Middle East’s Only Democracy Crushes Dissent
By Tammy Obeidallah | Palestine Chronicle | November 16, 2010
Ever since becoming an activist on behalf of Palestine some ten years ago, I have found ironic humor in the label, ‘The Middle East’s Only Democracy’ used by American policymakers and media in describing the Jewish State. This statement is erroneous on two counts. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of a democracy knows that Israelis overwhelmingly shun the values associated with such a system; furthermore quite a few countries in the Middle East hold elections regularly. Most recently, Jordan elected a new parliament.
Of course there are those who argue that a democracy simply means “majority rule,” or that government leaders are elected, so technically Israel would qualify. “Democracy” is defined by http://www.thefreedictionary.com, “government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.” So in the purely political sense, as Israeli leaders are elected, they have democracy. However, the fifth definition of democracy reads “the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community,” a concept diametrically opposed to Israel’s inherently racist establishment.
Not only is Israel content merely to expand settlements on stolen land and deny Arab citizens the basic rights of religious freedom, education, health care and mobility, any form of dissent is quashed. Arab Israeli Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was stripped of her parliamentary privileges for participating in the Gaza freedom flotilla. In addition to receiving numerous death threats, Zoabi was recently shot in the back and neck with rubber bullets during a protest against a march by militant settlers in the town of Umm al-Fahm. Under Zionism, there is no such thing as freedom of assembly or free speech.
Take for instance a recent haiku contest on Facebook sponsored by El Al Airlines. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry requiring three non-rhyming lines: the first and third line consisting of five syllables, the second line containing seven. I swallowed my pride and became a fan of the page; the possible temporary damage to my reputation seemed well worth it when considering the unwitting audience I would have. However, shortly after I began posting the haiku, a chorus of “she has to be banned” ensued.
I found out that indeed, I had been blocked from posting comments on the site after an hour or so. The El Al fan page administrator deleted all my haiku. I should not have been surprised.
This is the modus operandi of the Zionist machine. Dissent is not tolerated and must be completely obliterated, as in the case of Congressmen and women who dare try and stand up to it: Paul Findley (re-districted out), Cynthia McKinney (trumped up charge assaulting a guard who was harassing her; victim of a smear campaign and voted out), Dennis Kucinich (marginalized and belittled), Jim Traficant (jailed). Prominent figures in the media are silenced, most recently the legendary Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez, formerly of CNN. Numerous Israeli youth sit in jails for refusing to military duty in the West Bank. The most sinister, however is the way activists Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, Furkan Dogan and 8 other flotilla participants were silenced, along with the untold thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered since 1948 for the “crime” of resisting occupation or while merely trying to live out their daily lives in their homeland.
Yet the legacies of these brave individuals continue, and to honor them, I put forth the haiku again in a place where the hasbara machine cannot penetrate.
Ignorant tourists
Celebrate sixty-plus years
Of ethnic cleansing.
Bustling Tel Aviv
Welcoming occupiers
Atop Lydda’s graves.
Stealing Holy Land
As amid scorched olive trees
More settlements rise.
Arrogant squatters
Frolic on stolen beaches
Kids in Gaza die.
El Al transporting
Still more and more invaders
to dear Palestine.
Flight attendants’ thobes
Food service is falafel
Theft of a culture.
Big jet engines scream
Not unlike those that have rained
Hell upon Gaza.
And then there was my daughter’s contribution:
El Al carrying
“Israeli” stowaways to
Steal from Palestine
El Al’s jet engines
Cannot drown out the screams of
White phosphorus wounds.
Airline of the blind
You see touristy mudbaths
Not Gaza’s bloodbath.
Mubarak’s Critics See Hypocrisy in U.S. Support
By William Fisher | IPS | November 15, 2010
NEW YORK – The Egyptian government’s crackdown on political opponents continues unabated in advance of parliamentary elections Nov. 28, even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week hailed the “partnership” between the two countries as “a cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond”.
In the latest example of a widespread campaign of media repression, Kareem Nabil, an Egyptian blogger who completed a four-year prison term, was still being detained and beaten at the State Security Intelligence (SSI) headquarters in Alexandria by security officers, according to the New York- based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.
Nabil had been released from Burj al-Arab Prison on Nov. 6. He was subsequently re-arrested by security officers in Alexandria without charges.
A student at Cairo’s state-run religious university, Al- Azhar, Nabil was convicted in 2006 by an Alexandria court of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak, who he called a dictator.
Nabil’s re-arrest was seen by human rights activists as, in the words of an unnamed opposition figure, “another nail in the coffin of Egyptian democracy”.
The government’s efforts to stifle opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) have included firing an influential newspaper editor, revoking the licenses of TV channels, arresting bloggers, changing the rules governing political slogans, and fabricating infractions to disqualify opposition candidates from running.
As the government’s campaign continued, Clinton hosted a Nov. 10 visit by Egypt’s foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, and Egypt’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Gheit confirmed that he and Clinton did not discuss the forthcoming election.
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has come under increasing criticism from both conservatives and liberals for not being forceful enough in speaking out publicly regarding the parliamentary election and the presidential election, which is to follow.
Conservatives – and neoconservatives – are urging Obama to reinstate the “democracy-building” programmes implemented by the George W. Bush administration, Obama’s predecessor. But they appear to be far more concerned about Egypt’s continuing role as “mediator” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Liberals are pushing for more unequivocal rhetoric from the White House condemning the renewal of Egypt’s 30-year-old “emergency” laws and the widely-reported harassment of opposition political institutions and individuals.
The country’s 82-year-old leader since 1981, Hosni Mubarak, promised the U.S. he would repeal the emergency laws, which give Egypt’s security services the unfettered right to arrest and detain people without due process or judicial review.
The Obama administration has been most outspoken regarding the emergency laws, whose renewal it regards as a broken promise. It has also publicly condemned the June murder of blogger Khaled Saeed, who was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death on the street. He had recently posted a video online exposing police corruption.
Human rights advocates charge that the government has kidnapped bloggers and Internet activists, tortured them, and then imprisoned them until the bruises on their bodies have disappeared so there is no evidence of abuse.
One of those advocates, Hossam Bahgat, told IPS that democracy-building programmes can only be effective if they are “inside-out” – adopted by indigenous people who live and work in a country or a community, and not superimposed on them.
Bahgat, who heads a not-for-profit organization known as the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), was in New York to receive an award from Human Rights Watch (HRW) celebrating the “valor of individuals who put their lives on the line to protect the dignity and rights of others”.
His group recently won a case against the Interior Ministry on behalf of Egypt’s Baha’i citizens, a minority facing frequent violence and discrimination. Egyptians may now obtain official documents without revealing their religious convictions, or being forced to identify themselves as Muslims, Christians, or Jews.
The EIPR recently launched an advocacy campaign to combat sectarianism in Egypt and “strengthen the values of equal citizenship and shared existence in our common nation without religious or faith-based discrimination”.
“While the movement is being launched by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights as part of our ongoing efforts to defend equality and freedom of religion and belief, we realize that it cannot be successful if it remains ours alone,” Bahgat said.
“We firmly believe that this campaign will not meet with success unless it becomes a voice for Egyptians who believe that we are all in this together and those united by a common fear for our future due to rising social divisions, sectarian tension and a mindset that divides the country into an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ he said.
The Mubarak regime has been criticized for many years for what opponents call a nationwide campaign of persecution and discrimination against the Egyptian Coptic church. Copts are Christians who make up about five percent of the Egyptian population.
From a U.S. perspective, despite the “cumbaya” diplomacy on display during the Egyptian foreign minister’s visit to the U.S. State Department, Egypt is likely to continue to be the target of both liberal and conservative scorn.
But neither end of the political spectrum believes Washington has the clout to influence the upcoming elections. And Egyptian voters are both powerless and uninformed.
As one prominent activist, Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, wrote recently, “The outcome of the elections has already been determined – all that remains is the official announcement of the results after 28 November, in favor of the ruling National Democratic Party.”
White House Says Child Soldiers Are Ok, if They Fight Terrorists
Photo: Creative Commons/hdptcar
By Michelle Chen | ColorLines | November 15, 2010
“You cannot be completely happy with all these wounds—both in your body and in your mind.” — 15 year-old child soldier
The phenomenon of child soldiers, like genocide, slavery and torture, seems like one of those crimes that no nation could legitimately defend. Yet the Obama administration just decided to leave countless kids stranded on some of the world’s bloodiest battlegrounds.
The administration stunned human rights groups last month by sidestepping a commitment to help countries curb the military exploitation of children. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reported that President Obama issued a presidential memorandum granting waivers from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to four countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Yemen. The memo instructed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that it is in our “national interest” to continue extending military aid to those countries, despite their failure to comply with the rules Congress passed and George W. Bush signed in 2008.
A thumbs-up for child soldiers from the pen of President Obama? Whitehouse spokesperson P.J. Crowley explained it was a strategic decision to ease the 2008 law. The rationale is that on balance, it’s more effective for the U.S. to keep providing military assistance that will help countries gradually evolve out of the practice of marshaling kids to the battlefield, rather than isolating them.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Crowley argued, “These countries have put the right policies in place… but are struggling to correctly implement them.” The New York Times reported that administration spokespeople also cited the countries’ crucial role in global counter-terrorism efforts.
Strategically granting certain countries a pass on child rights reflects Washington’s warped attitude toward the global human rights regime. The U.S. has failed to ratify, or simply ignored, numerous human rights protocols, and our ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child has languished. Human Rights Watch points out, “Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.” (Although we did ratify two optional protocols in 2002, relating to child soldiers and other forms of exploitation.)
Somalia, by the way, is one of just two countries that the White House allowed to be sanctioned under the 2008 law; the second was Burma. Presumably this is because Somalia is not receiving direct military funding, reports the Monitor. Yet the U.S. continues to support Somali government forces as they fight Islamic insurgents—with the help of a large force of child soldiers. (To their credit, Somalia has at least promised the U.N. they”ll stop arming kids eventually, according to the Washington Post).
Maybe you could argue that the U.S. is so “advanced” it needn’t bother with rules about children’s rights to education and whatnot. Obama’s waivers might be seen as realpolitik in areas like Yemen, whose military we support as part of our sprawling counter-terrorism operations. But the bottom line is that the administration has carved out an exception to a law intended to ethically guide the flow of U.S. aid money around the world.
According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, which holds America to the same scrutiny that countries like Uganda and DRC routinely face in the media, we benefit indirectly and directly from the exploitation of child fighters:
In 2006 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) registered 59 children in detention during 16 visits to five places of detention or internment controlled by the USA or the UK in Iraq. US soldiers stationed at the detention centres and former detainees described abuses against child detainees, including the rape of a 15-year-old boy at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, forced nudity, stress positions, beating and the use of dogs. Following US troop increases in Iraq in early 2007, US military arrests of children there rose from an average of 25 per month in 2006 to an average of 100 per month. Military officials reported that 828 were children held at Camp Cropper by mid-September, including children as young as 11. A 17-year-old was reportedly strangled by a fellow detainee in early 2007. In August 2007 the USA opened Dar al-Hikmah, a non-residential facility intended to provide education services to 600 detainees aged 11-17 pending release or transfer to Iraqi custody. US military officials excluded an estimated 100 children from participation in the program, apparently on the grounds that they were “extremists” and “beyond redemption”.
Omar Khadr, the young Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay, remains trapped in a Kafkaesque quasi-judicial system without regard to the fact that he was a child when captured. Rights advocates like Monia Mazigh in Ottowa have called for Khadr to be recognized as a child soldier, but the administration seems to think securing a conviction in Kangaroo Court takes precedence over international law. And because Khadr, like the other Gitmo prisoners, is identified with that faceless dark horde the U.S. has branded “terrorists,” Americans aren’t even inclined to see him as a human being, let alone as a juvenile soldier deserving of sympathy.
So America’s hypocrisy on children in war has many layers. Obama condemns the practice in theory, then undermines federal law by issuing waivers for our partners in Africa and the Middle East. And of course, Washington sees no problem with punishing child soldiers as adults when they’re aligned with the terrorists who are bent on destroying America.
UN Treaties alone obviously won’t demobilize all the world’s child soldiers, but their main role is to put down a legal placeholder. And it’s that moral guidepost that the U.S. undermines every time it waives parallel U.S. laws based on the “national interest.”
Obama’s memorandum may look jarring on paper, but it’s grimly consistent with Washington’s agenda of waging war indefinitely, without boundaries, against an enemy we can no longer really define. The U.S. supports warfare that uses children as weapons, warfare that kills civilian children indiscriminately, warfare that ultimately sends our own children to perish on foreign soil. And so America marches on in a world of conflict where the first casualty is innocence itself.
Egypt detains 600 opposition members
Press TV – November 16, 2010
A senior Muslim Brotherhood official says Egyptian security forces have arrested over 600 of its members ahead of this month’s parliamentary elections.
Mohammed Mursi says police launched a crackdown on brotherhood members after the group announced plans to run for elections. He added that some 250 members are still detained.
“Arrests are still being made. Someone goes out to campaign, he gets harassed and arrested and then released in a few days,” said Mursi, who heads the group’s election campaign.
The Muslim brotherhood — the country’s largest opposition movement — is fielding 134 candidates for the November 28 polls. The movement is registering them as independents to get around a ban on religious parties.
Egypt’s largest opposition group currently holds one-fifth of the seats in parliament.
The government accuses the group of seeking to take over the country and has passed a series of constitutional amendments in an attempt to curtail the Brotherhood’s ability to participate in politics.
The religious-political organization was banned in 1954 — 26 years after its foundation — but has continued to play a key role in Egypt’s political arena.
In reaction to the recent developments in the country, notable Egyptian opposition figure and former UN nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that Cairo would not be able to retain its increasingly ‘authoritarian’ rule.
“The more unpopular this regime becomes, the more it realizes how much it is hated, the most authoritarian it becomes,” AFP quoted ElBaradei as saying on October 30, 2010. “That’s untenable in the long term, change will come,” he added.
The opposition parties say they want democratic reforms in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has had a quarter-century of authoritarian rule.
A coalition of rights groups in Egypt says the government crackdown on opposition candidates will prevent a fair vote.
US activists face new repression as political prisoners fight for justice
Nora Barrows-Friedman and Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2010
For decades the United States government has attempted to criminalize work in the Palestinian community in support of their national liberation cause. But in recent years this repression has increased dramatically. The Electronic Intifada spoke with the daughter of Sami al-Arian and the daughter of Ghassan Elashi — both political prisoners in the US — about the impact this repression has had on their families’ lives. And in an Electronic Intifada exclusive, Hatem Abudayyeh, an organizer and community leader whose home in Chicago was raided by federal agents on 24 September 2010, spoke to the press for the first time about his family’s story.
The Electronic Intifada spoke with al-Arian, Elashi and Abudayyeh as activists across the United States prepare for emergency demonstrations as the subpoenas for three anti-war and solidarity organizers to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago are being reactivated by the Department of Justice.
The three activists are among the 14 who received subpoenas during and soon after coordinated FBI raids on homes and offices across the Midwestern US on 24 September. The government says that the raids and subpoenas are part of an investigation into “material support” of foreign terrorist organizations but it has not arrested or charged anyone.
A grand jury, no longer in use anywhere outside the US, is an investigative tool that allows the government to compel citizens to testify even if they are not suspected of any crime.
The 14 targeted activists are involved with various peace with justice groups, including the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago, Students for a Democratic Society, the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Colombia Action Network, Fight Back! newspaper, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera. All the activists had submitted letters to the US attorney — the local Department of Justice prosecutor who convenes the grand jury — stating their intent not to testify; the Department of Justice had withdrawn the original subpoenas, but the grand jury was still convened.
The three activists receiving reactivated subpoenas are expected to be offered “immunity” — meaning that they face the choice of informing the government about the activities of other organizers or being jailed for the duration of the grand jury, and possibly facing further charges for criminal contempt of court.
“What [the US government] is doing is gathering political intelligence to indict people under this idea of providing material support for terrorism,” attorney Michael Deutsch, part of the legal defense team for the activists, told The Electronic Intifada. “The grand jury is not an independent body. It is controlled by the US Department of Justice and they decide who is subpoenaed and what the outcome of the grand jury investigation is. It is a tool of the FBI and the justice department to repress political activists.”
Deutsch wrote for The Electronic Intifada in 2008: “In the last forty years the government has used the grand jury as a tool of political inquisition subpoenaing and resubpoenaing activists the government knows will refuse to cooperate, stripping them of their constitutional right against self-incrimination and forcing upon them the choice of informing on their movement or going to jail for contempt.”
In an article contributed to the Mondoweiss site, Deutsch explains: “The search warrants and grand jury subpoenas make it quite clear that the federal prosecutors are intent on accusing public nonviolent political organizers … of providing ‘material support,’ through their public advocacy, for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colobmia” (“US Justice Department prepares for the ominous expansion of law prohibiting ‘material support’ for terrorism,” 10 November 2007).
The investigation’s legal basis is the bipartisan Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act passed under the Clinton administration in 1996 and expanded with the bipartisan Patriot Act enacted during the Bush administration. In June of this year the implications of the legislation — already used after 11 September 2001 to shut down major Muslim charities in the US — was broadened even further. According to Deutsch in Mondoweiss, in the decision Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project, the US Supreme Court “decided that nonviolent First Amendment speech and advocacy ‘coordinated with’ or ‘under the direction of’ a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as ‘terrorist’ was a crime.”
The “foreign terrorist organization” designation is unilaterally declared by the US Secretary of State and virtually impossible to challenge. The Center for Constitutional Rights describes “the government’s current fervor to use the label of terrorism as a brand for groups and organizations that are not toeing the line on US foreign policy” (“Factsheet: Material Support“).
At the height of the movement to bring an end to white supremacist rule in South Africa — the US was among the apartheid regime’s longest-standing supporters — the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, a foreign terrorist organization. Critics observe that had these laws been enacted then, the entire anti-apartheid movement in the US, which took direction from the ANC, would have been criminalized for providing “material support to terrorism.”
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights fact sheet, “these material support provisions violate the First Amendment as they criminalize activities like distribution of literature, engaging in political advocacy, participating in peace conferences, training in human rights advocacy and donating cash and humanitarian assistance, even when this type of support is intended only to promote lawful and nonviolent activities.”
These laws have had a tremendously chilling impact on civil liberties and humanitarian and domestic political organizing in the US, particularly amongst the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities.
Hatem Abudayyeh
Hatem Abudayyeh was asleep on his parents’ couch the morning of 24 September after spending the night with his mother in the emergency room when his wife frantically called him to report that federal agents had raided their home. A Palestinian community leader and solidarity activist, Abudayyeh is also Executive Director of the Arab American Action Network, which provides social services to thousands of families in and around Chicago.
“I ran into my house, passed all the agents and grabbed my daughter and went into the bedroom with her and held her and made sure she was OK,” Abudayyeh told The Electronic Intifada. Abudayyeh, his wife and five-year-old daughter were mainly confined to their small living room while a multi-agency task force searched through all their belongings.
“I wanted to see what they were searching for and grabbing but they wouldn’t allow us to do that,” Abudayyeh said. “They basically grabbed everything that said ‘Palestine’ on it.” During the search that Abudayyeh said went on for more than three hours, the agents went through his wife and daughter’s personal belongings, the family’s library, CD and DVD cases and financial documents. Amongst the materials confiscated were home movies Abudayyeh’s wife had recorded during a family visit to Palestine this summer.
Abudayyeh eventually learned that the home of his friends Joe Iosbaker and Stephanie Weiner, a Chicago couple who are long-time union and anti-war activists, was raided as well. That same morning more than 70 federal agents raided and served subpoenas to prominent organizers in the Twin Cities and Michigan, and called and otherwise harassed activists throughout the country. The office of the Twin Cities-based Anti-War Committee — which led demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, one of the largest anti-war protests in the US in recent years — was raided as well.
“The most accurate assessment is that on the political level, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not going so well for the administration. There are a lot of developments happening in Colombia and Palestine that are probably also not considered to be what the administration wants to see in those countries,” Abudayyeh said. “This attack on the anti-war movement is another example of the administration, whether Obama’s or Bush’s, trying to criminalize the activities of organizers in the US [working to change] foreign policy in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Colombia.”
Of the 14 activists targeted on 24 September, Abudayyeh is the only Palestinian or Arab (profiles of those targeted are currently available on stopfbi.net).
“The administration needs to put a local face on the enemy abroad and for many years that has been Arab and Muslim faces. It is interesting that in this case, I’m the only Arab. But the essential goal is the same — to criminalize anti-war activism and criminalize international solidarity activism in defense of a foreign policy that has gone awry and has caused the deaths of many thousands of American troops and many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.”
Abudayyeh and others say there hasn’t been government repression of a social movement in the US on this scale since COINTELPRO — an FBI program implemented in the 1950s and 1960s to infiltrate and disrupt domestic political organizations, particularly the Black Panthers and other oppressed nationality movements.
“We all know what McCarthyism did in this country in the ’50s,” Abudayyeh said. “It’s pretty frightening and disconcerting that in 2010, this can still happen.”
Abudayyeh recognizes that he is hardly the first Palestinian in the US to be targeted for his political views and organizing. “People who are activists in the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim community — especially since 11 September, but for decades before than — have dealt with this government repression,” he said.
Abudayyeh referenced the case of seven Palestinian immigrants and a Kenyan — dubbed the LA 8 — who were subjected to 20 years of prosecution and deportation proceedings for their activities educating Americans about US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. The US government arrested the eight in 1987 and accused them of organizing in support of a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. According to Abudayyeh, persecution of Palestinian activism began with the wave of Palestinian immigrants to the US after Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
“What they are targeted for is challenging US policy as it relates to Palestine,” Abudayyeh added. “Israel receives the largest amount of US foreign and military aid … which they use to occupy and oppress Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and they use that aid to threaten their neighbors, like Syria and Lebanon. Most of the leading activists around the war in Lebanon in 2006 in the US were Palestinians because we saw that as an extension of the war on the Palestinian people. We don’t separate the US occupation and invasion of Iraq from US support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.”
However, Abudayyeh said, despite this repression the Palestine support movement in the US has only grown, and today’s generation of student activists are doing even stronger work than what was happening during his youth.
“It’s incumbent for us in the US and everywhere else to speak out against these policies … It is probably the main liberation and social justice issue in the world today. I may be the individual who is being targeted today, but this isn’t an issue of an individual or organizations I work for or are affiliated with; it’s a historical repression and attack on the Palestine support movement in the US.”
There have been several other high-profile cases against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim activists since 11 September 2001. Political prisoners continue to serve draconian sentences as the Department of Justice under the Obama administration enforces the policies of the Bush-era PATRIOT Act and the Clinton administration’s material support laws.
Michael Deutsch told The Electronic Intifada that former university professor and stateless Palestinian Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar remains in a federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia following his sentence of 135 months for refusing to testify to a grand jury and inform on the activities of other activists in the US and Palestine. Deutsch said that Dr. Ashqar’s legal defense is filing a habeas corpus petition challenging his sentence, arguing that his rights were violated at his trial.
The US government accused Dr. Ashqar and his co-defendant Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian American, of participation in alleged racketeering activity in support of Hamas after dropping initial material support charges. The government presented as evidence a confession Salah made while he was tortured for 80 days in an Israeli prison and the prosecution’s main witnesses were Israeli intelligence agents who were allowed to testify anonymously with severely restricted cross-examination.
Despite vast resources spent by the US government to convict the two, Salah and Dr. Ashqar were acquitted by a jury of all conspiracy and terrorism-related charges. But Salah was convicted of obstruction of justice for filing false answers to interrogatories in a civil case and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, a sentence he has served out.
“No amount of jailing by the court will compel me to testify against others struggling for Palestinian freedom,” Dr. Ashqar stated in an affidavit given on 12 July 2003 published on the Free Dr. Ashqar Committee website (“Case History – 2003 Affadavit of Abdelhaleem Ashqar).
But Ashqar’s 11-year sentence for refusing to testify to a grand jury is unprecedented in US history and contrasts, for example, with the mere 30-month sentence received by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to US Vice President Richard Cheney who was convicted in 2007 for actively lying to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of classified information about CIA agent Valerie Plame. Libby served no time, however, as then President George W. Bush commuted the sentence on the grounds that it had been “excessive.”
Sami al-Arian
Meanwhile, Dr. Sami al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida and a longtime political and civil rights activist, has been under house arrest for more than two years following nearly a decade of political prosecution by the federal government. In early 2003, the US government launched a much-publicized assault against al-Arian — then-Attorney General John Ashcroft declared that he was among one of the “most dangerous people in the world” — which led to his imprisonment in solitary confinement for 43 straight months during a five-year detention.
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Dr. Sami Al-Arian (Arab American News) |
In December 2005, a Florida jury acquitted al-Arian on eight of the seventeen counts, and deadlocked in favor of acquittal on the remaining nine. No guilty verdicts were returned. About five months later, in April 2006, Dr. al-Arian decided to accept a plea agreement from the US government in an effort to spare his family the process of another lengthy trial.
According to the case background, Dr. al-Arian plead guilty to violating a Clinton-era presidential executive order by providing “immigration services” in the 1990s “to persons associated with the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], a Palestinian organization listed on the US forbidden organizations (terrorist) list” (“Case background in brief,” Tampa Bay Coalition for Peace). In return, al-Arian agreed to be deported from the US, despite having lived in the country for more than thirty years and despite the fact that he is a stateless Palestinian with no country to return to.
Despite lengthy trials, plea deals and hearings following the acquittals, the Bush administration refused to give up and placed Dr. al-Arian under house arrest in September 2008. After years in detention under deplorable conditions, Dr. al-Arian was convicted of criminal contempt charges relating to another case outside the one in which he had originally been involved. A leading prosecutor who — according to Sami’s daughter Laila al-Arian, has a history of making Islamophobic and anti-Arab comments — tried to force Dr. al-Arian into testifying against another Muslim organization in Virginia.
Laila al-Arian, an award-winning journalist and author, spoke to The Electronic Intifada days after a hearing was canceled at the last minute that could have finally decided whether her father could be released or put back on trial.
“My father refused to testify,” Laila al-Arian said. “If he refused to testify, he would be charged with criminal contempt. And if he did testify, he’d be charged with perjury. The prosecutor tried to put him in a catch-22 situation.”
According to al-Arian, the judge in this criminal contempt case, after reading the arguments, said that the very integrity of the justice department is at stake.
“She said that it was beginning to emerge that there was evidence that my father was misled and lied to by the Department of Justice,” al-Arian said. “Because when they signed a plea agreement with him in Florida in 2006, they told him that he wouldn’t have to cooperate or testify, or be forced to be involved in any other case other than his own. And that they would recommend the minimum sentence and that he would be released and deported. That of course never happened. The judge said if the justice department made this deal with my father then everyone in the justice department would be bound to that.”
The judge scheduled a hearing first in April 2009, but it was canceled. In September 2010, the prosecution asked the judge to reschedule a hearing for 29 October — and it was canceled again, with no reason given.
“It’s difficult to say what this all means,” al-Arian said. “It could be conjecture, but we’re hoping my father will be released and finally deported so that we can all move on with life. It’s been almost eight years since his arrest. Eight years is a very long time. We’re anxious for him to be able to move on. He’s lost so many important years already, and we want him to live as a free man. House arrest is not freedom.”
Because Dr. al-Arian is a stateless Palestinian refugee, it is still unknown to where he could be deported.
“Even if the judge rules in my father’s favor and he is released, he still doesn’t have a country to go to,” al-Arian said. “And we really hope that there will be a country that will open its doors to a persecuted political prisoner and a victim of the Bush administration, a victim of a wave of anti-Palestinian activism. It’s mind-boggling that in the 21st century, there is a group of people who don’t have a country. Hopefully someone will be able to adopt him. It’s one more battle we have to fight.”
Ghassan Elashi and the Holy Land Foundation
Similar to Dr. Sami al-Arian and his family, the founders of a US-based Muslim charity and their families are holding out hope that justice could prevail during a new appeals process.
In 2009, Ghassan Elashi, a Palestinian-American cofounder of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), once the largest Muslim charity in the US, was sentenced to 65 years following a targeted campaign launched by the Bush administration after 11 September 2001. Based in Dallas, Texas, the HLF sent direct humanitarian aid to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, as well as to Eastern Europe and across the US. The HLF established food banks on the East Coast, helped victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and provided assistance after floods and tornadoes devastated parts of Iowa and Texas in the 1990s.
As The Electronic Intifada previously reported, just months after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US Department of the Treasury froze the HLF’s bank accounts as the executive branch of the US government shut down the organization under the auspices of the Patriot Act. Using the Material Support Law provision, the US State Department accused the five HLF founders — now dubbed the Holy Land Five — of providing “assistance” to designated “terrorist groups” (namely Hamas) in Palestine. The Bush administration immediately closed the organization and issued aggressive charges against the charity workers. The federal prosecution team was allowed to use secret evidence, and there was no hearing before the sentencing of the HLF’s cofounders in 2009.
On 27 October 2010, US Attorney General Eric Holder personally awarded the entire local, state and federal prosecution team involved in the HLF case with the second-highest honor in the justice department — the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service.
Noor Elashi, Ghassan Elashi’s daughter, told The Electronic Intifada that the attorney general’s award comes as the defense team is preparing to argue an appeal in front of a three-judge panel on the grounds that the prosecution team violated the constitution at several instances, including the unprecedented use of an anonymous expert witness. If the panel agrees with just one of the arguments made, Elashi said, then that will invalidate all of the convictions, and the prosecution will have to re-try the case.
Another constitutional violation related to the HLF case was found by a federal judge in Dallas, Texas, on 7 November. Judge Jorge Solis ruled during an appeals process that the unsealing of a document which put 246 individuals and groups on a list of so-called “un-indicted co-conspirators” associated with the HLF violated the constitutional Fifth Amendment due process rights of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). In other words, the US government’s prosecution team’s release of this list condemned organizations such as NAIT to guilt by association without affording them their constitutional right to defend themselves in court. In the atmosphere of fear induced after 11 September 2001 such aspersions can be lethal to the reputation of any organization or individual.
However, West Bank-based Ma’an News Agency reported that “despite the Fifth Amendment violation … [Judge] Solis denied NAIT’s request, along with that of the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, to have its name taken off the government’s list, finding ‘ample evidence’ linking it to Holy Land [Foundation]” (“US court ‘should not have publicly released’ co-conspirators list“, 8 November 2010).
“The whole appeals process typically takes a year to two years before an oral argument is made,” Elashi said. “We don’t expect to hear anything soon. It could take anywhere between a few months to a few years … But knowing the relentless nature of the prosecution team, they won’t stop. What’s happened to Sami al-Arian is a perfect example of that.”
For now, the Elashi family is anticipating being able to visit Ghassan in prison for the first time in 18 months. Ghassan is currently being held in a Communications Management Unit (CMU) prison facility in Illinois, a block within some prisons that are nicknamed “little Guantanamos” due to the overwhelming majority of Muslims and persons of Arab and Middle Eastern descent being held in them and the draconian detention conditions that are applied.
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, people imprisoned in CMU facilities are systematically denied any physical contact with family members and are forbidden from hugging, touching or embracing their children, spouses or loved ones during visits. Phone calls are also severely limited. The center says that the CMU units are “an experiment in social isolation” (“CMUs: The Federal Prison System’s Experiment in Social Isolation“).
“There was a one-year visitation ban that was just lifted,” Elashi said. “On Thanksgiving weekend, my family and I are finally going to see my father. He’s become a ghost-like figure to me. When a loved one is being incarcerated, when the only communication is one 15-minute phone call every two weeks, they really start to sort of dissipate in your eyes. I am looking forward to seeing him.”
The Elashi family will be separated from Ghassan by a plexiglass wall, and they will only be able to communicate through a telephone receiver. The entire conversation, Noor Elashi said, will be live-monitored from the justice department in Washington, DC, and can be terminated at any moment.
“Even when you get to the prison itself, there is this sense that something may happen during the security process that may deny you entry,” Elashi added. “It’s sort of like being at [an Israeli-controlled] border crossing — for example, I’ve never been allowed into Palestine.”
Elashi said that although her family remains hopeful with the appeals process now underway, the widespread attacks on US-based activists and charity workers is increasingly troubling.
“I think that it’s finally hitting closer to home, and is becoming more apparent than ever in 2010 — nearly a decade after 11 September — that everyone’s at risk,” Elashi said.
“Not only people like my father, who founded a charity, but anybody,” Elashi added. “Even a former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, is at risk of being prosecuted under the Material Support Law because he helped supervise Lebanese elections, and has associated with [Lebanese political movement] Hizballah. American newspapers are at risk, because they’ve printed op-ed pieces by Hizballah and Hamas officials, an act that could be argued that, under the Material Support Law, aids these people and these parties by furthering their goals and giving them a voice.”
Lives disrupted, movements at stake
Amidst the mounting reports of federal raids on the Somali community in the US, the conviction of four African-American Muslim men accused of plotting to bomb a synagogue in what critics say was a case of entrapment, and reports of FBI informants infiltrating the Muslim community in the US, there is a growing movement to fight back against what many view as repressive, racist policies.
Following the raids and subpoenas of the 14 anti-war and solidarity activists in September, emergency demonstrations were held outside of FBI and other federal buildings in at least 62 US cities. Thousands have called in to the offices of President Obama, Attorney General Holder and US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Civil rights and liberties organizations, social justice and faith groups and trade unions have issued dozens of statements of solidarity. Ad-hoc groups have formed around the US to push back against what many view as a test case that will have repercussions for the wider social justice movement in the country. And the first national meeting of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression was held in New York City earlier this month.
“It’s definitely time for Americans, for all of us, to respond to this and join a massive campaign that would really approach Congress about revising the Material Support Law,” Elashi said. “It’s flawed. And it’s one that is responsible for [targeting] many innocent people — not only my father but activists all over the country whose only crimes are supporting the Palestinian cause, as well as causes in Colombia and other places.”
Laila al-Arian echoed this sentiment. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen that the Obama administration isn’t much better than its predecessor when it comes to American Muslims and civil liberties — and even anti-war activists,” she said. “Anyone who’s espousing views that are in any way controversial or unpopular can be a target. It’s just a way to stifle dissent and activism, which are completely lawful activities that are seen as unpopular. I just hope that people begin to make their voices heard when it comes to these kinds of crackdowns.”
Hatem Abudayyeh said that “National organizations like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute, the National Network for Arab American Communities and other national organizations which have civil rights and liberties at the forefront of their agenda should leverage the relationships they have with the administration, the Department of Justice, the US attorney’s offices to put pressure … to drop this investigation and to end these grand juries.”
“We have powerful institutions and we have prominent individuals across the country from the Arab and Muslim community,” Abudayyeh added. “Those organizations have put their names on to sign-on letters, they’ve made phone calls to US Attorney General Eric Holder and the US attorney and the president, and we need to continue to put that pressure on.”
Meanwhile, the Elashi family prepares to see Ghassan for the first time in a year and a half, the al-Arian family awaits the deportation of Sami, and countless other families pay an unbearable price for their first amendment activity supporting the Palestine liberation struggle.
“In one sense I’m a bit luckier than others,” Abudayyeh said, “because there are some couples in which both partners have been subpoenaed and who have young children. So if they continue to refuse to testify and there’s a possibility they might be held in civil contempt, then they have really difficult decisions to make in terms of their children … I know that my daughter will be in good hands with her mother and my parents and my siblings and everyone else in the extended family providing support.”
Nora Barrows-Friedman is an award-winning independent journalist, writing for The Electronic Intifada, Inter Press Service, Al-Jazeera, Truthout and other outlets. She regularly reports from Palestine.
Maureen Clare Murphy is managing editor of The Electronic Intifada and an organizer with the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago.
Israeli troops raid and loot house, commercial property of businessman
Palestine Information Center – 15/11/2010
TULKAREM — A large number of Israeli troops raided at dawn Monday the house of an imprisoned noted businessman called Ali Al-Dudu as well as his furniture showroom and stores in Tulkarem city and looted some contents of the house, all the merchandise and three of his vehicles.
Local sources said that a large number of troops aboard more than 30 military vehicles, bulldozers and big cargo trucks stormed Tulkarem at two o’clock this morning and confiscated lots of furniture from his home and everything stored in the showroom and its warehouses.
The invading Israeli troops also confiscated two cars and one truck owned by the businessman before withdrawing from the city with everything they stole. The things seized during this raid are worth millions of shekels.
The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) kidnapped the businessman last June only two days after they detained his daughter Yasmine, a student at Birzeit university, and his son Ziya’a. Both of his children were interrogated in Jalama prison.
Security forces from the Palestinian authority kidnapped his son Ziya’a immediately after his release from Israeli jails and interrogated him, in full coordination with the Israeli side, about his father’s business activities and alleged financial ties with Hamas Movement.
In a separate incident, the IOF kidnapped on the same day at dawn 11 Palestinian citizens from different West Bank areas only one day before Eid Al-Adha vacation, according to Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
Local sources said the detainees were kidnapped during raids on homes in the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and Al-Khalil.
The Militarization of the World
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH | CounterPunch | November 12, 2010
A bully or a mafia godfather would never run out of excuses to punish an insubordinate soul in “his territory.” Accordingly, U.S. imperialism has been very creative in invoking all kinds of excuses to punish Iran for its aspirations to national self-determination.
To justify the criminal economic sanctions against the Iranian people, the U.S. has for years insisted that Iran is supporting terrorism, threatening U.S. national interests, and pursuing a program of nuclear weapons manufacturing. As these harebrained allegations are increasingly losing credibility, the United States is now invoking a new ploy to justify its decision to further tighten the sanctions on Iran: “military dictatorship” and “human rights abuses,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has occasionally grumbled about in recent months.
There are a number of obvious problems with this latest U.S. excuse for escalating sanctions against Iran. To begin with, it is a blatant interference in the internal affairs of Iran.
Second, considering the fact that the U.S. has armed its “allies” in the Middle East (and beyond) to the teeth, its condemnation of the rise of Iran’s military power is clearly hypocritical. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), cited in Wikipedia, while Iran’s military spending in 2009 was $9.174 billion (or 2.7% of its GDP), that of Saudi Arabia was $39.257 billion (8.2% of its GDP), that of Israel was $14.34 billion (7% of its GDP), and that of the United Arab Emirates was $13.5 billion (or 5.9% of its GDP).
Third, in light of the fact that the U.S. is the most militarized country in the world, it’s belly-aching about “militarization of Iran” (whose military spending is less than one percent of the U.S.) is patently ironic; it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Again, while Iran’s military spending in 2009 was $9.174 billion, that of the U.S. was $663.255 billion. However, the official $663.255 billion includes neither the Homeland Security budget, nor the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, nor a number of supplemental expenditures added to military spending during the fiscal year. Once these omitted (or hidden) expenditures are added to the official Pentagon budget, total U.S. military-security expenditures would easily amount to $1000 billion, or one trillion dollars. Even in relative terms, Iran’s military spending is infinitesimally small compared to that of the United States. For example, while Iran’s per capita military spending is $131 (9,174,000,000 : 70,000,000), that of the U.S. is $3333 (1,000,000,000,000 : 300,000,000). And whereas Iran’s military spending as a share of its GDP is 2.7% (9.174 billion : 340 billion), that of the United States is nearly 7% (1 trillion : 14 trillion) [Ibid.].
Fourth, in light of the fact that the U.S. is altogether silent in the face of heinous human rights violations under the rule of the regimes it calls “allies,” its alleged concern for “human rights abuses” in Iran is hypocritical and utilitarian: it uses the lofty ideal of defending human rights to disguise its nefarious intentions to impose economic sanctions or to embark on military aggression against that country. Hypocritical defense of human rights is often used to justify wars of aggression as humanitarian operations, or “just wars,” as they were called in times past. Just as this ruse was used in 1999 to wreak carnage on Yugoslavia, so it is now used to pave grounds for committing similarly heinous crimes against Iran.
Regrettably, many left/liberal/antiwar individuals and organizations often fall for this hoax, thereby endorsing (or remaining silent in the face of) U.S. wars of aggression on ethical grounds, that is, on grounds of fighting dictatorship or terrorism in the hope of achieving liberation and democracy. Of course, to make the ruse credible, champions of war and militarism usually start with demonization and distortion, and then proceed to aggression and invasion.
It must also be pointed out that the purported U.S. support for human rights tends to be narrowly focused on purely cultural issues such as life style and identity politics, that is, the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation. As such, it is largely devoid of basic economic needs for survival. Even a cursory comparison with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Freedoms (UDHRF), adopted on 10 December 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, reveals some fundamental shortcomings of the U.S. human rights protocol. Human rights according to UDHRF include basic economic or survival needs such as:
“the right to work … to protection against unemployment … to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. . . . Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, and housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. . . . Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. . . . Everyone has the right to education.”
Human rights a la USA does not include any of these basic human needs—all the nauseating propaganda of championing human rights notwithstanding. Indeed, many of the basic economic rights, which came to be known as the New Deal reforms, and which were achieved through long and heroic struggles of the working people and other grassroots efforts, are now systematically undermined in order to pay for the gambling losses of the Wall Street financial giants.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, to the extent that there has been an undeniable rise in the power of armed forces in Iran, as well as a corresponding curtailment of civil liberties there, such unfortunate developments have evolved as a direct consequence of the constant threats posed by U.S. imperialism and its allies. Iran’s strengthening of its armed forces has become a virtual necessity in self-defense against threats of war, destabilization, sabotage, sanctions and other kinds of covert and overt operations engineered by the imperialist-Zionist forces.
By dividing the world into “allies” and “enemies,” the powerful war profiteering interests in the Unites States, the military-industrial-security colossus, compel both “allies” and “enemies” to militarize. While “enemies” such as Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea are forced to strengthen their defense capabilities against imperialistic aggressions, “allies” such as the regimes ruling Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Colombia are driven to militarization against their own people, since regimes loved by U.S. imperialism are hated by the overwhelming majority of their own citizens.
Critics tend to bemoan the rise in the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Iran without bothering to explain how the IRGC came to existence, or why it has expanded to where it is today. Who is to be blamed for the ascendancy of its influence in the Iranian politics and economics?
Those even faintly familiar with the history of the IRGC would recall that it came into existence as a resistance force against counter-revolutionary forces in Iran, which have always been supported by U.S. imperialism and its allies. Although it was formed in the spring of 1979 as a small paramilitary revolutionary force in the fight against the Shah’s rule, it remained for the U.S.-instigated invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein to expand it to a fully-fledged military power in defense of Iran’s territorial integrity. The ensuing brutal 8-year Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), in which the U.S. and its allies wholeheartedly supported Saddam Hussein, and the Guards’ legendary sacrifices and heroic defense of Iran’s independence drastically enhanced their size, their prestige and their power.
Although Iraq’s war with Iran ended in 1988, other forms of U.S. wars against Iran have continued to this day. These have included destabilizing “soft-power” operations in the name of democracy, covert operations through all kinds of NGOs and fifth-column groupings, promotion of and support for terrorist operations such as those carried out by Jundullah and Mojadeen Khalgh (MKO, or MEK), constant military threats, psychological warfare, and economic sanctions. Not surprisingly, the role and the influence of IRGC and other security forces in Iran have increased accordingly. Also unsurprisingly, as the political power of Iran’s armed forces has thus increased, so has their economic power.
I say “unsurprisingly” because it is altogether in the nature of things that large standing armies gradually extend their military-security power to the realm of economics. The fully-fledged and the best example of this phenomenon is the rise of the monstrous military-industrial complex in the United States—which, contrary to the defensive nature of Iran’s military force, represents an offensive imperialistic force.
It is of course a truism that maintaining large standing armies will sooner or later lead to authoritarianism. It is equally obvious that by the same token that militarization of the world can be blamed largely on imperialistic U. S. foreign policies, so can the rise of many authoritarian regimes around the world be attributed to those oppressive policies.
When a country (whose only sin is its aspiration to national self-determination) is labeled by U.S. imperialism as “our enemy” and is, therefore, encircled and threatened by the U.S. military monster, that country’s political, economic and democratic growth is bound to be distorted or derailed from a path of a healthy, natural or spontaneous evolution. Finding themselves in the bull’s eye of the menacing U.S. war juggernaut, security forces of such beleaguered countries are bound to react nervously/harshly in the face of protest demonstrations of domestic opposition, even when such demonstrations are for legitimate reasons. The shameful history of covert U.S. operations abroad, including the violent overthrow of many democratically elected leaders through military coup d’états, shows that expressions of indigenous opposition or grievances in such “enemy” countries are often subverted by well-financed and well-armed U.S. agents, either penetrated from outside or recruited from within, thereby warping the development of a “healthy” political/democratic process in those countries.
What is utterly demagogical is that, having thus perverted the politico-democratic process in such countries, the U.S. propaganda machine then turns around and blames the religion or culture or leaders of those countries as inherently incompatible with democratic values. Regrettably, not only do most of the American people but also many people elsewhere, including in the countries targeted for destabilization, fall for this ruse—in effect, blaming the victim for the crimes of the perpetrator.
Viewed in this light, the rise in the influence of the military-security forces in the Iranian politics and economics is a direct result of the menacing imperial policies of the United States and its allies toward that country.
Thus, President Obama’s or Secretary Clinton’s or other U.S. policy makers’ bellyaching about the rise of the power of the armed forces in Iran represents a case of gross obfuscation, that is, a case of barking up the wrong tree: instead of blaming IRGC they should blame their own imperialistic foreign policies, which nurtures militarization and curtailment of civil liberties not only in Iran but also in many other parts of the world. Indeed, militarization of the world and the resulting proliferation of many (relatively smaller) military-industrial complexes around the globe are unmistakable byproducts of the monstrous U.S. military-industrial complex. The inherent dynamics of this monster as an existentially-driven war juggernaut compels other countries around the world (both “allies” and “enemies”) to embark on paths to militarism and authoritarianism.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
Obama Lawyers Defend “Kill Lists”
By William Fisher | IPS | November 9, 2010
NEW YORK – Lawyers for the Barack Obama administration told a federal judge Monday that the U.S. government has authority to kill U.S. citizens whom the executive branch has unilaterally determined pose a threat to national security.
That claim came in federal court in Washington, D.C. in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The two human rights legal advocacy organisations contend that the administration’s so-called “targeted killing authority” violates the constitution and international law.
“The full contours of the government’s position would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” CCR attorney Pardiss Kebriae told IPS.
“As the government would have it, while non-citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay can challenge the deprivation of their liberty by the United States, a U.S. citizen could not challenge an impending deprivation of his life by his own government.”
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government’s claim to an unchecked system of global detention, and the district court should similarly reject the administration’s claim here to an unchecked system of global targeted killing,” she said.
The ACLU and the CCR were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorise the targeted killing of his son, Anwar Al- Aulaqi. The lawsuit asks the court to rule that, “outside the context of armed conflict, the government can carry out the targeted killing of an American citizen only as a last resort to address an imminent threat to life or physical safety.”
Anwar Al-Aulaqi was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and has dual U.S. and Yemeni citizenship. He is a firebrand extremist imam who has been accused by government officials and in the press of using his sermons and the Internet to recruit jihadists. He is thought to be in hiding in Yemen.
The lawsuit also asks the court to “order the government to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.” “If the constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, who presented arguments in the case.
“It’s the government’s responsibility to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, but the courts have a crucial role to play in ensuring that counterterrorism policies are consistent with the constitution.”
The government filed a brief in the case in September, claiming that the executive’s targeted killing authority is a “political question” that should not be subject to judicial review. The government also asserted the “state secrets” privilege, contending that the case should be dismissed to avoid the disclosure of sensitive information.
On Aug, 30, 2010, the CCR and the ACLU filed suit on behalf of Nasser Al-Aulaqi against President Obama, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, challenging their decision to authorise the targeted killing of his son as a violation of the U.S. constitution and international law.
“Targeting individuals for killing who are suspected of crimes but have not been convicted – without oversight, due process or disclosed standards for being placed on the kill list – also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people,” the groups noted.
“Since 9/11, the U.S. government has detained thousands men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable and release them.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on the case, which is one of two related lawsuits brought by the ACLU and the CCR.
The second is against the U.S. Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) challenging the legality and constitutionality of the scheme that requires them to obtain a license in order to file a lawsuit concerning the government’s asserted authority to carry out targeted killings of individuals, including U.S. citizens, far from any battlefield.
On Jul. 16, however, the Secretary of the Treasury labeled Anwar al-Aulaqi a “specially designated global terrorist”, which makes it a crime for lawyers to provide representation for his benefit without first seeking a license from OFAC.
The CCR and the ACLU sought a license, but after the government’s failure to grant one despite the urgency created by an outstanding authorisation for Al-Aulaqi’s death, the two groups brought suit challenging the licensing scheme as applied to the representation they seek to provide.
CCR and the ACLU have not had contact with Anwar Al-Aulaqi.
The OFAC requirements generally make it illegal to provide any service, including legal representation, to or for the benefit of an individual designated as a terrorist. A lawyer who provides legal representation for the benefit of such a person without getting special permission is subject to criminal and civil penalties.
In their lawsuit, CCR and the ACLU charge that OFAC has exceeded its authority by subjecting uncompensated legal services to a licensing requirement, and that OFAC’s regulations violate the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the principle of separation of powers.
The lawsuit asks the court to invalidate the regulations and to make clear that lawyers can provide representation for the benefit of designated individuals without first seeking the government’s consent.
The OFAC case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Resurrection of Ariel Sharon
Why the curious renewed interest in the former Prime Minister?
By William A. Cook | Palestine Chronicle | November 8, 2010
‘He’s neither alive nor dead.’
Raanan Gissin, Sharon’s former advisor, made the above comment last month as quoted in the Jerusalem Post (20-10-2010) upon the exhibit of a lifelike sculpture by Noam Braslavsky in Tel Aviv. The wax figure shows the comatose Sharon’s chest move up and down “to depict Sharon’s dependence on a breathing machine.” Some have found the work unsettling. “It’s very tragic,” Gissin noted. It’s “only sickening voyeurism,” Kadima MK Yoel Hasson declaimed. Braslavsky created “the sculpture because Sharon has been absent from the public eye for so long,” according to the Post’s article. Regardless, the exhibit has stirred up the Israelis as they are forced to revisit the former PM who is not yet dead.
Coincidentally, this week Christoph Schult published an article in Spiegel Online titled “The Israeli Patient: Searching for Ariel Sharon’s Political Legacy.” While noting that the former Prime Minister has been in a coma now for 5 years, “his presence looms over the country’s political course.” In an effort to explore whether or not the comatose PM would have taken Israel into peace negotiations with the Palestinians or not, he decided to interview Sharon’s sons and selected friends. Sharon’s sons offer little, indeed nothing worth recounting if the article’s lack of quotes is true. But Schult makes this point, “the entire country is living with the consequences of a policy that the former Prime Minister began but was never able to end. It was Sharon who ordered the construction of the security wall … and withdrew the Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip…” But Braslavsky got it wrong; Sharon breathes but lives via a gastric feeding tube. Can he hear? Can he see? Will he recover? No one seems to know for sure. His sons hope he will eventually wake.
So why the curious renewed interest in the former Prime Minister? It seems that the current policies of the Netanyahu administration, the increased vigor in the Knesset as it rams through a series of “thought” legislation, and the uncertainty that surrounds Obama’s ambiguous thrusts and withdrawals regarding his negotiations have shed klieg lights on what Sharon wrought before he fell into the coma. Five years ago I wrote an article, “Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, The Rape of Palestine,” (11-29-2005) that reflected then, when Sharon first went into the coma, what legacy he left to the Jewish state. It is a legacy of calculated carnage both of the people of Palestine and Judaism; it is imaged in his Wall of Fear that physically imprisons the Palestinians on one side and psychologically imprisons the Jews in fear and victimhood, a true legacy of isolationist tribalism as their efforts to control thought symbolizes. Magnify and multiply the abuses this man inflicted in 2005 by the atrocities of the 2006 Lebanon invasion, the Christmas invasion of Gaza, and the attack on the Marmara, added to those reported in B’Tselem since 2005, and one can understand why this state needs to hide behind thought control and the insulation that protects ruthless self interest. This passage from that article illustrates the point:
“As we moved through month after month of 2005, Sharon’s forces have continued their illegal “targeted killing” of Hamas militants, a short hand way of saying Israel has disbanded the basis of law in the West to reintroduce the law of the ancient barbarian states that granted license to the tribal chief or local tyrant absolute authority to determine guilt without arrest, without issuance of a charge, without counsel, without a plea, and without a court resulting in illegal assassination that goes unnoticed and unpunished in Israel and the United States, the self-extolled bulwarks of Democracy in the world. What hypocrisy. Thus have we come full circle in the mid-east as a new barbarian horde inflicts its merciless power on the innocent as well as the condemned for it inevitably happens, as it did this week, that innocent bystanders suffer the same fate as the object of the extrajudicial execution. The IDF record as reported by the Palestine Center for Human Rights as of January 2004 shows 309 civilians killed as a result of 157 executions. Rule without law, an action approved by the US government and supported by the American tax dollar. Yet no one objects. The above litany of Sharon’s brutality constitutes what is countable in the way of deaths attributable to the illegal actions of the IDF. But there are other consequences to this occupation that are lost to the non-observant eye…”
“The decline in the well-being and quality of life of Palestinian children,” reports Human Rights Watch, “[in the occupied territories] over the past two years has been rapid and profound according to CARE, 17.5% of children in Gaza are malnourished.” Thirteen percent of children between the ages of six months and five years “have moderate to severe acute malnutrition.” Nearly half of Palestinians live below the poverty line. Hospitals are in dire need of basic supplies including water and electricity. Almost ninety percent of the Rafah population depends on food aid. And while malnutrition and poverty imposed by the Israeli oppressors seems hideous enough, it pales in comparison to the reality facing the children as they grow up in the occupation. Dr. Shamir Quota, Director of Research for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programs, makes this observation: “Ninety percent of children two years old or more have experienced ¬ some many, many times ¬ the [Israeli] army breaking into the home, beating relatives, destroying things. Many have been beaten themselves, had bones broken, were shot, tear gassed, or had things happen to siblings and neighbors.”
Contemplate that statistic, ninety percent of two year olds growing up have witnessed soldiers bursting through the door of their home, rifles pointed at their mother or father, pushed against walls, beaten perhaps, shouted at certainly, cursed we might assume, and left in fear knowing another raid is imminent. What torture is here? This is intentional, calculated, psychological torture, genocidal “mental harm” as described in the UN Convention.
But there’s more. I left Palestine shortly after the “disengagement” from Gaza, a word that masks the reality of that “peace” move by Sharon. There is no disengagement: Sharon’s government owns the sky above Gaza; it owns the fence around Gaza; it owns access and exit from Gaza; it owns sea passage and use of the sea that borders Gaza; and it owns the missiles that it hurls from F-16s into the cities and refugee camps inside of Gaza indifferent to the innocent incinerated by its savagery. The only real disengagement that Sharon authorized in Gaza is disengagement from responsibility under the Geneva Conventions for occupying powers to provide adequately and humanely for the people so occupied. That means Israel does not have to pay for the care of the people who are locked into their prison in this most heinous apartheid on the face of the planet.”
But lest the disengagement plan be observed as an Israeli weakness in light of world opinion against its occupation policies, Israel redoubled its efforts to punish the Palestinians in Gaza.
“Israel’s policy of assassinating wanted Palestinians continued in Gaza following the unilateral withdrawal. The policy was reaffirmed by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Military Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, at a meeting on 8 November 2005. According to statistics from Al Mezan, 47 targeted assassinations took place from 12 September 2005 to 10 September 2006, usually in the form of air strikes on a moving vehicle. Such attacks killed and wounded a total of 25 bystanders; for instance, an attack on 27 October 2005 killed seven Palestinians, including three children, and injured 19 more. Based on Al Mezan statistics, 362 Palestinians in Gaza died as a result of Israeli military attacks in the year following the unilateral withdrawal: 151 from 12 September 2005 to 27 June 2006, and 211 in Operation ‘Summer Rains’ between 28 June and 10 September 2006. The majority of casualties were civilian. The number of attacks escalated over the course of the year. Between 12 September and 31 December 2005, 544 artillery shells were fired into Gaza, and there were 124 air strikes. Between January and April 2006, more than 3,600 artillery shells and 63 air strikes were launched. Most recently, in June alone, there were 1,376 shells fired and 122 air strikes, as well as an explosion on Beit Lahiya beach which a Human Rights Watch investigation attributed to Israel; these recent attacks resulted in the deaths of thirty-six people, including 12 children, and injured 110. (The Disengagement Plan and Israel’s Status as Occupying Power, NGO in Consultation Status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN).
Following Sharon’s withdrawal into the coma, Israeli politicians were faced with determining what actions to pursue: continued disproportionate and ruthless military attacks against Gaza and the West Bank in keeping with Sharon’s policies or withdraw to a more conciliatory posture to appease growing international criticism of that behaviour. It didn’t take long for the world to witness Israel’s answer. The fall 2006 invasion and razing of Lebanon’s infrastructure followed by its merciless killing of over a 1000 Lebanese including the second destruction of Qana village (the first occurred ten years earlier) where 63 Lebanese refugees including 42 children were hunted down, chased from home to home until destroyed. Again, the savage behaviour executed by Israel was meant to demonstrate to the world that Israel was not defeated by world opinion.
But world opinion appears to be having an impact. Neve Gordon notes in “Thought crimes in Israel” that Israel’s Knesset has a raft of laws before it that will “seal Israel’s transformation into a fully fascist state that persecutes and marginalizes everyone who does not subscribe to the official racially-oriented ideology.” These measures include swearing an oath of loyalty and allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to its laws and symbols as a condition for receiving public funding for film projects; for newly naturalized citizens to declare loyalty to the Jewish character of the state (similar Gordon notes to Jews and Muslims in Britain to swear to loyalty to the Church of England); for those protesting against or denying Israel’s Jewish character incarceration can be levelled effectively denying political freedom of speech; for those desiring to live in settlements who do not accept the settlement committee’s political views or religion no recourse is allowed to achieve their end thereby making it legal for settlements to deny access to non-Jews and Palestinians; for those who wish to mark the anniversary of the Nakba, public funds will be denied thus preventing expression to citizens of views that are critical of Israeli actions; for those who wish to encourage boycotts or disinvestment actions against the state monetary penalties will be imposed effectively silencing free speech; for all these measures the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has warned that they would effectively make an alternative political ideology, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens, a crime.
This then is the legacy of Ariel Sharon: a retreat into self-righteousness that finds fault with all who oppose the Zionist ideology, the isolation within that fears anyone who does not accept the Zionist mindset of force that ensures adherence to rights determined by them to be rights. It is imaged in Sharon’s Wall of Fear that would visually erase their neighbours whom they have erased from their minds as people, to force their citizens to walk the streets, roam the highways, bathe in the sea yet not see one who is different from them though they live in the same land, raise their families under the same sun, drink from the same aquifers, and retire in rest as they watch the sun set over the same sea. But they are not the same if they do not believe what the Zionists believe for there is cemented into that mindset an absolute understanding that they alone determine what will be at any cost regardless of international law or international agreements, and they will use whatever means at their disposal to control all who could or would find fault with their desires and will. … Full article
Night raid in Bil’in
By Hamde Abu Rahme | Mondoweiss | November 9, 2010
(Photo: Hamde Abu Rahme)
Today, November 9 at about 3:00 in the morning, the Israeli army entered the village of Bil’in. About 50 soldiers entered the village by jeep and foot. When they arrived at the two targeted houses, they ran and took positions outside while a number of soldiers entered the house.
At first the soldiers were hammering on the door of one house, demanding to see 30-year old Ashraf al-Khatib. It turned out they went to the wrong house. They then went to another house – forcing one of Ashraf’s brothers to show them where Ashraf lives. Soldiers then entered that house, and his brother’s family’s house, and again they woke up the family, asking for Ashraf al-Khatib. His brother, Haytham al-Khatib, is a journalist from the human right’s group B’tselem and was of the ones woken up by the army. Even though they entered a house where their target didn’t live, they stayed there for about one and a half hours, searching all the rooms.
Haytham al-Khatib told me about his 6-year-old son’s reaction to waking up to see dozens of soldiers in his house, “he asked me to close the door, because he didn’t want to see them.” Haytham himself was prevented when he wanted to record the raid in his family’s houses – the soldiers simply locked him in a room for more than an hour, away from his children and wife. The children in the houses are ages 1,5 and 8 years old, and this is not the first time they have seen their homes raided at night.
However, after 1.5 hours of searching for the target in three houses, two of which he doesn’t reside in, Ashraf al-Khatib was not found. Five weeks ago Ashraf was shot in his leg with live ammunition by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in Bil’in. The bullet went through his leg, breaking the bone. Even though he was heavily injured and in major pain, the soldiers tried to arrest him. Luckily he was brought to safety, and then taken to a hospital for surgery by fellow protesters. Tonight the army decided to come and take him in front of his wife and 1.5 year old daughter instead.
The soldiers finally retreated from the targeted houses by foot, walking toward the military road that follows the illegal segregation fence in Bil’in, at about 4.30 AM. The village of Bil’in has suffered from frequent night raids over the last few years, and a number of villagers have been taken for interrogation and imprisoned for their non-violent resistance to the occupation and segregation wall on Bil’in’s land.
Speaking out on Kashmir and Palestine in the US
Yasmin Qureshi, The Electronic Intifada, 9 November 2010
The United States has become a battleground for both the struggles of the peoples of Palestine and Kashmir, for freedom from military occupation and for justice. Awareness amongst the US public is broadened as the repression of both struggles grows ever more violent, and meanwhile those wishing to stifle debate on these issues in the US resort to harassment and intimidation.
The same day that renowned activist and writer Arundhati Roy commented that “Kashmir was never an integral part of India,” for which her home was later attacked, I was subjected to harassment here in the US while I spoke about the human rights situation in Kashmir. Though not threatened in the way that Roy was, what we both experienced were attempts to silence us. Forces sympathetic to the same right-wing ideology as those who attacked Roy mobilized their ranks by putting out an alert stating: “An Indian Muslim Woman is speaking about azadi [freedom] of Kashmiris and we should protest.”
After my presentation at the main public library in San Jose, California last month, I was told by one member of the audience that “You are the very reason why we Hindus hate Muslims,” and that comment was followed by many that were worse. I was called an extremist and told “Your presentation is a lie; this is India-bashing.” The abuse I received will be familiar to those who have been on the receiving end of the backlash when speaking about the Palestinian cause.
Indeed, a week earlier, Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa was called an extremist by Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz at the Boston Book Festival after she presented well-established facts about Palestine. He resorted to name calling and ad hominem attacks.
Israel and India are often represented in US media as bastions of democracy in the Middle East and South Asia, respectively. Supporters of the policies of both governments delegitimize any resistance or criticism and discourage revelation of the truth through intimidation and personal attacks.
Kashmir is the most militarized zone in the world with close to 700,000 Indian troops. According to Professor Angana Chatterji of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), between the years of 1989 and 2000, “In Kashmir, 70,000 are dead, over 8,000 have been disappeared and 250,000 have been displaced … India’s military governance penetrates every facet of life. … The hyper-presence of militarization forms a graphic shroud over Kashmir: detention and interrogation centers, army cantonments, abandoned buildings, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, detour signs, deserted public squares, armed personnel, counter-insurgents and vehicular and electronic espionage” (“Kashmir: A Time For Freedom,” Greater Kashmir, 25 September 2010).
Because she has spoken out, Chatterji has become a target of right-wing Hindutva groups — those espousing an exclusivist Hindu nationalist ideology in India that often denigrates and denies the legitimacy of non-Hindus in India. Hindutva groups in the US and India have attacked her because of her work tracking funding to Hindutva groups from the US after the 2002 pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat and more recently as co-conveyor of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir. Chatterji told me: “I was threatened with rape by Hindutva groups in 2005. Since announcing the Kashmir Tribunal in April 2008, each time I have entered or left India since, I have been stopped or detained at immigration.” Richard Shapiro, her partner and chair and associate professor at CIIS, was banned from entering India on 1 November 2010.
Hindutva groups try to scuttle any broader discussion about human rights violations in Kashmir, the conditional annexation by India in 1947 or right to self-determination by limiting it to the issue of the displacement and killings of the upper caste minority Kashmiri Hindu Pandits in the late 1980s and by insisting that Kashmir is not an international issue.
Similarly, Zionists seeking to draw attention away from Israel’s abuses of Palestinians’ human rights often focus exclusively on suicide bombings or the rule of Hamas. Their aim is to silence any discussion of the historic Palestinian demands for the implementation of the refugees’ right of return, an end to the military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and equality for Palestinian citizens in Israel.
And the front line in the battle to influence US public opinion towards both the Kashmir and Palestine struggles can be found at the university campus.
“There is a well-orchestrated and funded campaign of intimidation and harassment by Zionist and Hindutva groups on campuses to target academics,” says Sunaina Maira, Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis campus. Zionist academics tried to pressure the University of California, Berkeley to cancel an event last month titled “What Can American Academia Do to Realize Justice for Palestinians,” organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine. In a letter to the school’s chancellor, the groups urged him to withdraw official university sponsorship of the event and publicly condemn the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid at the school’s campus.
A similar attempt was made in 2006 by Indian American members of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, when they tried to cancel a panel titled “South Asian-Arab solidarity against Israeli apartheid” at Stanford University. The objective was to bring South Asians and Arabs together to take a unified stand against US imperialism and Israeli apartheid and speak up against the Zionist-Hindutva alliances. Despite the attempts by outside groups to stifle free speech, both these events eventually did take place on the campuses and were quite successful.
The attempts to silence those who speak out in the US are not the only thing that Kashmir and Palestine have in common. Both Kashmiris and Palestinians are struggling for justice and freedom against highly-militarized occupations. The recent protests by stone-throwing Kashmiri youth drew comparisons to the first intifada in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
And it is perhaps the linking of these struggles that those who stand in the way of freedom for oppressed peoples fear the most. Notably, Zionists and Hindutva advocates have adopted a similar Islamophobic language and worldview that considers any grievances or struggles by Muslims to be simply a cover for “jihadism” or “wahhabism” and thus justifies treating all such movements for justice — however they are conducted — as “terrorist.”
While the situations in Kashmir and Palestine are not completely analogous, in recent years India and Israel have fostered political and military links, including arms sales, joint intelligence, trade agreements and cultural exchanges.
Historically India has been supportive of the Palestinian struggle. But in 1992 India established diplomatic relations with Israel and ties were further strengthened in 2000 when India Home Minister L.K. Advani visited Israel; Advani is considered the architect of the rise of the Hindutva movement in the 1980s and ’90s. Today India is the largest buyer of Israel’s arms and Israel is training Indian military units in “counter-terrorist” tactics and urban warfare to be used against Kashmiris and resistance groups in northeast and central India.
The repressive governments of both India and Israel enjoy a warm relationship with the the US. Bilateral defense ties between US and India — based on the new strategic realities of Asia — is one of the objectives of US President Barack Obama’s current visit to India, according to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), a Washington-based think tank. The US also gives $3 billion in military aid to Israel annually.
Such alliances between states, which aim to perpetuate injustice and maintain regimes that are rejected by those forced to live under them, underscore the need for education and solidarity among supporters of those long denied their freedom, equality and self-determination.
Those in the US who defend the status quo may resort to tactics of intimidation. But just as state repression in Kashmir and Palestine has failed to quell those struggles for freedom, those of us in the US concerned with justice in Palestine and Kashmir — and the US government’s role in each — will not be intimidated into silence.
Yasmin Qureshi is a San Francisco Bay Area professional and human rights activist involved in social justice movements in South Asia and Palestine. Her article on Kashmir, “Democracy Under the Barrel of a Gun,” was published in June 2010 by CounterPunch and ZCommunications.
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Book Review
‘Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison’: A Tale of Two Diaries
By Jill Erzen | The Defender | October 13, 2026
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary reveals a “mind-numbing” contradiction between what the former top U.S. infectious disease official knew about COVID-19 and what he told the public, senior White House adviser Peter Navarro, Ph.D., said last week on “American Thought Leaders.”
In his new book, “Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison,” due out Oct. 20, Navarro compares Fauci’s private entries to his own pandemic-era diary, and uses what he calls “a tale of two diaries” to argue that Fauci should face criminal prosecution.
“I show, actually, how a prosecution can and should happen … at the state level, most likely,” Navarro said. “He should wind up in prison, and we’ve got the receipts in this book to put him there.”
Navarro said Fauci repeatedly acknowledged important facts in private, then publicly pursued policies that contradicted those facts — with devastating consequences.
“What he says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements that it’s mind-numbing,” Navarro said.
Navarro examines the lasting damage caused by lockdowns and other pandemic policies, and the ongoing toll of long COVID.
His book also addresses questions about vaccine safety, including why healthy young people faced COVID-19 vaccination mandates despite concerns about myocarditis, and why women were not warned about miscarriage risks linked to the shots. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Jennifer Kavanagh: Why the U.S. Should Pull Back From the First Island Chain
- Yemen denounces international community’s silence on Saudi aggression, siege
- UAE and Saudi Arabia move toward renewed coordination against Sanaa
- How Iran’s two-week retaliatory strikes exposed cracks in US military architecture in Persian Gulf
- The mother of all propaganda: Why the hype over US MOAB strike against Iran is nothing but theater
- Iran says it possesses technology behind US 14-ton GBU bunker-buster
- Trump asks Iran not to retaliate after he strikes Pickaxe Mountain – w/ Prof. Marandi
- Vice President J.D. Vance’s Deceptive ‘Antiwar’ Campaign Speech
- Iran: Palestinians’ rights must not be compromised in Gaza’s future; US, Israel to blame for Hormuz situation
- Ongoing tales of Syrian chemical weapons
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli rabbi permits occupiers to steal Palestinian olive harvest in West Bank
- Netanyahu’s spin on latest settler attack is laughable – Daily Update
- Israeli soldiers debunk Israel’s talking points
- In West Bank, Israeli settlers are totally out of control – Daily Update
- NPR investigation finds evidence of widespread fraud at mall kiosks tied to Israeli skincare brand
- Tucker Carlson exposes Israeli Lies about the Oct 7th attack, Charlie Kirk, and the U.S.
- Israel has detained thousands of Palestinian children since Oct 7th – over half spent time in solitary, many uncharged
- Israeli Analysis: Is Netanyahu Planning an ‘October Surprise’ Attack Before Israel’s Election?
- Israeli settlers brutally attack Palestinians and Washington Post female photographer, 65
- Words Have Changed, Occupation Continues: The Reality of the Gaza Ceasefire
- No Tricks Zone
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Proifessor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
