Atlantic’s New Editor Was IDF Prison Guard, Beat Palestinians
Goldberg in a meeting with President Obama. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
teleSUR | October 12, 2016
“In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”
These are the not-so-prescient words of Jeffrey Goldberg, named this week the new chief editor of the 159-year-old Atlantic Magazine, one of the most famous journalistic institutions in U.S. history.
The openly-Zionist Goldberg moved to Israel nearly 25 years ago and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Since then, he has been the opening speaker for numerous Zionist functions, including the American Jewish Committee conference and Zionism 3.0.
Most garishly, he worked as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot, Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners, where he boasted of helping beat Palestinian political prisoners. Ktzi’ot is one of Israel’s largest detention camps and has long been criticized for its inhumane conditions, which include frequent beatings, lack of drinking water and forced labor.
In his 2006 book Prisoners, Goldberg describes a scene at the detention camp, in which his friend repeatedly hits a Palestinian prisoner in the head with a sharp-edged object, beating him to a bloody pulp, a beating that Goldberg described “was prompted by something (the prisoner) said.” Goldberg covered up the crime by saying, “I found another military policeman, and handed off the wobbling prisoner, who was by now bleeding on me. ‘He fell,’ I lied.”
Goldberg himself took part in beatings, justifying them by saying, “Unlike (Goldberg’s camp guard friend), I never hit a Palestinian who wasn’t already hitting me.”
Additionally, his credibility as a journalist is most unsavory. At the New Yorker magazine, Goldberg authored dozens of articles that were later discovered to be false but provided the United States with a pretense for invading Iraq. In 2002, Goldberg also published a two-part series in the New Yorker in which he alleged that the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah was running a black market cigarette ring on U.S. soil to finance a terrorist operation. No evidence of any such activity has since been discovered. Indeed, the new head honcho of one the United States’ most prominent publications has become so fringe in his shilling for Israel and the U.S. empire, that even former key conservatives and staunch Zionists such as former New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan have heavily criticized him.
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Facebook resumes attacks on Palestinian groups
MEMO | October 12, 2016
Facebook resumed its policy of targeting Palestinian media pages with the accounts of eight administrators of the Palestine Information Centre and Al-Rai being deleted, Quds News reported.
This comes in light of the continued attack on the Palestine Network for Dialogue, an online discussion board, in what is being seen as an attempt to “besiege all Palestinian content on the network”.
Facebook continues to block Palestine Network for Dialogue’s page, in spite of it releasing an apology to say the action was taken by “mistake”.
The Palestine Information Centre had 2.2 million Facebook followers and published daily news on Palestinian, Arab and international issues in addition to health, sports and culture.
Facebook also deleted the account of Arab48 which had hundreds of thousands of followers. The website specialises in publishing stories about the plight of Palestinians both in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in addition to Arab Israelis living in Israel.
Saudi, French special forces hold joint drills near Lille: Report
French troops engage in joint drills with Saudi forces on the outskirts of the northeastern French city of Lille (Photo by alsharq.net.sa)
Press TV – October 12, 2016
Special Forces units with the Saudi and French armies have partaken in joint military drills in France.
The exercise engaged the Royal Saudi Land Forces’ crack unit brigade and its French counterpart in the town of Meer, London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Citing the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA ), the paper said the maneuvers had started last week.
The news comes only three days after the kingdom’s navy finished 10 days of live-fire military exercises in the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz.
The seaborne drills involved warships, speedboats, marines and special forces in the strategic waters.
The SPA alleged that the maneuvers sought to test combat readiness “in preparation for the protection of the marine interests of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against any possible aggression.”
France is known for its close relations with Saudi Arabia. The two sides have been seeking to boost their military ties in recent months.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom’s defense minister and most powerful figure after the monarch, has twice traveled to France since 2015.
During Salman’s visit to France last June, Paris and Riyadh reportedly sealed military deals worth up to USD 12 billion for the delivery of modern weaponry to the Arab kingdom amid Riyadh’s deadly military campaign against Yemen.
The prince paid another visit to France in July this year, in what was widely seen as an attempt to finalize the agreements reached with Paris the previous year.
Last year, the Paris government raised controversy by closing off a French beach for a visit by Saudi King Salman.
Putin: We know who destroyed aid convoy in Aleppo, Syria
RT | October 12, 2016
The attack on a UN humanitarian aid convoy near the Syrian city of Aleppo last month, which Washington has blamed on Russia, was actually carried out by one of the terrorist groups present in the area, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
“It was one of the terrorist groups. And we know that, say, the Americans know it too, but prefer to take a different position, to falsely accuse Russia. This is not helping,” Putin said at an economic forum in Moscow.
The aid convoy was attacked on the night of September 20. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported 20 civilians killed and 18 vehicles destroyed.
The Pentagon alleged that the convoy was destroyed from the air and that Russian warplanes were present in the area, concluding that it was a Russian strike that was responsible.
Russia denied the accusation and said a US drone was monitoring the convoy, so Washington should know the truth about the attack.
Putin also commented on the disagreement at the UN Security Council that eventually led to the cancellation of his visit to France. Paris indicated that it wouldn’t be comfortable hosting the Russian leader after Moscow blocked a resolution it had submitted.
“It’s not our partners who should take offense over us vetoing the French resolution. I’d say we are the offended party here,” Putin said.
He said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault had raised the idea of the resolution when he visited Moscow last week. Ayrault was told the draft pinned too much blame for the Aleppo violence on the Syrian government, but that if France made some amendments, the document could still pass.
However, as Ayrault visited Washington on the eve of the UNSC meeting, no changes were made to the draft and France also “accused Russia of all the deadly sins,” Putin said.
“Knowing our position, and not discussing it with us, they didn’t chuck in the resolution so it would pass, but [did it] to get the veto. What for? To exacerbate the situation and to whip up anti-Russian hysteria in media under their control, and to deceive their own citizens,” he added.
The situation in Syria will be discussed on Saturday in Lausanne, Switzerland, where top diplomats from the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are to gather for a meeting.
Debate Moderator Distorted Syrian Reality
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 11, 2016
How ABC News’ Martha Raddatz framed her question about Syria in the second presidential debate shows why the mainstream U.S. news media, with its deep-seated biases and inability to deal with complexity, has become such a driving force for wider wars and even a threat to the future of the planet.
Raddatz, the network’s chief global affairs correspondent, presented the Syrian conflict as simply a case of barbaric aggression by the Syrian government and its Russian allies against the Syrian people, especially the innocents living in Aleppo.
“Just days ago, the State Department called for a war crimes investigation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its ally, Russia, for their bombardment of Aleppo,” Raddatz said. “So this next question comes through social media through Facebook. Diane from Pennsylvania asks, if you were president, what would you do about Syria and the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo? Isn’t it a lot like the Holocaust when the U.S. waited too long before we helped?”
The framing of the question assured a response from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her determination to expand the U.S. military intervention in Syria to include a “no-fly zone,” which U.S. military commanders say would require a massive operation that would kill many Syrians, both soldiers and civilians, to eliminate Syria’s sophisticated air-defense systems and its air force.
But Raddatz’s loaded question was also a way of influencing – or misleading – U.S. public opinion. Consider for a moment how a more honest and balanced question could have elicited a very different response and a more thoughtful discussion:
“The situation in Aleppo presents a heartrending and nettlesome concern. Al Qaeda fighters and their rebel allies, including some who have been armed by the United States, are holed up in some neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo. They’ve been firing rockets into the center and western sections of Aleppo and they have shot civilians seeking to leave east Aleppo through humanitarian corridors.
“These terrorists and their ‘moderate’ rebel allies seem to be using the tens of thousands of civilians still in east Aleppo as ‘human shields’ in order to create sympathy from Western audiences when the Syrian government seeks to root the terrorists and other insurgents from these neighborhoods with airstrikes that have killed both armed fighters and civilians. In such a circumstance, what should the U.S. role be and was it a terrible mistake to supply these fighters with sophisticated rockets and other weapons, given that these weapons have helped Al Qaeda in seizing and holding territory?”
Siding with Al Qaeda
Raddatz also could have noted that a key reason why the recent limited cease-fire failed was that the U.S.-backed “moderate” rebels in east Aleppo had rebuffed Secretary of State John Kerry’s demand that they separate themselves from Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which now calls itself the Syria Conquest Front.
Instead of breaking ties with Al Qaeda, some of these “moderate” rebel groups reaffirmed or expanded their alliances with Al Qaeda. In other words, Official Washington’s distinction between Al Qaeda’s terrorists and the “moderate” rebels was publicly revealed to be largely a myth. But the reality of U.S.-aided rebels collaborating with the terror group that carried out the 9/11 attacks complicates the preferred mainstream narrative of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin “the bad guys” versus the rebels “the good guys.”
If Raddatz had posed her question with the more complex reality (rather than the simplistic, biased form that she chose) and if Clinton still responded with her recipe of a “no-fly zone,” the obvious follow-up would be: “Wouldn’t such a military intervention constitute aggressive war against Syria in violation of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg principles?
“And wouldn’t such a strategy risk tipping the military balance inside Syria in favor of Al Qaeda and its jihadist allies, possibly even its spinoff terror group, the Islamic State? And what would the United States do then, if its destruction of the Syrian air force led to the black flag of jihadist terror flying over Damascus as well as all of Aleppo? Would a Clinton-45 administration send in U.S. troops to stop the likely massacre of Christians, Alawites, Shiites, secular Sunnis and other ‘heretics’?”
There would be other obvious and important questions that a more objective Martha Raddatz would ask: “Would your no-fly zone include shooting down Russian aircraft that are flying inside Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government? Might such a clash provoke a superpower escalation, possibly even invite nuclear war?”
But no such discussion is allowed inside the mainstream U.S. media’s frame. There is an unstated assumption that the United States has the unquestioned right to invade other countries at will, regardless of international law, and there is a studied silence about this hypocrisy even as the U.S. State Department touts the sanctity of international law.
Whose War Crimes?
Raddatz’s favorable reference to the State Department accusing the Syrian and Russian governments of war crimes further suggests a stunning lack of self-awareness, a blindness to America’s own guilt in that regard. How can any American journalist put on such blinders regarding even recent U.S. war crimes, including the illegal invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
While Raddatz referenced “the heart-breaking video of a 5-year-old Syrian boy named Omran sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble after an air strike in Aleppo,” she seems to have no similar sympathy for the slaughtered and maimed children of Iraq who suffered under American bombs – or the people of Yemen who have faced a prolonged aerial onslaught from Saudi Arabia using U.S. aircraft and U.S.-supplied ordnance.
Regarding Iraq, there was the case at the start of the U.S.-led war when President George W. Bush mistakenly thought Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might be eating at a Baghdad restaurant so U.S. warplanes leveled it, killing more than a dozen civilians, including children and a young woman whose headless body was recovered by her mother.
“When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head,” the Associated Press reported, “her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed.” The London Independent cited this restaurant attack as one that represented “a clear breach” of the Geneva Conventions ban on bombing civilian targets.
But such civilian deaths were of little interest to the mainstream U.S. media. “American talking heads … never seemed to give the issue any thought,” wrote Eric Boehlert in a report on the U.S. war coverage for Salon.com. “Certainly they did not linger on images of the hellacious human carnage left in the aftermath.”
Thousands of other civilian deaths were equally horrific. Saad Abbas, 34, was wounded in an American bombing raid, but his family sought to shield him from the greater horror. The bombing had killed his three daughters Marwa, 11; Tabarek, 8; and Safia, 5 who had been the center of his life. “It wasn’t just ordinary love,” his wife said. “He was crazy about them. It wasn’t like other fathers.” [NYT, April 14, 2003]
The horror of the war was captured, too, in the fate of 12-year-old Ali Ismaeel Abbas, who lost his two arms when a U.S. missile struck his Baghdad home. Ali’s father, his pregnant mother and his siblings were all killed. As the armless Ali was evacuated to a Kuwaiti hospital, becoming a symbol of U.S. compassion for injured Iraqi civilians, the boy said he would rather die than live without his hands.
Because of the horrors inflicted on Iraq – and the resulting chaos that has now spread across the region and into Europe – Raddatz could have asked Clinton, who as a U.S. senator voted for the illegal war, whether she felt any responsibility for this carnage. Of course, Raddatz would not ask that question because the U.S. mainstream media was almost universally onboard the Iraq War bandwagon, which helps explain why there has been virtually no accountability for those war crimes.
Letting Clinton Off
So, Clinton was not pressed on her war judgments regarding either Iraq or the Libyan “regime change” that she championed in 2011, another war of choice that transformed the once-prosperous North African nation into a failed state. Raddatz’s biased framing also put Republican Donald Trump on the defensive for resisting yet another American “regime change” project in Syria.
Trump was left muttering some right-wing talking points that sought to attack Clinton as soft on Syria, trying to link her to President Barack Obama’s decision not to bomb the Syrian military in August 2013 after a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus, which occurred six months after Clinton had resigned as Secretary of State.
Trump: “She was there as Secretary of State with the so-called line in the sand, which…
Clinton: “No, I wasn’t. I was gone. I hate to interrupt you, but at some point…
Trump: “OK. But you were in contact — excuse me. You were…
Clinton: “At some point, we need to do some fact-checking here.
Trump: “You were in total contact with the White House, and perhaps, sadly, Obama probably still listened to you. I don’t think he would be listening to you very much anymore. Obama draws the line in the sand. It was laughed at all over the world what happened.”
In bashing Obama for not bombing Syria – after U.S. intelligence expressed suspicion that the sarin attack was actually carried out by Al Qaeda or a related group trying to trick the U.S. military into attacking the Syrian government – Trump may have pleased his right-wing base but he was deviating from his generally less war-like stance on the Middle East.
He followed that up with another false right-wing claim that Clinton and Obama had allowed the Russians to surge ahead on nuclear weapons, saying: “our nuclear program has fallen way behind, and they’ve gone wild with their nuclear program. Not good.”
Only after attacking Clinton for not being more militaristic did Trump say a few things that made sense, albeit in his incoherent snide-aside style.
Trump: “Now, she talks tough, she talks really tough against Putin and against Assad. She talks in favor of the rebels. She doesn’t even know who the rebels are. You know, every time we take rebels, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else, we’re arming people. And you know what happens? They end up being worse than the people [we overthrow].
“Look at what she did in Libya with [Muammar] Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s out. It’s a mess. And, by the way, ISIS has a good chunk of their oil. I’m sure you probably have heard that.” [Actually, whether one has heard it or not, that point is not true. During the ongoing political and military strife, Libya has been blocked from selling its oil, which is shipped by sea.]
Trump continued: “It was a disaster. Because the fact is, almost everything she’s done in foreign policy has been a mistake and it’s been a disaster.
“But if you look at Russia, just take a look at Russia, and look at what they did this week, where I agree, she wasn’t there, but possibly she’s consulted. We sign a peace treaty. Everyone’s all excited. Well, what Russia did with Assad and, by the way, with Iran, who you made very powerful with the dumbest deal perhaps I’ve ever seen in the history of deal-making, the Iran deal, with the $150 billion, with the $1.7 billion in cash, which is enough to fill up this room.
“But look at that deal. Iran now and Russia are now against us. So she wants to fight. She wants to fight for rebels. There’s only one problem. You don’t even know who the rebels are. So what’s the purpose?”
While one can’t blame Raddatz for Trump’s scattered thinking – or for Clinton’s hawkishness – the moderator’s failure to frame the Syrian issue in a factual and nuanced way contributed to this dangerously misleading “debate” on a grave issue of war and peace.
It is surely not the first time that the mainstream U.S. media has failed the American people in this way, but – given the stakes of a possible nuclear war with Russia – this propagandistic style of “journalism” is fast becoming an existential threat.