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Trying to Scuttle Iran Nuke Talks, Again

By Gareth Porter | IPS | May 15, 2014

As diplomats began drafting a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program and Western sanctions in Vienna on Tuesday, U.S. officials were poised to demand a drastic cut in Iran’s enrichment capabilities that is widely expected to deadlock the negotiations.

Iran is almost certain to reject the basic concept that it should reduce the number of its centrifuges to a fraction of its present total, and the resulting collapse of the talks could lead to a much higher level of tensions between the United States and Iran.

The Obama administration’s highly risky diplomatic gambit rests on the concept of “breakout time,” defined as the number of months it would take Iran to accumulate enough weapons grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon.

Both Secretary of State John Kerry and former U.S. proliferation official Robert Einhorn have explained the demand that Iran give up the vast majority of its centrifuges as necessary to increase Iran’s “breakout time” to at least six months, and perhaps even much longer.

Einhorn, who was the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control until June 2013, wrote in a report for the Brookings Institution that the number and type of centrifuges “will be limited to ensure that breakout times are … a minimum of 6 to 12 months at all times.”

In a separate article in The National Interest, Einhorn wrote that such a “breakout time” would entail a reduction from Iran’s present total of 19,000 centrifuges to “a few thousand first-generation centrifuges.”

Kerry suggested in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 8 that the administration would try to get a breakout time of more than one year but might settle for six to 12 months. He compared that with the two months he said was the current estimate of Iran’s breakout capabilities.

“Breakout” has been touted by hardline think tanks as a non-political technical measure of the threat to obtain the high-enriched uranium necessary for a bomb, but it is actually arbitrary and highly political.

Even proliferation specialists who support the demand to limit Iranian enrichment capabilities severely, however, including both Einhorn and Gary Samore, President Barack Obama’s former special assistant on weapons of mass destruction, believe that “breakout” is more about the politics surrounding the issue than the reality of the Iranian nuclear program.

In an interview with IPS, Samore said the breakout concept can only measure the capability to obtain the necessary amount of high-enriched uranium from acknowledged facilities – those that are under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It does not deal with a scenario involving secret facilities, he said, because it is only possible to estimate rates of enrichment in facilities with known quantities and types of centrifuges.

The use of the breakout concept is based on the premise that Iran would make a political decision to begin enriching uranium to weapons grade levels in its Natanz and Fordow plants as rapidly as possible. That would mean that Iran would have to expel the IAEA inspectors and announce to the world, in effect, its intention to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Samore, who left the Obama administration in January 2013 and is now the executive director for research at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Security, told IPS, “It’s extremely unlikely that Iran would actually take the risk for single bomb,” calling it “an implausible scenario.”

Samore is no dove on Iran’s nuclear issue. He is also president of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organization that puts out hardline propaganda aimed at convincing the world that Iran is a threat trying to get nuclear weapons.

Another problem with the specter of “breakout” is that, even if it took the risk of enriching the necessary weapons-grade uranium, Iran would still have to go through a series of steps to actually have a bomb that it could threaten to use.

A report released last week by the International Crisis Group (ICG) noted that calculations of breakout capability “are rough and purely theoretical estimates” and that they “omit inevitable technical hitches” and “an unpredictable and time-consuming weaponization process.”

According to the testimony by director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2010, that process, including integrating the weapon into a ballistic missile, would take three or four years.

The ICG report quoted a senior Iranian official as saying, “Serious people know that, even if Iran sought nuclear weapons, it will take years to manufacture one. What’s more, no state has ever invited opprobrium or a military strike just to produce a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium.”

In an interview, Jim Walsh of MIT’s Security Studies Program was scathing about the “breakout” scenario the administration is using to justify its diplomatic stance. “The idea of Iran kicking out inspectors to rush to get one bomb is silly,” he told IPS.

Samore believed that Iran would be far more likely to try what he calls a “sneakout” – the use of secret facilities to enrich uranium to weapons grade — than a “breakout.”

But as is generally acknowledged by proliferation specialists, such a covert route to a nuclear weapons capability would take much longer than trying to do so openly. Furthermore, it is almost certain to be detected, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified in April 2013.

Despite his conviction that the breakout concept makes no sense as the basis for negotiations with Iran, Samore believes it will be “the test for any deal,” because it is the only way to measure it. “It’s a political fact of life,” Samore said. “It all gets boiled down to breakout time.”

The dominance that the breakout advocates have achieved in the lopsided political discourse about Iran has given opponents of an agreement a new form of pressure on the Obama administration to make unrealistic demands in the negotiations.

Einhorn admitted at a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. on Tuesday that the decision on the length of breakout time and the level of centrifuges to be demanded “will come down to a political judgment.”

He clearly suggested, however, that the decision is primarily a response to political pressures from various unnamed parties and not a matter of finding a political compromise with Iran.

“Some say six months or less,” he said. “Others say you need a year. Some say a year and a half or two years.”

The former senior State Department official on proliferation issues insisted, moreover, that there was no possibility of accepting Iran’s explicit demand to be permitted to increase its enrichment capacity to as many as 30,000 centrifuges in order to support a nuclear power program.

“That amount would bring breakout time down to weeks or days,” he said. “That’s breakout.”

He did not discuss the possibility of agreement on gradually phasing in additional centrifuges as the practical need for them is demonstrated by progress on a new nuclear reactor.

The tough talk by Einhorn, who has clearly been given the green light to describe administration thinking publicly, makes it much less likely that the administration will back away from a breakout demand in the face of firm Iranian resistance.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Uranium Weapons Still Making Money, Wreaking Havoc

By John LaForge | CounterPunch | May 15, 2014

The US Army has awarded General Dynamics a $12 million contract to deconstruct and dispose of 78,000 depleted uranium anti-tank shells. The Pentagon’s May 6 announcement calls for “demilitarization” of the aging shells, as newer depleted uranium rounds are added to the US arsenal.

In the perpetually profitable business of war production, General Dynamics originally produced and sold some of the 120-millimeter anti-tank rounds to the Army. One of the richest weapons builders on earth, General Dynamics has 95,000 employees and sells its wares in 40 countries on six continents.

The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons in Manchester, England, reports the armor-piercing shells to be disassembled are thought to be the large 105-millimeter and 120-millimeter anti-tank rounds.

Depleted uranium, or DU, weapons are made of extremely dense uranium-238. More than 700,000 tons of DU has been left as waste in the US alone from the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor fuel rods. The urankum-238 is left when fissionable uranium-235 is separated for H-bombs and reactor fuel. DU is only ‘depleted’ of this U-235. It is still a radioactive and toxic heavy metal. A tax and ecological liability, DU is given away free to weapons builders.

The Pentagon is replacing older DU shells in spite of international appeals for a moratorium on their use. The military is set to buy 2,500 large anti-tank rounds just this year at a cost of $30 million or over $10,000 each from Alliant Tech Systems, formerly of Minneapolis.

In 1991, during its 40-day, 1,000-sorties-per-day bombardment, between 300 and 800 tons of DU was blasted into Iraq by US forces. Another estimated 170 tons were used in the 2003 bombing and annexation. Toxic, radioactive contamination left from the use of these weapons (the DU burns and turns to dusty aerosol on impact) has been linked to the skyrocketing incidence of birth abnormalities in southern Iraq and to the Gulf War Syndrome among tens of thousands of US combat veterans.

After the US/NATO bombardment of Kosovo in 1999, our DU weapons were discovered to be spiked with plutonium and other isotopes. This news created a political uproar in Europe and led to the admission by the US Energy Department that “the entire US stock of depleted uranium was contaminated” with plutonium, americium, neptunium and technetium. United Nations investigators in Kosovo found sites hit with DU to be poisoned with all four isotopes. The Nation magazine reported that about 150,000 tons uranium-238 was dirtied with plutonium-239 and neptunium-237 and that “some apparently found its way to the Persian Gulf and Balkans battlefields.” (Robert Alvarez, “DU at Home,” The Nation, April 9, 2001, p. 24)

European papers shouting “Plutonium!” in headlines saw US and NATO officials rushing to microphones to claim with straight faces that their shells contained “mere traces of plutonium, not enough to cause harm,” and that the highly radioactive materials “were not relevant to soldiers’ health because of their minute quantities.” But plutonium is 200,000 times more radioactive than U-238 and ingesting less than 27 micrograms of plutonium-239 a millionth of an ounce — will cause lung cancer.

(One indication of just how poisonous these weapons are is that in 30 years of resisting nuclear weapons and the war system, the only ‘not guilty of trespass’ verdict I ever won from a jury followed a protest at Alliant Tech over its DU program. The jury agreed with four of us that since poison weapons are banned by the Geneva and Hague Conventions our action was an attempt at crime prevention.)

Long-term disposal plans for the uranium from 78,000 shells were not outlined by the Army. Uranium in the shells is often alloyed with titanium or molybdenum, and if these metals are not recycled, they could become part of our vast stockpile of DU, requiring indefinite storage as intermediate-level radioactive waste. Other parts of the munitions are currently disposed of as low-level rad’ waste in spite of the plutonium content.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Destroying olives for spite

By Brian Cloughley | The News | May 12, 2014

Many people like olives because they are delicious and produce wonderful oil. They were originally cultivated in Syria, Palestine and Crete and there is evidence that some existing trees are 2,000 years old, which is amazing.

But there aren’t any 2,000 year-old olive trees in Palestine nowadays. Indeed there are very few left in the Palestinian lands that have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Since then, the Israelis have destroyed 800,000 Palestinian olive trees and last week the Israeli army cut down another 52 next to a village whose farmers are being driven into poverty by yet another vicious act of Israeli malice. The destruction was ignored by western politicians who say they want a solution to what US Secretary of State Kerry calls a “puzzle.”

Yes, it’s a puzzle. But even Kerry, in an off-guard truthful moment, ventured to say that if there is no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state with second-class citizens.”

That was welcome acknowledgement of Israel’s arrogance (although of course he promptly withdrew it after shrieks of protest), but he ignored that Israel is already an apartheid state where Palestinians are non-citizens.

There is nowhere else in the world, apart from Britain’s mediaeval tribal areas of Northern Ireland, where twenty-foot high concrete barriers separate peoples of different religions. But the Israelis go further, because their barricades exemplify apartheid which is ‘a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race.’

Israel has 400 miles of walls separating Jews from Arabs, and one of its latest extensions involves a village near Bethlehem which grows olives in “unique terraced hills built by hand over millennia.” Its irrigation system was built by the Romans and has lasted 2,000 years, but it’s going to be destroyed by the Israelis. And nobody will do anything about it.

There will not be a squeak of protest from any western country, least of all the United States whose entire legislative system is controlled by the Israeli lobby. AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, calls the shots in Washington and has given money to almost every senator and member of the House of Representatives. And why would it do that?

All decent people are in favour of donating to charities. But legislators of the US Congress are not charities. When they are given money by an organisation of any sort they are expected to produce results that are favourable to the donor – and in the case of AIPAC they certainly do that. President Obama isn’t a charity, either, and his speech to the 2011 AIPAC forum was grovelling and obsequious.

Obama declared that “I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland . . . [and] when an effort was made to insert the United Nations into matters that should be resolved through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, we vetoed it (applause)” in what was probably the most pathetically sycophantic speech ever made by a US president. But he needed AIPAC support for his re-election campaign the following year.

Two days after Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian people the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed both houses of Congress in a triumphant diatribe denying the rights of Palestinians. And for this he received adulation on a scale hitherto reserved for international figures of illustrious achievement.

Since the French hero of the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette, gave the first speech by a foreigner in 1824, dignitaries from each of France and Britain have spoken at eight joint meetings of Congress, the most by any countries (and Churchill’s three orations were historic), but there haven’t been any French or British luminaries welcomed in recent years. Guess which country has been honoured by the next highest number of appearances in front of the legislators of the world’s greatest democracy.

Washington has laid out the Congress carpet seven times for Israeli politicians, and Netanyahu leads with two imperial appearances. After his last triumphant performance it was reported that “President Obama got 25 standing ovations from Congress during his 2011 State of the Union address. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got 29 today.”

It is barely credible that this brutally racist prime minister could receive such adulation from the massed representatives of a nation having a Declaration of Independence declaring that “unalienable Rights” include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Life? – A letter in Britain’s medical journal The Lancet notes that “the life expectancy table ranks healthy life expectancy at birth for men in Israel at ninth worldwide, compared with 86th for men in the neighbouring Occupied Palestinian Territory. Corresponding ranks for women are 12th and 97th, respectively. This astonishing gap highlights yet again the apartheid-like regime that is in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

There is little liberty and no happiness for Palestinians in their own country, because almost all Arab lands have been seized by the Jews. Yet Israel’s persecution of Palestinians meets with the wholehearted support of America’s government whose taxpayers give Israel over three billion dollars a year.

The bankrolled legislators of America’s Congress contemptuously ignore UN Security Council Resolutions about Palestinian rights. In 1979, in spite of the US, the council declared that “the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” But resolutions mean nothing to Congress if they are critical of Israel. Money is much more important. Since then, Washington has vetoed 42 council resolutions intended to curb or criticise Israeli excesses.

While the recent talks between Israel and Palestine were going on the Israelis approved the illegal building of another 13,851 new settlement houses on Palestinian land. So of course the talks collapsed. They were never meant to succeed by either Washington or Tel Aviv.

You would think that Israelis might want to come to some sort of equitable arrangement with the Palestinians. But they don’t and won’t. Washington’s unconditional support means Israel will carry on rejecting olive branches of peace and continue destroying the olive groves of Palestine.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 4 Comments

New questions in FBI Boston bombing witness killing

By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening | May 14, 2014

Almost a year after an FBI agent shot and killed, under suspicious circumstances, a crucial witness in the Boston Marathon bombing case during a botched midnight interrogation in an Orlando apartment, serious questions are being raised about the FBI agent who fired seven shots into Chechen immigrant Ibragim Todashev last May 22.

Two investigations, one by the FBI itself and one by the Florida Attorney General’s office, exonerated the FBI in the shooting death, claiming the agent, never identified, had been acting in self-defense, when Todashev allegedly ran at him with a raised broom handle.

Now, in an excellent piece of investigative journalism, the Boston Globe has uncovered the identity of the agent, 41-year-old Aaron McFarlane, who joined the Bureau in 2008 after retiring on a $52,000 lifetime annual disability pension from a short stint as an officer in the Oakland Police Department.

Aside from the question of why someone who passed through the rigorous training program the FBI runs for its recruits at Quantico, VA would also qualify for a lucrative pension, it turns out that McFarlane also has a pretty checkered past at Oakland’s Police Department — a police department that has such an extraordinary record of corruption and brutality, that since 2012 it has been operated under the supervision of a federal court “compliance director,” whose job is to see that officers don’t brutalize residents or violate their civil rights.

McFarlane, the Boston Globe reported, did more than that as an Oakland cop. The paper reports that during his four years with the Oakland Police, he was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations. the paper found also that McFarlane, as a defense witness in a corruption trial, pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions from the prosecutor in that case, which involved officers.

The trial in question was the biggest corruption scandal in Oakland’s history. Filed in 2000, the case involved four police officers who called themselves the “Riders,” who were accused of beating and kidnapping people, making false arrests, planting evidence and falsifying police reports. The case ended up being short-circuited with no convictions under a settlement that had the city of Oakland paying damages of $10.9 million to some 119 victims of Oakland Police officer’s abuse and deceit, and with the whole department going into receivership.

According to the Globe’s report, the court transcript shows that when prosecutor David Hollister tried to ask McFarlane on the witness stand about a police report he had filed which appeared to have been falsified in order to “drum up a reason to arrest a man,” McFarlane pleaded the Fifth. Hollister told the Globe that the report in question “at first blush certainly appears to be criminal. I think on its face, Officer McFarlane should probably have some concerns about whether or not he violated Section 118.1 of the Penal Code in filing a false police report.”

Hollister also questioned McFarlane about another arrest he had made the same night of a man who suffered an unexplained head injury while being transported to jail. McFarlane said he “did not know” how the man in his charge was injured.

The city of Oakland also paid two settlements, for $22,500 and $10,000, in brutality cases brought against McFarlane and a fellow officer by two men who claimed they had been badly beaten by the two officers.

McFarlane’s record of apparent brutal behavior as a cop in Oakland is relevant to the Todashev case because it could explain why Todashev, who had agreed to talk with McFarlane in Todashev’s apartment, but later, according to Agent McFarlane, jumped up, ran to the front of the apartment, and then allegedly returned from the foyer brandishing a broomstick.

Unmentioned in the FBI’s story line of what happened, which was accepted at face value in the investigation conducted by the Orlando Florida State’s Attorney Jeffrey Ashton, was a bruise and a bloody contusion noted by the Orlando coroner on Todashev’s left cheek, right on the outside of the eye socket. The coroner said that injury was evidence of a “hard blow” to the head.

Was McFarlane, in that midnight interview, resorting to the behavior that got him in trouble in the Oakland Police Department?

As I wrote earlier, the pattern of bullets that McFarlane fired at Todashev — three to the upper middle of his back, one to the chest, two to the upper left arm and one into the top of the head, slightly to the rear of the crown, suggest not that he was shot in defense while charging at McFarlane and a Boston State Trooper also in the room, but that he was shot in the back multiple times while in the foyer attempting to flee the apartment — perhaps from a brutal beating.

As a police detective I showed the coroner’s report to pointed out, the bullets to the raised arm suggest that Todashev, hit three times in the back, may have realized he could not escape, and that he had turned, raising his left arm either defensively (he was a skilled martial arts expert and was right-handed), or along with his other arm in a sign of surrender. The last two shots had to have been the one to the chest, which blew out his aorta and would have been instantly fatal, and the shot to the head, which went straight through the center of the brain lodging in the cerebellum area — also a shot that would have been instantly fatal.

Neither Ashton nor the FBI are commenting on the Globe’s article. Ashton never did actually interview McFarlane or the other FBI agent who, inexplicably and in violation of FBI procedure, was not even in the apartment, but was outside during the entire interrogation, keeping a friend of Todashev’s from witnessing anything that was going on with his friend. Ashton instead had to rely on written answers about what happened provided by the FBI from the two men.

Hassan Shibly, a lawyer and executive director of the Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR) Florida office, said he has sent a letter today to the US Department of Justice, the FBI and the Florida State’s Attorney’s office, demanding to know “whether the extensive history of substantial allegations of police corruption, misconduct, abuse, and civil rights violations made against the FBI agent who shot and killed” Todashev were known to them, as well as “why the state and federal investigations failed to mention” that McFarlane “had a history of settlements and allegations against him regarding misconduct under color of law.”

Clearly if McFarlane resorted to the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying under oath about apparent falsification of evidence against a suspect he had arrested, and had been the subject of brutality suit settlements as a cop, it would raise grave questions about the integrity of his account of what happened late on May 21 in Todashev’s apartment, when he was being interrogated by McFarlane.

As Shibly writes in his letter (a copy of which was provided to TCBH!):

“How do we know that the officer and FBI agent did not engage in misconduct that ultimately led to the killing of IbragimTodashev?

“How credible and thorough are the DOJ and State Attorney’s investigations-which relied heavily on testimony given by individuals who may have engaged in police misconduct, civil rights abuses, and evidence falsification-particularly when the DOJ and State Attorney’s investigations make no mention of the questionable history of the officer and agent involved?

Shibly also asks the FBI to explain whether it simply did not know about McFarlane’s Fifth Amendment plea in a corruption case and about his violent history in the Oakland Police Department, in which case “how can the public trust that the FBI is doing a competent job when hiring agents on whom the liberty and security of our nation depends?” Alternatively, he asks, if the FBI did know McFarlane’s history and didn’t see a problem with hiring him, he asks, “How then can the public trust the liberty and security of our nation to an agency that allows individuals with questionable backgrounds into sensitive positions.”

It’s a good question. In a real democracy, there would be a Senate investigation into this case.

Certainly the death of Todashev, whom the FBI claims was the closest friend of the elder brother suspected of having masterminded the Boston bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was a serious blow to the investigation of that case.

But there is a darker possibility: that Todashev was being pursued and pressured, and was ultimately killed by the FBI, because he had information about the elder Tsarnaev’s relationship with the FBI–information that at a minimum could have embarrassed the Bureau, or that might even have shown the FBI to have been involved in some kind of “sting” operation gone wrong in Boston. The FBI, after all, has had undercover agents or informants involved in some 40 purported “terror” plots that it has “disrupted” since September 11, 2001. Was the Boston bombing supposed to have been another?

Shibly notes that CAIR, which is conducting its own investigation of the Todashev shooting, had already been aware of McFarlane’s identity, and knew about his checkered history of brutality and possible corruption as an Oakland cop, but he says the organization “but did not publicly release any such information to avoid jeopardizing any possible government investigations.”

Elena Teyer, Todashev’s mother-in-law, believes that McFarlane, a relatively inexperienced FBI agent who was dispatched from the Boston office to follow and question Todashev in Florida, was selected for the job precisely because of his police record of brutality and corruption, which she says meant he was “on the hook in order to save his job” at the FBI.

She says further evidence that there was a plan to kill her son-in-law was that the Bureau arranged for the arrest by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), on a bogus charge of visa violation, of Todashev’s live-in girlfriend, visiting Russian college student Tatiana Gruzdeva a fews days prior to the killing, and that a second agent physically removed a witness from the area outside the apartment half an hour before the killing of Todashev. That witness, a Green Card-holding legal Chechen immigrant named Husain Taramov, was barred by the US from returning to the US after he returned to Russia for Todashev’s funeral. (With both Taramov and Gruzdeva, who was deported to Russia last fall,  removed permanently from the US, there were no witnesses for Ashton or the Justice Department to interview about the shooting except the agent who fired the shots and the Boston State Trooper who had been with him.)

Teyer, a Russian immigrant, US citizen, and retired veteran of the US Army, suggests the FBI wanted Todashev killed because he knew too much about Tsarnaev and his relationship with the “corrupted FBI.”

 

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

2 Palestinians shot dead at Nakba rally

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Ma’an – 15/05/2014

RAMALLAH – Israeli forces shot and killed a young Palestinian man and a teenage boy Thursday during a protest rally marking the 66th anniversary of the Nakba west of Ramallah in the central West Bank.

Witnesses and medical sources identified the victims as 22-year-old Muhammad Audah Abu al-Thahir from the Ramallah-area village of Abu Shukheidim and 17-year-old Nadim Siyam Nuwarah from al-Mazraa al-Qibliyya village in Ramallah district.

The victims, according to medical sources, were shot by live ammunition in the chest. Their bodies were evacuated to Ramallah Medical Complex.

Medics said three teenagers were also injured by live bullets. One was struck in the chest, one in the foot, and one in the leg. Doctors say they are in stable condition.

An Israeli military spokeswoman did not immediately return calls.

Participants in the rally near Ofer detention center said they also wanted to show solidarity with Palestinian prisoners held without trial who have been on hunger strike for 22 days.

Palestinians across the occupied territories and elsewhere were commemorating the Nakba, or catastrophe, of the founding of the State of Israel on Thursday.

During the Nakba, more than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number more than 5 million with their descendants — fled or were driven from their homes in 1948.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Is the Special Tribunal for Lebanon covering up the bribery of witnesses?

Al-Akhbar | May 15, 2014

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) does not miss an opportunity to undermine its credibility and damage its image. This behavior is not restricted to the public prosecutor’s office, but to the trial chamber itself, which is supposed to be keen on implementing justice and presenting a positive image of the tribunal to the public.

The latest development is a decision issued by the tribunal’s First Chamber, which is in charge of trying the defendants in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The decision stipulated concealing the amount of money that the public prosecutor’s office pays to witnesses under the rubric of “expenses.” On May 9, the tribunal issued a decision granting the prosecution’s office the right to conceal the amount from the defense teams.

The decision came after the defense team for Hussein Oneissi requested that the tribunal order the prosecution’s office to disclose information it has on whether two of the public prosecution’s witnesses or members of their families were paid money from the office itself, from the international investigation committee or from the Lebanese authorities. Oneissi’s defense team argued that the issue is relevant to its defense strategy since it casts doubt on the credibility of some of the witnesses the public prosecutor is going to present to the court. After deliberations, the court decided to keep the matter a secret and not force the public prosecutor to disclose the information.

According to the decision, the tribunal reviewed similar cases in other international courts whereby it became evident that courts cover the expenses and costs of witnesses living in the Netherlands. Besides, some international courts (and national ones, according to the STL’s First Chamber) have developed clear standards under which they pay the “expenses of the witnesses.” It added that some courts pay the witness a monthly stipend in lieu of their salary that they were receiving as compensation for moving to the Hague to testify. The amount is equivalent to the minimum wage that a United Nations employee earns in the country where the witness comes from. The tribunal pointed out that it reviewed the amounts that the prosecution’s office paid as expenses to the witnesses and found them “reasonable.” It added that the defense team did not present proof that the two witnesses received sums beyond what is deemed reasonable. Therefore there is no need to reveal how much was paid as expenses to them.

But neither the prosecution nor the tribunal were able to rule out whether the two witnesses or one of them or members of their families received money from parties other than the prosecution’s office. This will continue to be a point of contention in the future because of how deeply it affects the credibility of the witnesses’ testimonies, especially those that the public prosecution is going to present as witnesses to be relied on to convict the defendants even though their testimonies have changed from one stage of the investigation to another.

In another matter, the public prosecutor gave a bizarre excuse for not giving the defense team of one of the defendant’s documents it requested that include information on students at one of Lebanon’s universities between the years 2004-2005 in addition to information about specific individuals at the same university in 2006. The public prosecution’s office had received this information from the Lebanese authorities which never denied any of the former’s requests. The public prosecutor cited several reasons for turning down the defense team’s request including the claim that this information would enable the defense team to breach the confidentiality of one of its witnesses.

But the most bizarre and most laughable excuse is the public prosecutor’s claim, in his letter to the tribunal on May 9, 2014, that handing over this information to the defense team might “violate the privacy of these students.” Let’s remember that the public prosecution’s office had insisted on getting the Lebanese people’s telecom data, health records, university records, travel records, insurance records and market licenses and – as experience has shown – was unable to protect its records and prevent them from being leaked. This same office is now claiming to care for the privacy of Lebanese students in order to prevent the transfer of information about them to their own colleagues – the defense lawyers – at the tribunal.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

‘Israel can’t erase the Nakba from history’

By Saeb Erekat | Ma’an | May 15, 2014

252851_345x230Today is the anniversary of what we Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, our catastrophe – although a single word cannot begin to explain it, and a single day cannot begin to commemorate it.

More than ever before, Israel needs come to terms with the horrors it has caused since 1948, by ending its subjugation of millions rather than intensifying its denial and trying to legitimize its persecution. Peace can only come through justice and reconciliation.

This day, in 1948, marks the forced exile of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands. Some were subjected to brutal massacres, many fled for fear of their lives. A few managed to stay in what would become Israel. All suffered. Sixty-six years later, all continue to suffer.

The Nakba is a story of fear and intimidation, of denial and persecution, a cruel, unending reality.

Today in occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinian families are evicted from their homes due to claims that their property belonged to Jews before 1948, while being forbidden from returning to their pre-1948 homes in West Jerusalem.

In Gaza – one of the most densely populated areas in the world – 1.2 million refugees overlook the open areas of what is now southern Israel. In my own home town, Jericho, there are two refugee camps where thousands continue to live in miserable conditions. In 2014, Palestinian children died of starvation at the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria.

Israel, which claims to be a democracy for all its citizens, continues to ban the villagers of Iqrit and Kufr Birem, two Christian villages in the Galilee, from returning to their lands, despite a ruling from the Israeli High Court of Justice on the matter.

This is not the only example of persecution within Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promotion of the “nationality bill,” determining Israel as the Jewish nation-state, is one more in a long line of discriminatory laws against a fifth of Israel’s own population, the original inhabitants of the land.

A list of laws make it not only acceptable, but legally admissible, to discriminate against Israel’s own citizens for belonging to a different ethnic-religious group.

Meanwhile, in the land which Israel has illegally occupied since 1967, settlers and soldiers use similar methods of intimidation and fear to force Palestinians from their homes.

The reality in the West Bank is no less than apartheid, and, in Gaza, out and out siege. Both within occupied Palestine and further afield, those who have been waiting 66 years, with their keys in hand, continue to wait.

Palestine has recognized Israel’s right to exist since 1988. We are not asking for Hebrew not to be an official language or Jewish holidays not to be official holidays. The character of Israel is not for us to define.

But we will not allow any Palestinian to be portrayed as the immigrant or intruder in his or her own land. We were here in 1948: We were here for centuries before that – Muslims, Christians and Jews – all Palestinians. The concept of an exclusively Jewish state naturally entails the denial of the Nakba. It tells us: “This is our land. You were on it illegally, temporarily, by mistake.” It is a way of asking us to deny the existence of our people and the horrors that befell them in 1948. No people should be asked to do that.

We will not be complicit in the notion that any ethnic-religious group should have dominance over any other. We will not accept the denial of basic human rights to which all are entitled.

Rather than accepting historical responsibility, rather than acknowledging a painful truth about the birth of Israel and addressing it, as a step toward peace, the Israeli government attempts to wipe the event from history.

In Israel, it is forbidden by law to even commemorate the Nakba. If you can erase the narrative, it is much easier to erase the people. This Israeli government, in particular, is taking extraordinary measures to achieve this. Is it any wonder that we have not managed to reach an agreement at this time?

Today, we remember those who have lost their lives, at the hands of their oppressors, in their quest for freedom and dignity. Despite this, we are ready to live side by side in peace with our Israeli neighbors. We hope Israelis, if not their current government, will move in that direction.

At this point we do not know what the future will look like in terms of a solution, or when it will come. What we know for certain is that we will remain.

Saeb Erekat is chief negotiator for the PLO.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Danny Glover calls for cultural boycott of Israel

Ma’an – 14/05/2014

BETHLEHEM – Danny Glover and other actors featured in a US documentary on a prominent social justice activist protested the film’s screening at a Tel Aviv festival this week, announcing their support for the cultural boycott of Israel.

In a statement released on Monday, the group said they “stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and support their call for cultural and academic boycott of Israel” and were “shocked to find the film slated to be screened” at an Israeli festival.

“We immediately took action to have the film withdrawn from the festival,” the statement added, but highlighted that festival organizers say it was not “possible” to change the schedule that they would “move forward with the screening, over our objections.”

The film “American Revolutionary: the Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” is scheduled to be shown in Tel Aviv at DocAviv, a festival dedicated to documentary film which runs through May 17 and purports to be the largest film festival in Israel.

The group, however, stressed their support for the Palestinian call for Academic and Cultural Boycott, which was launched in 2004 as part of the global campaign to boycott, sanction, and divest from the state of Israel in order to pressure it to end its long-standing occupation of the Palestinian territories and history of human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Grace Lee Boggs, the subject of the documentary film, also added her name to the statement supporting the cultural boycott.

As a long-time advocate of social and racial justice in the United States, the statement highlighted that she said that screening the film in Israel “is in direct contradiction to her legacy and ongoing work as a revolutionary.”

“We will pursue opportunities for this film and the ideas within it to be made available in Palestine in a way that supports the movement,” the statement added.

The campaign has scored a number of notable successes in recent years, with leading US academic and cultural figures coming out in support despite widespread pro-Israel sentiment in North America.

Supporters of the boycott believe that after decades of occupation and ethnic cleansing, international pressure is one of the few ways left to force Israel to respect Palestinian rights.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , | 1 Comment

Donetsk self-defense forces give Kiev troops 24 hours to withdraw

RT | May 15, 2014

Donetsk self-defense forces set an ultimatum for the Kiev military, warning that if troops do not withdraw from block posts in the Donetsk region within 24 hours, they will be taken by force, RIA Novosti reported.

The pro-autonomy militia of Donbass region in eastern Ukraine made the statement on Wednesday.

“If the armored vehicles are not pulled back, the roadblocks of the so-called legitimate authorities are not removed, I will have enough power and means – the commander supported me today – to destroy and burn everything. Reconnaissance and sabotage groups are ready to move and some are steady,” deputy commander of the pro-autonomy militia of Donbass, Sergey Zdrilyuk, told RIA Novosti.

“I give 24 hours for them to withdraw all troops, all forces,” he added.

The statement follows referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which showed that the majority of voters support self-rule amid an intensified military operation by Kiev.

Almost 90 percent of voters in Donetsk region have endorsed political independence from Kiev, the head of the Central Election Commission of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Roman Lyagin, previously announced.

In Lugansk region, 96.2 percent of voters supported the region’s self-rule, according to final figures announced by the local election commission.

After the referendum, the Donetsk People’s Republic proclaimed itself a sovereign state and asked Moscow to consider its accession into Russia.

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

On Nakba Day, Israelis Forced to Guiltily Confront a Secret

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | May 15, 2014

For 66 years Israel’s founding generation has lived with the guilt of a secret, one it successfully concealed from the generations that followed. Forests were planted to hide war crimes. School textbooks mythologised the events surrounding Israel’s creation. The army was blindly venerated as the most moral in the world.

Once, “Nakba” – Arabic for “Catastrophe”, referring to the dispossession of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 – would have failed to register with any but a small number of Israeli Jews. Today, only those who never watch television or read a newspaper can plead ignorance.

As marches and festivals are held today by Palestinians across the region to mark Nakba Day – commemorating the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the erasure of more than 500 villages – Israelis will be watching.

In fact, the Israeli media have been filled with references to the Nakba for the past 10 days, since Israel celebrated its Independence Day last week. The two anniversaries do not quite coincide because Israel marks its founding according to the Hebrew calendar.

While Israeli Jews were trying to enjoy guilt-free street parties last week, news reports focused on the activities of their compatriots – the Palestinians who remained inside the new state of Israel and now comprise a fifth of the population. Estimates are that one in four of these 1.5 million Palestinian citizens is from a family internally displaced by the 1948 war.

More than 20,000 staged a “March of Return” to one destroyed village, Lubya, buried under a forest near Tiberias and close to a major Israeli highway. Long tailbacks forced thousands of Israeli Jews to get a close-up view as they crawled past the biggest Nakba procession in Israel’s history.

For others, images of the marchers waving Palestinian flags and massively outnumbering Israeli police and a counter-demonstration by Jewish nationalists were seen on TV news, websites and social media.

The assault on Israel’s much cherished national mythology is undoubted. And it reflects the rise of a new generation of Palestinians no longer willing to defer to their more cautious, and traumatised, elders, those who directly experienced the events of 1948.

These youth see themselves as representing not only their immediate relatives but Palestinians in exile who have no chance to march back to their village. Many of Lubya’s refugees ended up in Yarmouk camp in Damascus, where they are suffering new horrors, caught in the midst of Syria’s civil war.

Palestinians in Israel are also being galvanised into action by initiatives like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to legislate Israel as a Jewish state. They see this as the latest phase of an ongoing nakba – an attempt to erase their nativeness, just as the villages were once disappeared.

Palestinians are making a noise about the Nakba on every possible front – and not just on Nakba Day. Last week media around the world reported on one such venture: a phone app called iNakba that maps the hundreds of destroyed villages across Israel. Briefly it became one of the most popular iPhone downloads, connecting refugees through new technology. iNakba visibly restores a Palestine that Israel hoped literally to have wiped off the map.

The app is the initiative of Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that is jointly run by Jews and Palestinians. They have been finding ever more creative and provocative ways to grab headlines.

They arrange regular visits to destroyed villages that a growing number of curious Israeli Jews are participating in, often in the face of vehement opposition from the communities built on the rubble of Palestinian homes.

Zochrot has created a Hebrew information pack on the Nakba for teachers, though education officials ban it. Last year it staged the first Nakba film festival in Tel Aviv. It is also creating an archive of filmed interviews with Israeli veteran fighters prepared to admit their part in expulsions.

Zochrot also held last year the first-ever conference in Israel discussing not just the principle but how to put into practice a right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees across the region.

Palestinian youth are taking up the idea enthusiastically. Architects are designing plans for new communities that would house the refugees on or near their old lands.

Refugee families are trying to reclaim mosques and churches, usually the only buildings still standing. Israeli media reported last month that internal refugees had been attacked as they held a baptism in their former church at al-Bassa, now swamped by the Jewish town of Shlomi.

Workshops have been arranged among refugee groups to imagine what a right of return might look like. Youth from two Christian villages, Iqrit and Biram, have already set up camps at their old churches, daring Israel to hound them out like their grandparents. Another group, I Won’t Remain a Refugee, is looking to export this example to other villages.

The size of the march to Lubya and the proliferation of these initiatives are a gauge of how Palestinians are no longer prepared to defer to the Palestinian leadership on the refugee issue or wait for an interminable peace process to make meaningful progress.

“The people are sending a message to the leadership in Ramallah that it cannot forget or sideline the right of return,” says Abir Kopty, an activist with the Lubya march. “Otherwise we will take the issue into our own hands.”

Meanwhile, progress of a kind is being made with Israeli Jews. Some have come to recognise, however reluctantly, that a tragedy befell the Palestinians with Israel’s creation. But, as another march organiser notes, the struggle is far from over. “That is a first step. But now they must take responsibility for our suffering and make amends.”

May 15, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment