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Commission Head Requests Increased Powers in Flotilla Probe

By Circarre Parrhesia – IMEMC News & Agencies – June 30, 2010

Israeli daily, Haaretz, is reporting that Israel will impart the commission to investigate the massacre aboard the MV Mavi Marmara with greater authority, yet it still will not be allowed to question the soldiers involved.

Ya’akov Turkel, the former Israeli Supreme Court justice that heads the probe, informed the Israeli government that, with the restrictions imposed on the probe, he and his team would be unable to fulfill their duties.Channel 2 television is also claiming that Turkel threatened to resign.

The commission is to investigate whether Operation Sea Breeze, the codename given to the assault, was in accordance with international law, and whether the force used in the assault on the Mavi Marmara was to be deemed proportionate. The committee may not call witnesses and cannot conclude upon the actions of individual members of the operation.

Turkel’s desire is to turn the probe into a full judicial hearing, giving him the freedom to call witnesses and any documents relating to the incident, and wants to expand the panel to five members, instead of three, not including the international observers.

Turkel approached Israel’s Justice Minister, Ya’akov Ne’eman, who in turn discussed the issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu. Haaretz also stated in their report that Netenyahu has also discussed the matter with Israel’s Attorney General, Yehuda Weinstein, and Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, with all agreeing that Netenyahu should formally consider the request.

At the time of writing no decision has been released to the press.

June 30, 2010 Posted by | Deception | Leave a comment

Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture

By Andy Worthington – 29.6.10

Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.

No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.

Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.

In the first of these two bleak stories, “US to repatriate Guantánamo detainee to Yemen after judge orders him to be released,” anonymous administration officials told the Washington Post that the President had generously decided to release a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, whose release was ordered last month by a judge in the District Court in Washington D.C.

As I explained in an article following the judge’s May 26 ruling, it had been publicly known since November 2007 that the government had conceded in June 2005 that Odaini, a student, had been seized by mistake after staying the night with friends in a university guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on the night that the house was raided by Pakistani and US operatives, and that he had been officially approved for release on June 26, 2006 (ironically, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture).

Nevertheless, the Justice Department refused to abandon the case against him, and took its feeble allegations all the way to the District Court, where they were savagely dismissed by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. When the judge’s unclassified opinion was subsequently released, an even grimmer truth emerged: that shortly after Odaini’s arrival at Guantánamo in June 2002, an interrogator recommended his repatriation (after he had been exploited for information about his fellow prisoners), and that, in April 2004, “an employee of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (‘CITF’) of the Department of Defense reviewed five interrogations of Odaini and wrote that ‘[t]here is no information that indicates [he] has clear ties to mid or high level Taliban or that he is a member of al-Qaeda.’”

Odaini was not subjected to specific torture techniques, but there are many people — myself included — who are happy to point out to the Obama administration that subjecting an innocent man to eight years of essentially arbitrary detention in an experimental prison camp devoted to the coercive interrogations of prisoners who were deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is itself a form of torture, especially as, unlike the worst convicted criminals on the US mainland, no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, and many have never even spoken to their families by phone.

Moreover, the fact that the administration proceeded with his habeas case, despite knowing that he was innocent, and then refused to release him as soon as the judge delivered his ruling, confirms that, when it comes to lawlessness and cruelty, the Obama administration is closer in spirit to the Bush administration than it cares to admit.

On Saturday, via its anonymous spokesmen, the administration confirmed how far it has fallen from all notions of decency. The officials explained that the moratorium on any releases to Yemen that was issued by President Obama in January, in response to cynical hysteria whipped up in the wake of the failed plane bomb plot involving a Nigerian who had reportedly trained in Yemen, “remains in place,” but, as one of the officials stated:

The general suspension is still intact, but this is a court-ordered release. People were comfortable with this … because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen.

In other words, a mouthpiece of the administration told a major US newspaper that Odaini, a patently innocent man whose release was ordered by a US judge, and whose ongoing detention was cynically sought by the Obama administration, was only being released because government officials were happy about his family background (his father, it transpires, is a retired security officer).

I shouldn’t really need to explain to the government that it’s unconstitutional to detain an innocent man, even if his father happened to be Osama bin Laden rather than a security officer, nor to point out how it would appear if this vetting procedure were to be applied to the criminal justice system in general, but in Obama’s world it is apparently necessary to point out these basic facts.

The second story that arrived in time to cast a mocking light on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture — “Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority” — was published in the New York Times. Since President Obama failed to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22 this year, the administration has failed to set a new deadline — and for a depressing reason, as Sen. Carl Levin explained to the Times.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” Sen. Levin said, adding that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration in 2013.

Sen. Levin had no doubt that this failure had come about because of a lack of political will on the part of the administration, which contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of Barack Obama in August 2007, when he was still a Senator. On that occasion, he spoke compellingly about how, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power.” However, since coming to power, as Sen. Levin explained, the administration has been “unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence.”

With a sharp eye for how principled rhetoric has not been followed up with any attempt whatsoever to persuade Congress of the importance of closing Guantánamo, Sen. Levin contrasted the administration’s “muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with ‘very vocal’ threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes,” and added that last year the administration “stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution,” and also responded with silence just a month ago, when the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating a prison in Illinois to take the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been cleared for release.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Sen. Levin concluded, adding, “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

“Dormant” is a good word, but something like “extinct” may be more appropriate, if, as Sen. Levin asserts, Guantánamo will still be open in January 2013. If that occurs, Guantánamo will have been open for 11 years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about. This is especially true because, as it stands now, nearly eight and half years after Guantánamo opened, the Obama administration’s refusal to take leadership on the issue, to drop its unacceptable moratorium on releasing Yemenis cleared by its own Task Force (and in some cases, like Mohammed Hassan Odaini, by the courts), and to abandon an unprincipled policy of continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial demonstrates that senior officials, including the President, genuinely have no interest in bringing to an end a regime founded on torture and arbitrary detention. In most respects, their actions — or their inactivity — represent a ringing endorsement of their predecessors’ vile policies.

The “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the Bush years may have come to an end, but anyone doubting the baleful effects of long-term detention without charge or trial should recall what Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the New York Times over six year and a half years ago: “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

That was in October 2003, and I dread to think what the mental state of some of those prisoners must be by now. The very thought that, two and half years from now, some of these men might still be held because the Obama administration doesn’t care enough to do anything about it cannot be excused for reasons of political expediency. Instead, it confirms that, in failing to bring to an end key elements of the Bush administration’s program of torture and arbitrary detention, the Obama administration has lost its principles.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison).

June 30, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Shabtai Rosenne and the Qibya Coverup

Richard Silverstein | June 17, 2010
Shabtai Rosenne
Shabtai Rosenne, from the days he served in the Israeli foreign service (AP)

Shabtai Rosenne is the 93 year-old Israeli appointee to the panel investigating the IDF’s attack on the Gaza flotilla last month.  He has had a distinguished career as an scholar specializing in international law and in the diplomatic corps.  I’ve written here about the ludicrousness of placing a nonagenarian in such a key position on such a sensitive political body.  But Nahum Barnea published a new charge against Rozen that strengthens my argument.

In 1953, there were repeated cross-border attacks from Israel and Jordan on each other’s territory in which citizens of both countries were killed.  Some attacks were carried out by military forces and some by irregular forces attempting to take vengeance on the other side for the losses of the 1948 War.  Finally fed up with this violence, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s prime minister resolved to strike a savage blow against a Jordanian target that would end the guerilla attacks once and for all.

Ben Gurion and his defense minister, the notorious Pinhas Lavon, planned the attack on the West Bank village of Qibya without notifying the rest of the cabinet.  Foreign minister Moshe Sharett was informed in general terms though given no specifics about the exact nature of the attack.

During an all-day assault, Israeli forces under the command of Ariel Sharon, destroyed 41 buildings in the village including the school.  Many homes were dynamited with the residents still within them.  60 residents were killed.  The response by the international community was, much like the Gaza flotilla incident, pure outrage.  In the aftermath of the bloodbath and the ensuing furor, the IDF turned to the foreign ministry to devise a way to mitigate the damage to Israel’s reputation.

In his memoir, Sharett explains that a plan was devised to deny the army had anything to do with the attack and to claim it was the result of attacks from Israeli border settlements who were angry with the continuing incursions against them from the Jordanian side.  As a result, Ben Gurion released this entirely mendacious statement:

None deplores it more than the Government of Israel, if … innocent blood was spilled … The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action … We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.

We can see that the lies of current Israeli governments find their paternity in one of the august founders of the modern state.

Sharett further notes that at a strategy meeting, Shabtai Rosenne, one of his senior advisors, suggested that in order to make Ben Gurion’s claim credible that Israel should pass a law enabling it to collectively punish the border settlements for their alleged misdeeds.  Sharett was aghast.  He didn’t believe the world would buy the original claim that the army wasn’t involved.  He thought Rozen’s further subterfuge was an insult to the world’s intelligence.

Barnea writes:

Sharett was angered.  He hadn’t expected those advisers closest to him would lend themselves to such a fabrication which no one in the world would believe.

So 57 years ago Shabtai Rosenne prepared lies on behalf of a state which had committed war crimes against Palestinian civilians.  Today, he is called upon again to defend Israeli soldiers who killed in cold blood.  Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.  But this time, we know Rosenne’s past and raise it to discredit the proceedings of this farce of an inquiry endorsed so heartily by Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu.

June 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Elena Kagan’s Harvard

By FRANK MENETREZ | June 28, 2010

When Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, her mishandling of a plagiarism case cost an innocent person his job while allowing the plagiarist, Professor Alan Dershowitz, to escape punishment.  Dershowitz has said that when Kagan was dean “it was a golden age” and “a very good time for the faculty.”  The Senate and the public deserve to know about the dark side of that “golden age.”

In 2003, an untenured professor at DePaul University named Norman Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of plagiarism.  Dean Kagan ordered an investigation the following year.  The investigation completely cleared Dershowitz, concluding that no plagiarism had occurred.

Harvard is the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, so its vindication of Dershowitz was widely perceived as definitive.  Armed with that vindication, Dershowitz relentlessly attacked Finkelstein in letters to DePaul faculty and every available media outlet.  Those attacks would likely have been dismissed as sour grapes if the Kagan-ordered investigation had come out the other way.

My independent research later revealed, however, that Dershowitz did in fact commit plagiarism and that no honest and competent investigation could have missed it.  The University of California Press (and CounterPunch) published my findings in 2008, but by then it was too late.  Dershowitz and his official exoneration by Harvard had already killed his tenure application, and effectively ended his academic career.

One reason the whole episode is so mystifying is that, from the start, the case against Dershowitz seemed to be supported by powerful evidence.  Finkelstein argued that Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel contained obvious errors that were identical to errors in an earlier book by a different author, so Dershowitz must have just copied that author’s work, errors and all.  Finkelstein explained the point in detail in an exchange with Dershowitz that was published in The Harvard Crimson in October 2003.

The identical errors issue was consequently well known and central to the plagiarism dispute when Kagan ordered an investigation in 2004.  But the Kagan-commissioned investigation still concluded that no plagiarism had occurred.  What happened?  Were there really no identical errors after all?

I decided to check for myself, and I quickly discovered enough identical errors to prove the plagiarism charge against Dershowitz beyond any reasonable doubt.  I looked at one of the passages identified by Finkelstein, a long quotation from Mark Twain, and found that Dershowitz’s version of the quotation and the version in the book Dershowitz was accused of plagiarizing contained 20 identical errors in a mere 21 lines of text.  Some of the errors were large (such as the omission of 87 pages of text without an ellipsis) and some were small (such as altered or missing words or punctuation), but the cumulative weight of the evidence was overwhelming.  There was no way Dershowitz could have independently generated exactly those 20 errors—he must have copied them.  It was an open-and-shut case.

So what exactly did the Kagan-commissioned investigation look at?  Did it address the identical errors issue?  (I put that question to the Harvard Law School administration myself when Kagan was still dean, but they refused to answer.)  If not, why not?  Did the investigation not even go so far as to read Harvard’s own student paper, in which the identical errors point had been raised?  And now that the truth has come out, does Kagan (or anyone else at Harvard) have anything they’d like to say to Finkelstein, the innocent man whose career was ruined?  To date, Kagan and Harvard have remained resolutely silent.

Granted, these questions might seem of limited significance for Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination.  The answers will not tell us what she thinks about originalism or abortion or the scope of federal executive power.  But they are still relevant, because they will shed light on something equally important.  In the end, all of us will be forced to assess Kagan on the basis of what we make of her character, because the written record of her judicial philosophy is so sparse.

We consequently have no choice but to cast about for evidence that she has a good heart, a genuine commitment to justice.  Her answers to questions about the Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair might reassure us that she does.  But continuing silence would give us reason to be skeptical.

Frank Menetrez contributed a detailed report on the Finkelstein/Dershowitz affair on this site in April of 2007.  He can be reached at                   frankjmenetrez@gmail.com

June 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

UK: Spies told to reveal instructions which ‘turned blind eye to torture’

By Abul Taher | Daily Mail | 27th June 2010

MI5 and MI6 have been ordered by a High Court judge to release secret guidelines which human rights groups claim instructed spies to turn a blind eye to the torture of British terror suspects abroad.

The guidelines will be released to six British former Guantanamo Bay detainees who are suing the Government for allegedly being complicit in their torture by the Americans.

The guidelines were issued to agents in 2002 and 2004.

‘We believe they will reveal a policy of complicity to torture, which explains all these cases over the years of MI5 agents knowing a Briton is being tortured but doing nothing about it,’ said Katherine O’Shea of Reprieve, a charity which has given legal help to former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The release is likely to damage David Miliband, the front-runner to become Labour leader. As Foreign Secretary, he told Parliament that the Government was never complicit in the torture of Britons abroad.

In February, the High Court overruled Mr Miliband’s attempt to stop former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, 31, seeing a CIA document which showed MI5 knew he was being tortured.

Mr Miliband argued the release would jeopardise intelligence-sharing accords between Britain and America which would damage the national interest. Mr Mohamed is a claimant in the latest case with Bisher Al Rawi, 49, Jamil El Banna, 58, Richard Belmar, 30, Omar Deghayes, 40, and Martin Mubanga, 37.

All six claim that during their detention they were questioned by British agents who not only knew they were being tortured, they also supplied further questions for interrogators.

The Foreign Office said last night that it was considering Mr Justice Silber’s ruling. A spokesman said: ‘We will look at whether their disclosure raises any national security issues that may need to be protected.’

Even if publication is blocked, advocates can still read the documents and give the six an outline of what they contain.

June 28, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The terrorist-naming game

By Paul Woodward on June 28, 2010

On September 11, 2001, George Bush changed the way Americans look at the world and the success with which he accomplished this feat is evident in the fact that his perspective largely remains unchallenged — even among many of his most outspoken critics. Bush’s simplistic for-us-or-against-us formula was transparently emotive yet utterly effective.

For almost a decade, Americans have been told to look at the world through the lens of “terrorism” and while differences of opinion exist about whether the lens has too wide or narrow an angle or about the extent to which it brings things into focus, those of us who say the lens is so deeply flawed that it should be scrapped, remain in a minority.

The Obama administration may now refrain from using the term itself, preferring instead “violent extremists,” but the change is merely cosmetic (as are so many other “changes” in the seamless continuity between the Bush- and post-Bush eras).

A couple of days ago Philip Weiss drew attention to the fact that when former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni described her parents as “freedom fighters,” Deborah Solomon, her interviewer in the New York Times, echoed Livni’s sentiment by saying that the fight for Israel’s independence took place in “a more romantic era.”

As Weiss notes, Livni’s parents belonged to the Irgun, the Zionist group which blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, killing 91 and injuring 46.

The first public account of what had happened that day was accidentally released in advance of the bombing.

In By Blood and Fire, Thurston Clark writes:

“Jewish terrorists have just blown up the King David Hotel!” This short message was received by the London Bureau of United Press International (UPI) shortly after noon, Palestine time. It was signed by a UPI stringer in Palestine who was also a secret member of the Irgun. The stringer had learned about Operation Chick but did not know it had been postponed for an hour. Hoping to scoop his colleagues, he had filed a report minutes before 11.00. A British censor had routinely stamped his cable without reading it.

The UPI London Bureau chief thought the message too terse. There were not enough details. He decided against putting it on the agency’s wire for radio and press until receiving further confirmation that the hotel had been destroyed.

Despite the efforts of Irgun leaders to restrict knowledge of the target and timing of Operation Chick, there were numerous other leaks. Leaders in both the Haganah and Stern Gang knew about the operation. Friends warned friends. The King David had an extraordinary number of last-minute room cancellations. In the Secretariat [the King David’s south wing that housed the headquarters of the British government in Palestine], more than the usual number of Jewish typists and clerks called in sick.

The next day the British prime minister, Clement Attlee referred to the bombing as an “insane act of terrorism” while a few days later the US president, Harry Truman, wrote “the inhuman crime committed… calls for the strongest action against terrorism…”

That was 64 years ago. From the sheltered perch of the New York Times, that’s apparently far enough back in history that it can now be referred to as a “romantic era.”

It’s hardly surprising then that many observers with an interest in justice for Palestinians take offense at the New York Times’ complicity in papering over the reality of Jewish terrorism. Yet here’s the irony: the effort to promote an unbiased use of the term “terrorism” simply plays into the hands of the Israelis.

The word has only one purpose: to forestall consideration of the political motivation for acts of violence. Invoke the word with the utmost gravity and then you can use your moral indignation and outrage to smother intelligent analysis. Terrorists do what they do because they are in the terrorism business — it’s in their blood.

So, when Tzipi Livni calls her parents freedom fighters, I have no problem with that — she is alluding to what they believed they were fighting for rather than the methods they employed. Moreover, by calling people who planted bombs and blew up civilians in the pursuit of their political goals, “freedom fighters,” Livni makes it clear that she understands that “terrorism” is a subjective term employed for an effect.

When Ehud Barak a few years ago acknowledged that had he been raised a Palestinian he too would have joined one of the so-called terrorist organizations, he was not describing an extraordinary epiphany he had gone through in recognizing the plight of the Palestinians. He was merely being candid about parallels between groups such as the Irgun and Hamas — parallels that many Israelis see but less often voice.

The big issue is not whether the methods employed by Zionist groups such as the Irgun could be justified but whether the political goals these groups were fighting for were legitimate. Zionism would not have acquired more legitimacy if it had simply found non-violent means through which it could accomplish its goal of driving much of the non-Jewish population out of Palestine.

We live in an era in which “terrorism” — as a phenomenon to be opposed — has become the primary bulwark through which Zionism defends itself from scrutiny. Keep on playing the terrorist-naming game and the Zionists win.

June 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Israeli Occupation Authority still banning entry of 3,500 commodities into Gaza

Palestine Information Center – 28/06/2010

GAZA: MP Jamal Al-Khudari, the head of the popular committee against the siege, has said that the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) was still barring the entry of 3500 commodities into the Gaza Strip.

He said in a report published on Sunday that the IOA allowed only 10% of goods that were previously banned from entering Gaza, describing the IOA talk about easing the siege as mere propaganda and means to deceive the world and is contrary to what is happening on the ground.

The lawmaker noted that in the first week the IOA opened two commercial crossings out of four, which were all completely closed, then it opened one crossing for a couple of days while the fourth was only partially opened.

There is no real end to the siege without opening all commercial crossings on permanent basis, allowing influx of all types of goods, opening a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, and finally allowing a sea route between Gaza and the outside world under European supervision, Khudari elaborated.

He championed continued pressure on the IOA to achieve those goals, asking the UN Secretary General and UNRWA to continue pressuring the IOA until the siege is totally lifted.

Meanwhile, a delegation of Lebanese doctors arrived in the Gaza Strip on Sunday in a show of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza.

The crossings and borders authority said in a statement that the 8 Lebanese doctors would remain in Gaza till next Thursday and might operate on a number of patients.

June 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Shalit, for example

By Uri Avnery | June 26, 2010 | Excerpt

[Gilad] Shalit has become a living symbol – a symbol of Israeli reality, of the inability of our leaders to make decisions, of their moral and political cowardice, of their inability to analyze a situation and draw conclusions.

If there had been an opportunity to free Shalit through military action, the Israeli government would have seized it eagerly.

So much is obvious, because the Israeli public always prefers solving a problem by force than doing anything that might be interpreted as weakness. The rescue of the hostages at Entebbe in 1976 is considered one of the most glorious exploits in the history of Israel, even though there was only a hair’s breadth between success and failure. It was a gamble with the lives of the 105 hostages and the soldiers, and it was successful.

In other cases, though, the gamble did not succeed. Not in Munich in 1972, when they gambled with the lives of the athletes, and lost. Not in Ma’alot in 1974, when they gambled with the lives of the schoolchildren, and lost. Not in the attempt to free the captured soldier Nachschon Wachsman in 1994, when they gambled with his life, and lost.

If there had been any chance of freeing Shalit by force, they would have risked his life, and probably lost. Fortunately for him, there has been no such chance. So far.

Actually, this is quite remarkable. Our security services have hundreds of secret collaborators in the Gaza Strip, in addition to high tech surveillance. Yet it seems that no reliable information about Shalit’s whereabouts has been obtained.

How has Hamas succeeded in this? Among other measures, by not allowing any contact with the captive – no meetings with the Red Cross or foreign dignitaries, just two short videos, almost no letters. They simply cannot be pressured. They refuse all requests of this nature.

This problem could possibly be overcome if our government had been ready to give assurances that no attempt would be made to free him by force, in return for a Hamas undertaking to let him meet with the Red Cross. To be credible, such an undertaking would probably need a guarantee by a third party, perhaps the US.

Absent such an arrangement, all the sanctimonious speeches by foreign statesmen about “letting the Red Cross meet with the soldier” are just so many empty words.

No less hypocritical are the demands of foreign personalities to “free the kidnapped soldier.”

Such demands are music to the Israeli ear, but completely disregard the fact that the subject has to be an exchange of prisoners.

Shalit is alive and breathing, a young man whose fate arouses strong human emotions. But so are the Palestinian prisoners. They are alive and breathing, and their fate, too, arouses strong human emotions. They include young people, whose lives are being wasted in prison. They include political leaders, who are being punished for simply belonging to one or another organization. They include people who, in Israeli parlance, “have blood on their hands,” and who, in Palestinian parlance, are national heroes who have sacrificed their own freedom for their people’s liberation.

The price demanded by Hamas may seem exorbitant – a thousand for one. But Israel has already paid such a price for other prisoners in the past, and that has become the standard ratio. Hamas could not accept less without losing face.

The 1,000 Palestinian prisoners have families – fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and children, brothers and sisters. Exactly like Gilad Shalit. They, too, cry out, demand, exert pressure. Hamas cannot ignore them.

The whole affair is shocking evidence of the inability of our government – both the previous and the present one – to take decisions and even to think logically.

Hamas already fixed the price four years ago, according to past precedents. Their demand has not changed since then… Full article

June 26, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Leave a comment

International agencies fund Venezuelan opposition with $40-50 million annually

By Eva Golinger | June 21, 2010

A revealing report published in May 2010 by the FRIDE Institute, a Spanish think tank, prepared with funding from the World Movement for Democracy (a project of the National Endowment for Democracy-NED), has disclosed that international agencies are funding the Venezuelan opposition with a whopping US$40-50 million annually.

This exorbitant amount of financing well exceeds the approximately $15 million previously believed to have been channelled to Venezuelan opposition groups via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the NED.

According to the FRIDE report, which analyzes the impact of this funding in Venezuela, and concludes that more donations are necessary to support the “democratic opposition” to President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the multi-million dollar funds are exclusively directed towards political activities in the polarized South American nation. A large majority of the $40-50 million donated by US and European agencies and foundations is given to the right wing opposition political parties, Primero Justicia (First Justice), Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time) and COPEI (Christian Democrat ultra-conservative party), as well as to a dozen or so NGOs, student groups and media organizations.

In the FRIDE report, the Venezuelan government is classified as “semi-authoritarian,” which is a term used frequently by the NED and another US donor to Venezuelan opposition groups, Freedom House, to describe the Chavez administration. The report even goes so far as to indicate that in Venezuela, “Elections are the main link between democracy and dictatorship.” As a result, the international funds provided to political groups in Venezuela are destined to fight against the government of Hugo Chavez in order to “restore representative democracy” and return a more US-friendly government to power.

The authors of the revealing report recognize that “international assistance” for political groups in Venezuela did not begin until 2002, after the Chavez government began implementing a series of major reforms. “The presence of large international donors engaged in democracy promotion, particularly the donors based in the US (including the Carter Center, the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and multilateral institutions (OAS and EC) is closely linked to the Chavez presidency … their political engagement began in the aftermath of the new Bolivarian Constitution, approved by popular consultation in 1999, which was the starting point of Chavez’ Revolution and Socialism of the 21st Century … many civil society organizations emerged in 2002 — the year of the attempted coup…”

According to the FRIDE document, “Foreign democracy assistance is mainly channelled through 10-12 small institutions, all of them with offices in Caracas. New political actors, such as the students’ movement or other groups, have rather sporadically been addressed by donors, mainly from the US.” In recent years, an opposition movement has emerged from the universities, backed by Washington primarily, but also by some European foundations, particularly from Spain. These student and youth groups have attempted to project a “fresh” image of the tarred traditional political parties that ruled the country throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and were largely viewed as corrupt and elitist.

But by receiving mass amounts of foreign funding and aid for their anti-Chavez political activities, the student and youth groups have demonstrated that their priorities and actions are directed by external forces, which in turn has caused for a loss of their credibility and has confirmed accusations that they are “agents” of the US government.

US: MAIN DONOR

US agencies are the principal donors to political groups in Venezuela, with annual funds of about $6 million. The FRIDE report confirms that this multi-million dollar aid is a result of US efforts to undermine the Chavez presidency. “Until very recently, the United States did not have a prominent role in democracy assistance to Venezuela. When US engagement began under the Chavez government, its political profile consisted of supporting democratic NGOs and opposition parties.”

US funds are channelled to opposition groups in Venezuela through the following organizations, Development Alternatives, Inc DAI (since 2002), the Pan-American Development Foundation PADF (since 2005), the International Republican Institute IRI (since 2002), the National Democratic Institute NDI (since 2002), Freedom House (since 2004), USAID (since 2002), NED and the Open Society Institute (since 2006).

Declassified documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the activities of these agencies in Venezuela have revealed that their multi-million dollar funding has largely gone towards promoting anti-democratic activities, such as the April 2002 coup d’etat against the Chavez government, and subsequent strikes, destabilization attempts and economic sabotage. The foreign funding has also gone to support the opposition electoral campaigns over the past eight years, including in-kind aid to train and strengthen political parties, help design elections and communications strategies and even to develop political platforms and agendas for opposition groups. This level of support goes well beyond mere donations and evidences a direct meddling in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.

EUROPE

But, not only are US agencies providing the millions to keep the Venezuelan opposition alive and feed the political conflict in Venezuela. The FRIDE report reveals that the European Commission is channelling between 6-7 million Euros annually to opposition political parties and NGOs in the South American nation. Although some of the EC’s work is done with Venezuelan government entities on a local level (infrastructure development), the majority is going to “civil society organizations” and “human rights” NGOs.

Additionally, the FRIDE report exposes the EC for serving as a “channel” for the “triangularization” of US funding to groups in Venezuela, in order to avoid the stain of Washington on the Venezuelan organizations receiving foreign aid for political activities.

Several German foundations, including the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and Friedrich Ebert Foundation (ILDIS-FES) are providing direct funding to political parties in Venezuela. Konrad Adenauer invests about 500,000 Euros annually in projects with the right-wing parties COPEI and Primero Justicia, and has a 70,000 Euros annual commitment to fund programs at the conservative Catholic University Andres Bello (UCAB), a hotbed of opposition student groups.

The governments of Canada and Spain are also funding political opposition groups and programs in Venezuela, though with a much lower profile, so as not to affect diplomatic relations.

The FRIDE report, which admits that a majority of the NGO’s receiving the multi-million dollar funding are actually “virtual organizations with no offices or staff,” also reveals that the international funders are evading and violating Venezuelan laws.

Because Venezuela has currency controls, so as to prevent large amounts of capital flight, there are restrictions on the flow of foreign currency in and out of the country. Additionally, the Venezuelan currency, the Bolívar has a fixed rate set by the State, although a large parallel, or “black market” exists for illegal trading.

The FRIDE report confirms that several international agencies, particularly those from the US, are exchanging currency on the illegal market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law.

“…An additional problem for civil society organizations has been the ‘double currency’: even after the devaluation of the Bolívar, the unofficial exchange rate is higher than the official one…Some donors have solved this problem by paying in hard currency, by using foreign bank accounts, or by applying a semi-official exchange rate…”

The FRIDE report, titled, “Assessing Democracy Assistance: Venezuela,” is part of a series of studies conducted in 14 nations where international agencies are actively involved in funding political groups favorable to US policies.

In addition to Venezuela, other case studies were conducted in Belarus, China, Georgia, Egypt, Ukraine, Nigeria, Bosnia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mysteriously, the report on Venezuela, and any evidence of its existence, disappeared from the FRIDE website after this author referred to it in a prior Spanish-language article.

June 25, 2010 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Right-wing self-delusion

By Glenn Greenwald | June 23, 2010

National Review‘s Jay Nordlinger cites a truly repellent (and false) comment made this week by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “A million and a half people are living in Gaza, but only one of them is really in need of humanitarian aid,” Barak said.  Nordlinger points out that Barak was referring to Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage for years by Hamas, which refuses to permit the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to him.  After observing that neither “the Cuban dictatorship or Chinese dictatorship permit the Red Cross to see prisoners,” Nordlinger then claims — with the needy victimization that typifies the Right — that “there’d be mass demonstrations in [Shalit’s] behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too” if “Shalit were other than Israeli.”  In other words, Nordlinger believes that the Western World would never tolerate the denial of ICRC access to detainees except when the detainee is Israeli.

I’m asking this literally:  is Nordlinger ignorant of the fact that the United States of America denied ICRC access to non-Israeli prisoners for years during the prior administration?

The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody.

The state department’s top legal adviser, John Bellinger, made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held. . . . He stated that the group International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access to “absolutely everybody” at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which holds suspects detained during the US war on terror. When asked by journalists if the organisation had access to everybody held in similar circumstances elsewhere, he said: “No”.

That happened because, among other reasons, the U.S. maintained a network of CIA secret prisons — black sites — where detainees were barred from any and all contact with the outside world for months and even years, including international monitoring groups such as the ICRC.  Maybe Nordlinger has heard of someone named Dana Priest, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for revealing, in The Washington Post, the existence of those secret American prisons:

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

As Priest wrote, these detainees — never charged, let alone convicted, of any crime — “exist in complete isolation from the outside world.  Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being.”  Even once those black sites were revealed by Priest, the Bush administration explicitly rejected the ICRC’s request for access to those detainees (the ICRC was also long denied access to prisons in Iraq run by the Iraqi Government during the U.S. occupation).  And the BBC reported in April of this year that the U.S. continues to maintain a secret prison at Bagram where prisoners are apparently abused and denied ICRC access.  Could someone point me to the “mass demonstrations” that took place in Europe and the U.S. over any of these American secret prisons?

This raises an important and under-appreciated point.  Many Americans defend the U.S.’s conduct not because they support it, but because they’re completely unaware of what those actions actually are.  Many of the people who support what they call the “enhanced interrogation” program really believe they’re defending three instances of waterboarding rather than scores of detainee deaths, because they literally don’t know it happened.  And here you have Nordlinger — a Senior Editor of National Review — claiming that denial of access to the ICRC is the hallmark of brutal tyrannies (it is), and arguing that a country could only get away with it if they do it to an Israeli, making clear that he is completely ignorant of the fact that his own Government did this for years (without, needless to say, prompting a peep of protest from his magazine), and reportedly continues to do it.  That the U.S. did this systematically just doesn’t exist in his brain; he really believes it’s something only China, Cuba and Hamas do.  They really do live in their own universe and just block out whatever facts they dislike while inventing the ones that make them feel good.

UPDATE:   Just to convey a sense for how much National Review polemicists care about detainees being denied ICRC access (when it’s the U.S. doing the denying):  the only mention found in NR‘s archives of Dana Priest’s revelation that the U.S. was maintaining a network of secret prisons with no ICRC monitoring was this one by Byron York, in which he suggested that, based on the Plame precedent, the persons responsible for the disclosure — but not the ones denying the ICRC access to detainees — should be prosecuted.  So it’s not really a surprise that Nordlinger managed to remain completely ignorant of what the U.S. did for all those years, since his “political magazine” barely even mentioned it.

June 24, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Sudanese Officials: Cyprus ‘arms ship’ allegation is “absurd”, contains mining explosives

Al-Manar TV – 24/06/2010

Sudanese officials on Wednesday dismisses allegations saying that the Arab country import arms on a ship intercepted in Cyprus as an “absurd”, saying that the explosives on board were for gold mining firm.

“Sudan has been importing explosives since the early 1990s to work this gold mine, and has never had any problems in the past. It’s the first time this has happened. It’s absurd,” Abdelbaqi al-Gilani, Sudan’s minister responsible for mining said.
“The ship is carrying some explosives for civil work … for quarry face blasting and mining, it has nothing to do with the military,” al-Giliani added.

On Tuesday, Cyprus said it it placed the “Santiago” anchored off the southern city of Limassol under police guard with a suspected military cargo that would contravene a 2004 UN embargo on arms sales and deliveries to Sudan. Cypriot officials examined the vessel after US authorities alerted them that it was carrying a large amount of explosives bound for Sudan.

“The ship is under guard and there are materials that are considered banned, this means either military material or explosives,” Commerce Minister Antonis Paschalides told state radio. “There is definitely military equipment which comes under a ban,” he added without elaborating.

The Sudanese mine at Hassay, 450 kilometers northeast of the capital Khartoum, is Sudan’s first — and only — gold mine.
The Ariab group working the mine is 51 percent Sudanese government owned, while 40 percent of the shares are held by holding group Cominor, created by Canada’s La Mancha and France’s Areva.

An Ariab official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, confirmed that there were explosives on board the Santiago for the firm. “There are 251 tons of explosives which are for us. I hope they get here quickly, as we need them to be able to continue operation,” the official said. “I don’t know if there is anything else on board the boat, but these explosives are definitely for us.”

June 24, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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