirrecion Nacional, responded to my questioning of him about the Forero piece, “there are no political killings like in Colombia.” Jacobo further emphasized that the unionists recently killed were his (pro-Chavez) comrades – a fact inconvenient to Forero’s well-publicized thesis. I should also note that President Chavez addressed the Union Meeting of Our America and was well received by the over 300 unionists in attendance from almost every country of the Western Hemisphere. At this meeting, Chavez called on workers to take control of the factories in which they work – good advice for us all.

There is an old saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” It seems an appropriate prism through which to view this most current attempt to rescue the Colombia FTA from that nation’s own continuing and indisputable status as the number 1 country in the world for anti-union killings.

Daniel Kovalik is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Law and Senior Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO, where he has worked for over 17 years.

August 5, 2010 Posted by | Deception | Leave a comment

Israel army escorts 300 settlers into Nablus

Ma’an – 05/08/2010

NABLUS: Residents of Nablus were told to stay indoors by Israeli troops patrolling the area just after midnight Thursday, ahead of a mass visit of Jewish worshipers to a tomb in the area.

Witnesses in the Balata refugee camp said 12 Israeli military vehicles entered the area on patrol, clearing the streets of residents. The troops reportedly entered the area from the east at the Beit Furik checkpoint.

Following the incursion, residents near the tomb said six buses pulled up to Joseph’s Tomb, believed to be the burial place of the patriarch and his two sons, and decamped alongside 20 military vehicles.

Palestinian security sources said an estimated 300 settlers made the trip, remaining in the area for four hours between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.

Gaza minister fears tomb to be annexed

Minister of Waqf in the Gaza government Taleb Abu Sha’ar called the a “violation” and “provocative.”

Abu Sha’ar said the military measures and the forceful visit to the site was a “violation of the holy place” and took place on the “pretext that the area belongs only to them.”

Abu Sha’ar warned that the tomb could become the next target for designation as an Israeli national heritage site, following the spring declaration of the Ibrahimi Mosque, in the West Bank city of Hebron, as a national site. The declaration sparked outrage and concerns that the mosque would be cut off from civilian use.

In 1993 the mosque was partitioned, half was designated for Jewish use and the other half for Muslim use.

3 detained from Nablus area overnight

Israeli forces conducted patrols of several districts in the Nablus area overnight, detaining three men from the town of Asira Ash-Shamaliya, north of Nablus, and took them to unknown destination, Palestinian police officials said.

The men were identified as Fakher Azam Hasan Bara, 35, Muhammad Abdullah Yousif Sawalha, 37, and Usama Hamed Hamdana, 30.

Sources said the homes of the men were entered and searched before they were detained.

August 5, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Restricting freedom of movement: an Israeli attempt to silence leaders of the popular struggle

International Solidarity Movement | August 5, 2010
Khatib during a speaking his speaking tour in Canada. Photo: Tadamon!

On August 4, 2010 about 1 PM, Mohammed Khatib from Bil’in was denied exit to Jordan via King Hussein Bridge. Khatib was on his way to Spain via Amman when Israeli border officials prevented him from crossing the border to Jordan. Denying the leaders of the non-violent Popular Struggle to go abroad is clearly an attempt to silence Palestinians who speak about human rights violations committed by Israel.

This is not the first time Israel has prevented leaders of the Popular Struggle from going abroad. Earlier this year Iyad Burnat, the leader of the Popular Committee in Bil’in was denied exit via King Hussein’s Bridge when on his way to Europe via Amman. Burnat and his 5 year old daughter were detained at the border, and after hours of waiting they were sent back to Bil’in. Later Burnat was given permission to travel abroad, on condition he did not speak about the situation in Bil’in. He is now threatened with arrest if he chooses to do so.

Both Khatib and Burnat had valid visas for their destinations, and had been planning their departure months in advance. Since Israel denies the vast majority of Palestinians entry to Jerusalem where the consulates are located, obtaining a visa is a time consuming process.

Crossing the border back to Israel after travelling abroad is also a complicated and potentially dangerous process. In 2009 Mohammed Othman was arrested at the Jordan border when returning from a speaking tour in Norway. Othman was held under administrative detention for months, without trial, allegedly considered a “security threat”.

Mohammed Khatib and other activists for the Popular Struggle can tell of frequent human rights violations: arrests and night raids carried out by the army, and theft of Palestinian land that makes life extremely difficult in their villages. As more and more people become aware of the situation in Palestine, Israel needs to find new strategies to silence those Palestinian voices speaking out – and denying Palestinians freedom of movement and freedom of speech is one tactic.

At 10 PM last night Mohammed Khatib returned to Bil’in. He reports that the reason Israeli border police gave for refusing to let him pass to Jordan was that the Israeli intelligence, Shebak, had given them instructions. The refusal came despite Khatib’s possession of a valid ruling by an Israeli court – issued on Tuesday – which allowed him to travel. This legal ruling was ignored by the border officials and proves once again that Israeli officials do not even follow their own legal system.

August 5, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

US airstrikes ‘kill Afghan civilians’

Press TV – August 5, 2010

Dozens of civilians have been killed and several others injured in Afghanistan after US warplanes bombarded the country’s east, according to witnesses.

The American forces launched two airstrikes in Nangarhar province on Thursday morning, witnesses told Press TV.

One of the attacks left at least 30 people dead and injured. The other strike, which hit a funeral procession in a separate area, killed 13 civilians including two children.

Thursday’s incident came after another US airstrike killed at least 52 civilians, including several women and children, in the city of Sangin in southern Helmand province last month.

US-led forces in Afghanistan regularly launch attacks on alleged militant hideouts, but the strikes usually result in civilian casualties.

In a new statement, Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General David Petraeus emphasized on Wednesday that protecting the Afghan people was the top priority in the nine-year war.

“We must continue — indeed, redouble — our efforts to reduce the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum,” said Petraeus.

Despite a promise by the commander of international forces in Afghanistan to reduce civilian casualties, the civilian fatalities are on the rise.

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

Israeli group spotlights sham of Israeli construction freeze

By Brian Ennis – IMEMC & Agencies – August 04, 2010

An Israeli NGO has documented widespread disregard for the construction freeze that was supposed to be enforced in the West Bank settlements.

Peace Now, an Israeli group which focuses on illegal settlements, saw an incredible amount of construction in the settlements in spite of the supposed freeze on new construction. The freeze was put in place this past January by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is set to expire at the end of September.

Peace Now documented 492 violations of this construction freeze. Using aerial photographs and other tools the group determined that construction had begun on over 600 units in sixty different settlements throughout the West Bank. 492 of these were directly in violation of the freeze.

Other research by the group indicates that in a normal period of construction in the settlements which matches the time of this freeze there would be construction of about 1130 new homes. This shows that during the “freeze” construction has only slowed by about half.

A report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released recently has some interesting numbers on the population the illegal settlements. It points out that between the period of 1972 and 2009 settlement population increased forty fold. This is compared to only a doubling of population in Israel and the Syrian Golan Heights.

August 4, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israeli police raze rebuilt Bedouin village

Ma’an – 04/08/2010

AL-ARAQIB, Israel: Hundreds of Israeli police stormed an unrecognized Bedouin village Wednesday, less than one week after it was razed to make way for Jewish National Fund forest, witnesses said.

Residents, who remained in the Negev-area village to rebuild, said clashes erupted with police, sent to clear the Bedouin who had not left the area.

The dwellings were rebuilt following a decision by the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the online news site Arab48 reported. The decision was made following the demolition of the buildings on 27 July.

Witnesses said bulldozers tore down the new structures, prompting the clashes, in which five people sustained injuries, including Palestinian member of Israel’s Knesset Taleb As-Sana, as Israeli police tried to remove him from one of the sit-in tents.

Salem Abu Madeghem and Awad Abu Fareeh, field researchers for the civil rights group in Israel Adalah, as well as two others, sustained injuries, residents said, adding that all were transferred to hospital for treatment.

Spokesman for Israel’s police Mickey Rosenfeld said a number of shacks were taken down in the village, and noted several were taken in for questioning. Others, he added, were arrested “for causing disturbances at the scene and police are in and around the village at the moment to prevent further disturbances.”

The Islamic Movement in Israel’s chief Sheikh Mussa Abu Ayyad said his organization would stand by the Bedouin residents, who are all citizens of Israel, and would provide services for them.

Locals said they intended to return to their village to once again rebuild the homes.

On 27 July, all 40 homes in the Al-Araqib village were destroyed and 300 residents were evicted during the raid which began at 4:30 a.m. after the Israeli government deemed the village illegally built on state land. The Bedouin residents say they have proof of land ownership, and have been in court for several years.

Approximately 1,500 police officers participated including special riot forces, mounted officers, helicopters, and bulldozers.

At least 200 children were left homeless as a result, as police removed residents property into prepared containers, and bulldozers razed buildings and sheepfolds, local activists said in a statement. Fruit orchards and olive grove trees were destroyed in the process.

Israeli activists who were present at the demolition described the move as an “act of war, such as is undertaken against an enemy.”

August 4, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

NYT: Pervasive surveillance is a serious threat — in China

By Glenn Greenwald| August 3, 2010

Yesterday, I wrote about the proliferation of the private online surveillance industry, how it furnishes ever more thorough and invasive information to the U.S. Government about citizens’ online activities, and why that destruction of privacy is so dangerous  My Salon colleague, Dan Gillmor, yesterday detailed just how comprehensive are the online surveillance capabilities which enable all of this.  Today, The New York Times confronts the same problem of privacy destruction at the hands of a pervasive Surveillance State . . . in China.  In a perfectly interesting article, Michael Wines describes how the Chinese Government has placed surveillance cameras covering virtually every public space in two of its more “restive” provinces, which last year saw deadly fighting between ethnic minorities and the Government.  He describes the dangers as follows:

Much of the proliferation is driven by the same rationales as in Western nations: police forces stretched thin, rising crime, mushrooming traffic jams and the bureaucratic overkill that attends any mention of terrorism.

But China also has another overriding concern — controlling social order and monitoring dissent. And some human rights advocates say they fear that the melding of ever improving digital technologies and the absence of legal restraints on surveillance raise the specter of genuinely Orwellian control over society. . . .

Officials say the cameras leverage the latest technology to battle crime and terrorism Guangdong provincial officials told Chinese news services last year that their new cameras had deterred more than 18,000 street crimes even before the one million cameras had been fully deployed. In Kunming, in south-central China, crime dropped 10 percent after the police installed new cameras, the city’s deputy police chief told a security forum last spring.

That said — and some Western skeptics dispute claims of the cameras’ crime-fighting success — China’s video surveillance clearly has a darker side. . . . The longer-term concern . . . is that video surveillance will become a pervasive tool for controlling not only China’s comparative handful of dissidents, but the masses of people who ordinarily would not run afoul of the state.

So government surveillance “clearly has a darker side” and could become “a pervasive tool for controlling not only dissidents, but the masses of people who ordinarily would not run afoul of the state”?  You don’t say.  Thank God we don’t live in a place like China where that happens, but instead in the U.S., where surveillance is only motivated by a desire to stop Terrorism and other crimes.

It’s certainly true that China deploys surveillance cameras far more aggressively, at least in these two provinces, than the U.S. does.  But the level of other types of at least equally invasive surveillance by the U.S. Government — including warrantless monitoring of telephone and Internet communications records, as well as Internet browsing activities — is approaching the level of absoluteness.  As the ACLU’s privacy expert Chris Calabrese told me yesterday:  “if the Government can monitor your Internet searches and store your broswing history, the list of websites you visit, that’s close to being able to read your mind.”  And, of course, the 2008 FISA Amendments Act dramatically expanded the Government’s ability to read the content of Americans’ emails and eavesdrop on their calls without warrants.

It isn’t as though the U.S. has no history of severe surveillance abuses by the Government against its citizens.  The opposite is true.  It’s not really hyperbole to say that every decade of the last century has seen such abuses, with a fairly unbroken trend toward more ever-invasive measures, including many in the last decade.  The only episode that imposed some mild restraints — the mid-1970s reforms brought about by the Church Committee’s exposure of decades of severe abuses — has been drowned by the post-9/11 explosion of the Surveillance State.  And then there was that instantly forgotten Washington Post series from a couple weeks ago documenting how our Surveillance State is so vast and secretive that nobody even knows what it does, let alone restrains it.

But anyway:  let’s fret about the dark side of China’s surveillance activities.  It’s always bizarre how eager we are to focus on the threatening acts of other countries’ Governments and how finely attuned we’re willing to be to the likelihood for abuse — over there — while blissfully averting our eyes from similar threats from our own Government and remaining happily faithful that our own government officials would never do such things no matter how many times they do.

August 4, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

The Orinoco Belt has a strong and, indeed, enviable competitive position

VHeadline | August 1, 2010

Former Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) Finance Coordinator Oliver L  Campbell writes: I have just read a story by Daniel Wallis of Reuters entitled “Venezuela revels in oil reserves — challenges remain.” Reading between the lines, I sense a veiled criticism much of which I believe is not merited. I have tried to give another, more realistic, and certainly more upbeat, assessment in the following comments.

Venezuela indeed intends to increase its oil reserves, but to say it “hopes to catapult past Saudi Arabia” as the world leader is colorful reporting that omits to mention the historical context.

It has been known since the 1920s, when the first exploration took place, that large amounts of heavy oil existed in the Orinoco Oil Belt. Some wells were drilled there in the 1930s, but work stopped since no commercial use could be found for the heavy oil until the beginning of the 1980s when Orimulsion was developed as a fuel for power plants. However, it was not till the end of the 1990s, when the four “strategic associations” were formed, that oil production started on a large scale.

Though it was known that huge deposits existed, no one saw a pressing need or hurry to quantify them. The present government decided to do so, primarily as a matter of national pride and the international prestige that comes from having the world’s largest oil reserves. A secondary factor is that OPEC quotas take into account both proven reserves and production capacity and, by increasing the former to Saudi Arabia’s level, Venezuela hopes in future to be allowed to increase its present production. The fact that international oil companies were prepared to bid for the Carabobo and Junin blocks before certification of the increase in the reserves shows they gave it little importance. The geologists knew huge reserves were there and certification was very much a paper exercise.

Mr Wallis refers to 513 billion barrels of recoverable oil “if costs were not an issue.” But they are not since costs are certainly much lower than those for deepwater, offshore drilling or those in the Athabasca Tar Sands. It is unfortunate the Orinoco Belt crudes and Athabasca crudes are often mentioned together as being tar sands. This is wrong since the oil in Orinoco Belt is accumulated in reservoirs in the subsurface, whereas the bitumen in the Athabasca Tar Sands is found near the surface mixed with sand, clay and minerals.

Neither is there anything unconventional about the production process in the Orinoco Belt. Wells are drilled in a cluster of up to 24 from one location using what is known as horizontal drilling — drilling is diagonal till the oil sands are reached when it switches to horizontal. With a temperature of 50ºC, oil flows easily and large electric pumps pump it to the surface without difficulty. On reaching the surface, the oil cools and becomes viscous like a thick tar. It is then blended with a light crude of 32ºAPI to produce a 16ºAPI crude of commercial quality. Alternatively, it is mixed with a diluent and pumped to the upgrader on the coast to be upgraded to either 16ºAPI or 32ºAPI depending on the plant. The diluent is recovered and pumped back to the production area.

So the only unconventional aspect of the 8º to 9ºAPI oil being currently produced is that it needs to blended or upgraded to make it commercially viable. I labour this point so the reader will understand that oil from the Oil Belt is produced like any heavy crude. Contrast this with the Athabasca crude which is obtained by surface mining that involves making huge holes in the ground and then separating the oil from the sands. Exploitation there has been called “a looming ecological disaster” and many Canadians are opposed to it. The separation process consumes a huge quantity of natural gas to heat large amounts of water. The toxic waste is stored in tailing ponds which are so huge that they cover 80 square miles and can be seen from space. The Orinoco Belt has none of these problems, and I have heard of no pressure group objecting to its development.

Mr Wallis states “The technology needed to pump the Orinoco’s ultra-heavy crude is much more complicated and expensive” than it is for light oil.

Though true, the complicated production aspect was solved a long time ago by the four strategic associations. The expensive part applies to the upgrading since blending with a lighter crude is not a costly operation. PDVSA do not publish individual crude production costs, but the average for all crudes, excluding depreciation, in 2008 was $7 a barrel. Add, say, another $3 for the Orinoco Belt extra-heavy crudes and then $5 for upgrading, plus another $5 to cover depreciation and you get a total cost of $20 a barrel at the outside. Compare this with $30 a barrel or more for Athabasca and $40 or more for deep sea production and you see Venezuela is in a privileged position. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other Middle East countries have lower costs, but only Saudi Arabia has comparable oil reserves.

My geologist colleagues question why a 20% recovery factor has been assumed when the current rate is only 9%, and I must admit I am surprised Ryder Scott agreed to it. But, taking a practical approach, does it really matter if the recoverable reserves are stated as 500 billion or 250 billion barrels? The latter would provide a production of 5,000,000 b/d for 137 years by which time who knows if oil will be used as fuel.

I disagree with Mr Wallis that planned projects “in isolated rural areas that lack even basic infrastructure” will create serious problems. Oil is produced in much more inhospitable places than the Orinoco Belt. I accompanied General Alfonzo Ravard, the president of PDVSA, on a visit to the area in 1980 and access was not that difficult. It must have improved since then. Anyway, oil companies are used to operating in difficult terrains and far from the towns. There is no comparison with working in Alaska or Canada under freezing conditions and the permafrost of the tundra, nor with being stationed on a platform 200 miles from land which is truly isolated. Once again, Venezuela is in the privileged position of having oil on land which vehicles can easily reach.

The consultant who asked “to what extent will PDVSA let their partners participate?” should have known the answer. PDVSA owns at least 60% of the shares in each of the mixed companies. Though people refer to them as joint ventures, legally they are not since joint ventures require joint decision taking. PDVSA considers them to be subsidiaries and consolidates them as such in the accounts. But they let the minority shareholders “participate,” or play an active role, by placing their employees either on the Board or in senior executive positions. They realise many of them have key skills which PDVSA lack.

I agree the companies are a disparate bunch — some have ample experience of extra heavy oil production and others have none at all. Venezuela favours other state companies and the trouble with some of these is not just a lack of experience but also a lack of financial resource. State companies often have to compete with other sectors of the economy — hospitals, schools, housing, roads, power plants — for funds. Mr Wallis is right in expressing “doubts about when touted projects to tap the area” will come on stream. The history so far has been largely of procrastination and missed targets.

The quote that “Oil in the ground has zero value” sounds sagacious but is fatuous — companies sell or farm out acreage frequently for large sums. They paid large bonuses upfront for the oil in the ground before any production in the Orinoco Belt started. In Venezuela’s case, the OPEC quota means present oil production is restricted so, guess what? PDVSA have closed in the oil that produces least return per barrel because of its higher cost — oil from the Orinoco Belt. There is thus no immediate hurry to increase production capacity, though clearly that is what PDVSA aims for within the next couple of years.

Mr Wallis points out the risk of investing in Venezuela. But I think that risk in the Oil Belt has receded since royalty was increased to 33%, income tax set at 50% and the mixed companies were formed. These conditions are so tough that the country can hardly squeeze any more from the foreign companies. PDVSA is also strapped for cash and has trouble meeting its 60% capital investment commitment so it would make no sense to undertake further expropriations.

A risk that does exist is not being able to repatriate dividends in a timely fashion since, to conserve cash, PDVSA has delayed the payment of dividends in other mixed companies.

However, state companies in the Orinoco Belt have political clout and can also exert diplomatic pressure to ensure prompt payment–the private companies can get a free ride on their coat-tails.

I trust I have made my case that the Orinoco Belt has a strong and, indeed, enviable competitive position, certainly better than Athabasca which also holds huge reserves. In addition, the easy accessibility on land means its production costs are half those offshore in deep water.

August 4, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Economics | Leave a comment

ACLU, CCR seek to have Obama enjoined from killing Awlaki without due process

By Glenn Greenwald | August 3, 2010

A major legal challenge to one of the Obama administration’s most radical assertions of executive power began this morning in a federal courthouse in Washington, DC.  Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son without due process of law.  But then, a significant and extraordinary problem arose:   regulations promulgated several years ago by the Treasury Department prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special “license” from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation.

On July 16 — roughly two weeks after Awlaki’s father retained the ACLU and CCR to file suit — the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki.  That action would have made it a criminal offense for those organizations to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government.  On July 23, the two groups submitted a request for such a license with the Treasury Department, and when doing so, conveyed the extreme time-urgency involved:  namely, that there is an ongoing governmental effort to kill Awlaki and any delay in granting this “license” could cause him to be killed without these claims being heard by a court.  Despite that, the Treasury Department failed even to respond to the request.

Left with no choice, the ACLU and CCR this morning filed a lawsuit on their own behalf against Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department.  The suit argues that Treasury has no statutory authority under the law it invokes — The International Emergency Economic Powers Act — to bar American lawyers from representing American citizens on an uncompensated basis.  It further argues what ought to be a completely uncontroversial point:  that even if Congress had vested Treasury with this authority, it is blatantly unconstitutional to deny American citizens the right to have a lawyer, and to deny American lawyers the right to represent clients, without first obtaining a permission slip from Executive Branch officials (the Complaint is here).  As the ACLU/CCR Brief puts it:  “The notion that the government can compel a citizen to seek its permission before challenging the constitutionality of its actions in court is wholly foreign to our constitutional system” and “[a]s non-profit organizations dedicated to protecting civil liberties and human rights, Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to represent clients in litigation consistent with their organizational missions.”  The Brief also argues that it is a violation of Separation of Powers to allow the Executive Branch to determine in its sole discretion who can and cannot appear in and have access to a federal court.

Today’s lawsuit seeks, on an emergency basis, an Order declaring the Treasury Department’s asserted power to be without statutory authority and/or in violation of the U.S. Constitution, and to bar the U.S. Government from imposing any penalties whatsoever (criminal or otherwise) on the ACLU and CCR for providing legal representation to Awlaki.  Assuming the court issues such an order, the next step will be for a lawsuit to be quickly filed on Awlaki’s behalf to enjoin his targeted assassination.

It’s rather amazing that the Federal Government asserts the right to require U.S. citizens and American lawyers to obtain government permission before entering into an attorney-client relationship — all because these officials decided on their own, with no process, to call the citizen a “Global Terrorist.”  It’s difficult to imagine a more blatantly unconstitutional power than that.  What kind of an American would think the Government has the power to decide whether citizens may or may not be represented by lawyers?  Then again, this is an administration that asserts the power to choose American citizens for targeted killings far from any battlefield with no due process of any kind — and plenty of its supporters are perfectly content with this — so nothing should really be surprising.

If one really thinks about it, it’s an incredible spectacle that a lawsuit is being filed with the aim of having Barack Obama enjoined by a Federal Court from killing an American citizen, far away from any battlefield, without any due process whatsoever.  That such a suit was never filed during the Bush years, but is now necessary under the rule of this Constitutional Scholar almost a decade after the 9/11 attack, speaks volumes about many important facts.

The Awlaki lawsuit, if it can proceed, will likely face serious obstacles, beginning with the same warped tactic which both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly invoked to shield illegal surveillance and torture from judicial scrutiny:  first, refuse to confirm whether such a program exists (notwithstanding public admissions that it does) on the ground such matters are “state secrets,” and then, with Kafkaesque perfection, insist that the lawsuit must be dismissed because (thanks to the Government’s refusal to acknowledge it) there is no evidence that Awlaki is subject to such an assassination program and thus lacks “standing” to sue.  It’s also possible that a federal judge will be highly reluctant to restrain the President from targeting alleged Terrorists, or will view the AUMF as constituting Congressional authorization for the President to kill anyone who is allegedly associated with Al Qaeda no matter where they are found (on the ground that the whole world is a “battlefield”), particularly if they’re alleged (without proferred evidence) to be involved in ongoing, imminent Terrorist plots.

But whatever anyone thinks of those issues, it should offend every American that the Government purports to have the power to ban lawyers from representing citizens without its permission, which (as it’s doing here) it can withhold without explanation and in its sole discretion.  Does any American want the Government to have that power with respect to citizens:  to bar lawyers, under the threat of criminal prosecution, from representing you if the Government calls you a Terrorist?  That’s the power the Obama administration is asserting and, in this case, actively wielding.  A court will now decide if it has the legal authority to do that, and if the court decides it does not, the next step will be a lawsuit brought on behalf of Awlaki contesting Obama’s authority to order American citizens killed without any criminal charges or due process.  The Obama administration should be very proud of itself.

August 3, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

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