Who’s Who at Wikileaks?
By Julie Lévesque | Global Research | December 20, 2010
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt
After the publication of a series of confirmations rather than revelations, there are some crucial unanswered questions regarding the nature and organizational structure of Wikileaks.
Shrouded in secrecy, the now famous whistleblowing site and its director Julian Assange are demanding “transparency” from governments and corporations around the world while failing to provide some basic information pertaining to Wikileaks as an organization.
Who is Julian Assange?
In the introduction to the book Underground: Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), by Julian Assange and Suelette Dreyfus, Assange begins with the following quotes:
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” — Oscar Wilde
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine De Saint-Exupery
From the start, Assange states that he undertook the research for the book; however, he fails to mention that he was actually one of the hackers analyzed in the book, going by the name of Mendax, a Latin word for “lying, false…”.
Although we cannot confirm that the above quotes referred to him, they nonetheless suggest that Assange, at the time, was hiding his true identity.
We know very little about the cryptographer Julian Assange. He is indeed very cryptic when it comes to revealing who he is and where he worked prior to the Wikileaks project. On the list of board members published previously by Wikileaks, we can read that Julian Assange:
has “attended 37 schools and 6 universities”, none of which are mentioned by name;
“Australia’s most famous ethical computer hacker”. A court case from 1996 cited abundantly in the mainstream press is available on the Australasian Legal Information Institute. Contrary to all the other cases listed on the afore mentioned link, the full text of Assange’s case is not available;
“in the first prosecution of its type… [he] defended a case in the supreme court for his role as the editor of an activist electronic magazine”. The name of the magazine, the year of the prosecution, the country where it took place are not mentioned;
allegedly founded “’Pickup’ civil rights group for children”. No information about this group seems to be available, other than in reports related to Wikileaks. We don’t know if it still exists, where it is located and what are its activities.
“studied mathematics, philosophy and neuroscience”. We don’t know where he studied or what his credentials are;
“has been a subject of several books and documentaries”. If so, why not mention at least one of them?
One could indeed argue that Assange wishes to remain anonymous in order to protect himself, the whistleblowers and/or the members of his organization. On the other hand, he cannot realistically expect people to trust him blindly if they do not know who he really is. […]
Who’s Who at Wikileaks? The Members of the Advisory Board
Here are some interesting facts about several members listed in 2008 on the Wikileaks advisory board, including organizations to which they belong or have links to.
Philip Adams:
Philip Adams, among other things, “held key posts in Australian governmental media administration” (Wikileaks’ Advisory Board, Wikileaks.org, 27 March 2008), chaired the Australia Council and contributed to The Times, The Financial Times in London and The New York Times. Confirmed by several reports, he is the representative of the International Committee of Index on Censorship. It is worth mentioning that Wikileaks was awarded the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression award. (Philip Adams, Milesago.com)
Adams worked as a presenter for ABC (Australia) Radio’s Late Night Live and as columnist for The Australian since the 1960s. The Australian is owned by News Corporation, a property of Rupert Murdoch, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Adams also “chairs the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Mind at Sydney University and the Australian National University”. CFR member Michael Spence also serves on this board and Rupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan Murdoch, has served as well until 2001. The 2008 Distinguished Fellow of the Center for the Mind was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has faced a slew of accusations for war crimes. Does Adams have conflicting allegiances: serving on the advisory board of the Wikileaks organization whose mandate is to expose war crimes, yet at the same time sitting on another board which honors an accused war criminal.
According to an article in The Australian:
Adams, who has never met Assange, says he quit the board due to ill-health shortly after WikiLeaks was launched and never attended a meeting. “I don’t think the advisory board has done any advisoring,” he quips.
CJ Hinke:
CJ Hinke, “writer, academic, activist, has lived in Thailand since 1989 where he founded Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) in 2006 to campaign against pervasive censorship in Thai society.” (Wikileaks’ Advisory Board, Wikileaks.org, 27 March 2008) FACT is part of Privacy International, which includes among others on its Steering Committee or advisory board, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Index on Censorship.
In 2009, FACT received funding from the following organizations: the European Parliament, the European Commission framework funding programmes, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, the Open Society Institute, the Open Society Justice Initiative, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, The Fund for Constitutional Government, the Stern Foundation, the Privacy Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the University of New South Wales (Sydney).
In the US, Privacy International is “administered through the Fund for Constitutional Government in Washington DC.”(About Privacy International, 16 December 2009).
One of the board members of this fund is Steven Aftergood, who wrote one of the first articles on Wikileaks before the website was even functional. In a report from Technology Daily dated January 4, 2007, it is stated that “Wikileaks recently invited Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy researcher at the Federation of American Scientists [FAS], to serve on its advisory board.”
Ben Laurie:
“’WikiLeaks allegedly has an advisory board, and allegedly I’m a member of it… I don’t know who runs it…’ Laurie says his only substantive interaction with the group was when Assange approached him to help design a system that would protect leakers’ anonymity.” (David Kushner, Inside Wikileaks’ Leak Factory, Mother Jones, 6 April, 2010)
This article appeared in Mother Jones in April 2010. An article of the New York Daily News dated December 2010 quotes Ben Laurie as follows: “‘Julian’s a smart guy and this is an interesting tactic,’ said Ben Laurie, a London-based computer security expert who has advised WikiLeaks.”
Despite his denial of being an advisor to Wikileaks, his name still appears on the list of advisory board members, according to reports. It is also worth noting that Ben Laurie is a “Director of Security for The Bunker Secure Hosting, where he has worked since 1984 and is responsible for security, cryptography and network design.”He is also a Director of Open Rights Group, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd and the Open Society Foundation.
Chinese and Tibetan Dissidents on the Advisory Board
Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang:
Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, a “Tibetan exile & activist” is a former President of the Washington Tibet Association, and was a member of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. In July of this year he was appointed by the Governor of Washington State to the State Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs. (A Tibetan Appointed to the Washington State Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs, Tibetan Association of Washington, 17 July 2010)
Wang Youcai:
Wang Youcai co-founded the Chinese Democracy Party and is another leader of the Tienanmen Square protests. Imprisoned for “conspiring to overthrow the Government of China… he was exiled in 2004 under international political pressure, especially from the United States. He is also a “member of Chinese Constitutional Democratic Transition Research and a member of the Coordinative Service Platform of the China Democracy Party” (Wikileaks’ Advisory Board, Wikileaks.org, 27 March 2008)
Xiao Qiang:
Xiao Qiang, is one of the Chinese dissidents listed on the Wikileaks board. He “ is the Director of the Berkeley China Internet Project…[He] became a full time human rights activist after the Tienanmen Massacre in 1989… and is currently vice-chair of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy”, according to Wikileaks’ description. He received the MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2001 and is a commentator for Radio Free Asia. (Wikilieaks’ Avisory Board, Wikileaks.org, 27 March 2008)
Xiao Qiang is also the “founder and publisher of China Digital Times” (Biographies, National Endowment for Democracy), which is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (Directives from China’s Ministry of Truth on Liu Xiaobo winning Nobel, Democracy Digest, October 8, 2010).
The Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy is an initiative of the Washington, DC-based NED. (World Movement for Democracy). In 2008, Xiao Qiang was part of a discussion panel titled “Law Rights and Democracy in China: Perspectives and Leading Advocates”, held by NED before the Democracy Award Ceremony. (2008 NED Democracy Award Honors Heroes of Human Rights and Democracy in China, National Endowment for Democracy, June 17, 2008).
Radio Free Asia is funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) which describes itself as a body that “encompasses all U.S. civilian international broadcasting, including the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Radio and TV Martí, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN)—Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television.” Eight of its nine members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate; the ninth is the Secretary of State, who serves ex officio”. (Broadcasting Board of Governors)
RFE/RL no longer hides its covert origins: “Initially, both RFE and RL were funded principally by the U.S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)… In 1971, all CIA involvement ended and thereafter RFE and RL were funded by Congressional appropriation through the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB) and after 1995 the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). (A Brief History of RFE/RL)
Interestingly, in a report from 2002, the CFR suggested “creating a Public Diplomacy Coordinating Structure (PDCS) to help define communications strategies and streamline public diplomacy structures. ‘In many ways, the PDCS would be similar to the National Security Council’… PDCS members would include the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury and Commerce, as well as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and BBG chairman”, a suggestion officially objected by the BBG “to preserve the journalistic integrity.” (BBG Expresses Concern With Report Recommendations on U.S. International Braodcasting, 31 July 2002)
Wang Dan:
Among the Chinese dissidents once listed on the board is Wang Dan. He was a leader of the Tienanmen Square democracy movement, which “earned him the top spot on China’s list of ‘21 Most Wanted Beijing Student Leaders’.” He was imprisoned for his subversive activities and “exiled in 1998 under international political pressure to the United States.” (Wikilieaks’ Avisory Board, Wikileaks.org, 27 March 2008)
He is chairman of the Chinese Constitutional Reform Association, and sits on the editorial board of Beijing Spring, a magazine funded by NED, the “chief democracy-promoting foundation” according to an article by Judith Miller in The New York Times. One of the founders of NED was quoted as saying “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” (quoted in William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, 2000, p. 180).
In 1998, Wang Dan was granted the NED’s Democracy Award “for representing a peaceful alternative to achieve democracy and for [his] courage and steadfastness in the cause of democracy”. (1998 Democracy Award honors Heroes of Human Rights and Democracy in China, National Endowment for Democracy)
The Battle for “Transparency”
In 2007, Wikileaks described itself as an “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.” Its priority? “[E]xposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.” Like the advisory board member list, this description no longer appears on Wikileaks’ website. The organization also claimed to be “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.” (Wikileaks.org, 17 December 2007)
In the currently available description, the reference to the Chinese dissidents and the origins of the other members has been removed. Wikileaks rather puts the emphasis on not being a covert operation.
Assange encourages blind faith in Wikileaks as he puts a lot of emphasis on the trustworthiness of his opaque organization. In the words of Assange:
“Once something starts going around and being considered trustworthy in a particular arena, and you meet someone and they say ‘I heard this is trustworthy,’ then all of a sudden it reconfirms your suspicion that the thing is trustworthy. So that’s why brand is so important, just as it is with anything you have to trust.”(Andy Greenberg, An Interview with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, Forbes, 29 October, 2010, emphasis added)
“People should understand that WikiLeaks has proven to be arguably the most trustworthy new source that exists, because we publish primary source material and analysis based on that primary source material,” Assange told CNN. “Other organizations, with some exceptions, simply are not trustworthy.”(The secret life of Julian Assange, CNN, 2 December 2010, emphasis added)
While Wikileaks no longer discloses the names of the members of its advisory board, nor does it reveal its sources of funding, we have to trust it because according to its founder Julian Assange, it “has proven to be the most trustworthy news source that exists”.
Moreover, if we follow Assange’s assertion that there are only a few media organizations which can be considered trustworthy, we must assume that those are the ones which were selected by Wikileaks to act as “partners” in the release and editing of the leaks, including The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, El Paìs, Le Monde.
Yet The New York Times, which employs members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) including Wikileaks’ collaborator David E. Sanger, has proven more than once to be a propaganda tool for the US government, the most infamous example being the Iraqi WMD narrative promoted by Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller.
In an interview, Assange indicates that Wikileaks chose a variety of media to avoid the use of leaks for propaganda purposes. It is important to note that although these media might be owned by different groups and have different editorial policies, they are without exception news entities controlled by major Western media corporations.
A much better way to avoid the use of leaks for disinformation purposes would have been to work with media from different regions of the world (e.g. Asia, Latin America, Middle East) as well as establish partnership agreements with the alternative media. By working primarily with media organizations from NATO countries, Wikileaks has chosen to submit its leaks to one single “worldview”, that of the West.
As a few critics of Wikileaks have noted, the Wikileaks project brings to mind the “recommendations” of Cass Sunstein, heads the Obama White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein is the author of an authoritative Harvard Law School essay entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures”. As outlined by Daniel Tencer in Obama Staffer Calls for “Cognitive Infiltration” of ” 9/11 Conspiracy Groups”:
Sunstein “argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via ‘chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine’ those groups”.
Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public — the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.
Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.” (emphasis added)
Links to The Intelligence Community
Wikleaks feels the need to reassure public opinion that it has no contacts with the intelligence community. Ironically, it also sees the need to define the activities of the intelligence agencies and compare them to those of Wikileaks:
“1.5 The people behind WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is a project of the Sunshine Press. It’s probably pretty clear by now that WikiLeaks is not a front for any intelligence agency or government despite a rumour to that effect. This rumour was started early in WikiLeaks’ existence, possibly by the intelligence agencies themselves. WikiLeaks is an independent global group of people with a long standing dedication to the idea of a free press and the improved transparency in society that comes from this. The group includes accredited journalists, software programmers, network engineers, mathematicians and others.
To determine the truth of our statements on this, simply look at the evidence. By definition, intelligence agencies want to hoard information. By contrast, WikiLeaks has shown that it wants to do just the opposite. Our track record shows we go to great lengths to bring the truth to the world without fear or favour.” (Wikileaks.org, emphasis added)
“Is Wikileaks a CIA front?
Wikileaks is not a front for the CIA, MI6, FSB or any other agency. Quite the opposite actually. […] By definition spy agencies want to hide information. We want to get it out to the public.” (Wikileaks.org, 17, December 2007, emphasis added)
Quite true. But by definition, a covert operation always pretends to be something it is not, and never claims to be what it is.
Wikileaks’ Entourage. Who Supports Wikileaks?
The people gravitating around Wikileaks have connections and/or are affiliated to a number of establishment organizations, major corporate foundations and charities. In the Wikileaks’ leak published by John Young, a correspondence dated January 4, 2007, points to Wikileaks’ exchange with Freedom House:
“We are looking for one or two initial advisory board member from FH who may advise on the following:
1. the needs of FH as consumer of leaks exposing business andpolitical corruption
2. the needs for sources of leaks as experienced by FH
3. FH recommendations for other advisory board members
4. general advice on funding, coallition building and decentralised operations and political framing
These positions will initially be unpaid, but we feel the role may be of significant interest to FH.”
The request for funding from various organizations triggered some doubt among Wikileaks collaborators.
John Young became very sceptical concerning the Wikileaks project specifically with regard to the initial fund-raising goal of 5 million dollars, the contacts with elite organizations including Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy and the alleged millions of documents:
“Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July will kill this effort. It makes WL appear to be a Wall Street scam.
This amount could not be needed so soon except for suspect purposes.
I’d say the same about the alleged 1.1 million documents ready for leaking. Way too many to be believable without evidence. I don’t believe the number. So far, one document, of highly suspect provenance.”
Young finally quit the organization on January 7, 2007. His final words: “Wikileaks is a fraud… working for the enemy”.
Four years after its creation, we still don’t know who funds the whistleblower site.
Wikileaks, Hackers, and “The First Cyberwar”
The shady circumstances around Julian Assange’s arrest for “sex crimes” have triggered what some mainstream media have called the “first cyberwar”. The Guardian for instance, another Wikileaks partner, warns us with this shocking title: “WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers”.
Some people suspect that this is a false flag operation intended to control the Internet.
It is no secret that hackers are often recruited by governmental authorities for cyber security purposes. Peiter Zatko a.k.a. “Mudge” is one of them. Here is an excerpt of a Forbes interview with Assange regarding his connection to Peiter Zatko:
Assange:Yeah, I know Mudge. He’s a very sharp guy.
Greenberg: Mudge is now leading a project at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find a technology that can stop leaks, which seems pretty relative [sic] to your organization. Can you tell me about your past relationship with Mudge?
Assange: Well, I… no comment.
Greenberg: Were you part of the same scene of hackers? When you were a computer hacker, you must have known him well.
Assange: We were in the same milieu. I spoke with everyone in that milieu.
Greenberg: What do you think of his current work to prevent digital leaks inside of organizations, a project called Cyber Insider Threat or Cinder?
Assange: I know nothing about it.
Peiter Zatko is an expert in cyber warfare. He worked for BBN Technolgies (a subsidiary of Raytheon) with engineers “who perform leading edge research and development to protect Department of Defense data… Mr. Zatko is focused on anticipating and protecting against the next generation of information and network security threats to government and commercial networks.” (Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Information Security Expert Who Warned that Hackers “Could Take Down the Internet in 30 Minutes” Returns to BBN Technologies, Business Wire, 1 February 2005, emphasis added)
In another Forbes interview, we learn that Mr. Zatko is “a lead cybersecurity researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], the mad-scientist wing of the Pentagon.” His project “aims to rid the world of digital leaks”. (Forbes, emphasis added)
There also seems to be a connection between Zatko and former hacker Jacob Appelbaum, a Wikileaks spokesperson. Zatko and Appelbaum were purportedly part of a hacker group called Cult of the Dead Cow.
Appelbaum currently works for the Tor Project, a United States Naval Research Laboratory initiative. The sponsors of that project listed on its website are:
NLnet Foundation (2008-2009), Naval Research Laboratory (2006-2010), an anonymous North American ISP (2009-2010), provided up to $100k. Google (2008-2009), Google Summer of Code (2007-2009), Human Rights Watch, Torfox (2009) and Shinjiru Technology (2009-2010) gave in turn up to $50k.
Past sponsors includes: Electronic Frontier Foundation (2004-2005), DARPA and ONR via Naval Research Laboratory (2001-2006), Cyber-TA project (2006-2008), Bell Security Solutions Inc (2006), Omidyar Network Enzyme Grant (2006), NSF via Rice University (2006-2007).
Zatko and Assange know each other. Jacob Appelbaum also played a role at Wikileaks.
The various connections tell us something regarding Assange’s entourage. They do not, however, provide us with evidence that people within these various organizations were supportive of the Wikileaks project.
Recent Developments: The Role of the Frontline Club
Over the last seven months, the London based Frontline Club has served as de facto U.K “headquarters” for Wikileaks. The Frontline Club is an initiative of Henry Vaughan Lockhart Smith, a former British Grenadier Guards captain. According to NATO, Vaughan Smith became an “independent video journalist […] who always hated war, but remained […] soldier-friendly”. (Across the Wire, New media: Weapons of mass communication, NATO Review, February 2008)
Upon his release from bail, Julian Assange was provided refuge at Vaughan Smith’s Ellingham Manor in Norfolk.
The Frontline Club is an establishment media outfit. Vaughan Smith writes for the NATO Review. (See NATO Web TV Channel and NATO Nations: Accurate, Reliable and Convenient). His relationship to NATO goes back to 1998 when he worked as a video journalist in Kosovo. In 2010, he was “embedded with a platoon from the British Grenadier Guards” during Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. (PBS NewsHour, February 19, 2010). According to the New York Times, The Frontline Club “has received financing for its events from the Open Society Institute”. (In London, a Haven and a Forum for War Reporters – New York Times, 28 August 2006)
Concluding Remarks: The Cyber Warfare Narrative
Wikileaks is now being used by the authorities, particularly in the US, to promote the cyber warfare narrative, which could dramatically change the Internet and suppress the freedom of expression Wikileaks claims to defend.
Peter Kornbluh, analyst at The National Security Archive, argues that “there’s going to be a lot of screaming about Wikileaks and the new federal law to penalize, sanction, and put the boot down on organizations like Wikileaks, so that their reactions can be deemed illegal.”
Ultimately, Wikileaks could spark off, intentionally or not, entirely new rules and regulations.
Israel/West Bank: Separate and Unequal
Under Discriminatory Policies, Settlers Flourish, Palestinians Suffer
Human Rights Watch | December 19, 2010
Jerusalem – Israeli policies in the West Bank harshly discriminate against Palestinian residents, depriving them of basic necessities while providing lavish amenities for Jewish settlements, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The report identifies discriminatory practices that have no legitimate security or other justification and calls on Israel, in addition to abiding by its international legal obligation to withdraw the settlements, to end these violations of Palestinians’ rights.
The 166-page report, “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” shows that Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank in the large areas where it exercises exclusive control. The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.
“Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits,” said Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch. “While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp – not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.”
By making their communities virtually uninhabitable, Israel’s discriminatory policies have frequently had the effect of forcing residents to leave their communities, Human Rights Watch said. According to a June 2009 survey of households in “Area C,” the area covering 60 percent of the West Bank that is under exclusive Israeli control, and East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed, some 31 percent of Palestinian residents had been displaced since 2000.
Human Rights Watch looked at both Area C and East Jerusalem and found that the two-tier system in effect in both areas provides generous financial benefits and infrastructure support to promote life in Jewish settlements, while deliberately withholding basic services, punishing growth, and imposing harsh conditions on Palestinian communities. Such different treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin that is not narrowly tailored to legitimate goals violates the fundamental prohibition against discrimination under human rights law.
Israeli policies control many aspects of the day-to-day life of Palestinians who live in Area C and East Jerusalem. Among the discriminatory burdens imposed on Palestinians that Human Rights Watch found are Israeli practices of expropriating land from Palestinians for settlements and their supporting infrastructure; blocking Palestinians from using roads and reaching agricultural lands; denying access to electricity and water; denying building permits for houses, schools, clinics, and infrastructure; and demolishing homes and even entire communities. Such measures have limited the expansion of Palestinian villages and imposed severe hardships on residents, including leaving them with limited access to medical care.
By contrast, Israeli policies promote and encourage Jewish settlements to expand in Area C and East Jerusalem, often using land and other resources that are effectively unavailable to Palestinians. The Israeli government grants numerous incentives to settlers, including funding for housing, education, and infrastructure, such as special roads. Those benefits have led to the consistent and rapid expansion of settlements, the population of which grew from approximately 241,500 inhabitants in 1992 to roughly 490,000 in 2010, including East Jerusalem.
“While Israeli policy makers are fighting for the ‘natural growth’ of their illegal settlements, they’re strangling historic Palestinian communities, forbidding families from expanding their homes, and making life unlivable,” Bogert said. “The policies surrounding Israel’s settlements are an affront to equality and a major obstacle to ordinary Palestinian life.”
One of the Palestinian communities that Human Rights Watch examines in the report is Jubbet al-Dhib, a village with 160 residents southeast of Bethlehem that dates from 1929. The village is often accessible only by foot because its only connection to a paved road is a rough, 1.5 kilometer-long dirt track. Children from Jubbet al-Dhib must walk to schools in other villages several kilometers away because their own village has no school.
Jubbet al-Dhib lacks electricity despite numerous requests to be connected to the Israeli electric grid, which Israeli authorities have rejected. Israeli authorities also rejected an international donor-funded project that would have provided the village with solar-powered street lights. Any meat or milk in the village must be eaten the same day due to lack of refrigeration; residents often resort to eating preserved foods instead. Villagers depend for light on candles, kerosene lanterns, and, when they can afford to fill it with gasoline, a small generator.
Approximately 350 meters away is the Jewish community of Sde Bar, founded in 1997. It has a paved access road for its population of around 50 people and is connected to Jerusalem by a new, multi-million-dollar highway – the “Lieberman Road” – which bypasses Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, like Jubbet al-Dhib. Sde Bar operates a high school, but Jubbet al-Dhib students may not attend. Settlements are designated closed military areas that may be entered only with special military permits. Residents of Sde Bar have the amenities common to any Israeli town, such as refrigerators and electric lights, which Jubbet al-Dhib villagers can see from their homes at night.
“Palestinian children in areas under Israeli control are studying by candlelight while watching the electric lights in settlers’ windows,” Bogert said. “Pretending that depriving Palestinian kids of access to schools or water or electricity has something to do with security is absurd.”
In most cases where Israel has acknowledged differential treatment of Palestinians – such as when it bars them from “settler-only” roads – it has asserted that the measures are necessary to protect Jewish settlers and other Israelis who are subject to periodic attacks by Palestinian armed groups. But no security or other legitimate rationale can explain the vast scale of differential treatment of Palestinians, such as permit denials that effectively prohibit Palestinians from building or repairing homes, schools, roads, and water tanks, Human Rights Watch said.
Moreover, in addressing security concerns, Israel often acts as if all Palestinians pose a security threat by virtue of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, rather than narrowly tailoring restrictions to specific individuals who are shown to pose a threat. The legal prohibition of discrimination prohibits such broad-brush restrictions.
“The world long ago discarded spurious arguments to justify treating one group of people differently from another merely because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin,” Bogert said. “It’s time for Israel to end its policies of discrimination and stop treating Palestinians under its control markedly worse than Jews in the same area.”
Israel’s highest court has ruled that certain measures against Palestinian citizens of Israel were illegal because they were discriminatory. However, Human Rights Watch is not aware that the courts have adjudicated whether any Israeli practice in the West Bank discriminated against Palestinians, although petitioners have raised such claims in a number of cases.
Human Rights Watch said that the blatantly discriminatory practices make it an urgent matter for donor countries to avoid contributing to or being complicit in the violations of international law caused by the settlements. These countries should take meaningful steps encourage the Israeli government to abide by its obligations, Human Rights Watch said.
Human Rights Watch reiterated its recommendation that the United States, which provides US$2.75 billion in aid to Israel annually, should suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements, which a 2003 study estimated at $1.4 billion. Similarly, based on numerous reports that US tax-exempt organizations provide substantial contributions to support settlements, the report urges the US to verify that such tax-exemptions are consistent with US obligations to ensure respect for international law, including prohibitions against discrimination.
Human Rights Watch called on the EU, a primary export market for settlement products, to ensure that it does not provide incentives for settlement exports through preferential tariff treatment, and to identify cases where discrimination against Palestinians has contributed to the production of goods. For example, the report documents how crops exported from settlements using water from Israeli-drilled wells have dried up nearby Palestinian wells, limiting Palestinians’ ability to cultivate their own lands and even their access to drinking water.
The report also describes cases in which businesses have contributed to or benefited directly from discrimination against Palestinians, for example through commercial activities on lands that were unlawfully confiscated from Palestinians without compensation for the benefit of settlers. These businesses also benefit from Israeli governmental subsidies, tax abatements, and discriminatory access to infrastructure, permits, and export channels. Human Rights Watch called on businesses to investigate, prevent and mitigate such violations, including ending any operations that cannot be separated from discriminatory Israeli practices.
“Discrimination of the kind practiced daily in the West Bank should be beyond the pale for anyone,” Bogert said. “Foreign governments and businesses at risk of being tainted by Israel’s unlawful practices should identify and end policies and actions that support them.”
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AlJazeeraEnglish | December 19, 2010
South Korea to hold drills amid tensions
Press TV – December 19, 2010
South Korea is resisting pressure from Russia and China to cancel live-fire exercises amid warnings from North Korea over the upcoming war games in the Korean Peninsula.
“We have no plan to cancel our exercises,” a South Korean defense ministry spokesman said on Sunday, adding that the one-day drills may take place on Monday or Tuesday.
The North has warned the South that Seoul will face disaster if it goes ahead with the live-fire exercises on Yeonpyeong Island near the disputed Yellow Sea border.
The upcoming exercise “would make it impossible to prevent the situation on the Korean Peninsula from exploding and escape its ensuing disaster,” Pyongyang said in a statement.
It said its military has already threatened “decisive and merciless punishment” for such an action and “does not make an empty talk.”
The foreign ministers of China and Russia on Saturday called for restraint on the Korean Peninsula as the UN Security Council (UNSC) prepares for an emergency meeting over the tensions between the two Koreas.
“China firmly opposes any actions to cause tension and worsen the situation, and demands both sides on the peninsula show calmness and restraint,” said Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
The Koreas must “carry out dialogue and contact, and completely avoid any actions that would fuel the tension,” Yang said.
The UNSC called a meeting for Sunday at Russia’s request, following Seoul’s Thursday announcement to launch the live-fire artillery exercises.
Meanwhile, the US urged top North Korean leaders in Pyongyang to show “maximum restraint” over the South’s planned live-fire drills.
US President Barack Obama has already vowed to offer what he described as ‘unshakeable support’ for Seoul.
In recent months, the US and South Korea have conducted several massive joint sea and air drills in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
The North has called the drills provocative and an effort to trigger a war, warning the South against holding more joint military exercises with Washington.
Tensions have erupted between the two Koreas after last month’s deadly clash between South and North Korean forces along their disputed sea borders.
The fighting left four South Koreans, including two civilians, dead. Each side blames the other for initiating the fighting.
WIKILEAKS — WHOSE AGENDA?
By Jeff Gates | Intifada Palestine | December 19, 2010
Those tracking the agenda now advancing behind the WikiLeaks façade should check for the undisclosed bias among editors at the four newspapers chosen to select what was leaked. And when it was leaked.
The pro-Israeli bias of The New York Times needs no citations. In London, WikiLeaks releases are overseen by Deputy Editor Ian Katz at The Guardian. What about Le Monde in Paris and Der Spiegel in Berlin?
The tipping point for German media dates to 2003 when Haim Saban purchased ProSiebenSat1, Germany’s second largest media conglomerate. Why this particular acquisition? Because “Germany is critical to Israel” conceded Steve Rattner, Saban’s investment banker—now under indictment in New York for fraud.
Saban’s support was key to putting Angela Merkel in office in 2005. Thus Netanyahu’s comment on November 29th about Germany becoming Israel’s new ‘partner for peace’ in the Middle East—while Tel Aviv collapsed U.S.-sponsored peace talks.
On December 10th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington to announce the end of this latest charade of talks.
Saban has long been close to the Clintons. Ex-President Bill Clinton helped him sell advertising. Though Saban paid for the building now housing the Democratic National Committee, he is doubtless thrilled that Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, a Jewish-Zionist, will take the reins in January as House Majority Leader.
Both political parties are critical to Israel.
Entropy — Again
The collapse of peace talks marked the success of yet another Israeli entropy strategy. When negotiating with Zionists, the relevant question is always: What’s Next From Israel: Entropy or Outrage? Take your pick: perpetual delay or another well-timed provocation. Or both.
In 2007, Saban, a self-described Zionist, acquired control of Univision, the most popular U.S. media outlet for Latinos. As America’s fastest-growing voting bloc, their support is also critical to Israel. This latest acquisition confirms the systematic imbedding of pro-Israeli influence in opinion-shaping domains, including media, think tanks and politics.
Israel is waging war on the U.S. by way of deception. That strategy can only succeed if this war is waged in plain sight by its adept game theory war planners.
Tel Aviv’s agenda requires a critical mass of control over key “in between” domains — between “the mark” (that’s us) and the facts that We The People require for a system of governance reliant on our informed consent.
The modus operandi on display at every turn: displacement of facts with false beliefs.
Thus the role of media, think tanks and pro-Israeli policy-makers in selling Americans on consensus beliefs around Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi uranium from Niger. All were false yet all were widely believed.
The entirety of the phony intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq is traceable to Israeli or pro-Israeli sources. The invasion was marketed to a trusting American public by a mainstream media dominated by those sharing the same undisclosed bias.
In the Information Age, if that’s not treason, what is?
With Friends Like This….
When in human history were fabricated beliefs first deployed to deceive? At the heart of this ancient craft one finds proponents of the oldest of the three “religions of the book” promoting a “Clash” between its two derivatives: Christianity and Islam.
Displacement is the key to this mental and emotional manipulation. Within hours of WikiLeak’s November release of diplomatic cables, peace talks were displaced by renewed talk of war with Iran. WikiLeaks concedes it had those cables since May.
Barack Obama has no better grasp of this long-running treachery than George Bush, Bill Clinton, G.H.W. Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, Coolidge, Harding or Wilson.
Only with clarity on the common source of this duplicity can a long-deceived global public ensure accountability for the many conflicts engineered by those skilled at pitting two sides against the middle while profiting off the misery of both.
By wielding their influence in key in-between domains, those complicit prey on the good faith of others. We Americans will remain unwitting players in a fabricated drama (The Clash of Civilizations) so long as we believe a narrative sustained in plain sight by those skilled at deception.
To betray, one must first befriend; to deceive, one must first create a relationship of trust. No one can persuade Americans to forfeit their freedom. We must be induced to freely embrace the forces that, step-by-step, displace our freedom. That’s called Zionism.
To restore the true self to self-governance requires that Americans recover enough self-confidence to follow facts wherever they may lead. And trust in themselves enough to act consistent with those facts — despite what those complicit would deceive them to believe.
Our freedom now depends on it.
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association—How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. See www.criminalstate.com
The mystery of missile defence
After the latest failed missile defence tests, critics wonder why the US has spent $100bn on the system
By Chris Arsenault | Al-Jazeera | 17 Dec 2010
The cold war ended two decades ago, but dreams of an impenetrable missile shield from Ronald Reagan – who once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” – are firmly back on the US national security agenda.
Late on Wednesday, the US tested its newest round of interceptors, spending $100m to blast a missile from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean towards California.
The anti-ballistic missile system failed, as the kill vehicle designed to blow the projectile out of the sky missed its target, adding to a long-list of unsuccessful tests for the expensive weaponisation scheme.
Since the end of the cold war the US has spent “approximately $100bn” on missile defence systems, Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defence Agency, told Al Jazeera.
Wednesday’s failed long-range test was important because it involved an attempt to intercept a dummy warhead, rather than the usual testing scheme of just maneuvering the missile to a particular point in space, said Ian Anthony, the research coordinator for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank in Sweden.
Big bucks
Despite constant technological problems with the system, the White House has requested $9.9bn for missile defence programmes for the next fiscal year (2011), Anthony told Al Jazeera.
Those vast sums of money concern Theodore Postol, a professor of science and international security at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. The weapons expert, hardly a liberal dove, just doesn’t believe missile defence can work technologically.
View Mapping the missiles in a larger map
“If you look at it as an engineering and defence enterprise, it makes no sense,” Postol told Al Jazeera.
Technological failures and massive financial costs aside, if Barack Obama, the US president, is serious about reducing the possibility of nuclear war, then it seems developing new missile systems isn’t the best way to inspire international trust.
“The US will always say that missile defence is a defensive system,” said Tom Sauer, a professor of international relations at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. “The problem is that the Russians or Chinese may perceive it as threatening or offensive. When it comes to missile defence, perspective is everything.”
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and a former KGB agent who is well versed in cold war history, called US plans for a missile shield in Eastern Europe “very similar” to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.
“The Bush administration planned to have a radar station in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland,” Dr. Sauer said. Obama has not ended the missile programme in Eastern Europe, he has just amended it slightly.
“[Current] plans call for deployment of land-based SM-3 interceptors [a modified surface to air missile] in Poland and Romania to defend Europe against short to medium range ballistic missiles,” said Missile Defense Agency spokesman Lehner.
Washington hard-liners
But even though the US and its NATO partners plan on erecting shields in former Soviet bloc countries, defence hawks in Washington are not happy.
“The Obama administration is pursuing this reset policy with Russia. As far as I can tell, it has been completely one sided with Russia pocketing all of the gains,” said Baker Spring, a security expert with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.
The US and Russia have negotiated a new nuclear arms reduction treaty refered to as START, limiting the former cold war rivals to 1,550 warheads and 700 launchers each, enough to destroy the world several times over.
Some Republicans Senators including John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) have said arms reduction could limit US missile defence plans and plan to vote against it.
But blaming weaponisation programmes on Republican hawks would not be historically accurate. The Democratic administration of former US president Bill Clinton pursued a plan to launch 1000 missile interceptors into space, under its Strategic Defence Initiative, which critics call “star-wars”.
“We think the [Obama] administration’s programme should include that,” the Heritage Foundation’s Spring told Al Jazeera.
Postol laughs when asked about the Heritage Foundation, calling them “ideologues” who don’t understand the science behind the military programmes that they support.
‘Disappointed in Obama’
But, like the Heritage Foundation, the MIT professor and former naval adviser is also critical of Obama.
“The Obama administration is making false claims about the technical capabilities of missile defence, like the Bush administration before it. As someone who supported Obama, I find this very disappointing,” Postol said.
Unsurprisingly, Lehner from the Missile Defense Agency thinks the programme is technically sound, despite Wednesday’s failed tests.
“In total, we have had 46 successful intercepts in 58 tests since the integration of the BMDS [a ballistic missile defence system contracted to Boeing] in 2001,” he said.
But Postol says the tests themselves are “basically rigged” with “minimal standards applied to the contractors of what constitutes success”.
There are different kinds of systems designed to deal with short, medium or long range attacks. A basic premise behind missile defence is the idea of hitting a bullet with a bullet, either near the earth’s surface – like the patriot missile defences used in the 1991 Gulf War – or other systems designed to hit missiles high in the atmosphere, or outer-space, where intercontinental ballistic missiles fly.
“The fact that these systems try to operate at these high altitudes makes them vulnerable to simple countermeasures,” Postol said, citing ballons or decoy projectiles which are cheap, simple and effective ways to trick missile defences. “Nobody has been able to come up with an explanation of why the concerns I have raised are not true.”
‘Military-industrial complex’
North Korea and Iran, states cited by the US as justification for missile defence, can easily deploy counter-measures rendering the advanced technology useless, said Sauer, the international relations professor.
So, if the technology doesn’t work, what is driving the programme?
Postol chalks it up to domestic politics in the US, coupled with a desire to appease America from Europe. Republicans support the technology, even though they don’t understand how it works, he says, while democrats don’t want to be called wimps on national security.
NATO, which has been dangling without a clear raison d’etre since the end of the cold war, incorporated missile defence as a new mission at its most recent summit in Lisbon, Portugul.
Sauer agrees that partisan politics in the US play a role, but says the costly scheme speaks to something more profound than bickering between Democrats and their Republican counterparts. After all, the Clinton administration resurrected the programme which could have disappeared after the cold war.
Boeing, a primary contractor for missile defence systems, maintains operations in all fifty US States. Thus, if an unsuccessful weapons programme is cancelled, local politicans will rally to protect it, for fear of losing local jobs and votes, Sauer said.
“Many representatives in Congress would like to see more money for these programmes, they are part of the military industrial complex,” Sauer said.
The delusions of the peace process
The politics of the peace process have emphatically ensured that the mere prospect for producing peace is nonexistent
By Richard Falk | Al-Jazeera | 18 December 2010
It is astonishing that despite the huge gaps between the maximum that Israel is willing to concede and the minimum that the Palestine Authority could accept as the basis of a final settlement of the conflict, governmental leaders, especially in Washington, continue to pull every available string to restart inter-governmental negotiations.
Is it not enough of a signal that Israel lacks the capacity or will to agree to an extension of the partial settlement freeze for a mere additional 90 days, despite the outrageous inducements from the Obama Administration (20 F-35 fighter jets useful for an attack on Iran; an unprecedented advance promise to veto any initiative in the Security Council acknowledging a Palestinian state; and the assurance that Israel would never again be asked to accept a settlement moratorium) that were offered to suspend partially their unlawful settlement activity.
In effect, a habitual armed robber was being asked to stop robbing a few banks for three months in exchange for a huge financial payoff. Such an arrangement qualifies as a transparently shameless embrace of Israeli lawlessness on behalf of a peace process that has no prospect of producing peace, much less justice.
Justice here is conceived in relation to the satisfaction of Palestinian rights, especially the right of self–determination that has through the years been whittled down.
The continued division of Historic Palestine
The Palestinian acceptance of the 1967 borders (a decision ratified by the PLO in 1988) as the unilaterally reduced basis of the territorial claims associated with Palestinian self-determination, which is only 22 per cent of historic Palestine, and this is less than half of what the UN had proposed in its 1947 partition plan that was at that time quite reasonably rejected by the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours as a colonialist ploy in which the indigenous population was adversely affected and never consulted.
In retrospect, the Palestinian readiness to settle for the 1967 borders was an extraordinary concession in advance of negotiations that was never acknowledged by either Israel or the United States, casting real doubt on whether there was ever a credible commitment to end the conflict by diplomacy.
The shamelessness continues. Instead of castigating Israel for its refusal to show even a pretense of pragmatic flexibility that would make the Obama approach seem slightly less fatuous and regressively wimpy, the US government simply announced that it was abandoning its efforts to persuade Israel to extend the moratorium, and was now embarking on a resumption of the negotiations between the parties without any preconditions, that is, settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing could now continue uncontested.
EU: vocal on settlements and silent of statehood
This was too much even for the normally passive European Union. A few days ago a meeting of the EU Foreign Ministers in Brussels issued a statement insisting that all Israeli activity cease in what was called the “illegal settlements” and that the Gaza blockade be ended “immediately” by an opening of all the crossings to humanitarian and commercial goods, as well as to the entry and exit of persons.
The EU statement was impressively forthright for once: “Our view on settlements, including East Jerusalem, are clear: they are illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace.”
Regrettably, the EU statement was silent on the issue of recognition of Palestinian statehood, losing the opportunity to reinforce the symbolically important diplomatic step taken by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to accord Palestine recognition within its 1967 borders.
Nevertheless, the EU did distance itself from Washington, leaving the United States to the discomfort of its lonely solidarity with Israel. By refusing a diplomatic accommodation with Turkey in the aftermath of the flagrantly criminal attack last May on the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian assistance to the beleaguered people of Gaza, Israel confirms this perception of its pariah status.
Underneath these dark clouds of deception and delusion, the peoples of occupied Palestine, as well as the several million refugees, endure their harsh daily existence while the world watches and waits, seemingly helpless.
The durable American envoy to the conflict, George Mitchell, continues to say that the objective of the talks is “an independent, viable state of Palestine..living side by side with Israel.” The incoherence of such an objective should be palpable. How can one honestly talk about such an envisioned Palestinian state as “viable” when the American leadership agrees with Israel that “subsequent developments” (the code phrase for settlements, land seizures, wall, ethnic cleansing, annexation of Jerusalem) need to be embodied in the outcome of negotiations?
And what sort of “independence” is being contemplated if the Palestinian borders are to be still controlled by Israeli security forces and a demilitarised Palestine is expected to live side by side with a highly militarised Israel? The American approach plays with lives as it plays with language, and yet most of the mainstream media swallows this latest bend in the river without raising even a sceptical eyebrow.
The value of retrospection
These considerations ignore some other problematic aspects of the current framework. The Netanyahu government demands PA acknowledgement of Israel as “a Jewish state,” thereby overlooking the human rights of the Palestinian minority in pre-1967 Israel, numbering about 1.5 million or about 20 per cent of the total population, to live as citizens under conditions of non-discrimination and dignity.
Sometimes history is useful. Even the notorious Balfour Declaration, a pure assertion of British colonial prerogative, promised the Zionist movement only “a homeland,” not a sovereign state. The workings of warfare and geopolitics and clever propaganda gradually shifted the parameters of understanding, allowing a homeland to be transformed into a sovereign state with disastrous chain of consequences for the indigenous population.
In this respect the most recent Hamas position of refusing recognition of Israel while agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders is a reasonable effort to draw a line between affirming the illegitimate and being reconciled to political circumstances. To expect more is to drive the Palestinians into an unacceptable corner of humiliation, in effect, endorsing the nakba, and all that has followed by way of dispossession and abuse.
Of course, the issue of self-determination is not for non-Palestinians to determine. Those who call upon Washington, even now and despite its partisanship and ill-concealed alignments, to impose a solution are thus doubly misguided. Even Hilary Clinton acknowledged days ago the impossibility of adopting such an approach.
What seems clear at present is that both the PA and Hamas seem ready to accept a state of their own within 1967 borders, more or less along the lines set forth back in 1967 in the Security Resolution 242, which remains an iconic document that supposedly embodies a continuing international consensus. What it would mean with respect to implementation is certain to be highly contentious, especially in relation to those infamous “subsequent developments,” better understood as massive encroachments on Palestinian prospects for separate statehood.
The mindlessness of diplomacy
Many in the Palestinian diaspora doubt whether a two-state solution is attainable or desirable. Instead they are calling for a single secular, bi-national democratic state that is co-terminus with the historic Palestinian mandate, and alone has the inherent capacity to reconcile contemporary ideas of democracy, human rights, and a belated realisation of Palestinian rights, including the long deferred claims of Palestinian refugees.
Geopolitics is stubborn, and is not moving in hopeful directions. Now arms are being again twisted by American diplomacy in the region to resume talks between the parties on what are being called “core issues” (borders, security arrangements, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, relations with neighbours).
While this mindless diplomatic spinning goes forth, other clocks are ticking madly: the settlements expanding at accelerating rates, new segments of the wall are being constructed, ethnic cleansing intensifies in East Jerusalem, the apartheid practices and structures in the West Bank are being steadily strengthened, the entrapped and imprisoned population of Gaza lives continuously on the brink of a survival crisis, the refugees in their camps endure their dreary and unacceptable confinement.
Netanyahu thunderously warns that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, that never will a single Palestinian refugee be allowed to return, that Israel is a Jewish state, and that whatever Tel Aviv calls “security” must be treated as non-negotiable. Given these predispositions, combined with the disparities in bargaining power between the parties, as well as the one-sided hegemonic role of the United States, who but a fool could think that a just peace could emerge from the such a deformed pattern of geopolitical diplomacy?
Is it not better at this time to rely on the growing Palestine Solidarity Movement, peace from below, and the related success being experienced in waging the Legitimacy War against Israel, what Israel itself nervously calls “the de-legitimacy project” that is viewed by its leaders and think tanks as a far greater threat to its illicit ambitions than armed resistance?
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).
He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
How Wikileaks Is Effecting American-Israeli Relations
By Hannah McKale | Desert Peace | December 18, 2010
The first and most important question to ask when approaching events on the geopolitical spectrum is to first ask the question, who is to benefit? In the case of the most recent Wikileaks dump that occurred at the end of November, the most obvious party with something to gain from the files and cables exposed is Israel. American and Israel relations have been quite close ever since the end of the second world war.
When the news first broke that Wikileaks would be making another massive dump of information, people could not help but wonder what it may be. Now, it has been revealed to the public, and while it is not nearly quite as scathing as a video of soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians, there is still a definite agenda behind the release of these embassy cables. The cables were between American embassies and embassies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A majority of the cables pertain to Iran and potential military actions against the country. Who has been calling for a precision military strike against Iran for months now, if not years? You guessed it. Israel, and at least a portion of the United States Government wishes to bring the surrounding region against Iran. While the overall image of the American government is tarnished a great deal by these leaks, Israels is not affected whatsoever.
While the US is forced to deal with scathing leaked information such as its meddling in Argentinian affairs, Israel’s own agenda is only gaining ground. Some have even postulated a potential Mossad or CIA connection to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
According to the former Pakistani Chief of Intelligence, Hamid Gul, Wikileaks is designed to act as a controlled release of information, and disinformation designed to manipulate public opinion of Washington, and Iran.
Israel has cause for a strike against Iran in order to curtail its nuclear capabilities. The government of both America and Israel claim that Iran’s agenda for nuclear power will inevitably lead to a nuclear confrontation given that Iran acquires nuclear weaponry. This past August, the Iranian Busherh reactor was reportedly attacked by a virus which was said to be deployed against the installation by a government organization. Israel was fingered as the main culprit in this instance.
Israel and America have always maintained a close relationship in leadership. Both are proponents of the War on Terror, and both are also keenly interested in the Middle Eastern occupation. With Iran remaining one of the few independent states in the Middle Eastern area, Israel is looking to turn the rest of the Islamic world against Iran by using an indirect approach through information warfare. The most horrifying negative aspect of this most recent Wikileaks dump is the opportunity it gives the government to claim security measures are required for cyberspace. It was not entirely surprising how hostile some of the talking heads of the mainstream media appeared to be against Wikileaks, when it is exposing government corruption these imbeciles demand punishment for Assange, the shutdown of Wikileaks, and better control of information on the web.
It appears that the leadership schools of both the United States and Israel both have their agendas in full throttle in this Wikileaks situation. While Israel’s agenda of dominating the Middle East’s future is coaxed closer to the surface for those who have their eyes open, it also appears that segments of power within the United States government are attempting to mar the reputation of the nation in eyes of those around the world. Assange and Wikileaks will be demonized by the establishment, and methods of information control will be proposed by the government, all in the name of national defense.
Hanna McKale is a political scientist hailing from New York, NY. When she is not researching, she advocates for Online Education, and travels all over the world.
Gains in Kandahar Came with More Brutal U.S. Tactics
Analysis by Gareth Porter* | IPS | December 17, 2010
The Barack Obama administration’s claim of “progress” in its war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October.
But those tactical gains have come at the price of further exacerbating the basic U.S. strategic weakness in Afghanistan – the antagonism toward the foreign presence shared throughout the Pashtun south.
The military offensive in Kandahar, which had been opposed clearly and vocally by the local leadership in the province, was accompanied by an array of military tactics marked by increased brutality. The most prominent of those tactics was a large-scale demolition of homes that has left widespread bitterness among the civilians who had remained in their villages when the U.S.-NATO offensive was launched, as well as those who had fled before the offensive.
The unprecedented home demolition policy and other harsh tactics used in the offensive suggest that Gen. Petraeus has abandoned the pretense that he will ever win over the population in those Taliban strongholds.
The New York Times first reported the large-scale demolition of houses in a Nov. 16 story that said U.S. troops in Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwaii districts had been using armoured bulldozers, high explosives, missiles and airstrikes in “routinely destroying almost every unoccupied home or unused farm building in areas where they are operating”.
Neither U.S. nor Afghan officials have offered any estimate of the actual number of homes destroyed, but a spokesman for the provincial governor told the Times that the number of houses demolished was “huge”.
Confirming the widespread demolition policy, Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for Petraeus, suggested that it was necessary to provide security, because so many houses were “booby- trapped” with explosives.
But Bush also acknowledged that U.S. troops were using a wide array of “tools” to eliminate tree lines in which insurgents could hide. And the demolition policy was clearly driven primarily by ISAF’s concerns about the IED war that the Taliban has been winning in 2010.
The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed in a Nov. 19 article that, in one operation in Zhari district, the military had used more than a dozen mine clearing charges, each of which destroyed everything – houses, trees, and crops – in a 100-yard-long path wide enough for a tank.
The district governor in Arghandab, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, acknowledged that entire villages had been destroyed – a policy he defended by claiming that there were no people left in them. “[I]n some villages, like Khosrow,” he said, “that we’ve found completely empty and full of IEDs, we destroy them without agreement, because it was hard to find the people, and not just Khosrow but many villages we had to destroy to make them safe.”
But Col. David Flynn, the battalion commander of a unit of the 101st Airborne Division responsible for a section of the district, contradicted the claim that demolition was only carried out if the people who owned the houses could not be found.
Flynn told reporters of London’s Daily Mail he had issued an ultimatum to residents of Khosrow Sofia: provide full information on the location of IEDs the Taliban had planted there or face destruction of the village, according to the account published Oct. 26.
Flynn told the reporters that one of his platoons had a casualty rate of 50 percent in the village.
Flynn later claimed that the residents had responded to his threat by clearing out all the IEDs themselves, according to Carl Forsberg of the Institute for the Study of War. Researcher and author Alex Strick Van Linschoten, one of the only two Westerners to have lived independently in Kandahar City in recent years, said a friend had been told the same thing.
However, Linschoten told IPS that he understands from an eyewitness that at least two other villages in Flynn’s area of responsibility, including the nearby Khosrow Ulya, were leveled and one was reduced to “a dust bowl”.
District chief Ahmad referred to “Khosrow” as one of the villages he said the Americans “had to destroy to make them safe”.
The threat to destroy a village if its residents did not come forward with information would be a “collective penalty” against the civilian population, which is strictly forbidden by the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.
It is unclear how widely the threat to demolish homes was used in Zhari and Panjwaii and how many of the villages were destroyed in retribution for refusing to do so.
According to data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), however, only 13 IEDs were turned in by the population in the entire country in October. That suggests that the residents of the newly occupied villages in the three districts did not provide any information about IEDs.
The house demolition policy and the increased use of collective punishment were part of a broader strategy of increasing the pressure against the Pashtun population in the south. The level of targeted raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces against suspected Taliban was tripled before Petraeus took over command from Gen. Stanley McChrystal in June, even though McChrystal acknowledged publicly that those raids generated intense anger across the country against foreign forces.
Although those targeted raids killed and captured a large number of Taliban commanders, they also subjected thousands of part-time guerrillas and supporters to arrest and detention. The effort to weaken the Taliban insurgency through such violent tactics is bound to continue the cycle of more Pashtuns vowing revenge against foreign troops and rejecting the Afghan government.
Journalist Anand Gopal, a Dari-speaking specialist on Afghanistan, discovered another form of collective punishment practiced during the offensive. Gopal told IPS that people in Zhari district reported two cases in which U.S. and Afghan forces rounded up and detained virtually everyone in a village after receiving small arms fire from it.
The house demolitions in Kandahar have apparently affected many thousands of people. The demolitions “have made a whole lot of people very angry, because they will be cold and hungry in the coming months”, said a U.S. source who asked not to be identified.
But the U.S.-NATO command is evidently unconcerned about that anger. Chandrasekaran quoted a “senior official” as asserting that, by forcing people to go to the district governor’s office to submit their claims for damaged property, “in effect you’re connecting the government to the people.”
Now Brig. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of U.S.-NATO troops in southern Afghanistan, has openly embraced that justification of the house demolition policy. In an interview with AfPak Channel published last week, he suggested that the demolition of houses “allows the district governor to connect with the population…”
But that connection is certain to be marked by bitterness. A tribal elder in Panjawaii was quoted by the Post’s Chandrasekaran as dismissing the offer of compensation for houses destroyed as “just kicking dirt in our eyes.”
The new level of brutality used in the Kandahar operation indicates that Petraeus has consciously jettisoned the central assumption of his counterinsurgency theory, which is that harsh military measures undermine the main objective of winning over the population.
But there are tell-tale signs that higher-level commanders in Kandahar know that those tactics will not defeat the Taliban either. Col. Flynn, the U.S. commander in a section of Arghandab, told the Daily Mail, “At the end of the day, you cannot kill your way to victory here. It will have to be a political solution.”
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Imagine the Brookings Institution having a forum on the Future of the South in 1964 and inviting no black people
By Philip Weiss on December 18, 2010
Truly demoralizing. Jim Crow is on the job in Washington, D.C. This is the Brookings Institution’s lineup for its recent conference on Hard Choices in the Israel/Palestine conflict. It shows how stifling the atmosphere is inside the Establishment when it comes to discussing these issues. The left is represented by Ken Pollack! I don’t see one Israeli Palestinian.
Go through the names on this “Saban Forum”:
Lots of Israelis, liberal Zionists and Israel lobbyists, and administration officials like Stuart Levey and Dennis Ross. The panel on Where Israeli society is going has no representative of 20 percent of the population that is being persecuted (Palestinians) but Moshe Halbertal (who yes, goes to the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations), Tom Friedman, rightwinger David Brooks, Nahum Barnea, and Leon Wieseltier. What bandwidth: liberal Zionist to gooey-eyed lover of Israel Brooks, and Wieseltier the son of a Revisionist Zionist who knows better but is afraid to unpack his blasted inheritance lest it smash the New Republic’s ethnocentrism to smithereens.
Ari Shavit of Haaretz leads a panel on the Midterm elections with: Joe Lieberman, Eric Cantor, John McCain, Brad Sherman. Oh my lord. Scary. Where is Brian Baird? Or even a J Street Jew?
Elliott Abrams. Elliott Abrams at the Brookings? What happened to liberalism?
James Steinberg. Jeffrey Feltman, Daniel Shapiro. Stuart Levey, from the Administration.
Wow there are a lot of American Jews doing Middle East policy. I know, the Establishment is heavily Jewish.
This is the Establishment. Charlie Rose is there. No Realists. No Palestinians. Oh, Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the P.A. With Tzipi Livni, co-author of Cast Lead, which killed 300-400 children.
The Racak Hoax
By Diana Johnstone, Paris | 20 January 1999
French newspaper and television reports today feature evidence apparently ignored by U.S. media, suggesting that the “Racak massacre” so vigorously denounced by the U.S.-imposed head of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) “verifiers” mission to Kosovo, William Walker, was a setup. This coincides with reports in the German press indicating strong irritation with Walker among other OSCE members. Meanwhile, the ineffable State Department spokesman James Rubin appeared tonight on CNN for short glimpses between Clinton impeachment dronings, plodding forward amid questions from journalists who were even more gung-ho for NATO bombings than he and his bride Christiane Amanpour, whose love story apparently owes so much to the common anti-Serb cause. It seems the U.S. is clueless as to the doubts being cast elsewhere on the “massacre” story, and the only questions well-paid U.S. journalists could conjure up were variations on the theme, “Why isn’t cowardly NATO already bombing the Serbs?”
RENAUD GIRARD has covered virtually all the Yugoslav wars of disintegration on the spot for the French daily Le Figaro. Below is my rough but accurate translation of his lead article published in 1999:
Kosovo: Obscure Areas of a Massacre
By Renaud Girard | Le Figaro | January 20, 1999
The images filmed during the attack on the village of Racak contradict the Albanians’ and the OSCE’s version Racak.
Did the American ambassador William Walker, chief of the OSCE cease-fire verification mission to Kosovo, show undue haste when, last Saturday, he publicly accused Serbian security forces of having on the previous day executed in cold blood some forty Albanian peasants in the little village of Racak?
The question deserves to be raised in the light of a series of disturbing facts. In order to understand, it is important to go through the events of the crucial day of Friday in chronological order. At dawn, intervention forces of the Serbian police encircled and then attacked the village of Racak, known as a bastion of UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA) separatist guerrillas.
The police didn’t seem to have anything to hide, since, at 8:30 a.m., they invited a television team (two journalists of AP TV) to film the operation. A warning was also given to the OSCE, which sent two cars with American diplomatic licenses to the scene. The observers spent the whole day posted on a hill where they could watch the village. At 3 p.m., a police communique reached the international press center in Pristina announcing that 15 UCK “terrorists” had been killed in combat in Racak and that a large stock of weapons had been seized.
At 3:30 p.m., the police forces, followed by the AP TV team, left the village, carrying with them a heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, two automatic rifles, two rifles with telescopic sights and some thirty Chinese-made kalashnikovs. At 4:40 p.m., a French journalist drove through the village and met three orange OSCE vehicles. The international observers were chatting calmly with three middle-aged Albanians in civilian clothes. They were looking for eventual civilian casualties. Returning to the village at 6 p.m., the journalist saw the observers taking away two very slightly injured old men and two women. The observers, who did not seem particularly worried, did not mention anything in particular to the journalist. They simply said that they were “unable to evaluate the battle toll”.
The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning, around 9 a.m., by journalists, soon followed by OSCE observers. At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed UCK soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his indignation. All the Albanian witnesses gave the same version: at midday, the policemen forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado. The most disturbing fact is that the pictures filmed by the AP TV journalists — which Le Figaro was shown yesterday — radically contradict that version. It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning, sticking close to the walls. The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from UCK trenches dug into the hillside.
The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village. Watching from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the UCK guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out. A score of them in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted. What really happened? During the night, could the UCK have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre? A disturbing fact: Saturday morning the journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place. Intelligently, did the UCK seek to turn a military defeat into a political victory? Only a credible international inquiry would make it possible to resolve these doubts. The reluctance of the Belgrade government, which has consistently denied the massacre, thus seems incomprehensible.
Contrary to what Renaud Girard says in his conclusion, “The reluctance of the Belgrade government” is not, in fact, entirely incomprehensible, since Belgrade is convinced that the U.S.-led “international community” is determined to frame the Serb side in order to justify NATO bombing. The hasty and virulent William Walker condemnation of the Serbs for “the most horrendous” massacre he had ever seen (and that after four years in El Salvador!), not to mention the latest in a series of fatal “captures” of Bosnian Serbs accused of war crimes, has only confirmed the view of most Serbs that they can expect only unfair condemnation, not justice, from such “investigators”.
Doubts are cast on the reality of the “Racak massacre” even by Le Monde, which for years has led the crusade against the Serbs. But Le Monde’s own correspondent, Christophe Chatelot, sent the following report from Pristina:
Were the Racak Dead Really Coldly Massacred?
By Christophe Chatelot | Le Monde | 21 January 1999
The version of the facts spread by the Kosovo Albanians leaves several questions unanswered. Belgrade says that the forty-five victims were UCK “terrorists, fallen during combat,” but rejects any international investigation.
Isn’t the Racak massacre just too perfect? New eye witness accounts gathered on Monday, January 18, by Le Monde, throw doubt on the reality of the horrible spectacle of dozens of piled up bodies of Albanians supposedly summarily executed by Serb security forces last Friday.
Were the victims executed in cold blood, as the UCK says, or killed in combat, as the the Serbs say? According to the version gathered and broadcast by the press and the Kosovo verification mission (KVM) observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the massacre took place on January 15 in the early after-noon. “Masked” Serbian police entered the village of Racak which had been shelled all morning by Yugoslav army tanks. They broke down the doors and entered people’s homes, ordering the women to stay there while they pushed the men to the edge of the village to calmly execute them with a bullet through the head, not without first having tortured and mutilated several. Some witnesses even said that the Serbs sang as they did their dirty work, before leaving the village around 3:30p.m.
The account by two journalists of Associated Press TV television (AP TV) who filmed the police operation in Racak contradicts this tale. When at 10 a.m. they entered the village in the wake of a police armored vehicle, the village was nearly deserted. They advanced through the streets under the fire of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) fighters lying in ambush in the woods above the village. The exchange of fire continued throughout the operation, with varying intensity. The main fighting took place in the woods. The Albanians who had fled the village when the first Serb shells were fired at dawn tried to escape. There they ran into Serbian police who had surrounded the village. The UCK was trapped in between. The object of the violent police attack on Friday was a stronghold of UCK Albanian independence fighters.
Virtually all the inhabitants had fled Racak during the frightful Serb offensive of the summer of 1998. With few exceptions, they had not come back. “Smoke came from only two chimneys”, noted one of the two AP TV reporters. The Serb operation was thus no surprise, nor was it a secret. On the morning of the attack, a police source tipped off AP TV: “Come to Racak, something is happening”. At 10 a.m., the team was on the spot alongside the police; it filmed from a peak overlooking the village and then through the streets in the wake of an armored vehicle.
The OSCE was also warned of the action. At least two teams of international observers watched the fighting from a hill where they could see part of the village. They entered Racak shortly after the police left. They then questioned a few Albanians about the situation, trying to find out whether there were wounded civilians. Around 6 p.m., they took four persons — two women and two old men — who were very slightly wounded toward the dispensary of the neighboring town of Stimje. The verifiers said at that time that they were “incapable of establishing the number of casualties of that day of fighting”.
The publicity given by the Serbian police to that operation was intense. At 10:30 a.m., it gave out its first press release. It announced that the police had “encircled the village of Racak with the aim of arresting the members of a terrorist group who killed a policeman” the previous Sunday. At 3 p.m., a first bulletin announced fifteen Albanians killed in fighting. The next day, Saturday, it welcomed the success of the operation which, it said, had resulted in the death of dozens of UCK “terrorists” and the capture of a large stock of weapons.
The attempt to arrest an Albanian presumed to have murdered a Serb policemen turned into a massacre. At 5:30 p.m., the police evacuated the site under the sporadic fire of a handful of UCK fighters who continued to hold out thanks to the steep and rough terrain. In no time, the first of the Albanians who had got away come back down into the village, those who had managed to hide came out in the open and three KVM vehicles drove into the village. One hour after the police left, night fell. The next morning, the press and the KVM came to see the damage caused by the fighting.
It was at this moment that, guided by the armed UCK fighters who had recaptured the village, they discovered the ditch where a score of bodies were piled up, almost exclusively men. At midday, the chief of the KVM in person, the American diplomat William Walker, arrived on the spot and declared his indignation at the atrocities committed by “the Serb police forces and the Yugoslav army”. The condemnation was total, irrevocable.
And yet questions remain. How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site while they were constantly under fire from UCK fighters? How could the ditch located on the edge of Racak have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were present before nightfall? Or by the observers who were present for over two hours in this tiny village? Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so little blood in the hollow road where twenty three people are supposed to have been shot at close range with several bullets in the head? Rather, weren’t the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion? Don’t the violence and rapidity of Belgrade’s reaction, which gave the chief of the KVM forty-eight hours to leave Yugoslavia, show that the Yugoslavs are sure of what they are saying?
Only an international inquiry above all suspicion will make it possible to clarify these obscure points. Finnish and Belurussian legal doctors were expected to arrive in Pristina on Wednesday to attend the autopsies being carried out by Yugoslav doctors. The problem is that the Belgrade authorities have never been cooperative in this matter. Why? Whatever the conclusions of the investigators, the Racak massacre shows that the hope of soon reaching a settlement of the Kosovo crisis seems quite illusory.
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