Mohamed Arafi is suing his employer for barring him from servicing an Israeli delegation staying at a Washington, D.C. hotel
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in town to address the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, and Mohamed Arafi, a Moroccan-born U.S. citizen, was ready to work. An entire Israeli delegation, including Barak, was staying at Washington, D.C.’s high-end Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where Arafi has been a valet dry cleaner since late 2009. But when he showed up to work on December 10, 2010, he was told that he was barred from working the two floors where the Israelis were staying. The reason given, according to Arafi, was because he is Muslim, and the Israeli delegation did not want to be served by Muslims.
Now, Arafi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are fighting back in the form of legal action alleging employment discrimination by the hotel against Arafi. The recently filed case is currently in district court in Washington, D.C, and comes on the heels of an inconclusive Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling on the case.
The hotel is not backing down, and responded in a Nov. 28 filing (pdf) that they were following a national security directive from the State Department that barred Arafi and 11 other employees from serving the Israeli delegation.
Arafi says that the hotel has also punished him for speaking out by cutting his workweek from five days to two days, and that his work colleagues said demeaning things about Muslims to him after the incident became known to them.
“What they want me to do is just quit,” Arafi said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to run away…I want to stay there until I have my rights.” The company has denied Arafi’s charges.
The case could also be seen as a stark illustration of the consequences of Israeli-style “war on terror” attitudes towards Muslims.
The lawsuit describes what happened (pdf), according to Arafi, when the Israeli delegation came to the hotel:
Ms. Escander, [Arafi’s supervisor], stated to Boris [another employee], “Boris, Israel is here. You go up and get the dry cleaning for Mohamed.” Mr. Arafi was confused and asked for an explanation. Ms. Escander stated to Plaintiff, “You know the Israeli delegation is here. You cannot go on the 8th and 9th floor (to pick up or deliver laundry).” Plaintiff asked for further explanation. Ms. Escander stated, “You know how the Israelis are with Arabs and Muslims. It’s better if you just let Boris go.”
The lawsuit alleges that the hotel first claimed to be complying with an Israeli government request not to have Muslims serve them. Arafi said that after he went to the Washington Post with his story, the hotel’s reasoning changed to saying they had no choice in the matter because of the State Department directive. The hotel says the directive came as a result of the department finding “irregularities” in Arafi’s and the other employees’ background checks.
A Mandarin Hotel spokesman repeated that reasoning in a phone interview, and said the lawsuit was “all sizzle and no steak.” The State Department press office did not respond to two phone calls requesting comment.
But Nadhira Al-Khalili, the CAIR attorney working on Arafi’s case, says that neither of the reasons the hotel has given excuse their actions.
“Even if [the State Department] did [issue a national security directive], we say that it was unlawful and the hotel cannot use this national security exemption to discriminate against Mr. Arafi,” said Al-Khalili. She noted that “this is an untested area of the law” and that a ruling could set a precedent.
The specific law the Mandarin Oriental Hotel says the State Department used is a provision in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The law prohibits employment discrimination but also states that a national security interest provides an exemption to the law’s requirements. But Arafi and Al-Khalili say that it makes little sense that Arafi would have “irregularities” in his background check or be considered a security threat. Arafi has routine access to government officials and he says that he personally serviced former President George W. Bush just days before the Israeli delegation came through.
The case “really does have the appearance of racial discrimination of the rawest kind,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a national security expert, told CNN. “But the hotel is able to use the State Department to say, any complaint you have, you should take up with the State Department.”
Regardless of whether it was a State Department directive or an Israeli request that the hotel complied with, important questions need to be asked about the case. Is the State Department ordering private businesses to discriminate because of Israeli attitudes? Or is a private employer being cowed by an Israeli government demand?
If nothing else, the case illustrates how pervasive anti-Muslim sentiment is in some workplaces in the U.S.
“Since I’ve worked at CAIR, employment discrimination has been the number 2, and sometimes number 1, complaint,” said Al-Khalili. “It’s disturbing that one additional aspect of the law is being used to discriminate against Muslims. We’re going to try and challenge it and try to say it does not apply in this particular case.”
Al-Khalili has a lawsuit filing due in the coming weeks, and vowed to appeal even if Arafi’s case is ruled against. The entire process, she acknowledged, could take years.
December 9, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia |
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My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel (and sit–SEE UPDATE) on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.
At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.
With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.
I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.
Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.
As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”
So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.
Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.
This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.
Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.
If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.
If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.
But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.
The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?
In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either).
I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.
Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.
Patrick Meighan
——-
UPDATE (12/9/11): Hey all, thank you for the nice thoughts from many folks who have read this account. One necessary clarification about the 7 hours spent by the roughly 100-of-us in the Parker Center parking garage immediately following our arrest:
though we were indeed forced to kneel on that parking garage pavement for an extended period and though we did in fact have our hands tightly zipcuffed behind our backs for that entire seven-hour stretch on the pavement, and though we were barred from standing and moving for that time period, the LAPD officers, in point of fact, did allow us to shift ourselves out of the kneeling position onto our butt-cheeks, our side-legs, etc., as necessary. At the very least, when we began to do so, they did not stop us. I apologize for implying otherwise.
I also want to say that I don’t consider my above-described treatment at the hands of the LAPD to be, in any way, uniquely-brutal, or that I was especially victimized. Yes, getting arrested and going to jail was scary and sometimes painful and it generally sucked, but jail is supposed to suck. Again, the point of this blogpost is not that I was treated especially poorly by the LAPD officers who arrested, processed and held us. The LAPD officers were just doing their jobs, as they understood them. The point of the blogpost is simply to contrast the legal response to nonviolent protestors against the the legal response (or, rather, non-response) to the perpetrators of the largest act of coordinated larceny in economic history, for whom the next arrest will be the first one.
Best,
Patrick Meighan
Culver City, CA
December 9, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Corruption, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular |
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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals formally denied an appeal in the ongoing case of the Holy Land Five (HLF), deciding to uphold the convictions of the leaders of the once-largest Muslim charity organization in the US on spurious “terrorism” charges despite irrelevant, prejudicial evidence and unconstitutional precedents used by the federal government.
The Dallas Morning News reported on 7 December that:
Fifth Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King, writing on behalf of colleagues Emilio M. Garza and James E. Graves, Jr., noted:
“While no trial is perfect, this one included, we conclude from our review of the record, briefs, and oral argument, that the defendants were fairly convicted. For the reasons explained below, therefore, we affirm the district court’s judgments of conviction of the individual defendants. We dismiss the appeal of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.”
Since the Bush administration dismantled the Holy Land Foundation — which sent direct humanitarian aid to Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation as well as to communities in the US suffering from the effects of natural disasters — under the guise of the draconian Patriot Act, the five defendants have been accused and convicted of providing “material support” to “terrorist organizations” (namely the Hamas political party in Palestine). In September 2009, all five were sentenced to prison terms varying from 15-65 years. The Patriot Act strengthened a Clinton-era “anti-terrorism” legal caveat called the Material Support law which has been used to take down Muslim organizations and individuals in this country for the last ten years.
This past September, as The Electronic Intifada reported, oral arguments began in the appeals process, following last year’s submission of a 149-page appeal by the defense team.
In a press release from the Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), it is pointed out that the Federal government violated significant amendments of the US Constitution and basic legalities during this ten-year effort to prosecute the Holy Land Five. Those violations include:
– The fact that the court barred the defense from learning the names of two government witnesses, one of which was the government’s key witness in the trial. According to the brief, this action violated the defendants’ Fifth Amendment right to due process and Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against them.
– The fact that the court admitted unfairly prejudicial evidence with little or no relevance to the charges in the case. This evidence included exhibits about Hamas suicide bombings, testimony about Hamas killing collaborators with Israel, a video of demonstrators stomping on and burning the American flag and other such imagery — none of which had any connection to the defendants.
– The fact that the court denied the defense access to evidence the prosecution had access to. Instead, prosecutors were allowed to cherry-pick what evidence the defense could review.
The Electronic Intifada will provide updates in the HLF case, especially regarding the next steps for the defendants, their families and their legal teams.
The ongoing efforts by the US government to criminalize Palestine solidarity and charity work — see the continuing persecution of Dr. Sami al-Arian, who was never convicted but remains on repressive house arrest following years of imprisonment, including solitary confinement; or the FBI’s grand jury cases against activists in the Midwest — is nothing new, and is not surprising, but as my colleague (and subpoenaed activist in the grand jury trial) Maureen Murphy has written, “it poses a special threat to the growing Palestine solidarity movement in the US, which is increasingly challenging the US government’s military aid to Israel and its diplomatic cover for Israeli war crimes and apartheid.”
December 8, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism |
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Israeli soldiers broke into the house of Saher Al-Sous, in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. Al-Sous is a board member of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People, the founding organization of the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC).
At around 3:30 am, Israeli troops knocked-down the door of Al-Sous’ cousin with the rifle-butts terrorizing the children and their mother; the father was out of town for some business.
After realizing their mistake, they went to Saher’s house and woke up all the family to hand Saher a ‘warrant’ for an interview with an Israeli intelligence officer they identified as “Leor”.
Al-Sous told IMEMC that he went to the appointment at the Gush Etzion military base, near Hebron, and waited for more than one hour, without being interviewed or asked any question by any officer; he finally decided to go back home.
Al-Sous is a graduate of Bethlehem University and has been involved in the Rapprochement Centre for more than 10 years, he helps promote the center’s work and activities. He is currently working with the team preparing for the Shepherds Nights Festival around Christmas time.
This is not the first time the Israeli military harasses members of the board of the Rapprochement Center. Similar harassment targeted the chairman of the board, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, who was also summoned to an interview with the Israeli intelligence officers and was not interviewed.
The Israeli military invaded the headquarters of the Rapprochement Centre in 2003, and confiscated all the computers and files from the offices an issue that caused a serious interruption to its work and activities.
The Rapprochement Centre was established in 1988 as a non-profit, nongovernmental organization that works to bridge the gap between Palestinians and peoples from all around the world, including Israel, informing the public about the reality in Palestine, and empowering the community through nonviolent direct action.
The center is a co-founding member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and several other advocacy and nonviolent networks in Palestine.
December 7, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture |
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NAZARETH — Physicians for human rights (PHR)-Israel, Adalah center and Al-Mizan center for human rights issued a joint position paper against the extraction of false confessions under torture and extortion from Palestinian children and adolescents.
This position paper addresses the extreme vulnerability of Palestinian children to specific conditions and practices of detention, and the illegitimate and cruel interrogation methods to which they are subjected by Israeli soldiers and interrogators, which result in extortion and false confessions.
It also analyzes the legal framework as it applies to Palestinian children and adolescents, who are detained by the Israeli occupation forces.
The paper is based mainly on a psychiatric expert opinion written by Dr. Graciela Carmon, a psychiatrist and member of PHR-Israel’s board of directors, which was submitted to the military courts during legal proceedings in the case of a 14-year old Palestinian boy from the village of Nabi Saleh.
According to this paper, some 700 Palestinian children are detained by Israel each year, on average one or two per day. Palestinian children as young as the age of 12 are arrested, interrogated and put on trial in Israel’s military courts.
Based on testimonies provided by 40 children who were detained and sent to military courts in 2010, physical and verbal violence was used against them during detention in 70% of the cases.
Most violent incidents occurred during their presence in military jeeps or during their wait at a military base or a police station, where the children are made to wait for hours often blindfolded, with their hands painfully tied behind their backs with plastic cable ties, and deprived of food, drink, access to a toilet and sleep.
Interrogations of Palestinian children and adolescents by the Israeli occupation forces are, in most cases, conducted without the presence of their parents or a lawyer, and carried out by several regular police interrogators, not by special interrogators for children and adolescents.
The interrogators also use physical and verbal violence in a considerable number of cases, as well as deception and threats of harm against them and their family members.
The paper also noted that there is an almost absolute acceptance shared by almost all judges in Israel’s courts of the abusive conduct of the security and military forces towards Palestinian children and adolescents.
This situation constitutes a flagrant violation of Israel’s obligations under international human rights law, including the UN convention on the rights of the child (CRC) of 1989, to which Israel is a state party, the paper underlined.
According to the CRC, the arrest of a child should be the last resort, and the best
interest of the child should be the main consideration, the paper read.
December 7, 2011
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Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, is proposing that all Israeli citizens – especially the 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel – should be forced to declare an oath of loyalty to the political ideology of Zionism as a condition for obtaining an ID card.
Danon, a member of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, posted this message on his Facebook page:
I thought about the wording for the loyalty declaration bill: “I hereby declare my loyalty to the State of Israel as a Jewish Zionist and democratic state, and solemnly swear to maintain it values and not to engage in illegal acts against it or against any of its institutions.” I would love to hear your opinions.
Adherence to Zionist ideology a condition for obtaining an ID card
Meanwhile the right-wing website IsraelNationalNews.com quoted Danon explaining the purpose of his bill:
Loyalty to the State is something which should be obvious, but I’m afraid that in the current situation in the Arab sector loyalty has become rare, and in order to preserve this important value we’ll have to make it a condition that ID cards will be given in exchange for a declaration of loyalty to Israel.
The “Arab sector” refers to 1.4 million Palestinians who are survivors and descendants of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, who are nominally citizens of Israel but face extreme discrimination and diminished rights because they are non-Jews.
Danon’s bill is a thinly-veiled attempt to strip indigenous Palestinians forced to live under a state imposed on them by war and conquest of citizenship, quite possibly as a prelude to expelling them to ensure that Israel remains “Jewish.” After all, what kind of “democracy” can Israel be if it forces citizens to swear allegiance to a particular political ideology – Zionism – which negates the rights of those citizens and expresses the state’s racial hatred toward them and intolerance of their very existence?
December 6, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism |
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Photographs depicting Palestinian lawmakers jailed by Israel are displayed
in the parliament building that was destroyed during Israel’s offensive in Gaza
City, January 29, 2009. (MaanImages/Wissam Nassar)
JERUSALEM – An Israeli military court on Tuesday ordered the deportation of a Palestinian lawmaker from Jerusalem to Ramallah, a statement from the Palestinian Legislative Council said.
Ahmad Attoun, a Jerusalemite, was detained in front of the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem in September.
He had taken shelter in the ICRC building along with another Hamas legislator, Muhammad Abu Teir, and former PA minister Khalid Abu Arafa, after Israeli authorities revoked their Jerusalem residency permits.
In a statement issued in June 2010, after Israel ordered the men to leave Jerusalem, the three Hamas men wrote: “We as sons of Jerusalem have never left it before … we emphasize that we will remain here and never leave it.”
Hamas-affiliated Attoun was released from an Israeli jail in 2009, along with five other Palestinian lawmakers. He had been held for three years.
The ICRC has said it told Israeli authorities that international humanitarian law prohibited the forcible transfer of Palestinian residents from their homes.
December 6, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture |
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NABLUS – Israeli settlers on Monday kidnapped a 60-year-old shepherd after attacking him in Orif village south of Nablus, officials said.
Village council head Fawzi Shehadeh said six residents of Yitzhar settlement attacked Salim Jamil Shehadeh near the local high school and took him away in a car. The settlers stole all 50 of his sheep, the councilor added.
Palestinian Authority settlement affairs official Ghassan Doughlas told Ma’an the government was conducting intensive negotiations with Israeli officials to secure the shepherd’s release.
On Saturday, settlers from Itamar violently assaulted elderly shepherd Najih Abdul-Qadir as he worked on his land east of Nablus, Doughlas said.
Some 500,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There are about 2.5 million Palestinians in the same territory.
All settlements are considered illegal under international law.
December 5, 2011
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Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture |
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The Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples
During an interview with the Russian news network RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military. I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party.
These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.
However, I jumped to conclusions when I implied that the Obama regime opposes military detention on constitutional grounds. Dahlia Lithwick reported in a Slate article that the entire Obama regime opposed the military detention provision in the McCain/Levin amendment. Lithwick wrote: “The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed.”
I checked the URLs that Lithwick supplied. It is clear that the Obama regime objects to military detention. However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”
Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”
The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.
By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.
A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”
In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to whom it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.
Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.
~
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
December 5, 2011
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Word that the Los Angeles Police, who sent in 1200 officers in riot gear to violently rout a few hundred Occupy Movement demonstrators from their LA encampment last week, had earlier sent 12 young undercover officers into the peaceful occupation camp to spy on the activists should come as no surprise.
Nor should wild and unsubstantiated claims–clearly bogus–that these spies overheard some of the protesters supposedly planning to sharpen bamboo sticks to use as weapons against police, come as a surprise either. Since the national Occupy Movement is by design rigorously non-violent, and since there has been not one example of occupiers using violence against police, even when attacked, if any of the police spies really heard such talk it had to have been coming either from some provocateur on the payroll of the FBI or one of the plethora of other federal intelligence agencies, or from another of the 12 LAPD undercover cops which were so well disguised they didn’t recognize each other. (No such handmade weapons were in evidence during the police assault on the occupation, and no arrests were made of anyone allegedly making such plans.)
The LAPD has a long, sordid history of undercover activity, including provocateur activity, being used against peaceful protesters and anti-establishment groups, dating to the early part of the last century. More recently, the late LAPD police chief Daryl Gates famously operated, first under Chief Ed Davis, when Gates was director of the so-called Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) and later as chief of the department, a massive spying operation that boasted dozens and perhaps over 100 officers working undercover. These cop spies were used not to attack organized or serious crime, but to monitor and gather dossiers on nonviolent political activists, nearly entirely on the left.
In the 1950s, LAPD spies regularly infiltrated leftist labor and political organizations considered to be Communist or “fellow travelers” of the CP, as well as civil rights organizations. In the ‘60s, the PDID was used extensively to infiltrate anti-war organizations and black nationalist organizations.
In the mid-1970s, as the anti-war movement faded away, the PDID spy net widened substantially. I had my own experience with the broad reach of this LAPD’s spy unit, when I was a co-founder of a non-sectarian leftist alternative weekly newspaper, the Los Angeles Vanguard.
The LAPD Red Squad spy operation has a long ugly history of repression
I and my fellow Vanguard members learned, several years after our venture had folded for economic reasons, that the PDID had sent a young officer tasked to it who was just out of the Police Academy to join our staff as a volunteer. The woman, Connie Milazzo, posed as a journalist wannabe, and asked for assignments, which we dutifully gave her. She also often volunteered to answer the phones in our office when we’d go to lunch — which gave her an opportunity to talk to our sources if they called, and also to rifle our files, which of course were left on our desks.
Even worse, the LAPD, we later learned, went to the executive of an ad agency we had hired to sell corporate ad space for us, and used the drug arrest of his son to extort him and get him to have the person assigned to sell ads for us only pretend to be trying to do so, while collecting a significant part of our weekly revenues. This deceitful tactic succeeded in driving us out of business, as we simply concluded that we could not generate enough co-op ads to support the operation, and folded it in 1978.
When we finally learned, long after the paper had been shut down, of Milazzo’s true identity, and it became clear she had also infiltrated a number of other left groups, it led to a lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California which uncovered the truth that the PDID had sent out 20 such young officers as spies to infiltrate 200 Los Angeles organizations, including such “dangerous” outfits as the National Organization for Women, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, and the office of Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky!
Much of what the PDID did in its heyday was laughable, in retrospect, but much of it was truly horrible. One undercover operative actually wormed his way into membership in a left-wing political party, and became the live-in lover of a woman member of that group for nearly a year–a long sexual and “romantic” relationship which of course was simply a cynical sham and a cover for the operative (with privileges). This is the depth to which the LAPD can sink.
The disclosure that the LAPD, with its long history of abuses, was infiltrating the Occupy Movement should lead to an immediate lawsuit against the department to ferret out exactly what these undercover cops actually did. How much of their activity was simply intelligence gathering — bad enough of a violation of the civil rights and First Amendment freedoms of the activists, who were committing no crimes–and how much was provocateur-type work, trying to set the movement, or people in it, up for planning violence against property or the police? We need to know. Hopefully, in addition to filing a lawsuit, the LA Occupy activists will simultaneously conduct an investigation among themselves to try and ascertain who those cops were and what they were saying and doing as they posed as activists.
But the revelation that the LAPD was spying should also alert the Occupy Movement groups across the country that they too were and probably still are being infiltrated and spied on. The pattern of attacks on occupation encampments around the country over the last two weeks has been so similar, and the information about national coordination so convincing already, that it seems almost certain to me at least that it is as likely that police everywhere were spying and perhaps engaging in provocateur activities as we know it was that they shared strategies like attacking encampments at night, using overwhelming numbers, force and violence, applying weapons like pepper spray, rubber bullets and batons, and keeping the press at bay.
It is all of a piece.
My suggestion at this point is that the Occupation Movement, at least in cities where there is a Federal Reserve Bank, which would include San Francisco, New York, Dallas, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Richmond, Washington, Philadelphia and Boston, move their operations to those federal properties. That puts the onus for future repression out of the hands of local police and directly on the Obama administration. If nothing else, it eliminates any chance of the Democratic Party trying to co-opt the movement, since any attacks on those encampments would be directly tied to the Obama Administration’s “Justice” Department and Homeland Security Department. Federal Reserve Banks are protected by Federal Reserve Police, who after 9-11 were designated by an act of Congress as Federal Law Enforcement officers. As such they are answerable to the Homeland Security Department and ultimately to the White House.
Like other federal and local police, these guys can be heavily armed. They are also authorized to carry pepper spray, which seems to be the popular weapon of choice for the new American gestapo to use against demonstrators against capitalism’s crimes, so demonstrators should be prepared.
But at least by forcing the federal government to be the assailant in confrontations over demonstrations and occupation encampments, the real enemy will be made more clear. It is not, after all, city governments that have been catering to, empowering and fawning on the corporate oligarchy, but rather the federal government–both Congress and the White House.
An additional benefit of adopting the tactic of occupying federal property is that it would make the charges filed against activists federal, instead of local, and would put the cases in federal courts, where there is at least more of a likelihood than in corrupt state and municipal courts of getting a decent judge who respects the Constitution and its protection of the right of assembly, free speech and address of grievances. This is particularly true in relatively liberal districts like San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New York.
December 4, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular |
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FBI Storing Information on Activities Protected by the First Amendment, Memos Obtained by ACLU Show
NEW YORK – The FBI has been illegally using its community outreach programs to secretly collect and store information about activities protected by the First Amendment for intelligence purposes, according to FBI documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The trust that community outreach efforts aim to create is undermined when the FBI exploits these programs to gather intelligence on the very members of the religious and community organizations agents are meeting with,” said Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent. “The FBI should be honest with community organizations about what information is being collected during meetings and purge any improperly collected information.”
FOIA documents showing instances of inappropriate intelligence gathering include:
• San Francisco FBI memos, written in 2007 and 2008 by agents who attended Ramadan Iftar dinners under the guise of the FBI’s mosque outreach program, documenting participants’ names, conversations and presentations. The 2008 memo also recorded participants’ contact information and descriptions of their opinions and associations.
• A 2009 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing FBI participation in a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization. Agents detailed conversations with three community leaders and members about their opinions, backgrounds and charitable activities.
• A 2007 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing a mosque outreach meeting attended by 50 people representing 27 Muslim community and religious organizations, identifying each person by name and organization and analyzing their “demographics.”
“Except under certain special circumstances, the Privacy Act bars the FBI from maintaining records like these describing how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Congress passed this law to prevent records obtained by the government for one purpose from being used for another reason without a person’s consent, but that is precisely what the FBI has done.”
There is no indication in the FOIA documents that community members were informed that the FBI’s outreach activities were used for intelligence gathering purposes or could be potentially used to target these people and their organizations for investigations.
One of the organizations whose members were noted attending the mosque outreach meeting was the Muslim Community Association (MCA). “Like all Americans, we want to help the FBI. Now we feel betrayed,” said MCA Board Secretary Isa Shaw. “We support the idea of building trust through FBI community outreach programs, but the government should not be taking advantage of it to violate our First Amendment rights like this.”
The ACLU is calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate Privacy Act violations in the FBI’s San Francisco and Sacramento Divisions and to initiate a broader audit of FBI practices nationwide. It is also urging the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes, to be honest with community organizations regarding what information is collected and retained during community outreach meetings and to purge all improperly collected information.
The request for these documents was made by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
A detailed description of examples (with links to FOIA documents) showing the FBI’s improper collection of information at community outreach meetings is available at:
www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-eye-fbi-alert-community-outreach-int…
December 2, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Islamophobia |
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New York – In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.
At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”
Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.
The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.
Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.
The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.
“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”
Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”
Changing the way we do business
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisors who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.
Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.
During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” the New York Times reported.
Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”
Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.
PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.
Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz
Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”
Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.
The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”
Fighting “crimiterror”
Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.
Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving at the time as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”
A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Demographic Unit
For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.
Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”
Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”
The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”
Shop ‘til you’re stopped
At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.
Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.
“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.
“Occupy” meets the Occupation
When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.
Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”
“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”
December 2, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular |
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NABLUS – Israeli settlers on Monday kidnapped a 60-year-old shepherd after attacking him in Orif village south of Nablus, officials said.
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