Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday any attempt to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria using F-16 fighter jets and Patriot missiles from Jordan would violate international law.
Russia, which has vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions aimed at pressing for a no-fly zone in Syria, vehemently opposes any foreign military intervention in the Syrian conflict.
“There have been leaks from Western media regarding the serious consideration to create a no-fly zone over Syria through the deployment of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles and F-16 jets in Jordan,” said Lavrov, speaking at a joint news conference with his Italian counterpart.
“You don’t have to be a great expert to understand that this will violate international law,” he said.
The United States has moved Patriot missiles and fighter jets into Jordan, officially as part of an annual exercise in the past week, but making clear that the military assets could stay on when the war games are over.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that a US military proposal to arm rebels fighting against Assad also calls for a limited no-fly zone inside Syria that could be enforced by US and allied planes on Jordanian territory.
Lavrov also rejected US claims that Syria has used “small amounts” of sarin on rebels, saying there was no need for that because government forces were making steady advances on the ground.
“The regime, as the opposition is saying out in the open, is enjoying military success on the ground,” he said.
“What sense is there for the regime to use chemical arms, especially in such small amounts?” Lavrov asked.
Russia said on Friday it was unconvinced by US allegations that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people.
US President Barack Obama’s administration said on Thursday it would boost military support for the opposition as a result.
The short answer is Iran and Hezbollah according to Congressional sources. “The Syrian army’s victory at al-Qusayr was more than the administration could accept given the town’s strategic position in the region. Its capture by the Assad forces has essentially added Syria to Iran’s list of victories starting with Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, as well as its growing influence in the Gulf.”
Other sources are asserting that Obama actually did not want to invoke direct military aid. The rebels fighting to topple the Assad government or even to make use of American military power in Syria for several reasons. Among these are the lack of American public support for yet another American war in the Middle East, the fact that there appears to be no acceptable alternative to the Assad government on the horizon, the position of the US intelligence community and the State Department and Pentagon that intervention in Syria would potentially turn out very badly for the US and gut what’s left of its influence in the region. In short, that the US getting involved in Syria could turn out even worse than Iraq, by intensifying a regional sectarian war without any positive outcome in sight.
Obama was apparently serious earlier about a negotiated diplomatic settlement pre-Qusayr, and there were even some positive signs coming from Damascus, Moscow, and even Tehran, John Kerry claimed. But that has changed partly because Russia and the US have both hardened their demands. Consequently, the Obama administration has now essentially thrown in the towel on the diplomatic track. This observer was advised by more than one Congressional staffer that Obama’s team has concluded that the Assad government was not getting their message or taking them seriously and that Assad’s recent military gains and rising popular support meant that a serious Geneva II initiative was not going to happen.
In addition, Obama has been weakened recently by domestic politics and a number of distractions and potential scandals not least of which is the disclosures regarding the massive NSA privacy invasion. In addition, the war lobby led by Senators McClain and Lindsay Graham is still pounding its drums and claiming that Obama would be in violation of his oath of office and by jeopardizing the national security interest of the United States by allowing Iran to essentially own Syria once Assad quells the uprising. Both Senators welcomed the chemical weapons assessment. For months they have been saying that Obama has not been doing enough to help the rebels. “U.S. credibility is on the line,” they said in a joint statement this week. “Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions,” they said, such as using long-range missiles to degrade Assad’s air power and missile capabilities. Another neo-con, Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said the opposition forces risk defeat without heavier weapons, but he also warned that may not be enough. “The U.S. should move swiftly to shift the balance on the ground in Syria by considering grounding the Syrian air force with stand-off weapons and protecting a safe zone in northern Syria with Patriot missiles in Turkey,” Casey said.
Secretary of State Kerry held meetings with more than two dozen military specialists on 5/13/13. The Washington Post is reporting that Kerry believes supplying the rebels with weapons might be too little and too late to actually flip the balance on the Syrian ground and this calls “for a military strike to paralyze Al-Assad’s military capacities.” A Pentagon source reported that the USA, France, and Britain are considering a decisive decision to reverse the current Assad momentum and quickly construct one in favor of the rebels” within a time period not exceeding the end of this summer.
Shortly after the meetings began, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia quickly returned to Saudi Arabia from his palace at Casa Blanca, Morocco after receiving a call from his intelligence chief, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. Bandar reportedly had a representative at the White House during the meetings with President Obama’s team. King Abdullah was reportedly advised by Kerry to be prepared for a rapid expansion of the growing regional conflict.
What happens between now and the end of summer is likely to be catastrophic for the Syrian public and perhaps Lebanon. The “chemical weapons-red line” is not taken seriously on Capitol Hill for the reason that the same “inconclusive evidence” of months ago is the same that is suddenly being cited to justify what may become essentially an all-out war against the Syrian government and anyone who gets in the way. Hand wringing over the loss of 125 lives due to chemical weapons, whoever did use them, pales in comparison to the more 50,000 additional lives that will be lost in the coming months, a figure that Pentagon planners and the White House have “budgeted” as the price of toppling the Assad government.
“We are going to see a rapid escalation of the conflict”, a staffer on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee emailed this observer: “The president has made a decision to give whatever humanitarian aid, as well as political and diplomatic support to the opposition that is necessary. Additionally direct support to the (Supreme Military Council), will be provided and that includes military support.” The staffer quoted the words of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to the media on 5/13/13 to the same effect.
A part of this “humanitarian assistance” the US is going to establish in the coming weeks a “limited, humanitarian no-fly zone, that will begin along several miles of the Jordanian and Turkish borders in certain military areas into Syrian territory, and would be set up and presented as a limited bid to train and equip rebel forces and protect refugees. But in reality, as we saw in Libya a Syrian no fly zone would very likely include all of Syria.
Libya’s no-fly zones made plain that there is no such thing as a “limited zone”. Put briefly, a “no-fly zone” means essentially a declaration of all-out war. Once the US and its allies start a no fly zone they will expand it and intensify it as they take countless other military actions to protect its zones until the Syrian government falls. “It’s breathtaking to contemplate how this in going to end and how Iran and Russia will respond,” one source concluded.
The White House is trying to assuage the few in Congress as well as a majority of the American public that it can be a limited American involved and that the no-fly zone would not require the destruction of Syrian antiaircraft batteries. This is more nonsense. During the no-fly zone I witnessed from Libya in the summer of 2011 the US backed it up with all manner of refueling, electronic jamming, special-ops on the ground and by mid-July a kid peddling his bike was not safe. Over the 192 days of patrolling the Libyan no-fly zones, NATO countries flew 24,682 sorties including 9,204 bomb strike sorties. NATO claimed it never missed its target but that was also not true. Hundreds of civilians were killed in Libya by no-fly zone attack aircraft that either missed their targets or emptied their bomb bays before returning to base while conducting approximately 48 bombing strikes per day using a variety of bombs and missiles, including more than 350 cruise Tomahawks.
At a Congressional hearing in 2011, then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates got it right when he explained while discussing Libya “a no-fly zone begins with an attack to destroy all the air defenses … and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”
According to the accounts published in American media, Obama could alternatively authorize the arming and training of the Syrian opposition in Jordan without a no-fly zone. That appears unlikely because the Pentagon wants to end the Syrian crisis by summer’s end, the observer was advised “rather than working long term with a motley bunch of jihadists who we could never trust or rely on. The administration has come to the conclusion apparently that if they are in for a penny they are in for a pound.”
In response to a question from this observer about how he thought events might unfold in this region over the coming months, a very insightful long-term congressional aid replied: “Well Franklin, maybe someone will pull a rabbit out of the hat to stop the push for war. But frankly I doubt it. From where I sit I’d wager that Syria as we have known it may soon be no more. And perhaps some other countries in the region also.”
The good news from Palestine is that the ‘painted frog’ of the Huleh valley is not extinct after all. Recently it turned up again after not having been seen for the past half century. Behind the disappearance of the painted frog stands a much bigger story, the fate of the Huleh valley after the conquest of Palestine by the Zionists and behind that story is the reality behind one of the foundation myths of the Zionists, that of a barren, stagnant and empty land awaiting redemption in the hands of the Jewish people.
In the 19th century the Huleh wetlands were one of Palestine’s prize natural assets. They were formed over millennia by three rivers flowing south into the Huleh valley from their headwaters in Syria, the Hasbani, the Banias and the Liddan. The valley stretched for a distance of about 25 kilometers in length and six in width. Its centerpiece was Lake Huleh and its adjoining wetlands, covering an area of about 60 square kilometers, expanding and contracting in tune with the seasons. The lake itself was more than five kilometers long and more than four wide at its broadest point. The river flow continued southwards into Lake Tiberias and then the Jordan River. The fertile land around the lake provided the surrounding villages and beduin cultivators with a good living from cereal crops, maize, rice and honey. The lake and wetlands were a nesting and feeding spot for masses of migratory birds. The life beneath the water was just as rich as on the outside.
Here are descriptions of the Huleh wetlands by the Rev. W.M. Thomson, an American missionary who visited Palestine in the 1850s to follow in the footsteps of the master but still took detailed notes of everything he saw, the food people ate, the clothes they wore, the crops they cultivated, the glassware and soap they produced in their worships as well as the flora, the fauna, the valleys, hills, plains and rivers. (1):
“There lies the Huleh like a vast carpet with patterns of every shade and shape and size, thrown down In Nature’s most bewitching negligence and laced all over with countless streams of liquid light …. The plain is clothed with flocks and herds of black buffalo bathe in the pools. The lake is alive with fowls, the trees with birds and the air with bees.” (‘Unrivalled beauty of the Huleh’, p. 225)
“The soil of this plain is a water deposit like that of the Mississipi Valley about New Orleans and extremely fertile. The whole country around it depends mainly upon the harvests of the Huleh for wheat and barley. Large crops of Indian corn, rice and sesamun (simsum) are also grown by the Arabs of the Huleh, who are all of the Ghawareneh tribe. They are permanent residents although dwelling in tents. All the cultivation is done by them. They also make large quantities of butter from their herds of buffalo and gather honey in abundance from their bees. The Huleh is, in fact, a perpetual pasture field for cattle and flowery paradise for bees. At Mansura and Sheikh Hazeib I saw hundreds of cylindrical hives of basket work, pitched, inside and outside, with a composition of mud and cow dung. They are piled tier above tier, pyramid fashion, and roofed over with thatch or covered with a mat. The bees were very busy and the whole region rang as though a score of hives were swarming at once. Thus this plain still flows with milk and honey and well deserves the report which the Danite spies carried back to their brethren: ‘A place where there is no lack of anything that is in the earth.” (‘Produce of the land of Huleh’, p. 253).
“This Huleh – plain, marsh, lake and surrounding mountains – is the finest hunting ground in Syria and mainly so because it is very rarely visited. Panthers and leopards, bears and wolves, jackals and hyenas and foxes and many other animals are found, great and small, while it is the very paradise of the wild boar and the fleet gazelle. As to waterfowl, it is scarcely an exaggeration to affirm that the lower end of the lake is absolutely covered with them in the winter and spring.” (‘Wild animals of the Huleh’, p. 260).
Dr. Thomson does not mention the painted frogs of Huleh but they must have been there in abundance, breeding in the protection of the rushes, hunted by the pelicans and storks that stopped at the lake on their flights from the north. He noted the presence of the ‘lilies of the valley’ growing amongst the rushes, which in places were so densely entangled with bamboo as to make approaches to the water impenetrable. The Huleh valley was one part of a rich environmental and agricultural mosaic stretching across Palestine. Of course part of it was barren. It still is but one would not say Australia is a barren land because of the Simpson desert or the United States because of the Mojave desert in California. It was not just the fertility of the Huleh valley that took Dr. Thomson’s attention. He was equally fulsome in his praise of the groves of citrus fruits, the extensive fields of wheat and barley grown along the seaboard right down to Gaza and the grapes and olives of the interior. His descriptions are corroborated in numerous other contemporary accounts, which stand as the most effective rebuttal of the central myth of the barren land.
Indeed, the central problem for the Zionists was that all the fertile land was already being cultivated, by people who were not prepared to part with it. Like all native peoples the land for them was an integral part of the cycle of life. That was the way it had always been and not until the Zionists arrived had they had to face life without it. It was the latifundistas living outside Palestine and the middlemen who negotiated the deals who gave the Zionists their foothold. Once the contracts were signed they drove the tenant cultivators away. There was no remorse: where these uprooted people went was none of their business. The British, in charge of this supposedly ‘sacred trust of civilisation’, as the mandate was described in article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, were complicit in this ruthless process, providing an umbrella of armed and pseudo-legal protection.
Through legal purchase the Zionists were never going to get what they wanted. By 1945 they had acquired less than six per cent of Palestine and remained a one-third minority of the population despite the massive immigration of the 1930s. David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders knew that only war would give them what they wanted. They played a crafty game, dumping the British when they were no longer of any use and turning to the United States. Partition was a complete violation of the natural rights of the indigenous people but was welcomed by the Zionists, naturally, as they were being given what they did not possess and had no right to possess. At the same time as pretending to be satisfied with partition, they regarded it only as the first step. It was not just that the Americans had concluded by early 1948 that Palestine could not be partitioned peacefully. The Zionists would never allow it to be partitioned peacefully as this would leave the Palestinians on their land. There could be no Jewish state as long as they stayed, and if there is a regret in the Benny Morris school of historical reflection it is only that the opportunity was lost to get rid of them all.
In the meantime land hunger focused settler eyes on possibilities in the rich, fertile and well watered Huleh valley. Draining what were called the swamps of Huleh would create more room for colonization but for the time being remained beyond their technical and financial means. When it happened it was inscribed as one of the founding myths of Zionists: the redemption of the land, making the desert bloom, and all the rest of it, when in fact the settlers ruined in the Huleh valley what was an ecologically rich wetland with few parallels in the Middle East.
From the beginning control of water was essential to the Zionist project. Weizmann fought hard at the Paris peace conference in 1919 for the Syrian headlands of Palestine’s water to be included in the British mandate and therefore within the borders of the Zionist state Lloyd-George, Balfour and Churchill wanted to establish in the heart of the Middle East while talking endlessly about nothing more than a ‘national homeland’ for the Jewish people. Weizmann’s scheming and lobbying broke against the rock of French strategic interest but seizing and controlling water resources in and around Palestine remained a prime target of the Zionist leadership, with their diversion of these waters creating one of the many crises that preceded the 1967 war.
The Huleh valley stood out from the beginning of Zionist settlement. The first colony in the valley was established in the 1880s but because of the ravages of malaria no further settlements were established for half a century. In the 1930s Steinmatsky’s Palestine Guide (2) noted the drainage of ‘swamps and marshes’ since the First World War, ending the scourge of malaria and restoring ‘fertile tracts of land to cultivation thus increasing the tillable area of Palestine’. Unique amongst Palestine’s network of rivers, lakes and subterranean aquifers, the Huleh wetlands ‘which are now marshy tracts offer untold opportunities for agricultural development. Thorough drainage is the first need to be followed by systematic irrigation. This land has been granted for use under a concession to a group which did not avail itself of the concession. The concession has now passed to a Jewish group which will soon start on the preliminary work.’ (p. xii).
In his collection of essays on land acquisition and development in Palestine, Arthur Ruppin, a German lawyer who settled in Jaffa as the chief land purchasing and development officer for the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization, lists the Huleh wetlands as land which might be uncultivable for the Palestinian settled and nomad population but would be cultivable for incoming Jewish colons, given their access to credit and use of modern farm machinery. (3) The fertile land around the lake was either state land from Ottoman times or already owned and cultivated, with only one Zionist settlement having been established up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Ruppin wanted to open up land for settlement by draining the wetlands, which for him were no more than marsh and swamp waiting to be reclaimed.
In a memorandum handed to Sir John Hope Simpson, sent to Palestine in 1930 to investigate immigration, land development and settlement, the three major causes of rising distress amongst the Palestinians, Ruppin attempted to show that ‘if the farming of the fellaheen were to be a little bit intensified – in the coastal zone, Beisan, Huleh and the lower Jordan Valley – the Jews would be able to buy 1,300,000 dunums without displacing the people who have so far [sic.] worked the land. Fifty-five thousand [Jewish] families could be settled on this land.’(4) Hope-Simpson demurred on various grounds, one of them being that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) would not let ‘Arabs’ work on its land and that ‘increasing land purchase will displace the Arabs from many parts of Palestine’. This in fact is what happened as part of a process Hope-Simpson described as the ‘extra territorialisation’ of land once purchased by the JNF and put beyond the purchase or rental by non-Jews forever. Zionist colonists who still used the Palestinians on the land or in workshops and factories were violating the Jewish-only labor ‘principles’ that were the corollary of the ‘principles’ governing land purchase.
At the age of 50 Ruppin and others founded the Brit Shalom movement. It was committed to ‘Jewish-Arab’ friendship but the refusal of the Palestinians to give up their rights and their land eventually forced him to conclude that negotiations would achieve nothing and that if the Zionist project was to succeed, ‘we must increase our strength and our numbers until we reach parity with the Arabs. The life or death of the Zionist movement will depend on this …. Perhaps a bitter truth but it is the truth with a capital T’. Writing in 1936 he expected this point to be reached in five to ten years. (5) Ruppin died in 1943 so was not around when not just parity but numerical superiority was achieved by expelling the bulk of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948. In the language of the occupier, there were 12 ‘Jewish’ and 23 ‘Arab’ ‘settlements’ in the Huleh valley by 1948. ‘Following the establishment of the State of Israel and during the 1948 War of Independence the Arab inhabitants left the valley, moving to neighboring Arab countries’. (6)
Meron Benvenisti has put the number of villages in the region at 60 but this includes semi-permanent beduin encampments built from rushes or mud bricks. (7) Walid Khalidi has documented how they ‘left’ and what happened to their ‘settlements’. Village after village was depopulated and destroyed before being built over by Zionist settlements. (8) All that remained after the Zionist assault through the Huleh valley was one Beduin settlement,(9) with the Zionist settlers now free to take the land left behind and harvest the crops planted by those they had expelled.
With the Palestinians gone and the state of Israel established over their heads and on their land there were no barriers to the exploitation of the Huleh valley. Beginning in 1951 it was subjected to ‘redevelopment’ that amounted to ecological vandalism on a grand scale by blundering land-hungry settler administrators. The wetlands were drained and turned into arable land, shrinking the lake to perhaps one tenth of its original size. At the time the drainage and irrigation works were seen as a brilliant engineering achievement, of which the most significant benefits were regarded as the creation of thousands of dunums of cultivable land and the eradication of malaria. Yet it was not long before disappointment and an understanding of the damage that had been done set in. As summarized by Zohary and Hambright, while the drained peat soil proved suitable for agriculture, ‘the anticipated exceptional yields were never obtained’. (10)
Furthermore, ‘as the level of groundwater fell, air penetrated into the dried peat, enhancing microbial decomposition of organic matter. Often these processes led to uncontrollable underground fires and the formation of dangerous caverns within the peat. The weathered peat soils turned into infertile black dust. Strong winds sweeping the valley produced dust storms that caused major damage to agricultural crops. Consequently, the ground surface subsided by up to three meters in some regions and inundation of these areas during winter rains restricted cultivation in many areas. An indirect problem associated with the drying of the soils was the proliferation of field mice populations which soared and wreaked havoc on agricultural crops in the valley. Over time, farmers abandoned more and more of the valley where cultivation was no longer profitable, thereby further enhancing the rate at which these soils deteriorated’.
By 1958 this was the state of the valley described in such glowing terms by Dr. Thomson only a century before. A unique wetlands region which had been part of the landscape for thousands of years had been mostly destroyed within the space of nine. Elsewhere in Palestine olive groves, pomegranates and citrus orchards were uprooted as part of a dual process of settlement building and the removal from the land of all traces and symbols of the Palestinian presence. The olive and pomegranate were preeminent symbols of the ‘primitive’ Palestinian village and so had to go along with the houses. (11) Through the vindictive destruction of olive trees by settlers on the West Bank this process continues to the present day.
Along with the shrinking of Lake Huleh and the drying of the land came the destruction of flora and fauna. The lake had been a rich source of aquatic life, with researchers listing ‘260 species of insects, 95 crustaceans, 30 snails and claims, 21 fishes, seven amphibians and reptiles, 131 birds and three mammals’. (12) After the drainage ‘119 animal species were lost to the region of which 37 were totally lost from Israel [sic]. Similarly, many freshwater plant species became extinct and many of the massive flocks of migratory birds that used to land in the valley found alternative feeding sites on their routes between Europe and Asia.’ Only in the 1980s was it decided to take steps to repair the damage, by flooding part of the valley in the hope of renewing something of the original bio-diversity but only a ‘small fragment of an extinct eco-system’ has been revived.’ The painted frog with its mottled back and belly speckled with white spots belongs to an amphibian family thought to have died out 10,000 years ago until spotted in the Huleh wetlands in the 1940s. This ‘living fossil’ was believed to have been one of the species that were ‘lost’ when the wetlands were drained in the 1950s but two years ago a ranger saw one and now it is thought that there is a colony of hundreds.
The Huleh eco-system did not die of natural causes. It did not become ‘extinct’ because of sudden climate change or any of the other natural catastrophes that have killed off species and reshaped the surface of the planet for millennia. It was another casualty of the nakba. The Zionist colons had none of the skills that come with husbanding the land generation after generation over countless centuries. They had to learn and their vandalism in the Huleh valley was born of their ignorance and their haste to settle and cover all traces of where the people they drove out had lived, prayed, studied and farmed and where their ancestors were buried.
Where the painted frog went as the Huleh wetlands were drained only the frog knows. Most probably, it burrowed deeper into what remained of the mud and rushes until it was safe to come out, a period of time that spanned more than 50 years. The parallel with the people is unmistakable: driven towards extinction as a people, they have survived and are waiting for the time when they also will be able to return.
– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Notes:
(1) Rev. W. M. Thomson, The Land and the Book (Nelson and Sons: London, 1879).
(2) Steimatsky’s Palestine Guide (Jerusalem: Steinmatsky Publishing Company, n.d. , 1930s?).
(3) Arthur Ruppin, Three Decades of Palestine (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1936), pp. 207-8
(4) Alex Bein., ed., Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971)
(5) Ibid., p.320
(6) Tamar Zohary and K.David Hambright, ‘Lake Hula-Lake Agmon’, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
(7) Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscapes. The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p.127.
(8) Walid Khalidi ed., All That Remains. The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), pp. 428-509 passim for the fate of Palestinian villages on the Huleh plain.
(9) Ibid, p. 131
(10) Zohary and Hambright, op. cit.
(11) Benvenisti, p.216.
(12) Ibid.
A young Palestinian protester runs away from Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against the expropriation of Palestinian land by Israel in the village of Kafr Qaddum, near the West Bank city of Ramallah on June 22, 2012.– Source
Kafr Qaddum, Occupied Palestine – On Friday 14 June, the Israeli army arrested a 10-year-old child during the weekly protest in Kafr Qaddum. Israeli soldiers fired tear gas canisters and sound bombs at the villagers; many local residents suffered from tear gas inhalation.
At approximately 12:00, when residents and international solidarity activists started gathering for the demonstration before the Friday prayers, nearly 30 foot soldiers stormed the village from the main road leading toward the illegal Israeli settlement Qedumim. As they entered the village, they fired tear gas canisters directly at the group before the demonstration even began. Local youth resisted the incursion, chasing the soldiers back from the bystanders toward a hill overlooking the village.
Over the next two and a half hours, soldiers shot tear gas and threw sound bombs at demonstrators in the olive groves next to the main road of the village. At approximately 12:30, soldiers detained a 10-year-old boy. While in their custody, soldiers tied his hands, grabbed him by the neck, beat him and threatened to “drop [him] from this rock.”
Nearly one and a half hours later, the boy was released and residents of Kafr Qaddum celebrated his return. Soldiers continued to fire tear gas at local youth protesting at the edge of the village close to the illegal settler colony of Qedumim. No further arrests were made and the demonstration ended at around 15:00.
Kafr Qaddum is a 3,000-year-old agricultural village that sits on 24,000 dunams of land. The village was occupied by the Israeli army in 1967; in 1978, the illegal settler-colony of Qedumim was established nearby on the remains of a former Jordanian army camp, occupying 4,000 dunams of land stolen from Kafr Qaddum.
The villagers are currently unable to access an additional 11,000 dunams of land due to the closure by the Israeli army of the village’s main and only road leading to Nablus in 2003. The road was closed in three stages, ultimately restricting access for farmers to the 11,000 dunams of land that lie along either side to one or two times a year. Since the road closure, the people of Kafr Qaddum have been forced to rely on an animal trail to access this area; the road is narrow and, according to the locals, intended only for animals. In 2004 and 2006, three villagers died when they were unable to reach the hospital in time. The ambulances carrying them were prohibited from using the main road and were forced to take a 13 km detour. These deaths provoked even greater resentment in Kafr Qaddum and, on 1 July 2011, the villagers decided to unite in protest in order to re-open the road and protect the land in danger of settlement expansion along it.
Kafr Qaddum is home to 4,000 people; some 500 residents attend the weekly demonstrations. The villagers’ resilience, determination and organization have been met with extreme repression. More than 120 village residents have been arrested; most spend 3-8 months in prison; collectively they have paid over NIS 100,000 to the Israeli courts. Around 2,000 residents have suffocated from tear-gas inhalation, many in their own homes. Over 100 residents have been shot directly with tear-gas canisters. On 27 April 2012, one man was shot in the head by a tear-gas canister that fractured his skull in three places; the injury cost him his ability to speak. In another incident, on 16 March 2012 an Israeli soldier released his dog into the crowded demonstration, where it attacked a young man, biting him for nearly 15 minutes whilst the army watched. When other residents tried to assist him, some were pushed away while others were pepper-sprayed directly in the face.
The events of the past week are part of a continuous campaign by the Israeli military to harass and intimidate the people of Kafr Qaddum into passively accepting the human rights violations the Israeli occupation, military and the illegal settlers inflict upon them.
What should you do if you uncover wrongdoing and the people responsible are the same ones who are supposed to investigate it? The way our politicians and elite media figures talk, you would think there’s something honorable about tipping them off (or shutting your mouth). In the political arena, the bold person of conscience – the rebel, the maverick, the damn-the-costs truth-teller – is the bad guy, not the action hero; the company man is played by Bruce Willis. When Edward Snowden gave up a lucrative career in an island paradise to blow the whistle about the US government’s staggeringly broad spying operations – revealing what thousands of others with access to the same information wouldn’t – he was going up against a system that values loyalty to those who sign your paychecks over loyalty to principle or the public. A columnist for The New York Times, which is very much a part of that system, denounced him in terms one would think would be reserved for our leaders, declaring that Snowden had “betrayed the Constitution” and “the privacy of us all” by leaking evidence of the Obama administration doing just that.
Snowden need not be the world’s greatest human being for us to recognize the courage it took to do what he did. When compliance with a system makes one an accomplice to wrongdoing, there’s no virtue in being compliant. There’s no virtue in abiding by the “honor codes of all those who enabled [one] to rise,” as the Times columnist put it, when that code doesn’t respect the rights of everyone else. We recognize that when we go to the movies. Maybe we should stop condemning it in real life?
Instead of getting caught up in media attempts to pathologize a whistle-blower, we should also probably look more closely at what the whistle was blown on, because what Snowden revealed should be concerning, even if you don’t have relatives in Yemen.
This Matters
According to leaked classified documents, the US National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting data on nearly every call made by nearly every American, from the time it was placed, who was called and from where it originated. The NSA also has relationships with nearly every major Internet company, from Facebook to Google, granting the agency streamlined access to your user history. Everything you email or post to your wall could end up on an NSA server somewhere. That’s a lot of data, which is why the agency is building a 1.5 million square feet server farm in Utah to hold it, at a cost of $1.2 billion.
The Obama administration claims the information it belatedly admits it collects is only later accessed with a court order. But then, those court orders are classified, granted by judges in a secret court in front of which only the government can appear. Meanwhile, the White House has refused to release its legal rationale for the spying program, which senators from the president’s own party suggest is both illegal and unnecessary. It has, however, publicly credited the program with breaking up terrorist plots, though those claims – like its earlier denials that the spying program existed – have proven false.
But while it’s intrusive, sure, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right? Well, no. Even if you don’t have grandparents in Yemen, you should be concerned about any agency – that is, a collection of fallible human beings – that claims the right and has the power to know pretty much everything you’ve ever done on your iPhone. Go ahead and assume the best motives on the part of those in power, just don’t forget that even the most honorable people have ex-lovers too. Even saints can be seduced by power.
Most spooks aren’t saints, either. They’re like us: fallen. And what would you do if you were invisible? For some NSA employees, listening to your phone calls is the equivalent of sneaking into the locker room, several of them telling ABC News that the agency routinely eavesdrops on the phone calls of Americans abroad as they call friends and family back home.
“Hey, check this out,” the agents would tell each other, according to one whistle-blower. “There’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out.” Not exactly the model of professionalism one would hope for in someone who has god-like eavesdropping powers.
“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said another military whistleblower. Journalists and aid workers had their communications intercepted on a regular basis.
That was a decade ago.
It’s Gotten Worse
These days, the NSA is now known to be intercepting a much broader range of communication. Revelations to The Guardian show it claims the ability to tap into not just email communication, but live Skype calls. Basically everything you do on the Internet could potentially be viewed by a US government agent. There’s no need for black helicopters when you voluntarily divulge your life secrets with the help of a black box made by Sony. Or a white one by Apple.
You should be especially concerned if you have opinions about things going on in our world. When a group of Pennsylvanians began working to stop a natural gas fracking project in their community, they found themselves listed on a state Department of Homeland Security bulletin. “We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies,” the Secretary of Homeland Security, a Democrat, stated in an email.
If you oppose corporate America’s destruction of your community, you could end up being lumped in with actual terrorist threats. And once the word “terrorism” is invoked, all bets are off, potentially leading to a government agent, working on behalf of their corporate stakeholders, going through every ill-considered email you ever sent.
Sometimes, simply stating one’s political beliefs is enough to grab the state’s attention. In Seattle, the NSA’s partners in surveillance at the FBI tracked a group of young anarchists to a May Day demonstration, not because they were wanted for any crimes, but because they called themselves anarchists.
“Although many anarchists are law-abiding,” an FBI agent explained, “there is a history in the Pacific Northwest of some anarchists participating in property destruction and other criminal activity in support of their political philosophy.” And so we track them. And with the surveillance capabilities we have today, it’s not hard to make even the most innocent acts seem sinister, particularly when one has unpopular political beliefs or presents a challenge to corporate or state power.
It Could Be You
Combined with expansive terrorism laws, that could be a nightmare for those who fall in the arbitrary crosshairs of a government prosecutor looking to make a name for themselves. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that humanitarian groups can be convicted of “material support” for terrorism even if that support consists solely of helping seek conflict resolution. As former president Jimmy Carter said at the time, “the vague language of the law leaves us wondering if we will be prosecuted for our work to promote peace and freedom.”
Others don’t have to wonder. Since 2010, antiwar activists across the country have been subpoened and forced to testify before grand juries into a “material support” for terrorism investigation that has succeeded in scaring those who do humanitarian work in Palestine and Colombia, but as of yet yielded no convictions. Perhaps our broad spying and terrorism laws are working, just not in the way our leaders tell us. And, as these activists can attest: you don’t need to be convicted of anything to be constantly spied on.
As another NSA whistle-blower, William Binney, recently told journalist Amy Goodman, “if you’re doing something that irritates or is against what the government wants to be expressed to the American public, then you can become a target.” It’s as easy as that. And whenever you call a friend, keep in mind that you’re calling every friend your friend has ever called. Are you absolutely sure you have nothing to hide?
In Washington, most politicians seem annoyed that you now know this. They wish you didn’t. As Senator Al Franken explained, “Anything that the American people know, the bad guys know so there’s a line here, right?”
That’s how those in Washington often view those they claim to represent in our representative democracy: lumped in with the bad guys. Indeed, aiding us in our knowledge of what the government is doing in our name, as Bradley Manning and now Edward Snowden have done, is often likened with aiding the enemy.
“I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said of the NSA leaks. “I think it’s an act of treason.”
Feinstein voted for a war in Iraq that she and her husband personally profited from, so she knows a thing or two dozen about treachery. But she’s off base here. The American public is not the enemy, nor should informing them about the things being done to them with their own money be construed as the act of a traitor. Edward Snowden may not be the world’s greatest human being; who reading this has met him? What we do know is that his act did a lot of good by exposing a lot of wrong and took a lot more courage than it takes to criticize him on Capitol Hill. Since they don’t see that very often there, no wonder they mistake it as treason.
Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad have developed several methods that allow them to bypass the obligatory registration as ‘foreign agents’.
Currently the law obliges all NGOs engaged in political activities and receiving funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”under threat of fines.
One possible option is to register an ordinary commercial company that would receive funds from abroad and employ NGO staff as workers to pay their salaries, Kommersant daily wrote quoting the head of a Russian NGO who spoke on the condition of total anonymity.
The source noted that about 15 Russian groups had already switched to this method.
Another possible loophole, suggested by the daily itself, is to set up an endowment that would properly register as a foreign agent and receive foreign funding which would then be transferred to one or several Russian groups, allowing them to skip the registration as they are formally sponsored by a Russian company.
The third way has been outlined in a recent report by the Civil Initiatives Committee, an influential expert group chaired by former finance minister Aleksey Kudrin, which said that under growing pressure Russian NGOs could re-register in neighboring states.
Some Russian officials already called for changes in the recently approved law, saying that the flaws of the original bill are being exposed as it is applied. Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, said that the practice was only showing one thing – that the law had been poorly written and that it was in need of corrections.
Fedotov added that the council had already prepared several suggestions on corrections, but he did not go into detail.
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich has said that the law needs changes and called for activists to draft their amendments. But Dvorkovich added that the law is in force and must be observed by all members of the community until it is altered in the desired way.
Prosecutors and the Justice Ministry launched a major nationwide program in March this year in order to check how the fresh law is being applied. The inspections caused protests from NGOs, rights activists and the international community, which claimed they were a form of government pressure on independent critics.
Russian officials, including the president, have repeatedly stated that the law is not banning any NGOs and simply requires disclosure of the sources of their income. Such transparency would give Russian citizens and voters some clues about possible motives of the groups’ political actions, the officials added.
Currently no organization is registered as a foreign agent in Russia.
Thousands of US tech, finance, and manufacturing firms have secret agreements with national security agencies to trade sensitive information in return for classified intelligence, Bloomberg’s sources revealed.
The firms involved are referred to as ‘trusted partners’ by US intelligence organizations such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and branches of US military.
In fact, thousands of US companies voluntarily provide US agencies with data (i.e. equipment specifications), Bloomberg’s four sources, who either worked for the government or in companies that have these agreements, said. And the information received can be used to gain access to computers of America’s rivals.
Cooperation between companies and intelligence agencies is legal, reported Bloomberg. And the fact that the companies provide information voluntarily means there is no need for US agencies to get court orders and no oversight is required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one out of four sources said.
Also, some of the companies’ executives are guaranteed immunity from civil actions related to transfer of information.
For example, Microsoft passes on information about bugs in its software before it publicly releases a fix to the problem, two sources confirmed. This kind of information can protect US government computers, as well as help to infiltrate those used by foreign governments by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Microsoft’s system.
Microsoft is reportedly not told how the US government uses the information passed on down to it, according to one official. Spokesman for Microsoft Frank Shaw confirmed such releases and stated that they give the government a chance to get “an early start: on risk assessment and mitigation.”
McAfee, America’s global computer security software company, is another ‘trusted partner’ and is known for its cooperation with the NSA, CIA, and FBI. It can share valuable data including malicious internet traffic, one of the sources said.
The company’s worldwide chief technology officer, Michael Fey, rebuffed the claim that the company does not share any personal information with the government.
“McAfee’s function is to provide security technology, education, and threat intelligence to governments … [including] emerging new threats, cyber-attack patterns and hacker group activity,” he stated.
Due to the sensitivity of information being traded, these kinds of agreements are usually made strictly between companies’ chief executive officers and heads of the US agencies. At times the chief executives could clear a few trusted people to work directly with the agencies.
Sharing info: Out of ‘patriotism’ or for ‘classified’ info?
In return for their cooperation, companies are showered with attention and gratitude.
“If I were the director and had a relationship with a company who was doing things that were not just directed by law, but were also valuable to the defense of the Republic, I would go out of my way to thank them and give them a sense as to why this is necessary and useful”, Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA said.
One of the sources said that public would be surprised how much help the government is seeking in terms of collecting information. Reportedly, it is currently implementing a new expensive program called Einstein 3. The program was developed by the NSA to protect the government from hackers by analyzing billions of emails being sent to the government computers.
Five of America’s major internet companies, including AT&T and Verizon, have agreed to install the program on their servers and have received immunity guarantees, which specify that they would not be held liable under US wiretap laws, one of the sources revealed.
In the past companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth were already reportedly involved for eavesdropping on behalf of the NSA. In 2006 sources revealed that the companies collected call records of tens of millions of Americans and shared them with NSA.
US companies are willing to participate in these kinds of agreements because they either believe they are helping to protect the nation and/or helping to advance their own interests by receiving classified information in return, sources said.
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, was given sensitive government information a year into its data sharing agreement with NSA. The info provided linked the 2010 attack on Google to a specific unit within the Chinese military – the People’s Liberation Army – one of the sources confirmed. Brin was even given a classified clearance to attend a secret briefing on the subject.
Google was reportedly one of the participants in the secret NSA PRISM program that was revealed by ex-CIA staffer and whistleblower Edward Snowden. The program uses data mining surveillance to access emails, videos, chats, photos and search queries from nine worldwide tech giants.
Snowden also disclosed a secret NSA program called Blarney, which gathers metadata on computers and devices that send emails or browse the Internet through principal data routes, known as a backbone.
The whistleblower was last seen Monday, checking out of his hotel in Hong Kong, where he stayed for three weeks after leaving the US.
Snowden is hoping that staying in Hong Kong would help him avoid any extradition attempts on behalf of the US. In terms of the US-Hong Kong Extradition Treaty, both Hong Kong and Beijing have the power to stymie Snowden’s extradition. China for its part has no extradition treaty with the United States.
China has thus far refrained from making statements on the Snowden case. But a popular Chinese Communist Party-backed newspaper has printed an article demonstrating the benefits of not sending Snowden back to US, arguing that his knowledge of US surveillance programs are key to China’s national interest.
The article comes after Snowden resurfaced and gave an exclusive interview to the South China Morning Post, revealing top-secret US government records that show dates and IP addresses of computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland that were hacked by the NSA over a four-year period.
In the meantime, the FBI has launched an investigation into Snowden leaking US top secret surveillance tactics and has promised to hold the whistleblower accountable.
An excellent presentation disputing man-made global warming using nothing but pure science and statistics by Professor Bob Carter (Australian geologist). It would be very difficult to dispute his facts. In this video he pretty much proves that over 10,000 years the earth has been cooling. Looking at shorter periods of time one can find whatever they want in the numbers. There have been many periods of rapid warming and cooling over this period.
He examines the data concerning climate change, Global warming, the problems with the idea that CO2 is driving climate change and global warming, & examples of the scientific data being ignored over popularist views about CO2 causing climate change and Global warming;… the hypothesis fails the test.
The name card at the Senate hearing read, “Hon. General Keith B. Alexander,” but layering on the extra honorific title was not enough to change the sad reality that the National Security Agency’s director – a proven prevaricator – was not “honorable.”
You might have thought that some impish congressional staffer was trying to inject a touch of irony into the proceedings by prefacing “General” with “Hon.” – like Mark Antony mocking Julius Caesar’s murderers as “honorable men” in Shakespeare’s play. But that didn’t seem to be the case.
Likely, the extra title was just a mistake by the person printing out the name cards or someone who thought it would do no harm to tack on one more flattering title like a court herald might do in announcing the arrival of royalty. But – whatever the case – the image of Alexander, with his history of lying to Congress (see below), sitting behind the assurance that he was “honorable” might have elicited from the Bard a comment like, “Methinks they doth protest too much.”
The Wednesday hearing was led by Senate Appropriations Committee chair Barbara Mikulski, Democrat from Maryland, the state which hosts the gargantuan multi-billion-dollar-spending National Security Agency. To her credit, she let her Senate colleagues focus on the revelations by Edward Snowden regarding highly intrusive NSA monitoring of the communications of virtually every living soul, even though cyber-security spending was to be the main agenda item.
The public hearing, however, did allow the “honorable” Alexander to do a snow job on Edward Snowden, with the eager help of some of the senators. But when a few senators dared to ask probing questions, those were deferred to the Senate Intelligence Committee, where chair Dianne Feinstein can more easily protect Alexander and his Fourth-Amendment-shredding accomplices – including herself – especially in executive session.
Oversight Is ‘Nonsense’
Wednesday’s hearing proved Daniel Ellsberg right in saying earlier this week: “to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads – they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor.”
Given what we now know, thanks to whistleblower Snowden, it is clear that Alexander made a host of untruthful statements to the media as well as Congress in recent years. Not to worry. Unconstitutional eavesdropping advocates/defenders in Congress and the media know quite well how to play all this. Exhibit A: Lead headline in Thursday’s Washington Post, “Dozens of attacks foiled, NSA says.”
Here’s the lede: “The head of the National Security Agency defended his agency’s broad electronic surveillance programs Wednesday, saying that they have helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks and that their recent public disclosure has done ‘great harm’ to the nation’s security.” The Post adds that Alexander went on to claim: “Our agency takes great pride in protecting this nation and our civil liberties and privacy.”
The front-pager by Ellen Nakashima and Jerry Markon recounted – with no apparent attempt to solicit background, much less confirmation – specific cases where Alexander claimed that the intrusive eavesdropping programs “helped thwart” terrorist attacks. It took the London Guardian virtually no time to challenge Alexander on two of the main cases he adduced: the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, now serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington and Nicholas Watt, no doubt anticipating the tales Alexander would weave, wrote: “But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programmes played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots. Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.”
Previous Prevarication
My apologies, but it’s just too contrived for me to defer to the convention, prevailing in the Washington Establishment, of not calling a lie a lie. For those few who may not have noticed, lying to the obsequious note-takers and speedy stenographers who pose as journalists is part of the woodwork in the nation’s capital these days.
But lying to Congress? Isn’t that still a felony or at least grounds for getting summarily fired? There is proof that Alexander lied to Congress – well before Wednesday’s disingenuous performance. He did so almost eight years ago. And he seems to have paid no price. Indeed, it has served him well, career-wise.
For almost a dozen years now we have been hearing, “After 9/11 everything changed!” Include NSA under that rubric. After the attacks of 9/11, then-Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden saluted smartly when ordered by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to trash what had been known throughout the intelligence community as NSA’s “First Commandment – Thou shalt not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.”
After 9/11 the prevailing attitude – in Congress as well as the Executive – was that there was no need to pay much attention to the rule of law, or to abide by solemn oaths to support and defend the Constitution. But there were still some Americans who believed that the law was the law and who sought some accountability from telecommunication companies that had cooperated with warrantless wiretapping.
However, by an artful change in the law, Hayden, Cheney, Bush and the telecoms were held harmless. The authors of the bill and the mainstream media even lauded those who collaborated in the warrantless wiretaps for their patriotism.
So, Hayden’s successor, Keith Alexander, knew which side his bread was buttered on and followed Hayden’s example. But Alexander was caught in a lie when he misled Rep. Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, who had the NSA portfolio on the House Intelligence Committee. It is a felony to lie to Congress; yet, that is precisely what Alexander did on Dec. 6, 2005, as Congressman Holt paid a call on NSA.
Alexander told Holt that NSA was not violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act strictures against eavesdropping on Americans without a court order, which then was one of the Bush administration’s most sensitive secrets, albeit one that was about to be spilled.
Unfortunately for Alexander, the White House had neglected to tell him that a day earlier — on Dec. 5, 2005 – President Bush tried and failed to keep the New York Times sitting on the story (which it had politely done for more than a year). However, the Times editors had learned that their reporter James Risen was prepared to disclose the secret in a book scheduled for publication in early 2006. So the Times editors decided that they couldn’t afford to be scooped on their own story – and finally rebuffed Bush’s entreaties.
However, the unlucky Alexander was left out of the loop on these discussions so he continued to use the shopworn, dishonest NSA talking points when he spoke with Holt. On Dec. 16, 2005, the Times finally front-paged the exclusive by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”
It seems almost necessary to remind readers at this point that there was a “before 9/11” when a quaint notion prevailed that it was not quite right to lie to Congress. Even after 9/11, Holt was appropriately outraged. Holt said he would see to it that Alexander did not get a fourth star.
However, impunity seems to prevail in these circles of signals intelligence. Less than five years later, in May 2010, the Senate confirmed Alexander for appointment to the rank of four-star general at a ceremony at which he also assumed the key post of U.S. Cyber Commander.
Smoother than Clapper
Fortunately for the senators now bent on covering up NSA’s violation of Fourth Amendment rights – the sweeping up of “metadata” on apparently every phone call made by Americans so it can be mined for information about “terrorists” – the “honorable” Alexander is a smooth talker skilled in the art of deception. You might apply to Alexander the addendum to the old saying about “once you practice to deceive”: “But once you’ve practiced for a while; You markedly improve your style.”
National Intelligence Director James Clapper was much less polished when he tried to deflect questions about the collection of the phone data during a Senate hearing. What an embarrassment it was to watch him entangle himself when asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
In answering, Clapper appeared in some distress – “more than somewhat not comfortable,” as author Damon Runyon would put it. Clapper, who was under oath, tried to hide his face behind his hand, tugged on his pate though it hosted no hair, and responded: “No, sir.”
Wyden, who knew different, followed up, “It does not?”Clapper: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” Clapper later tried to excuse his lie as the “least untruthful” response he could come up with in an open hearing.
Clapper’s sad performance was particularly painful because he has been, for the most part, a stand-up guy even when facing pressure from lawmakers to retreat on controversial intelligence assessments. For example, he stood up to members of Congress when some pressed him to change the intelligence community’s considered judgment that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon almost ten years ago.
On Wednesday, Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan, openly accused Clapper of criminal perjury and called for him to resign, saying, “It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people.” Amash added that “Perjury is a serious crime … [and] Clapper should resign immediately.”
But Clapper too is an “honorable man” – someone deeply enmeshed in the machinations of America’s “secrecy/surveillance state.” It will be interesting to see if he decides to fall on his sword and demonstrate that at least someone has a sense of honor – or he could take lessons from Alexander on the finer arts of dissembling.
O Tempora; O Mores.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, part of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army officer and CIA intelligence analyst for 30 years, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
British police are preparing one of their most unprecedented security operations, involving water cannons and summary hearings, for next week’s G8 summit in Northern Ireland.
Police Service of Northern Ireland district commander Chief Superintendent Pauline Shields said more than 8,000 officers are being dispatched to Northern Ireland to help local police in the security operations.
The arrangements include a daunting four-mile security fence around the Lough Erne Golf Resort that will host the summit on Monday and Tuesday next week, while another barbed wire barrier is being set up outside the area.
The police have also deployed several mobile water cannons to frighten off potential protesters with a seven-mile area of the Lough Erne lake itself being closed down and patrolled by police boats.
“I would say the scale of the G8 in Northern Ireland is the biggest operation that the Police Service of Northern Ireland has ever had to deal with and probably as big as any police service throughout the UK would have dealt with,” Shields said.
This comes as she dismissed concerns that the police are gearing up a heavy-handed response to any protests outside the summit venue.
Police say they have made 260 extra prison cells available in nearby Omagh, Country Tyrone, and in the Northern Irish capital of Belfast, while sixteen judges will be on standby to hold summary hearings for arrested demonstrators.
But Shields claimed the measures are only meant to “facilitate” peaceful protests.
“We will have a policing operation in place that will facilitate peaceful protest…. We believe there may be a small minority of people who may be intent on causing disorder – we would ask people to abide by the law and if they break the law, then we will be in a position to deal robustly with them,” she said.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday agreed to halt plans to redevelop an Istanbul park at the center of two weeks of mass anti-government unrest, in a move protesters welcomed as “positive”.
It marked the first easing of tensions in the standoff, which has presented the government with the biggest challenge of its decade-long rule.
Hours after giving a “last warning” to defiant demonstrators camping out in Gezi Park, Erdogan made the concession in his first talks with a key group of protesters to defuse tensions in the crisis.
“The positive outcome from tonight is the prime minister’s explanation that the project will not continue before the final court decision,” Tayfun Kahraman, a spokesman for the Taksim Solidary group, seen as the most representative of the protest movement, said in televised remarks.
A peaceful sit-in to save Gezi Park’s 600 trees from being razed prompted a brutal police response on May 31, spiralling into nationwide outpourings of anger against Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), seen as increasingly authoritarian.
The promise to abide by a court decision suspending the redevelopment of Gezi Park was hailed as a win by the protesters, who had earlier balked at Erdogan’s offer to hold a referendum over plans to reconstruct Ottoman-era military barracks on the site in return for evacuating the park.
Speaking after the four-hour emergency meeting, Deputy Prime Minister
Huseyin Celik said the government would respect the court’s decision on the project suspension and insisted a popular vote to seal the fate of the park
would go ahead.
“But Gezi Park protesters should stop their demonstration now,” he warned.
The court process is expected to take several months. In the meantime, a probe is under way to investigate the use of excessive police force in dealing with the protesters across the country, Celik added.
Some 5,000 people have been injured and four were killed by the police so far, because of the use of tear gas, rubber ballets and water cannons on demonstrators.
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli occupation police closed main streets leading to the Old City in occupied Jerusalem on Thursday, local sources said.
The Israeli decision to close the streets came due to the preparations for the organization of the Formula 1 race, which will take place on Thursday and Friday in the occupied city of Jerusalem with the participation of the Ferrari World team, under the sponsorship Kaspersky Company specialized in computer protection programs.
The police declared, in a statement, their intention to close the streets leading to al-Khalil, Asbat, and Al Magharibah Gates in the Old City on Thursday and Friday, according to Jerusalemite sources.
The race will be launched from the neighborhoods in the western part of Jerusalem towards the eastern part, in the vicinity of the Old City wall.
For its part; the Jerusalem Sports Federations Group asserted that the Ferrari race comes within the framework of the Judaization plans implemented by the occupation in the city of Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the Israeli police, accompanied with bulldozers and trucks, evacuated on Wednesday Wadi Joz car park east of Jerusalem claiming that it belongs to Israel Lands Administration (ILA).
Siyam, Abu Ta’a, and Farhan families confirmed that the car park was established on their own lands, declaring their intention to prosecute the ILA for its racial policy.
The families confirmed that the Israeli authorities have notified them since 6 months to evacuate the car park.
The park owners affirmed that they have official documents confirming their ownership of the land, where they appealed to the Israeli Municipal Authorities which permitted them to rehabilitate the park to be used as a car park, however they were surprised yesterday by the ILA breaking into the park.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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