Jewish Colonists Torch Olive Orchards Near Ramallah
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – June 16, 2011
A number of armed extremist Israeli settlers torched on Wednesday at night dozens of olive trees that belong to villagers of Bil’in village, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah. The trees are located in Palestinian orchards isolated behind the Annexation Wall.
The Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements issued a press release on Thursday stating that the torched olives are in the western side of the village, close to the Metatyahu illegal settlement built on orchards illegal annexed from the residents.
The Committee added that Israeli soldiers stationed in the area obstructed the work of local firefighters trying to reach the burning orchards. The orchards became isolated behind the wall and the firefighters were delayed at the Wall gate.
It also stated that dozens of youth gathered near the gate in an attempt to help the firefighters but the army fired gas bombs at them leading to clashes.
The Committee held Israel fully responsible for the attack as the army provides ‘protection’ for the armed settlers instead of stopping their violations and assaults.
On July 9th 2010, the International Court at The Hague ruled that the Israeli Annexation Wall in the West Bank and around occupied East Jerusalem is illegal, and must be removed. It also called for compensating the victims.
The Court said that signatories of the Geneva Convention, including the UK, US, have the responsibility to oblige Israel to uphold the ruling and remove the Wall. Israel ignored the ruling the same way it ignored all Security Council and General Assembly resolutions regarding the Palestinian-Israel and Arab-Israeli conflict.
2 hit by live fire critical after Ramallah-area protest
Ma’an – 16/06/2011
RAMALLAH — Seven Palestinians were injured, including two critically, Wednesday after an anti-wall protest was quashed, sparking anger in the village of Deir Qaddis, west of Ramallah.
A rally headed from the village to obstruct Israeli bulldozers digging up private lands for the construction of the separation wall, a Ma’an correspondent reported. Israeli forces were heavily deployed in the area and tried to disperse the demonstrators, beating them with clubs and rifle butts.
The use of live fire was reported, and a military official confirmed that bullets were used after one of the soldiers was attacked by protesters.
“One, a 24 year-old, was shot twice in the pelvis and in the shoulder, and the second, a 22 year-old, was shot in the back of his thigh and will require an operation,” the protest organizers said in a statement.
Aiming to stop the construction of the wall and the destruction of private agricultural lands, several demonstrators managed to pass the line of soldiers and worked to stop the work of bulldozer drivers. They succeeded in stymieing the heavy machinery before soldiers fired high-velocity tear-gas canisters and stun grenades at the demonstrators. … Full article
Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Adel Al-Gazzar Returns Home to Egypt and Is Arrested
By Andy Worthington | 14.6.11
Yesterday, former Guantánamo prisoner Adel al-Gazzar (aka Adel El-Gazzar), who had been living in Slovakia since being freed last January from America’s notorious prison on Cuban soil, returned, for the first time in ten years, to his home county, Egypt, where he was promptly arrested.
This was not because of anything he had done, but because, as a critic of the regime, he had left the country in 2001, and had been in Pakistan, undertaking humanitarian work in a refugee camp when he was caught in a US bombing raid (which, with subsequent medical neglect on the part of the US authorities, led to him losing a leg). As a result, following his departure from Egypt, he had been given a three-year sentence in absentia by the Egyptian State Security Court for his alleged part in a supposed plot that was known as al-Wa’ad.
This, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm explained, was “the first major terrorism case in Egypt” after the 9/11 attacks, in which the defendants — 94 in total — were charged with “attempting to overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and infiltrate Palestinian territory.”
However, the case “was widely condemned as an attempt by Mubarak to suppress his Islamist opponents,” and this was an interpretation that carried considerable weight, as “[m]ore than half of the suspects were subsequently released.”
From America, Adel al-Gazzar’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, “call[ed] for the charges to be dropped.” By phone from New York, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm, “I think primarily they should be dismissed on humanitarian grounds because of what he suffered.” That was an assessment of al-Gazzar’s time in US custody, but reflecting on the Egyptian side of his story, and the trumped-up charges that led to his in absentia sentence, he added, “Such cases were often used as a tool by the Mubarak regime to silence dissent.”
Al-Gazzar’s story, in his own words, can be found in an extraordinary interview conducted in Slovakia last year by former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, but to recap briefly, as Ahmed Ghappour explained in a press release yesterday:
Mr. al-Gazzar was handed over to the US while recovering in a Pakistani hospital from injuries sustained while volunteering with the International Committee of the Red Crescent on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. He was hit by a US air strike while helping refugees displaced by the onset of war.
In the midst of his recovery, he was transferred to a US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was subject to severe beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation for days on end, and suspension by the wrists. He received no medical attention during his time in Kandahar, and as a result, his leg was infected with gangrene so severe that it had to be amputated.
Ahmed Ghappour stated, “Mr. al-Gazzar has literally lost life and limb as a result of his unlawful detention by the United States. The last thing he deserves is to return to prison for a sham prosecution that was initiated by the abusive Mubarak regime.”
Nevertheless, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm of his concerns that al-Gazzar would be convicted and imprisoned after another sham trial, even after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s hated regime. “The Egyptians have a track record of abuse and one that we’ve seen continued in the post-Mubarak era,” Ghappour said, reflecting on the mixed record of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over the government after Mubarak’s resignation in February — on the one hand, the announcement of the trial, in August, of former President Mubarak, his two sons Gamal and Alaa and businessman Hussein Salem, who will face charges of “intentional murder, attempted murder of demonstrators, abuse of power to intentionally waste public funds and unlawfully profiting from public funds for them and for others,” but, on the other, the sentencing of at least 7,000 civilians in military courts since Hosni Mubarak was ousted, a much higher number than before the dictator’s fall.
“I think there is a bigger picture here, to be honest,” Ghappour added. “The question is: how will the transitional regime receive him, considering that the prosecution was based on a political crime of dissent? Does Mubarak’s departure mark a game change for the post-9/11 cases? Will he be treated differently because he was in Guantánamo Bay?”
That question has not yet been answered. As Al-Masry Al-Youm reported, “Following his arrest, the officers allowed [al-Gazzar’s] wife and four children to meet with him and check up on him at the airport after his lengthy absence from the country. The authorities then proceeded to begin the legal paperwork needed to send Gazzar to the prosecution so they could determine their position regarding his case.”
Abdul Ghappour also explained that he had spoken with al-Gazzar on Sunday, as he was preparing for his flight. “He seemed really hopeful to come back home,” he said, adding, “Mr. al-Gazzar, you’d call him a true patriot. He loves Egypt and he has been dying to go back home for 10 years to be reunited with his countrymen and his family.” As his London-based lawyers at Reprieve also explained:
He had not seen his family, including his wife and four children, for a decade. Efforts by his family to visit him in Slovakia were thwarted. And, recently, his mother suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which has left her paralysed and requiring full time care.
It is to be hoped that Adel al-Gazzar will be released soon, as he has already suffered more than enough. Held at Guantánamo for nine years despite being cleared for release back in 2004, he then found himself imprisoned again — in a detention center in Slovakia, described by local media as “a police detention facility for illegal migrants.” He and two other men released in Slovakia were held there while the government failed to sort out their status in the country, obliging al-Gazzar to embark on a hunger strike to raise awareness of their plight and secure them proper housing and residential status, but as another of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, explained:
This is the third time Adel has been punished for completely unsubstantiated allegations. [His] persecution … makes a mockery of everything the revolution stands for. Where is the new dawn? Justice and the rule of law must return to Egypt. We hope the Egyptian military will put an end to Adel’s decade-long ordeal.
This is my hope too, as it would be deeply disturbing if, after all he has gone through, and everything that was done to avoid him being tortured in Egypt, he were to end up abused by the successors to Mubarak’s reign of terror.
Dark ironies nevertheless pepper this case. At the time of his release from Guantánamo, for example, when the US government complied with his request not to be repatriated to Egypt, as he feared torture at the hands of the Mubarak regime, everyone who supported his release — relieved that he had been freed after a six-year wait — politely refused to point out how grimly ironic it was that al-Gazzar — and another cleared Egyptian, Sharif al-Mishad, who was released in Albania in February 2010 — couldn’t be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured by the same torturers who had been some of the Bush administration’s closest friends when it came to torturing other prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”
Two of those unfortunate prisoners were Mamdouh Habib, the Australian citizen rendered by the CIA from Pakistan, whose torture was personally directed by Mubarak’s spy chief Omar Suleiman, and Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani religious scholar rendered to torture from Indonesia, where he had been sorting out his late father’s affairs, on nothing more than the vaguest of hunches that he was involved in some way with terrorism (which he wasn’t).
There were others, detailed in an account I compiled for the United Nations in 2010, and undoubtedly others whose stories have not yet surfaced, but the most celebrated prisoner sent by the US to be tortured in Egypt was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who, after being picked up crossing into Pakistan form Afghanistan in December 2001, was sent to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although he recanted his false confession, it was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As for al-Libi, after his usefulness was finally exhausted, he was rendered back to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi disposed of him in May 2009, telling the world that he had committed suicide in a prison cell.
On Tuesday, the next step took place in Adel al-Gazzar’s case, as reported in the Egyptian media. Via Mohamed Za’er, the director of the Egypt-based Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners, Daily News Egypt explained that, on Tuesday, military prosecutors had referred him to “an appeals prison not usually used for political prisoners.”
Daily News Egypt also reported that the verdict against al-Gazzar was “contested … before the military court” on Tuesday, noting also that the court “is expected to look into the case within 60 days.” Mohamed Za’er explained, “If approved, al-Gazzar will be granted a re-trial, though it is no longer a crime to be a member in an Islamist group following the January 25 Revolution. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood now has an official political party after being banned for years.”
That ought to be a good sign, but in Egypt, still caught between the end of Mubarak’s rule and a hoped-for transition to free and fair elections, nothing is certain.
~
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK)
UN report debunks Israel’s Naksa propaganda
By Alex Kane | June 15, 2011
Immediately after the Israeli military reportedly killed dozens of unarmed demonstrators in the occupied-Golan Heights on June 15, Israel’s propaganda machine went into high gear. Newly-released details from a United Nations report authored by the Secretary General clearly show that the Israeli spin on the Naksa protests was just that: spin.
The principle claim was that the Israel Defense Forces only shot at the bottom half of protesters’ bodies, and therefore did not kill them. Instead, as a New York Times report put it, the Israeli military said that “10 protesters were killed after they threw makeshift firebombs and started a fire that set off land mines near the border town of Quneitra, on the Syrian side of the lines.”
It turns out that there was indeed a fire that killed demonstrators, according to the UN. But according to published accounts of Ban Ki-Moon’s report on the demonstrations, it was Israeli weaponry that caused the fire which ultimately killed protesters.
A UN report on the Naksa day events said the IDF used tear gas, smoke grenades and live fire to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the ceasefire line.
It stated: “Several anti-tank mines exploded due to a brush fire apparently started by tear gas or smoke grenade canisters near UNDOF facilities at Charlie Gate, resulting in casualties among protesters.”
The brush fire was put out by Syrian and Israeli fire squads, and UNDOF, the report read.
Meanwhile, the Zionist blogosphere is all over this story by Michael Weiss of the Telegraph that purports to show Syrian state documents proving that “Assad orchestrated Nakba Day raids” on the Golan Heights. Weiss, who works for a pro-Israel advocacy group, claimed that the document was authentic and originated from the “‘Office of the Mayor’ in Al-Qunaitera province.” But blogger Richard Silverstein throws cold water on Weiss’ report, writing that it was Israeli intelligence–which has a history of pushing false stories in the media–who leaked the memo to him.
Yemenis urge ousting US, Saudi envoys
Press TV – June 15, 2011
The deputy head of Yemen’s Democratic Party has called for the expulsion of American and Saudi Arabian ambassadors from his country.
In an interview with Al-Alam news channel on Tuesday, Abdul Salam Faqih warned that Washington and the members of the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council ([P]GCC), including Saudi Arabia, want to hijack the Yemeni people’s uprising.
This will be done through the establishment of a proposed Transitional Council in Yemen, made up of officials loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime, Faqih said.
The revolutionary figure added that Saleh regime elements will not solve any of the problems facing Yemen, and urged Yemenis to stand up to such a proposition.
Yemeni youth must vouch for national figures that have no foreign links, in order to form the Transitional Council, Faqih stressed.
The remarks come amidst conflicting reports about Saleh’s fate following the attack on his presidential palace earlier this month.
Some media outlets quoting Israeli and European sources claim Saleh is dead.
However, a Saudi source says the long-time Yemeni leader is still alive, but is in bad shape and not fit to re-take the helm as president.
Yemen’s official news agency is meanwhile quoting Saleh as telling Saudi King Abdullah that his health is improving.
Saleh was flown to Saudi Arabia on June 4, a day after an explosion ripped through the Yemeni presidential compound in the capital, Sana’a. Since then Saleh has not been seen in public.
Opposition groups believe that with his departure, Saleh’s 33-year rule has come to an abrupt end.
The protesters are now demanding the formation of a transitional presidential council in the country.
On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of the Yemeni capital Sana’a once again.
The demonstrators massed outside the home of acting president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, demanding the immediate formation of a transitional presidential council in the country. Otherwise they said they would act unilaterally.
The protesters also called for the total overhaul of Yemen’s political system as well as the trial of Saleh and his aides.
They hold Saleh responsible for the killing of hundreds of people since anti-government rallies began in late January.
The West’s Obscene Demonization of Gaddafi
By Glen Ford | BAR | June 15, 2011
The slander campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi has reached way beyond the realm of the ridiculous, and can only be described as obscene. We are now supposed to believe that Colonel Gaddafi, himself, ordered his soldiers to rape hundreds of women. There is not one bit of hard evidence that such mass rapes have occurred, but that does not seem to matter to a corporate media that are bent on glorifying the Benghazi-based rebels and demonizing Gaddafi and his soldiers. Amnesty International, an organization that is decidedly hostile to Gaddafi’s government, admits that it cannot find evidence of mass rapes by the Libyan armed forces. And the man in charge of the United Nations’ human rights investigation in Libya told journalists that “massive hysteria” was behind the rape charge. Nevertheless, the western media repeat the baseless allegations ad nauseam, like young boys telling dirty stories.
The International Criminal Court, which specializes in prosecuting Africans who get on the wrong side of the United States, speaks vaguely of being in possession of evidence, but it turns out that the allegations come from one Libyan woman, who claims that she sent out inquiries about sexual assaults to 70,000 women, that 60,000 of them responded, and 259 reported they had been abused. But when investigators asked this solitary source to show them the questionnaires, as investigative reporter Russ Baker tells us, she could not produce the evidence. And it is a mystery how she could have mailed out and gotten back tens of thousands of questionnaires, when Libya’s postal system had been shut down by the war.
This war was launched on the basis of an imaginary massacre of Libyan civilians by Gaddafi’s forces – which, of course, never happened – and is now fueled by a campaign of demonization and a depraved indifference to the truth.
Certainly since 2001, the world has been subjected to a massive U.S. psychological assault, a vast disinformation operation in which the corporate media act as megaphones for government liars.
The invasion of Iraq was launched by lies about weapons of mass destruction. When the lies fell apart, American politicians justified the war by saying it was worth it to get rid of the monster, Saddam Hussein. Saddam was so thoroughly demonized that any amount of maiming and death would be acceptable to erase him from the scene. If Saddam Hussein was the Devil, himself, then there could be no limits on military efforts to eliminate him. Now, the same kind of dehumanizing psychological offensive is directed at Moammar Gaddafi, who is depicted in comic-book style as a puppet master of mass rape, so that whatever death and destruction is rained down on Libya by NATO, it will have been “worth it.” This is a profoundly dangerous way for a superpower to behave. It fills the population with a bloodlust that cannot be easily controlled. The U.S. government, with plenty of help from the media, is telling Americans that those who oppose U.S. policies in the world are savages. That’s what the white settlers said about the Indians, and we know how that ended.
~
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Napalm Death, please cancel your concert in Tel Aviv
By PSCABI and PYAIA – Gaza, June 14, 2011
Dear Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway, Shane Embury, Danny Herrera, & Mitch Harris of Napalm Death:
We are Palestinian students and youth based in Gaza, among 1.5 million in a tiny Strip of land the size of Britain’s Isle of white, surrounded and kept captive in a medieval siege by the Israeli Occupation Forces, the fourth most powerful army in the world. Over a million of us in Gaza are United Nations refugees, expelled by the Israeli army to make way for the Israeli state to be built over the ruins of our 531 villages and 10 urban neighborhoods destroyed and emptied, in a process that fits the definition of ethnic cleansing.
Over half of us are children.
We are asking you to understand the Israeli Apartheid Regime’s complete subjugation of our lives and adhere to the 2005 call from over 170 Palestinian civil society organisations in Palestine to not perform in Apartheid Israel in Tel Aviv this Friday June 17th. Just as you adhered to the wishes of the African National Congress (ANC) during Apartheid South Africa, we hope you will remember us too.
We love music, we have our own big range of music and dance that we love to play. But we have few instruments. Israel’s air, land and sea blockade of all our borders has meant for years musical instruments were banned from entry to Gaza as the Israeli Apartheid regime decided that we as Palestinians should also be deprived of coriander, nutmeg, ginger, dried fruit, fresh meat, lentils, pasta, chocolate, donkeys, cattle, fishing rods, toys, workbooks and newspapers. Music reminds us of better times when Israeli attacks are killing our loved ones every week. Yet what we have is often drowned out by Israeli-US made F16s, F15s, F35s, surveillance planes, drones, naval gunboats, Merkava tanks and border fire.
When asked in an interview in 2007 about the band name ‘Napalm Death’ Barney Greenway said “we are anti war, and the Napalm is used to make munitions and bombs, you know.”
During Israel’s attacks on Gaza over the winter of 2009 over 1400 people were killed, the vast majority of whom were civilians including hundreds of our children. The United Nations Goldstone report into the attacks declared that the Israeli armed forces had been “systematically reckless” in using the flesh-burning white phosphorous – a modern-day Napalm in built-up areas. Evidence of depleted uranium and other metal toxins were also found and have contributed to a 30% increase in cancers and birth defects in Gaza since the attacks. The already decimated agricultural industries now face enormous land contamination and over 90% of water is not fit to drink. … Full letter
-Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)
-Palestinian Youth Against Israeli Apartheid (PYAIA).
Berlusconi suffers defeat in referendum
Press TV – June 13, 2011
The majority of Italians have backed an opposition-proposed referendum which calls for abolishing immunity for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and banning nuclear power production.
The government worked hard to keep the turnout below 50 percent to be able to scrap the vote, but Italians flocked the polls to vote in opposition to the government.
With the turnout of 57 percent, over 90 percent voted against the government, since the majority of voters were opponents.
The opposition has already begun calling on the government to step down.
“At this point they should resign,” Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of Italy’s main opposition Democratic Party, told reporters.
During the two-day referendum, Italians voted against legislation that allows the country’s ministers to avoid attending corruption trials. They further opposed an existing law that forces the privatization of local water utilities, as well as a plan to resume nuclear power production.
The Italians’ main concern was voting on whether their country should resume nuclear power production, following Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster triggered by a powerful earthquake and an ensuing tsunami in March.
The nuclear vote aimed at putting an end to Berlusconi’s plans to restart Italy’s atomic energy program by 2014.
Most of those who participated in the referendums were reportedly supporters of the center-left opposition. Berlusconi, on the other hand, had urged his supporters to boycott the ballot.
The referendum is widely viewed as a test measuring Berlusconi’s popularity and power base. The Italian premier is currently involved in four corruption trials.
The 74-year-old has had an extensive history of criminal allegations, including mafia involvement, corruption, and bribery of police officers, lawyers, and judges.
The vote comes after Berlusconi’s party suffered a humiliating defeat in mayoral elections in Milan and Naples last month.
Harper targeted First Nations for increased surveillance, fears Native “unrest,” newly released government documents show
Money for housing on reserves slashed, money for surveillance of Natives increased
Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa (IPSMO) – June 13, 2011
Newly exposed internal documents from Indian Affairs and the RCMP show that shortly after forming government in January of 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had the federal government step up intelligence gathering on First Nations to anticipate and manage First Nations political action across Canada.
Information obtained by the First Nations Strategic Bulletin through Access to Information requests reveals that almost immediately upon Harper’s taking power in 2006, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) was given the lead role to spy on First Nations. The goal was to identify the First Nation leaders, participants and outside supporters of First Nation occupations and protests, and to closely monitor their actions.
To accomplish this task, INAC established a “Hot Spot Reporting System.” These weekly reports highlight all those communities across the country that engage in direct action to protect their lands and communities. They include Tsartlip First Nation, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, Six Nations, Grassy Narrows, the Likhts’amsiyu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, and many more.
“Rather than listening to the needs of First Nations communities Harper is making plans to use force to stifle the dissent that inevitably arises from chronic poverty and dispossession in Native communities,” said Russell Diabo, Mohawk policy analyst, in response. “First Nations education and housing is chronically under-funded, but policing and surveillance of legitimate Indigenous movements is always a priority.”
The documents reveal that First Nations are a closely monitored population who are causing a panic at the highest levels of the Canadian government.
Says Gord Elliot of Tsartlip First Nation, “Obviously trust and good faith are expected when working with INAC, the RCMP and other agencies of the Government. We are outraged to discover these same Ministries are spying on us. We were identified as a ‘hotspot’ because we had a roadblock demonstration to voice our concerns about the Treaty process and non-acknowledgment of Section 35 Constitutional Rights and Title.
We felt we had no choice because the Canadian Government won’t acknowledge our Constitutionally protected Aboriginal Rights and Title.”
Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
Peter Dale Scott | The Aasia-Pacific Journal | June 13, 2011
It is a troubled Time for NATO’s campaign against Libya. President Obama has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their tepid response “is putting the Libya mission and the alliance’s very future at risk.”1 Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, “Mr Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been rebuffed by the White House.”2
The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going begins to get tough, the professional p.r. campaigns get going, often with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite, and “she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.”3
Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl, that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government.4
The history of American foreign interventions is littered with such false stories, from the “Remember the Maine” campaign of the Hearst press in 1898, to the false stories of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, 1964. We know furthermore that in their Operation Northwoods documents, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 proposed a series of ways, some of them lethal, to deceive the American people in order to engineer a war against Cuba.5
Since the fiasco of the false Iraqi stories in 1990-91, these stories have tended to be floated by foreign sources, usually European. This was conspicuously the case with the forged yellowcake documents from Italy underlying Bush’s misleading reference to Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union address.6 But it was true also of the false stories linking Saddam Hussein to the celebrated anthrax letters of 2001. (Their anthrax was later determined to have come from a U.S. biowarfare laboratory.)7
This recurring history of falsified stories to justify interventions should be on our minds as we now face the allegations, as yet neither proven nor disproven, that Gaddafi has been using rape as a method to fight insurrection, and may have been guilty of raping victims himself. These charges were made on June 8 by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who claimed (according to Time Magazine)
there were indications that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered the rape of hundreds of women during his violent crackdown on the rebels and that he had even provided his soldiers with Viagra to stimulate the potential for attacks.*
According to Time, the rape stories are being circulated by doctors who claim to have met and treated patients but do not have patients’ permission to reveal their identities. Earlier, according to a Libyan doctor interviewed in an Al Jazeera video, “many doctors have found Viagra and condoms in the pockets of dead pro-Gaddafi fighters, as well as treated female rape survivors. The doctor insists this clearly indicates the Gaddafi regime is using rape as a weapon of war.”9
But what of Moreno’s charge that “Now we are getting some information that Gaddafi himself decided to rape, and this is new.”10 This is a sensational charge: until we learn there is a reliable source for it, one can suspect it was made to grab headlines.
One problem in investigating these charges is that Libyan culture is so unkind to rape victims that they are reluctant to come forward. Researchers for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were unable to find one woman who said she had been raped. A U.N. human rights investigator, Cherif Bassiouni, told Agence France-Presse that the rape and Viagra stories were being circulated by the Benghazi authorities as “part of a ‘massive hysteria.’” In fact he had discovered only three cases.11
Military conflict of course is normally accompanied by rape. What might constitute a war crime would be whether (to quote Time) Gaddafi “had provided his soldiers with Viagra.” Moreno actually said, according to the Associated Press, that “some witnesses confirmed that the [Libyan] government was buying containers of Viagra-type drugs ‘to enhance the possibility to rape.’”
Others have objected that the purchase of Viagra-type drugs falls far short of indicating a war crime. Former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in Tripoli on an investigative mission, has pointed out in her emails that to date the one army known to have distributed Viagra as part of its war operations is the U.S. Army – as a bribe to entice information from aging tribal leaders in Afghanistan.12
Time’s subtle enhancement of Moreno’s claim – from purchasing Viagra to providing it to soldiers, reminds us of the sorry record of the U.S. mainstream media in circulating past false stories to justify war. It is painful to say this, but virtually every major U.S. military intervention since Korea has been accompanied by false stories. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo should be pressed to come forward quickly with the supporting evidence for his charges, which should be based on more than the testimony of doctors working for the Benghazi regime.
Notes
1 “Gates rebukes NATO allies, warns of ‘dismal’ future,” Agence France-Presse, June 10, 2011.
2 “The billion dollar war? Libyan campaign breaks Pentagon estimates costing U.S. taxpayers $2 million a day,” London Daily Mail, June 9, 2011.
3 “No Casus Belli? Invent One,” Guardian (London), February 5, 2003.
4 Ted Rowse, “Kuwaitgate – killing of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers exaggerated,” Washington Monthly, September 1992.
5 Scott, American War Machine, 195-201.
6 Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 97.
7 Consider the following story in the London Daily Mail by Simon Reeve: Iraq has been identified as the most likely source of the anthrax used to terrorise America during recent weeks. New plans are now being considered for retalia tory military strikes against Saddam Hussein, according to American government officials. Although studies of the anthrax spores sent through the mail are continuing, American scientists have discovered “hallmarks” that point to Iraqi involvement. American investigators are increasingly convinced that the anthrax was smuggled into the US and mailed to a number of targets by unidentified “sleeper” supporters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. (Simon Reeve, “Scientists Link Iraq to Anthrax Terror Attacks,” Sunday Mail.
8 [London], October 28, 2001; discussed in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 194-95). [The example is also interesting in its fusing of Saddam and Al Qaeda, in fact bitter rivals]
9 Karen Leigh, “Rape in Libya: The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Time, June 9, 2011.
10 Washington Post Blogpost, March 29, 2011.
11 Agence France-Presse, June 9, 2011.
12 “UN investigator casts doubt over Libya mass rape claims,” Agence France Presse, June 9, 2011.
13 Toby Hamden, “CIA give Afghan warlords Viagra in exchange for information on Taliban,” Telegraph [London], December 26, 2008.
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Who’s to blame for the Iraq war?
A not-so-trivial quiz
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | 14 March 2010
Maidhc Ó Cathail names and shames the top 19 politicians, academics and policy makers – all con men and all Zionist Jews – who lied and conspired to steer the US toward aggression against the Iraqi people. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Even The Neo-Cons Admit The Iran War Is Failing
- Inside the Caucasus Drone Corridor Fueling Tensions With Iran
- ‘Not our war’: Trump’s naval coalition to reopen Strait of Hormuz dead in the water
- Iran declares support centers for USS Gerald R. Ford legitimate targets
- Moscow issues warning over Trump’s Golden Dome plan
- Brussels wants ‘our sons to die for Ukraine’ – Orban
- Where in the World Is Benjamin Netanyahu? On the Move or Out of Sight?
- Pentagon insider says high US official Douglas Feith reported to Netanyahu
- The Sludging of Rural America
- Lawyers’ groups demand end to British military bases in Cyprus
- If Americans Knew
- Predictions of another 9/11, amid Israel-US killing spree – Not a ceasefire Day 157
- As US-Israel war on Iran rages, Gaza faces massive dust storm – Not a ceasefire Day 156
- No let-up in attacks on Gaza as Israel takes on Iran, Lebanon – Not a ceasefire Day 155
- ‘Of Course’: IDF Drops Case Against Soldiers Accused of Raping Palestinian Prisoner
- Don’t Fall for the Regime Change Talk. Israel Is ‘Mowing the Lawn’ in Iran
- Will Israel and the US wreck the Gulf States along with Iran?
- US so far burned through ‘years’ of munitions in Iran war: Report
- How the Israeli Tail Wags the American Dog
- Outdated intel likely led to deadly U.S. strike on Iranian elementary school, sources say
- Pentagon insider says high U.S official Douglas Feith reported to Netanyahu
- No Tricks Zone
- Storing Green Energy To Last Germany 10 Days Would Require A 60-Million Tonne Battery
- New Studies: UK Sea Levels Were 4 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Destructive Green New Deal: German Energy And Metal Group Warns Of Drastic Crisis
- New Study Documents A 20-Year Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Decline – Driven By Internal Variability
- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
- Televised! Leading German Political Candidate Tells Schoolchildren CO2 Makes Sun Hotter!
- New Study: A Century Warming Of 1.1°C Is ‘Commonplace’ And ‘Not Unusual’ During This Interglacial
- New Study: ‘Internal Noise’ And Volcanic Forcing Can Trigger 10-15°C Warming Within Decades
- Glaciers Worldwide Are Suddendly Surging, Experts Blame Warming!
- Surprising Discovery: Sahara Is Greening…Billions Of Trees Where Once Thought To Be Barren
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