Moscow to Sweden: Alleged ‘colliding’ jet 70km from civil route, used NATO tactics
RT | December 14, 2014
Russia’s Defense Ministry has dismissed Sweden’s accusation that an unresponsive Russian military aircraft nearly collided with a passenger plane over the Baltic Sea. The ministry added that NATO planes in the area also have their transponders turned off.
The Russian aircraft in question was 70 kilometers away from the flight path of a passenger jet taking off from Copenhagen, and thus there were “no prerequisites” for collision between the two, Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement. He also denied allegations that the military jet was flying right above southern Sweden, breaching its airspace.
“The flight was in strict accordance with international laws on the use of airspace and did not violate state borders while remaining at a safe distance from the routes of civil aircrafts,” Konashenkov said.
Earlier on Saturday, Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told local radio that the Russian jet had its transponders turned off so it could fly undetected, and claimed that it nearly crashed into a passenger plane over Sweden.
“This is serious. This is inappropriate. This is outright dangerous when you turn off the transponder,” Hultqvist said.
Konashenkov called Hultqvist’s assessment of the Russian jet being invisible – and thus dangerous – a “deception,” pointing out that none of NATO’s spy and patrol jets operating in the region have their transponders turned on. That, however, does not prevent Russia from detecting them.
“I want to particularly stress that the flights of NATO military planes in the international space on Russia’s borders – which have intensified more than threefold over the last months – are always conducted with disabled transponders. But that does not mean that the Russian airspace control are not able to detect them,” the spokesman stressed.
As recently as December 12, the country’s detection system spotted a NATO RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in the same area where the supposed “incident” with the Russian jet took place – only closer to the civilian aircraft route, Konashenkov revealed.
NATO has recently stepped up its military flights in the region, due to a perceived Russian threat and the need to reassure the allied Baltic states. It comes against the backdrop of tensions over Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the defense minister of the non-NATO Sweden announced that the nation is planning to retrain about 7,500 reservists who have served in the Swedish army since 2004.
“The armed forces will be able to carry out fully-manned war preparations which will result in increased operational capacity,” Hultqvist explained, justifying the plans.
Peace activist Jan Oberg told RT that the move is in line with the anti-Russian mood in the country’s media and politics, triggered by the Ukraine crisis.
“The whole thing comes from the Ukrainian crisis – and that was predominantly not created by Russia, but by the West,” Oberg said. “It could be very much to show that we are doing something. You have to follow up on the fact that the Swedish media and political debate in this country are very anti-Russian and that the interpretation what happened in Ukraine has not been very balanced.”
“There is a very uniform media structure in this country. I am sad to say that it is the case. It has become worse over time.”
Back in October, Swedish media went on a wild goose chase for a phantom submarine, alleged to be Russian – even though the knowledge of identity was later denied by the Swedish military.
It all started with a blurry image. A week of searches led to nothing, but cost the Swedish taxpayers almost $3 million dollars.
NATO’s reach
NATO has recently launched a massive military build-up of troops in the Baltic states and other Eastern European NATO member states, following the crisis in Ukraine.
The alliance argues that the expansion is needed to show support and assure that NATO members are protected from a possible attack by Russia.
The US-led alliance has also been boosting its presence through military exercises held on a regular basis.
NATO’s new chief, Jens Stoltenberg, boasted of the bloc’s successes in December.
“We have already boosted our presence in the eastern part of our alliance. We have five times more planes in the air. Our forces start an exercise every two days. And we have also increased the number of ships in the Baltic and the Black Seas,” Stoltenberg told reporters.
One of the most recent war games included servicemen from nine NATO member states participating in nearly two weeks of military exercises in Lithuania.
However, Moscow sees NATO expansion towards its borders as an aggressive move, and a violation of post-Cold War agreements.
In early December, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov called the build-up of NATO forces in Eastern Europe hostile and destabilizing to the Baltic, once the safest region in Europe.
In November, Moscow said that NATO exercises next to Russian borders have “a clearly anti-Russian nature,” and will scarcely contribute to European safety.
READ MORE:
Retraining reservists and rearming! Baltic countries got bellicose over ‘Russian threat’
Mistaken identity: French plane entered Swedish air space – not Russian as reported
Sweden confirms mysterious foreign vessel entered its waters back in October
Iron Sword 2014: NATO stages massive military drill in Lithuania
NATO destabilizing Baltic by stationing nuke-capable aircraft – Moscow
New calls for return of Guantanamo Brit, after 13 years of torture
Reprieve | December 11, 2014
In the wake of a new report on US abuses post-9/11, calls have been renewed for the return of a British resident held without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay for the past 13 years.
Shaker Aamer, a Londoner with a British wife and four British children, was captured and tortured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2001 before his rendition to Guantanamo Bay in 2002. His ordeal has included a litany of abuses similar to those described in the US Senate report on CIA torture, a portion of which was released this week. The details of CIA torture revealed in the report have provoked widespread condemnation.
As one of the first five prisoners taken to Bagram Air Force Base in late December 2001, Mr Aamer was forced to stay awake for nine days, beaten, denied food, and tied up in such a way as to risk strangling himself if he moved. Other times, he was forced to stand up for over 16 hours a day.
During his 13 years at Guantanamo Bay, Mr Aamer has been repeatedly subjected to physical violence – including regular beatings and “forcible cell extractions” (FCEs), at times as often as eight per day. He has also been forced into prolonged periods of solitary confinement, protracted sleep deprivation, manipulation of the temperature around him, and humiliating ‘genital searches.’
Earlier this year, Mr Aamer said: “The worst thing about torture is that you don’t know how to think, what to do, how to feel. You know you have your mind, but you don’t know how to react, which is horrible because you feel vulnerable. It’s terrible.”
The UK government has repeatedly stated that it wants Mr Aamer released from Guantanamo and returned to his family in London. Mr Aamer’s lawyer, Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith believes that he is still imprisoned because of the evidence he might give around UK complicity in torture. He has said: “It is deeply suspicious that the UK won’t say why their friends in the US refuse to transfer Shaker home to London.”
Did Theresa May lobby Senate Committee on CIA report?
Home Secretary Theresa May was one of several UK officials who met with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) ahead of the publication of its report on torture by the US and its allies, it’s emerged.
Documents unearthed by legal charity Reprieve reveal that from 2009, 24 meetings were held between UK Government officials or ministers and SSCI members. The Home Secretary met with the Committee in 2011 “in her capacity as Home Secretary”, while other UK Government visitors to the SSCI included former and current UK ambassadors to the US.
The SSCI began its formal inquiry into the CIA torture programme in 2009, and the timing of the UK meetings with the Committee have raised concerns that the UK may have attempted to influence the contents of the report.
Yesterday, Downing Street admitted that redactions were requested by the UK on “national security grounds” – an apparent shift from a claim made earlier this week, when the Prime Minister’s spokesman said there had been no such UK requests made.
Spinning the ‘warmest year’
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | December 9, 2014
The buzz is intensifying about 2014 possibly being the warmest year globally in the historical temperature record.
The spin
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a Press Release on 3 Dec: 2014 on course to be one of the hottest, possibly hottest, on record. Excerpts:
WMO’s provisional statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2014 indicated that the global average air temperature over land and sea surface for January to October was about 0.57° Centigrade (1.03 Fahrenheit) above the average of 14.00°C (57.2 °F) for the 1961-1990 reference period, and 0.09°C (0.16 °F) above the average for the past ten years (2004-2013).
If November and December maintain the same tendency, then 2014 will likely be the hottest on record, ahead of 2010, 2005 and 1998. This confirms the underlying long-term warming trend. It is important to note that differences in the rankings of the warmest years are a matter of only a few hundredths of a degree, and that different data sets show slightly different rankings.
“The provisional information for 2014 means that fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “There is no standstill in global warming,” he said.
“What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives. What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the northern hemisphere,” he said.
“Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and associated atmospheric concentrations are committing the planet to a much more uncertain and inhospitable future. WMO and its Members will continue to improve forecasts and services to help people cope with more frequent and damaging extreme weather and climate conditions,” said Mr Jarraud.
The provisional statement was published to inform the annual climate change negotiations taking place in Lima, Peru. WMO also updated its acclaimed Weather Reports for the Future series, with scenarios for the weather in 2050 based on the Fifth Assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, which is co-sponsored by WMO and the UNEP. Newly added reports are for Peru, France, Viet Nam, Spain, Canada and Norway, painting a compelling picture of what life could be like on a warmer planet.
Matt Ridley has a subsequent article in The Times : Beware the corruption of science. Subtitle: Environmental researchers are increasingly looking for evidence that fits their ideology rather than seeking the truth. Excerpts (from the GWPF article):
Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.
In any case, the year is not over, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there’s a political climate summit in Lima this week. The scientists of WMO allowed themselves to be used politically. Not that they were reluctant. To squeeze and cajole the data until they just crossed the line, the WMO “reanalysed” a merger of five data sets. Maybe that was legitimate but, given how the institutions that gather temperature data have twice this year been caught red-handed making poorly justified adjustments to “homogenise” and “in-fill” thermometer records in such a way as to cool down old records and warm up new ones, I have my doubts.
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door. Imagine if bankers were in charge of measuring inflation.
Typically, Michael Mann responds to Ridley’s article with this tweet:
Michael E. Mann: Latest #climatescience smearer @mattwridley has a disturbing record of disinformation & denial. Via @SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Matt_Ridley
Data and uncertainty
Last week, I received the following query from a reporter:
I’m covering the release of the WMO’s provisional climate statement for 2014. It says 2014 is on track to become one of the hottest, if not the hottest, years on record. A lot of people here at the UN climate talks in Lima say this shows there is no slowdown in warming. What is your take?
My response:
We won’t really have a good assessment on the temperatures for 2014 until about March 2015, when all of the observations have been assembled and quality controlled. The different temperature datasets and analyses give different results, which reflects the uncertainties in the data and analysis methods. Even if one or several data sets do find 2014 to be the hottest year, given the uncertainties one can only conclude that this is one of the top 5 or so warmest years.
The real issue that is of concern to me is the growing divergence between the the observed global temperature anomalies and what was predicted by climate models. Even if 2014 is somehow unambiguously the warmest year on record, this won’t do much to alleviate the growing discrepancy between climate model predictions and the observations.
If it does turn out to be the hottest does that indicate the pause is over?
One year won’t really make a difference, unless it is extremely warm. And then 2015 would need to be even warmer than 2014. So declaring the pause to be ‘over’ will require continued warming. Again, the pause itself is not of such great significance; rather it is the growing divergence between climate model predictions and the observations – one warm year isn’t going to really change this.
—-
The differences among the different global surface temperature analyses are illustrated by this figure that Steve Mosher provided for my recent Senate testimony:
From the main text of the WMO report:
Global average temperatures are also estimated using reanalysis systems, which use a weather forecasting system to combine many sources of data to provide a more complete picture of global temperatures. According to data from the reanalysis produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the January to October combined land and ocean global average temperature would place 2014 as third or fourth highest for this dataset, which runs from 1958. Based on these lines of evidence it is most likely that 2014 is currently one of the four warmest years on record, but there is a possibility that the final rank will lie outside this range.
The reanalysis systems have been underutilized for estimated temperature trends, warmest years, etc. Because of changes to observing systems, the reanalyses have generally not been used for trend analyses. However, particularly for examining recent trends (e.g. the pause), I would say that the observing systems have arguably been sufficiently homogeneous since 1989 for this purpose. The great advantage of using the reanalyses is that ‘infilling’ for regions without observations is accomplished through data assimilation using a numeral weather prediction system (for details, see previous CE post reanalyses.org). This ‘infilling’ is done in a dynamically consistent way, which IMO is much better than the various statistical infilling or kriging strategies.
With regards to ‘warmest year’, Gavin Schmidt tweeted an interesting graph that illustrates record warmth estimates, although it is not clear what constitutes the distributions. In any event, it is seen that 2014 has a similar distribution to 1998, 2005, 2010. With this visualization, it is seen that 1998 clearly stood out as ‘warmest year’ at the time.
Implications for the pause
Well, ranking 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014 as the ‘warmest years’ seems very consistent with a plateau in surface temperatures since 1998. Even if 2014 maintains its status among the top 4, how does this impact the ‘pause’ narrative?
RealClimate, Tamino, and probably others are busy trying to convince that the pause doesn’t exist. The preferred data set for such analyses is Cowtan and Way; I am not a fan of this dataset owing to concerns about how they treat the Arctic [link]. Statistical games can be played, and you can infer that there is a pause (or not).
The real issue is the growing divergence between climate model projections and the surface temperature observations, illustrated in this diagram by Ed Hawkins:
You can see that using the Cowtan and Way data set doesn’t help much with regards to the discrepancy: Cowtan and Way is within the error bars of HadCRUT4.
Updating this diagram to include 2014 is going to increase the discrepancy between the models and observations, because the climate models show an inexorable warming.
JC summary
Focusing on the ‘warmest year’ is a pointless exercise, unless the warm anomaly is as large as 1998. Focusing on the ‘pause’ is mainly significant in context of the comparison between climate model projections and surface temperatures.
Attempts to spin 2014 as a possible ‘warmest year’ is exactly that: spin designed to influence the Lima deliberations. While the WMO report was not unreasonable, their press release was a clear attempt to influence the Lima deliberations in the direction of being ‘alarmed.’
I’ll be waiting until HadCRUT and Berkeley Earth have provided their final 2014 temperature analyses (which will probably be sometime late winter). Particularly with regards to the recent temperature record and the ‘pause’, I think more scrutiny should be given to the various reanalyses, which in principle is probably the best way to provide a truly global analysis.
Alternative Media and the MH17 JIT Reversal
By Ulson Gunnar | New Eastern Outlook | December 8, 2014
After weeks of protests and growing suspicion, Dutch authorities overseeing the investigation of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 have finally included Malaysia as a member of its Joint Investigation Team (JIT).
Malaysia had made it clear it was immensely displeased with its inexplicable exclusion from JIT formed after the downing of MH17 over eastern Ukraine. Including NATO members (Belgium and the Netherlands), a defacto NATO collaborator (Australia) and a potential culprit in the air disaster (Ukraine), Malaysia’s exclusion looked to be a part of an ongoing cover-up amid a larger attempt to use the disaster to frame Russia and advance NATO’s agenda in Eastern Europe.
The conflict amid which MH17 was shot down is perceived to be a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia. That the investigation includes exclusively pro-NATO members or NATO members themselves, both the conduct of the investigation and any conceivable outcome would be highly suspect. Malaysia, the only nation directly effected by the disaster and perceived of being beyond the direct influence of NATO, would have provided a much needed counterbalance.
Now that it has become a member of JIT, analysts must vigilantly watch to ensure it is allowed full access to evidence and equal participatory standings. While Malaysia’s inclusion provides hope that JIT will now be unable to pursue a political agenda with impunity, the possibility is high that NATO will simply cite Malaysia’s inclusion in JIT to legitimize its actions, no matter how biased the conduct of JIT’s investigation may be or how skewed its outcome, even if Malaysia raises protests over both.
Alternative Media’s Role in JIT Reversal
The diminishing primacy of the West’s powerful global media monopoly may be partially why Malaysia was finally included in JIT. Had there been no alternatives to this monopoly, including networks rising up in developing nations and among BRICS, as well as the more decentralized alternative media of “citizen journalists,” Malaysia’s protests simply would have been tuned out and other issues put forward to cover up the glaringly compromised nature of JIT’s original members and their methodology.
It was also revealed that JIT had arranged agreements among members to bar the release of certain information when deemed necessary. With Malaysia excluded from JIT, any number of relevant or incriminating pieces of evidence could have already been purged from the investigation while other pieces of evidence fabricated to take their place. The alternative media played a crucial role in bringing this suspicious arrangement to the public’s attention.
In all, large and growing outrage over what was clearly a politically motivated investigation was given a platform by the alternative media to reach a wider general public. Unable to ignore obvious misconduct in the investigation and a glaring lack of objectivity and impartiality because of this fact, may have forced NATO to include Malaysia despite the obvious restraints it would put on its attempt to whitewash the investigation.
What Malaysia Must Do Now
Malaysia must ask the questions and demand the evidence required to determine whether or not evidence was destroyed or switched during its absence in JIT, then ensure an impartial, objective investigation is pursued to determine the cause of MH17’s fateful crash and who was responsible. It must ensure it is included in all matters of the investigation and that pro-NATO members are unable to pursue avenues unilaterally without Malaysia’s knowledge and input.
If the alternative media did indeed play a role in helping Malaysia obtain a position within JIT, the truest test will be for the same media platform to now ensure NATO does not simply use Malaysia’s inclusion in JIT to force through foregone, biased and deceitful conclusions. The alternative media must help Malaysia bring any grievances it may have with JIT’s other members and their methods during the investigation to the forefront of public attention.
Inconsistencies and findings Malaysia may publish that run contradictory to NATO’s conclusions and innuendos must also be brought to the public’s attention via the alternative media, considering much of MH17’s investigation has either been spun or covered up entirely by the West’s media monopolies.
What the Drawn Out, Suspicious Investigation Already Tells Us
Had NATO truly been sure of Russia’s culpability in MH17’s downing, carrying out a quick, transparent, and inclusive investigation none could question would have been at the forefront of NATO’s agenda. Instead, a shadowy investigation carried out by a stacked Joint Investigation Team, excluding a nation effected directly by the disaster for no apparent reason besides its residing beyond NATO’s direct sphere of influence reeks of a cover up or at best, an attempt to spin an uncertain chain of events into a politically and strategically favorable outcome.
For JIT’s original members not to have vocally protested this suspicious behavior and multiple conflicts of interest, illustrate that much of JIT’s work regardless of Malaysia’s inclusion in the process lacks the legitimacy of a truly objective and impartial process.
That NATO cannot conduct the investigation in a transparent manner and has resorted to multiple attempts to imply Russian culpability before presenting concrete evidence suggests there is either no evidence to implicate Russia at this time, or there exists evidence that directly contradict NATO’s claims.
Regardless, it will be up to the alternative media to provide the necessary checks and balances the Western media should, but won’t provide itself. Independent analysts must continue examining the ongoing investigation and reporting inconsistencies in both methods and outcomes. By stopping NATO from exploiting tragedy to advance its own agenda amid the MH17 case, future disasters may see a speedy, objective investigation and perhaps, may not occur at all.
Official denies having confirmed Iranian anti-ISIS strikes in Iraq
Al-Akhbar | December 9, 2014
A senior Iranian official on Tuesday denied remarks attributed to him in a British newspaper saying Tehran had carried out airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group in Iraq.
The Guardian last week quoted deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Rahimpour as saying that Iran had conducted strikes against ISIS for “the defense of the interests of our friends in Iraq.”
His remarks appeared to contradict the official position of Iran, which has not confirmed it carried out the attacks as reported by the Pentagon.
Rahimpour on Tuesday however said he was misquoted, and that his remarks had been made in response to a question on possible airstrikes.
He said he was referring to “the general way in which Iraq is allied to Iran and that we are ready to provide military assistance if the Iraqi government asks for it.”
“My comments were misinterpreted,” Rahimpour told AFP on the sidelines of an international conference in Tehran.
Iran has consistently denied having troops in Iraq, and was not invited to join a US-led military coalition against ISIS, which has carved out a vast region of control in the country and in neighboring Syria.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said he had no knowledge of Iranian airstrikes against ISIS in his country.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Algerian court clears ex-Guantanamo detainee
Reprieve | December 8, 2014
The criminal court in Algiers today dropped all charges against Reprieve’s client, Ahmad Belbacha, citing “lack of evidence” as the reason for its decision.
The decision overturned a 20-year sentence which the court had given Ahmad in 2009 – in a hearing that neither Ahmad, his family, or any lawyer attended, or were even informed was due to take place.
Ahmad was released from Guantanamo Bay in March 2014, seven years after his case was first reviewed by a Bush-era panel and he was cleared for transfer. Ahmad’s file was scrutinised again in 2009 by six independent US government agencies, including the CIA and FBI, who unanimously agreed that he should be released from US detention.
After his eventual release from Guantanamo, and return to Algeria, Ahmad was summoned in June for a retrial of the 20 year sentence he had received in absentia. The judge in the June hearing postponed the case, because the prosecution file was empty. Today’s ruling – in which the judge cited “lack of evidence” before throwing the case out and acquitting Ahmad of all charges – finally marks the end of more than a decade of struggle to prove his innocence.
Alka Pradhan, staff attorney at human rights NGO Reprieve said: “We are so happy for Ahmad and his family, but they should never have been made to pay this heavy price. The Algerian justice system today gave Ahmad what he never received from the Americans, and which 136 men detained in Guantanamo today still fail to receive from them: a day in court, a chance to present a defence, and a public examination of the facts. What that court in Algiers found today was that the ‘evidence’ against Ahmad wasn’t just paper thin – it didn’t exist at all. We hope that all those other men still held without trial will soon get their chance to show the same.”
Israeli Occupation Authorities re-impose female detainee’s previous sentence
Palestine Information Center – December 8, 2014
RAMALLAH — The Israeli Occupation Authorities re-imposed the previous sentence of the re-jailed female ex-detainee Bushra al-Tawil after being released in the Wafa al-Ahrar swap deal in 2011, human rights sources said.
Ahrar center for prisoners’ studies recalled that al-Tawil was released in 2011, after spending five months of her 16-month sentence, in the swap deal. However, she was re-arrested following the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli soldiers in June.
Al-Tawil is a university student at Ramallah Media College and an activist in prisoners’ issue. Her parents were also arrested by the Israeli occupation forces more than once.
The Dirty Little Secret behind the “Global Terrorism Index” (GTI)
The Omission of Israeli Terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
By Karin Brothers | Global Research | December 6, 2014
The Global Terrorism Index from 2000 – 2013[1] was launched on December 5, 2014, endorsed by such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu and Jane Goodall; it describes itself as ”a comprehensive study that accounts for the direct and indirect impact of terrorism in 162 countries.” The GTI not only lists the countries most affected by terrorism (Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan), and the major terrorists (Muslims: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram and ISIS), but also advises on the most effective ways of dealing with it, noting that terrorism is connected more to injustice than to poverty.
Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), which also produces the Global Peace Index, the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) which is collected and collated by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which is supported by the Department of Homeland Security.
A Self-Serving Definition of Terror Incidents?
The Global Terrorism Index uses data from START’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD) which includes incidents meeting the following criteria:
1. The incident must be intentional – the result of a conscious calculation on the part of a perpetrator.
2. The incident must entail some level of violence or threat of violence — including property violence, as well as violence against people
3. The perpetrators of the incidents must be sub-national actors. This database does not include acts of state terrorism.
In addition to this baseline definition, two of the following three criteria have to be met in order to be included in the START database from 1997:
… The violent act was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal.
… The violent act included evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate victims.
… The violent act was outside the precepts of international humanitarian law.
There is a contradiction in the definition of terrorist incidents in the study. While the GTI claims that their database only includes acts which are contrary to international humanitarian law, the “two out of three” criteria allows for legal actions to be included. Legal actions included in the GTD database are Palestinian resistance attacks on the Israeli military. [2]
A unique feature of the GTI is described as a “lagged scoring”, or replicating a terror event for up to five years to weight the estimated psychological impact of a terror event. Examples of such scoring were given as the bombing of a marketplace or the 2011 massacre in Norway of 77 youth.
Global Terror Database Notes and Anomalies
A cursory look at the Global Terror Database[2] for Israel indicates various problems. Some of the listed incidents are inadequately documented, with “unknown” location. Actions attributed to Hamas are counted despite what should have been its state exclusion and the exclusion for legal actions. The “West Bank and Gaza Strip” is listed but the incidents involving Palestinians are far from complete.
The Terror Omission
It is only in Appendix C that the Global Terrorism Index mentions that despite a “notable amount of terrorism” in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), this region is excluded “by Global Peace Index convention”. Since the GTI was supposed to be using the START Global Terrorism Database, it is not clear why the Global Peace Index “convention” was relevant; also, the GPI’s source, the Economist Intelligence Unit, does include the Palestinian Territories. By excluding the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and pre-2006 Gaza Strip from the survey, the attacks by Israeli settlers are omitted.
It becomes apparent why the occupied Palestinian territories were excluded when the incidence of Israeli settler violence is examined. According to their definition of terrorism, the Israeli settlers’ violence not only qualifies as terrorism, but puts them near the top of the listing of the most violent terrorists. With over 1,750 violent settler attacks fully documented from 2006 – 2013[3], the only group credited with more terror attacks was the Taliban, with 2,757 incidents from 2002 – 2013. Al Qaeda’s 1,089, Boko Haram’s 750 and ISIL’s 492 attacks aren’t even close.[4] When the numbers of settler attacks on Palestinians are combined with the number of non-military Israeli attacks on the Arabs within Israel, the problem of Israeli violence within the tiny state can be seen to be one of staggering proportions. Yet, according to the GTI, Israel was not in the 20 worst states for terrorism.
Moreover, the number of violent incidents, as the report points out, should be weighted by factors reflecting the psychological impact on a victim community. About half of the incidents listed in the GTI report were from explosions, which typically aim for a broader, less personal, target community. The settler attacks on Palestinians tend to be of a more personal nature: shootings, running down civilians with vehicles, beatings, and damage or destruction of civilian property, such as razing agricultural land and raiding houses. Children have been frequent targets, as are Palestinian farmers and workers. Because settlers are allowed to attack Palestinians with impunity from prosecution and often target those whose neighbouring lands they want, settler attacks tend to be more traumatic and should be accorded the full psychological weighting factor.
Are Israeli Settlers Comparable to Muslim terrorists?
Although the actions of Israeli settlers fit the definition of terrorism, can they be considered as comparable to the organizations accused of terrorism? The Muslim organizations accused of being terrorist are a variety of political and/or religious ideological movements that typically arose as a reaction to western power. Israeli settlers are by definition people who have chosen to violate international humanitarian laws by living on territory they have no right to; the settler movement is led by right-wing, religious extremists. That some settlers make the choice for economic motives is similar to the ISIS or Taliban fighters who join because they need the wages.
Additionally, settler attackers are doubly guilty of terrorism: the act of living illegally on Palestinian land fits this definition of terrorism; subsequent attacks on Palestinians are further acts of terrorism.
The Global Implications of Not Naming Settler Attacks as “Terrorism”
The Israeli settlements — all of which are illegal – have been identified as a major impediment to peace. The refusal of a major “global” terrorism report to name the Israeli settlers as one of the groups most responsible for terrorism not only misrepresents a major source of regional violence but exposes the Global Terrorism Index as a propaganda tool that supports a U.S. agenda.
In recent years, governments have been attempting to thwart terrorism by blocking supportive fund-raising. When it comes to Israeli settlements, however, the US and Canada actually encourage fund-raising by giving organizations (such as Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and the Jewish National Fund) financial support in the form of donor tax-deductions.
Charities which provide funds for the Israeli settlements should be regarded as terror-financing organizations. They should not only lose their tax-deductible status, but they should be banned because they support the violation of international humanitarian law. The terror-financing laws that are being strictly enforced for Muslim charities should be applied to Christian and Jewish charities as well. Governments that do not recognize settler violence as terrorism are feeding what Naomi Klein once termed “the engine that keeps the War on Terror running”: injustice in Israel.
Notes
1. The Global Terrorism Index is at: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Terrorism%20Index%20Report%202014_0.pdf
2. Global Terror Database on Israel: http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?search=israel&sa.x=0&sa.y=0
3. Annual reports of the Palestinians Center for Human Rights Gaza (PCHRGaza) at: http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=40&Itemid=172,
Israeli settler attacks from 2000-2013 accounted for 63 deaths, and from 2006 – 2013 at least 1766 violent attacks. (From 2002 – 2013, there were 35 deaths and over 1750 attacks documented.)
While PCHRGaza has published weekly reports that have included settler violence since 1997, it only started to compile the total number of settler attacks in their annual reports from 2006 onwards. One would have to examine the weekly reports for 2000 to 2005 to obtain the annual totals that should have been used for the Global Terrorism Index’s 2000 – 2013 study.
The PCHRGaza noted on at least some of their annual reports that their totals for Israeli settler attacks were not complete because they included only those for which they had documentation. Al Haq and the UN also kept documentation of settler attacks, only some of which overlap PCHRGaza’s.
4. Global Terrorism Index “Targets and Tactics, 2000 – 2013″: totals of incidents by group p. 51
Google Earth photos for Morsi’s detention place and previous statement by the Interior Minister confirms the ‘Sisi Office Leak’
MEMO | December 6, 2014
Arabi 21 has obtained two Google Earth pictures of the “hangar” in which President Morsi was held after the third of July military coup. The Mekameleen Satellite Channel‘s leaks on Thursday’s leaks on Thursday focused on the attempt of the Supreme Military Council to modify the hangar and convert it into an official prison by means of falsification with the acquiescence of the Interior Ministry and Public Prosecutor Hisham Barakat.
The first Google Earth picture of the “hangar” taken on 5 February 2014 shows that it existed within the military unit close to the Military Academy in Abu Qir.
The second picture taken on 21 March shows the modifications undertaken on the military unit’s wall whereby the “hangar” ended up an independent building outside the borders and the wall of the unit, with a wide road leading to it from the main public street.
Meanwhile, new evidence emerged confirming the authenticity of the leak and the accuracy of its substance. Egyptian Interior Minister Brig. Gen. Muhammad Ibrahim had stated in a broadcasted TV interview a year ago that President Muhammad Morsi was not held in a prison at the time of the military coup on the 3rd of July but was detained “elsewhere”.
Answering a question put to him by journalist Amr Adeeb as to whether Morsi wore the “white fatigue” – in reference to prison uniform, Ibrahim said that prison rules were not applied to Morsi at the time. He confirmed in the interview that the Interior Ministry was responsible for Morsi and that he was sent to one of its prisons only after he appeared in court, months after his secret detention.
What Ibrahim said confirms what was contained in the leaked audio recording aired by Egyptian satellite channel Mekameleen. The leaks came out of Sisi’s office and involved a discussion about the endeavour of the Military Council to convert a “hangar” that belonged to it into a prison under the responsibility of the interior ministry in order to justify detaining Morsi within it. … Full article
See Also:
Leaked Audio Shows Egypt’s Coup Leaders as a Criminal Syndicate
Golden Age of Pearl Harbor
By David Swanson | War is a Crime | December 5, 2014
As we read Ulysses on Bloomsday every June 16th (or we should if we don’t) I think that every December 7th should not only commemorate the Great Law of 1682 that banned war in Pennsylvania but also mark Pearl Harbor, not by celebrating the state of permawar that has existed for 73 years, but by reading The Golden Age by Gore Vidal and marking with a certain Joycean irony the golden age of anti-isolationist imperial mass-killing that has encompassed the lives of every U.S. citizen under the age of 73.
Golden Age Day should include public readings of Vidal’s novel and the glowing endorsements of it by the Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, and every other corporate paper in the year 2000, also known as the year 1 BWT (before the war on terra). Not a single one of those newspapers has ever, to my knowledge, printed a serious straightforward analysis of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into World War II. Yet Vidal’s novel — presented as fiction, yet resting entirely on documented facts — recounts the story with total honesty, and somehow the genre used or the author’s pedigree or his literary skill or the length of the book (too many pages for senior editors to be bothered with) grants him a license to tell the truth.
Sure, some people have read The Golden Age and protested its impropriety, but it remains a respectable high-brow volume. I may be hurting the cause by openly writing about its content. The trick, which I highly recommend to all, is to give or recommend the book to others without telling them what’s in it.
Despite a filmmaker being a main character in the book, it’s not been made into a film, as far as I know — but a widespread phenomenon of public readings could conceivably make that happen.
In The Golden Age, we follow along inside all the closed doors, as the British push for U.S. involvement in World War II, as President Roosevelt makes a commitment to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as the warmongers manipulate the Republican convention to make sure that both parties nominate candidates in 1940 ready to campaign on peace while planning war, as FDR longs to run for an unprecedented third term as a wartime president but must content himself with beginning a draft and campaigning as a drafttime president in a time of supposed national danger, and as FDR works to provoke Japan into attacking on his desired schedule.
The echoes are eerie. Roosevelt campaigns on peace (“except in case of attack”), like Wilson, like Johnson, like Nixon, like Obama, and like those members of Congress just reelected while blatantly and unconstitutionally refusing to stop or authorize the current war. Roosevelt, pre-election, puts in Henry Stimson as a war-eager Secretary of War not altogether unlike Ash Carter as a nominee for Secretary of “Defense.”
Golden Age Day discussions might include some known facts of the matter:
On December 7, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew up a declaration of war on both Japan and Germany, but decided it wouldn’t work and went with Japan alone. Germany, as expected, quickly declared war on the United States.
FDR had tried lying to the American people about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked.
Roosevelt had also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism.
As of December 6, 1941, eighty percent of the U.S. public opposed entering a war. But Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.
On April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet: “It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our side.”
On August 18, 1941, Churchill met with his cabinet at 10 Downing Street. The meeting had some similarity to the July 23, 2002, meeting at the same address, the minutes of which became known as the Downing Street Minutes. Both meetings revealed secret U.S. intentions to go to war. In the 1941 meeting, Churchill told his cabinet, according to the minutes: “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it.” In addition, “Everything was to be done to force an incident.”
From the mid-1930s U.S. peace activists — those people so annoyingly right about recent U.S. wars — were marching against U.S. antagonization of Japan and U.S. Navy plans for war on Japan — the March 8, 1939, version of which described “an offensive war of long duration” that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.
In January 1941, the Japan Advertiser expressed its outrage over Pearl Harbor in an editorial, and the U.S. ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary: “There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government.”
On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
As early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its war with Japan. In November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S. crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
On December 21, 1940, China’s Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been urging them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in Henry Morgenthau’s dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed.
On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the Chinese air force, and the provision of “numerous fighting and bombing planes” to China by the United States. “Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected,” read the subheadline.
By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American planes to be flown by American volunteers trained by Chennault and paid by another front group. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, “wired Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese spies.” Whether or not that was the entire point, this was the letter: “I am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with twenty-four to be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese pilot training program here. Details through normal channels. Warm regards.”
The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force, also known as the Flying Tigers, moved ahead with recruitment and training immediately and were provided to China prior to Pearl Harbor.
On May 31, 1941, at the Keep America Out of War Congress, William Henry Chamberlin gave a dire warning: “A total economic boycott of Japan, the stoppage of oil shipments for instance, would push Japan into the arms of the Axis. Economic war would be a prelude to naval and military war.”
On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, “If we cut the oil off , [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out there.” Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said “was” rather than “is.” The next day, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan. Radhabinod Pal, an Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, called the embargoes a “clear and potent threat to Japan’s very existence,” and concluded the United States had provoked Japan.
On August 7, 1941, the Japan Times Advertiser wrote: “First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya and Burma, with the link broken only in the Thailand peninsula. Now it is proposed to include the narrows in the encirclement, which proceeds to Rangoon.”
By September the Japanese press was outraged that the United States had begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers said, was dying a slow death from “economic war.”
In late October, U.S. spy Edgar Mower was doing work for Colonel William Donovan who spied for Roosevelt. Mower spoke with a man in Manila named Ernest Johnson, a member of the Maritime Commission, who said he expected “The Japs will take Manila before I can get out.” When Mower expressed surprise, Johnson replied “Didn’t you know the Jap fleet has moved eastward, presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?”
On November 3, 1941, the U.S. ambassador sent a lengthy telegram to the State Department warning that the economic sanctions might force Japan to commit “national hara-kiri.” He wrote: “An armed conflict with the United States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”
On November 15th, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as “the Marshall Plan.” In fact we don’t remember it at all. “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” Marshall said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret, which as far as I know they dutifully did.
Ten days later Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary that he’d met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly next Monday.
It has been well documented that the United States had broken the Japanese’ codes and that Roosevelt had access to them. It was through intercept of a so-called Purple code message that Roosevelt had discovered Germany’s plans to invade Russia. It was Hull who leaked a Japanese intercept to the press, resulting in the November 30, 1941, headline “Japanese May Strike Over Weekend.”
That next Monday would have been December 1st, six days before the attack actually came. “The question,” Stimson wrote, “was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”
The day after the attack, Congress voted for war. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin (R., Mont.) stood alone in voting no. One year after the vote, on December 8, 1942, Rankin put extended remarks into the Congressional Record explaining her opposition. She cited the work of a British propagandist who had argued in 1938 for using Japan to bring the United States into the war. She cited Henry Luce’s reference in Life magazine on July 20, 1942, to “the Chinese for whom the U.S. had delivered the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor.” She introduced evidence that at the Atlantic Conference on August 12, 1941, Roosevelt had assured Churchill that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. “I cited,” Rankin later wrote, ” the State Department Bulletin of December 20, 1941, which revealed that on September 3 a communication had been sent to Japan demanding that it accept the principle of ‘nondisturbance of the status quo in the Pacific,’ which amounted to demanding guarantees of the inviolateness of the white empires in the Orient.”
Rankin found that the Economic Defense Board had gotten economic sanctions under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference. On December 2, 1941, the New York Times had reported, in fact, that Japan had been “cut off from about 75 percent of her normal trade by the Allied blockade.” Rankin also cited the statement of Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson, U.S.N., in the Saturday Evening Post of October 10, 1942, that on November 28, 1941, nine days before the attack, Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., (he of the catchy slogan “Kill Japs! Kill Japs!”) had given instructions to him and others to “shoot down anything we saw in the sky and to bomb anything we saw on the sea.”
General George Marshall admitted as much to Congress in 1945: that the codes had been broken, that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-American agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect before Pearl Harbor, and that the United States had provided officers of its military to China for combat duty before Pearl Harbor.
An October 1940 memorandum by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum was acted on by President Roosevelt and his chief subordinates. It called for eight actions that McCollum predicted would lead the Japanese to attack, including arranging for the use of British bases in Singapore and for the use of Dutch bases in what is now Indonesia, aiding the Chinese government, sending a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Philippines or Singapore, sending two divisions of submarines to “the Orient,” keeping the main strength of the fleet in Hawaii, insisting that the Dutch deny the Japanese oil, and embargoing all trade with Japan in collaboration with the British Empire.
The day after McCollum’s memo, the State Department told Americans to evacuate far eastern nations, and Roosevelt ordered the fleet kept in Hawaii over the strenuous objection of Admiral James O. Richardson who quoted the President as saying “Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war.”
The message that Admiral Harold Stark sent to Admiral Husband Kimmel on November 28, 1941, read, “IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT REPEAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT.”
Joseph Rochefort, cofounder of the Navy’s communication intelligence section, who was instrumental in failing to communicate to Pearl Harbor what was coming, would later comment: “It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.”
The night after the attack, President Roosevelt had CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow and Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Information William Donovan over for dinner at the White House, and all the President wanted to know was whether the American people would now accept war. Donovan and Murrow assured him the people would indeed accept war now. Donovan later told his assistant that Roosevelt’s surprise was not that of others around him, and that he, Roosevelt, welcomed the attack. Murrow was unable to sleep that night and was plagued for the rest of his life by what he called “the biggest story of my life” which he never told.
Have a Meaningful Golden Age Day!
Leaked Audio Shows Egypt’s Coup Leaders as a Criminal Syndicate
By ESAM AL-AMIN | CounterPunch | December 5, 2014
The Watergate scandal in the early 1970s exposed Richard Nixon and his inner circle as conspirators who were trying to cover up their criminal involvement in spying against their political opponents. Once it was uncovered, Nixon had to resign the presidency in disgrace, as many of his assistants and senior government officials were convicted and served many years in prison. A majority in Congress at the time, including Republican members, condemned the former president and voted to impeach him. The American public was shocked to witness the level of corruption reaching the highest echelons of their government. Had it not been for the audiotapes that were released by order of the Supreme Court, the extent of Nixon’s lawlessness and lies would never have been revealed or believed.
Now a series of audiotapes involving Egypt’s top military brass, which ousted former President Mohammad Morsi in a military coup in July 2013, were publicly leaked this week. The pro-Muslim Brotherhood satellite channel Mukameleen (Arabic for “We’ll Continue”) released the six audio recordings (see links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in a special nightly program on December 4. Shortly thereafter, the recordings went viral on Arabic-language websites, though most foreign language media outlets have yet to cover them.
The contents of the audio recordings (31 minutes in total) are shocking, as they involve the highest-ranking military rulers in Egypt, including coup leader Gen. Abdelfattah Sisi, conspiring together, falsifying evidence, forging documents, and admitting to criminal behavior on tape, while acknowledging that the legal case concocted against Morsi was in danger of collapsing. The question of who released the recordings is still a mystery but rumors abound. The program presenter at the satellite channel Mukameleen insinuated that the leak came from a source within Sisi’s inner circle that is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and the January 25 revolution. Haitham Abu Khalil, a prominent human rights advocate, tweeted that since the recordings came from within the Defense Ministry, the leaker must be a rival to Gen. Sisi, such as former Chief of Staff Sami Anan who declared his presidential candidacy last spring only to be sidelined by Sisi and ridiculed by his propaganda machine. Meanwhile, opposition leader Ayman Noor told Al Jazeera from his home in exile in Lebanon that the tapes are authentic because he has known the players and could easily identify their voices.
The individuals heard on the recordings comprise some of the major figures who were involved in the military coup and have ruled the country ever since. They include Gen. Mamdouh Shahin, legal advisor to Sisi, Gen. Abbas Kamel, Sisi’s chief aide and office manager, Gen. Mohammad Ibrahim, the interior minister, Gen. Osama El-Gindy, chief of naval forces, and Gen. Mahmoud Hegazi, head of military intelligence, who was later promoted to army chief of staff. The recording also featured Gen. Sisi himself, who was the defense minister at the time before being elected president last May in a vote that was considered by many neutral observers and monitors to be a sham election. In the tapes, Gen. Shahin also described the conspiratorial role of the chief General Prosecutor, Hisham Barakat (who was appointed to the post by the coup leaders) and several of his senior prosecutors including Mustafa Khater and Ibrahim Saleh who have been leading the prosecution teams against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
Conspiracy in Action
It’s not clear when the recordings were made but they probably occurred sometime last spring when Morsi’s defense team challenged the basis for his initial incarceration and petitioned the presiding judges to dismiss all charges against him under the pretext that he was kidnapped by the military with no criminal charges until months later. According to Egyptian law, if the defense team was able to prove that Morsi was illegally detained, he would have to be released, after which he would have most certainly declared that he was the legitimately-elected president by millions of Egyptians.
During the first minute of the recording, Gen. Shahin is heard telling Sisi’s office manager, Gen. Kamel, that General Prosecutor Barakat was in panic mode and had sent him his three leading prosecutors (including Khater and Saleh) and asked him to “fix” his problem. During an earlier court session, government prosecutors falsely told the judges that Morsi was never kidnapped and had always been in the custody of the interior ministry, even though he was actually being held in a military barracks at Abu Qir naval base near Alexandria. Shahin then told Kamel that they needed to provide the prosecutors with “an order of arrest of Morsi signed by interior minister Gen. Ibrahim that must be backdated to the day of the coup.” Shahin then called Ibrahim (min. 2-3) and asked for the forged legal document to be signed by the interior minister. He also asked Ibrahim to make sure that the order was “printed in the official government records” so the order would appear legitimate, adding “as we used to do so during the days of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” – when SCAF issued backdated laws during the military rule in the aftermath of Mubarak’s ouster. On tape Ibrahim is heard readily agreeing, and requesting that Shahin provide him with details to be included in the order including, the address and description of the detention facility.
Shahin and Kamel then called Gen. El-Gindy, the chief of the naval forces, who commanded the naval base where Morsi was detained for several weeks before he was officially charged and transferred to an interior ministry prison. In the next few minutes (starting at min. 5) Shahin tried to convince Gen. El-Gindy to turn over one of his buildings in the base to the interior ministry to be used as a prison for a month until Morsi’s trial ended. When El-Gindy asked why they could not use an existing prison facility and claim that it was the facility used for Morsi’s initial incarceration, Shahin said that this would not work because there was an official report on record written by investigative judge Hasan Samir that gave a detailed description of Morsi’s detention facility that would not match any existing prison under the control of the interior ministry. In one instance Shahin warns (min. 9-11) that unless the prosecutors win this issue in court “the espionage charges and the Ittihadiyya (presidential palace) murder case (against Morsi) would collapse.” Shahin then stated that they would have to plan for the worst-case scenario, as he was certain that the defense team would request physical inspection of the detention facility that the judges may actually grant. In this case, the detention facility must be part of the prison system under the interior ministry and match what was already on the record. However, Gen. El-Gindy expressed skepticism, as he could not transform any existing building in the naval base to become a stand-alone prison and turned over to the interior ministry. Yet, he promised to look into the matter.
In the next audio recording Gens. Shahin and Kamel called military intelligence chief Gen. Hegazi (min. 13) to seek his support in getting Gen. El-Gindy to cooperate. In frustration, Hegazi complained that the military does not get adequate legal counsel and that’s why the military is now “collecting corpses” on the streets. Surprisingly, Shahin who is Sisi’s legal advisor, answered “there is no one here (i.e. in the military) whose specialty is the law in order to provide legal advice.” He further stated that interior minister Ibrahim has already agreed to sign the order and backdate it in order to “give the prosecutors the documents they need.” Hegazi then suggested that they build a “hanger” on the naval base “which the (army’s) engineering department could do in 72 hours”. He added “They could build a separate gate, fence it, put a sign on it and turn it over to the interior ministry as a prison facility.” Shahin was then delighted since the prosecutors told him that, “they had 15 days to finish the task.”
Military chief of staff Gen. Hegazi then called the chief of the naval forces Gen. El-Gindy in the presence of Gen. Shahin (min. 18) and asked if it was possible to build a hanger similar to the detention facility that housed Morsi during his initial incarceration. El-Gindy readily agreed to do it as Sisi’s office manager Gen. Kamel informed him (min. 20) that Sisi said that, “he should spare no cost because the important thing is to do it completely right.” He then added that Sisi instructed the interior ministry “to take over the new detention facility as if they had occupied it for 100 years.”
In the next recording, Shahin tells Kamel that all the falsified documents were now ready and then commented that Kamel “should not worry about the forgery of the documents” since no one would be able to challenge them in court. Kamel then instructed him to make sure that “all the prison records are also doctored including the registration of Morsi as a criminal prisoner at the time.” Shahin then stated (min. 21) that General Prosecutor Barakat is now “very, very, very happy because he was under great duress because of this problem.”
Shahin and Kamel then joked that the new place would be ready for inspection by Morsi’s defense team. Kamel suggested (min. 22) that they make the detention facility so authentic as to also include a “torture room” and show how prisoners “are hanged from their feet.” Shahin then jokingly responded: “you can always command us. Forgery is the order of the day.” Kamel then commented on the Muslim Brotherhood by saying “the bastards would never win. We’d never allow them to gloat against us.”
The next recording is the only time Sisi is heard on the tapes (min. 22:20) in which he stated that he had just finished a meeting with interior minster Ibrahim. He then asked Shahin if he had completed the task at hand with the interior minister. Shahin responded that he had, and that it was the hardest obstacle in this predicament, in which case Sisi responded, “Indeed it was a very difficult problem.”
In the next recording, Gens. Kamel, Shahin, and El-Gindy are heard discussing the newly built hanger turned prison facility (min. 23-31) at the Abu Qir naval base. When El-Gindy stated that the facility was now ready to be turned over to the interior ministry, Shahin jokingly intimated, “It’s ready for us” (i.e. to be our prison when the military rule is ousted). El-Gindy responded by saying that it was unsuitable for them since it was only a 3-star rather than a 7-star facility (min. 23). El-Gindy then proceeded by saying that the new facility matched the one where Morsi was detained in all its details including “chairs, beds, appliances, refrigerators, washers, and the garage.” He then added, “It’s the same as the original from A to Z – even the sports equipment is the same. We even left the newspapers of that period in the cells.” Kamel then jokingly commented (min. 25) that such immaculate details “would drive the man (Morsi) crazy.” Shahin then stated (min. 26) that “he arranged with the head of the prison system to send 3 or 4 prisoners there to show that the facility had always been in use.” When the prisons chief asked why not house more prisoners Shahin responded by saying “Hell no. Do you want to expose us? This facility is supposed to be a special prison for only a limited number of prisoners.” Kamel then said that he would inform interior minister Ibrahim “to send his security people to take over the facility” and that there is “a tacit agreement (with the prosecutors) to receive early warning before an actual inspection takes place” in order to get the facility “ready.” He then assures them that the prison guards would have already been “briefed and trained” so as not to be uncovered. Finally, Shahin instructed that “all the record books must be cooked with proper dates and names of visitors including the visits by the African leaders (to Morsi in his early days of detention) as well as by a delegation from Egypt’s human rights organization, etc.” Kamel then assured them that “Lt. Gen. Tariq has been working on this with interior ministry officials.”
When wolves are guarding the sheep
These revelations clearly demonstrate that Egypt is currently being ruled by a criminal enterprise masquerading as patriotic military generals or statesmen. Since the July 2013 coup thousands of Egyptians have been killed in the streets while at least forty thousand have been arrested, jailed and tortured. In essence, the coup was a counterrevolutionary movement led by the military generals and elements of Mubarak’s deep state that eventually resulted not only in the acquittal of the former dictator and his cronies but also in thwarting Egypt’s path towards freedom and democracy.
More than forty years ago, Nixon told the American public that he was not a crook, only to be shamed nine months later and admit that indeed he had violated the law and had to resign. But the military generals in Cairo are not only crooks by their own admission, but also murderers, thugs, and psychopaths. There are no parliament, judiciary, or viable civil society institutions in Egypt to hold them accountable. Meanwhile, the international community is looking the other way while Egypt descends into turmoil and chaos, and most Egyptians face unprecedented repression and corruption on a massive scale. During the 18 momentous revolutionary days in the spring of 2011, many Egyptians believed that the military generals stood with them against the tyranny and decadence of the Mubarak regime, and declared in Tahrir Square and across Egypt that “the people and the army are one.” Four years later most Egyptians who yearn to be free openly declare “no to military rule” and understand now more than ever that freedom and democracy cannot be bestowed by any one group but must be taken by the people themselves.
Esam Al-Amin can be contacted at alamin1919@gmail.com.
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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