Israeli fighter jets, gunboat and tanks violate Lebanon’s sovereignty
Press TV – April 18, 2011
An Israeli gunboat has entered the Lebanese territorial waters in a fresh violation of the country’s sovereignty, the Lebanese army says.
The army said in a statement that the gunboat entered illegally at 7:30 a.m. local time on Monday, a Press TV correspondent reported from Beirut.
The Israeli gunboat entered the Lebanese territorial waters on the coastline of the southern border town of Naqoura before returning, the statement said.
On Friday, six Israeli fighter jets violated Lebanon’s airspace and flew over the Shebaa Farms, Nabatieh, Marjayoun, Hasbaya and Kfar-Kila, said the Lebanese army.
Meanwhile, Israeli tanks made an incursion into the Lebanese territory on Thursday.
Two Israeli Merkava tanks infiltrated four meters across the Blue Line in the vicinity of al-Adeisseh before withdrawing.
Israel violates Lebanon’s sovereignty on an almost daily basis under the pretext that the infringements have surveillance purposes.
The Lebanese government, the Hezbollah resistance movement, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have repeatedly criticized Israel over its violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which brokered a ceasefire in the war of aggression Israel launched against Lebanon in 2006, calls on Israel to respect Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Israel considers 1,000 citizenship applications from US Christians seeking permission to settle in the West Bank
MEMO | April 15, 2011
The Israeli media has revealed that 1000 Christian Americans have submitted applications for Israeli citizenship and permission to settle in the occupied West Bank. In return, they have said that they will convert to Judaism and serve in Israel’s occupation army.
According to a report in the Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, a group made up of hundreds of US citizens presented their request to the Israeli MP Lian Shem Tov.
During her meeting with the group’s representative, Baruch Abramovich, who is active in Judaizing Christians and taking them to Occupied Palestine, the MP pledged to assist the Americans and support their application to the Israeli government.
According to Abramovich, this group has “no political ambitions, but wants to be part of Israel”. He added that, “bringing these Americans would contribute to the development of the West Bank as part and parcel of the State of Israel, and to the development of the economy and even the Israeli army.”
The newspaper reported that Shem Tov has presented the American project to the so-called Shomron Regional Council and exerted efforts to push the idea. She has also organized a meeting between the Council and the group’s representatives to discuss the request in detail.
Israel steps up Jerusalem expulsions
Even Tony Blair can’t save Palestinian bookseller to the stars
By Jonathan Cook in Jerusalem | Redress | 14 April 2011
Munther Fahmi is known as the “bookseller of Jerusalem”. Among his customers are to be found Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter and Hollywood actress Uma Thurman.
In a city riven by political and social tensions, Mr Fahmi’s bookshop has provided an oasis of dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, with well-known writers and scholars from both sides of the divide regularly invited to give readings and talk about their work.
But despite his high-profile connections, Mr Fahmi’s days in the city of his birth look to be numbered.
Israeli officials have told him that, after 16 years running his bookshop in the grounds of East Jerusalem’s landmark 19th-century hotel the American Colony, he is no longer welcome in either Israel or Jerusalem.
Two months ago he exhausted his legal options when Israel’s high court refused to overturn the deportation order. His only hope now rests with a governmental committee to which he has appealed on humanitarian grounds.
Mr Fahmi, 57, is far from optimistic. “My lawyer tells me applications from Palestinians are almost never accepted.”
The holder of an American passport for many years, Mr Fahmi said he was staying on a tourist visa that expired on 3 April. “If the committee rejects my case, I will be sent packing on a plane at very short notice.”
Mr Fahmi is one of thousands of Palestinians who over the past four decades have fallen foul of an Israeli policy stripping them of their right to live in Jerusalem, said Dalia Kerstein, director of Hamoked, an Israeli human rights group.
Although Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, in violation of international law, most of its Palestinian population received only Israeli residency permits, not citizenship.
According to Israeli figures, more than 13,000 Palestinians – from a current population of 260,000 in East Jerusalem – have had their residency revoked since then.
Ms Kerstein said the number of revocations had risen sharply in recent years, with more than 4,500 Palestinians losing residency in 2008 alone, the last year for which complete figures are available.
Israeli law stipulates that Palestinians in Jerusalem can be stripped of residency if they spent at least seven years abroad – defined as including the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza – or acquired a foreign passport.
Since a test case in 1988, the Israeli courts have backed revocations in cases where the authorities claim Palestinians have transferred their “centre of life” elsewhere.
“There is clearly a policy to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and Israel to reduce what is called here the ‘Palestinian demographic threat’,” said Ms Kerstein. “It’s really a case of ethnic cleansing.”
Last week Hamoked and another human rights group, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (Acri), petitoned Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the policy, arguing that it contravenes international law.
Oded Feller, a lawyer for Acri, said Palestinians in East Jerusalem were effectively “prisoners”, punished by Israel if they took part in a more globalized world.
“The problem for people like Munther is that the Israeli government and the courts treat them as though they are immigrants, ignoring the fact as the city’s native residents they have an inalienable right to live here,” Ms Kerstein said.
Like most other Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Mr Fahmi’s family declined Israeli citizenship in 1967. “We are Palestinians and Israel is occupying us. Why would we take citizenship and give a stamp of legitimacy to our occupation?”
But that decision left him and other Palestinians in Jerusalem in a precarious position.
Mr Fahmi’s residency was revoked – without his knowledge – during a long period spent in the United States, starting in 1975 when he left to study. He gained his American passport after marrying there and raising a family.
He decided to settle back in Jerusalem in 1995, after the signing of the Oslo accords. “I had seen Yasser Arafat [the Palestinian leader] and Yitzhak Rabin [Israel’s prime minister] shake hands in front of the White House. Naively, I thought it heralded a new era of reconciliation.”
For the last 16 years, he has been forced to exit and enter the country every few months on a tourist visa.
But Mr Fahmi learnt the full significance of his loss of residency 18 months ago, when Interior Ministry officials told him that, according to a new policy, he would no longer be automatically issued tourist visas.
Now, he has been told, he can spend only three months a year in Israel, including Jerusalem. In his appeal to the humanitarian committee, he has said he needs to be in Jerusalem to care for his 76-year-old mother.
“Is there any other country where the native population is treated like this in its homeland?” he said.
The policy to withhold tourist visas to Palestinians with foreign passports has been only patchily implemented, said Ms Kerstein, following objections from US and European embassies.
Mr Fahmi appeared a surprising choice for enforcement, given his influential supporters. A petition has attracted more than 2,000 signatures, including those of the British novelist Ian McEwan, who won this year’s Jerusalem Prize for literature, the historian Eric Hobsbawn, and Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose book Jerusalem: The Biography has been a bestseller.
Mr Fahmi hopes backing from many Israelis and diaspora Jews, including Israel’s two most famous novelists, Amos Oz and David Grossman, may forestall his expulsion.
“I hope the authorities will take note that many of my supporters are people who describe themselves as friends of Israel,” he said.
Mr Grossman told Reuters news agency last week that the Israeli government’s actions were “a scandal”.
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle East history at Columbia University in New York, who has also signed the petition, said Mr Fahmi’s case highlighted Israel’s determination to maintain a clear Jewish majority in Jerusalem.
A formula devised by an Israeli government committee in 1973 fixed the percentage ratio of Israeli Jews to Palestinians in the city at 73 to 27. Despite an aggressive policy of settling Jews in East Jerusalem, higher birth rates among Palestinians have seen their proportion swell to just over a third of the city’s total population.
“There isn’t a family I know in East Jerusalem that doesn’t have someone affected by this revocation policy,” said Professor Khalidi. “It’s systematic.”
Last year Israel appeared to be expanding the policy when it revoked the residency of four Hamas members of the Palestinian legislative council who live in East Jerusalem.
Earlier this year it also banned from Jerusalem Adnan Gheith, a prominent Palestinian political activist who has opposed a Jewish settlement drive in his Silwan neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. He was told to keep out of the city for four months.
Reports in the Israeli media suggest that Israel’s security services have drawn up a list of several hundred activists in Jerusalem who they want issued with expulsion orders.
In an indication of the fear among Palestinians in East Jerusalem that their residency rights are under threat, Israeli officials have noted a marked increase in Palestinians applying for Israeli citizenship over the past five years.
Figures this year from the Israeli interior ministry revealed that about 13,000 Jerusalem Palestinians, or 5 per cent of the population, are now Israeli citizens.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
Bahrain abducts two senior clerics
Press TV – April 11, 2011
Bahraini forces have abducted two senior clerics as the government is putting more pressure to suffocate anti-regime protests.
The Saudi-backed Bahraini forces arrested clerics Sayyed Mohammad al-Alawi and Sheikh Abdul Adim al-Mohtadi in the capital Manama on Monday. It comes after the Bahraini government dismissed 30 doctors and 150 health ministry workers for supporting anti-government protests, a Press TV correspondent reported.
Meanwhile, police stormed schools on Monday and arrested teachers ahead of a planned strike.
Earlier, Bahraini authorities expelled 16 Lebanese nationals from the country. The move came after the leader of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, voiced support for the Bahraini protesters.
Bahraini people have been demanding an end to the two-century-long rule of the Al Khalifa dynasty since February 14. Scores of protesters have been killed and many others gone missing since the beginning of the revolution.
Bahraini forces have reinforced a massive armed crackdown on the uprising with the help of Saudi, the UAE and Kuwaiti troops.
Armed Settlers supported by Israeli army attack Palestinian village
International Solidarity Movement | April 10, 2011
At 8.30am yesterday morning around fifty settlers, some masked and armed with guns, descended from Yitzhar settlement onto the Palestinian village of Assira Al Qibliya. International observers from the UK and Ireland witnessed the settlers throwing rocks at homes and people on the outskirts of the village injuring one local, who is being treated in hospital.
Within thirty minutes an army jeep carrying Israeli soldiers arrived. They stood in front of the settlers on the hillside approximately one hundred metres from the Palestinian homes yet did nothing to prevent their attacks. The soldiers could be seen firing guns into the air and directly towards the Palestinians who had come out of their homes to witness and document this attack on their village.
During the attack four settlers broke away from the main group and made their way to a Palestinian quarry. Two armed with machine guns stood on a ledge while two descended onto the side of the road and set fire to a car used by the Palestinian workers.
The settlement of Yitzhar was originally established as a military outpost in 1983 but demilitarised and turned over to residential purposes a year later. Yitzhar is home to a Jewish orthodox community of over 100 who have in the past decade attacked the residents and properties of Assira Al Qibliya and neighbouring villages on numerous occasions using rocks, knives, guns and arson. These attacks often happen on Saturdays, the religious holiday of Shabbat.
Yitzhar is home to Rabbi Elitzur who published a book last November entitled “The Handbook for the Killing of Gentiles”, condoning the murder of non-Jewish babies, lest they grow to “be dangerous like their parents”. Rabbi Elitzur is vocal in his encouragement of “operations of reciprocal responsibility” such as the arson attack made on Yasuf mosque in December 2009
Despite the West Bank settlement’s status as illegal under international law, Yitzhar was included in the Israeli governments’ 2009 “national priority map” as one of the settlements earmarked for financial support. Yitzhar also receives significant funding from American donations, tax-deductible under U.S. government tax breaks for ‘charitable’ institutions.
Israeli Army fires on Palestinians planting olive trees
International Solidarity Movement | April 10, 2011
Bullets and tear gas were fired upon Palestinians and internationals whilst they planted olive trees on the land legally owned by the village of Iraq Burin yesterday.
The popular committee asked for a group of internationals to assist them in planting olive trees on the village land which is close to an army out post and the illegal Israeli settlement of Bracha. The trees were successfully planted even under the aggressive presence of the Israeli Army.
As the trees where being planted one army jeep came close and was a looming presence as local people took the chance to go further into the land to pick “akoub” (a plant used for cooking.)
After some 20 minutes, another jeep turned up, and the heavily armed soldiers started moving towards the people. One of the soldiers was seen aiming his gun directly at one of the boys.
When one boy, who in a symbolic act of resistance, threw a stone towards the soldiers in the far distance, they responded by firing shots and tear gas directly at the people, who had to run and duck to avoid being hit. More shots where fired at the youth but it is not clear if they were live or rubber coated steel bullets. However, what was clear was the completely disproportionate use of weapons and force on people partaking in a peaceful act of planting trees.
Despite the dangerous aggression of the Israeli army all 50 olive trees were planted on the hillside and three in the local cemetery – one for each of the boys that were killed in the village in the last year. On 19th March 2010, 16-year-old Muhammed Qadus, together with his cousin Asaud Qadus were shot and killed by the Israeli Army during a peaceful demonstration. On the 27th January this year, 19-year-old Oday Maher Hamza Qadous was shot dead by a settler on the hilltop just outside the village.
Report: All major Israeli wineries use grapes from occupied territory
Who Profits from the Occupation | March 2011
Despite being part of the Zionist colonization project as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the Israeli wine industry as we know it today is a fairly new development and was only established in the 1980’s. Currently, the Israeli wine industry comprises six large wineries (Carmel, Barkan, Golan Heights, Teperberg 1870, Binyamina and Tishbi) and dozens of medium and small wineries, totaling over 150 wineries, and about 12,000 acres of vineyards.
This report provides detailed information about these wine producers and their connection to the settlement wine industry. Additionally, it includes a survey of almost all of the settlement wineries in the Golan Heights and in the West Bank.
While the wine industry is known for being very meticulous in providing information about the origin of grapes that are used in the production of wine, there are several methods which are used in the Israeli wine industry to conceal information concerning the use of grapes from settler vineyards in occupied territory. Investigating the connections of the Israeli wine industry to settler vineyards, we found that while grapes from the Golan Heights are used quite openly, the wineries that use grapes from West Bank vineyards most often use a myriad of methods to conceal their origins.
Our report describes some of these methods, from those used by government export agencies to those used by individual exporters. For instance, the Israeli export institution redraws the map of the wine regions of Israeli wine in a way that deliberately blurs the distinctions between areas inside the State of Israel and areas of occupied territory. Israeli manufacturers of wine conceal information concerning the exact location of the vineyards from which they receive the grapes, by using vague descriptions, by not providing full disclosure of the location of vineyards or by detailing vineyards in the West Bank only in their publications in Hebrew.
This report also provides a comprehensive portrayal of the incentives of the Israeli wine industry to cultivate grapes and to develop wineries in occupied territory. Our report has found that in addition to the benefits that all commercial activities in settlements enjoy, including readily accessible land, tax benefits and other financial incentives provided by the Israeli government, the wine industry in the West Bank enjoys particular benefits and support from several government offices.
For instance, Israelis who cultivate vineyards on occupied territory are allocated subsidized water quotas; they receive funds from the Ministry of Agriculture for planting and building agricultural facilities, from the Ministry of Defense for paving roads and for fencing in the plots and from the Ministry of Tourism for turning the vineyards and wineries into tourist attractions.
Developing vineyards and wineries provide additional advantages for settlers in the West Bank. Due to a combination of legal and physical conditions, the planting of vineyards is a relatively easy and highly accessible means for taking over Palestinian land. Additionally, settlers both in the West Bank and in the Golan Heights have found that the wine industry can be used in order to develop tourism to the settlements, for local and international visitors alike. Tourist attractions do not only serve as an additional source of income for the settlements, but, more importantly, they operate to normalize and promote the entire settlement enterprise.
The full report is available at: http://www.whoprofits.org/articlefiles/WhoProfits-IsraeliWines.pdf
Sadr vows to fight US overstay
Press TV – April 9, 2011
Iraq’s influential cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has warned that resistance against US forces will increase if the occupiers fail to leave by their deadline at the end of 2011.
In a statement read at an anti-US demonstration in Baghdad on Saturday, Sadr said that Iraqis will “escalate military resistance” to the US occupation after the deadline, Reuters reported.
Some Iraqis held signs reading, “Occupiers Out” and “No to America,” while others burned US, Israeli and British flags.
“They, the Iraqi government, agreed with the occupiers that they would leave within months from this homeland, according to an unfair agreement that we did not and will never accept,” spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi read to tens of thousands of supporters.
“We wait for one thing, their full withdrawal from Iraq, and [the departure of] their last soldier and base from these holy and great lands,” he added.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Baghdad and Washington in 2008 mandates the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said Washington will keep its nearly fifty-thousand troops in Iraq if Baghdad asks for additional help. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, however, has rejected the offer.
Sadr, well-known for his anti-US stance, along with his political bloc has vehemently opposed the signing of the SOFA with the US, which extends the presence of US troops in Iraq.
Initially the pact was expected to be put to a nationwide vote. However, the Iraqi government, under US pressure, decided against the referendum.
Italian activists call on company to withdraw from Israeli railway project in the occupied territories
By Stephanie Westbrook | Mondoweiss | April 8, 2011
In Italy, “Stop That Train” launches a campaign calling on Pizzarotti & C. SpA to withdraw from the construction of the Israeli high-speed railway crossing the occupied Palestinian territories. The German Ministry of Transport defines the project as “potentially in violation of international law.”
The Italian Coalition “Stop That Train” recently met with Pizzarotti & C. SpA, a private company from Parma involved in the construction of a new Israeli railway that would allow Israeli commuters to travel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in just 28 minutes. In particular, Pizzarotti is involved in Section C, which crosses the internationally recognized borders of Israel and penetrates the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
The A1 railway is the largest infrastructure project the Israeli government has undertaken in the last ten years and for 6.5 km cuts through the occupied Palestinian territories, resulting in further confiscation of land and putting at least three communities at risk, including the villages of Beit Surik and Beit Iksa.
The call to action of the Italian Coalition “Stop That Train” has already been endorsed by more than 60 national and international organizations, including Israeli, as well as local groups throughout Italy. The coalition calls on Pizzarotti to withdraw from the project, which constitutes a flagrant violation of International Law, in contravention of international norms on human rights, including the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting exploitation of land by an occupying power.
During the meeting with “Stop That Train,” Pizzarotti representatives reiterated what had already been declared in a statement issued by the company on March 17. “Pizzarotti has never played and does not currently play a decision-making role in the planning and design of the railway” and the company is involved exclusively in the construction of a tunnel (T3) for the area “which is fully located within the boundary marked by the Green Line.”
The Italian Coalition “Stop That Train” maintains that regardless of Pizzarotti’s involvement or not in the design of the A1 line, the company has an obligation to verify that projects in which it is involved are in accordance with human rights and international law. This is particularly true in areas of conflict such as Israel and Palestine.
The Israeli feminist organization, the Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), which authored a 28-page dossier on the project, stresses that Pizzarotti, through a joint venture with the Israeli Shapir Civil and Marine Engineering, “signed a contract to construct the entire T3 tunnel. Nowhere in the contract signed by Pizzarotti does it state that the company is not involved or not responsible for the section of the tunnel that is located in the West Bank. … Stating, as Pizzarotti does, that it is not responsible for the eastern portal of the tunnel and that it will not carry out the excavation of the section that crosses the West Bank is, therefore, simply a way of evading the issues and an attempt to dodge its responsibilities.”
The project also includes involvement of DB International, a company fully owned by the German government, which has a contract with the Israeli Railways to provide engineering expertise for the electrification of the rail line. In a letter dated March 14, 2011, the German Minister of Transport defined the project for the A1 railway as “problematic for foreign policy and potentially in violation of international law”, indicating that DB International has confirmed in writing that it will cease all activities in the project.
The Italian Coalition “Stop That Train” is committed to continue the campaign with determination, calling on Pizzarotti to withdraw from the project. A new web site for the campaign was recently launched (www.stopthattrain.org) and on April 9 a demonstration will be held at Pizzarotti headquarters in Parma. In addition, actions similar to those used against Veolia, a French company forced to announce its withdrawal from the light rail construction project in occupied East Jerusalem, are currently being planned.
The Italian Coalition Stop That TrainFor more information or to endorse the campaign: fermarequeltreno@gmail.com
Charges against Gazan engineer show strip is still occupied
Dirar Abu Sisi was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Ukraine. He is charged with developing rockets, missiles and mortar shells for Hamas
Yossi Gurvitz | +972 | April 5 2011
Israel has kidnapped, apparently with the Ukrainian authorities turning a blind eye, a Gazan engineer named Dirar Abu Sisi. He was detained for several weeks under the usual schtick of a double gag order: one gag order preventing making public the fact that he is held, another denying the public the right to know there is a gag order. This buys the GSS (Internal Security Service) precious torture time, and allows him to present the prisoner to the press after he has confessed, which is as it likes it. Yesterday, the veil of secrecy was lifted as Abu Sisi was indicted, confessions and all. His lawyers say they have been tortured out of him, which is a reasonable claim.
The GSS claims Abu Sisi provided Hamas with weapons technology and developed rockets, missiles and mortar shells for it. Which is where it all turns to farce. Abu Sisi, who is not an Israeli citizen, is charged with violations of Israeli law, which has no standing either in the Gaza Strip or in Ukraine, where he was kidnapped. Specifically (Hebrew), the charges are: Membership in a terror organization (residing outside the borders of Israel), contact with a foreign agent (again, this law is invalid in Gaza), conspiracy to commit crimes (likewise), an attempted murder (likewise), and manufacturing of arms.
The last charge is particularly twisted. As far as the Israeli authorities are concerned, the manufacture of any weapon – including the anti-tank rockets Abu Sisi allegedly developed – is a felony. In the hugely asymmetrical armed struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a Palestinian who produces weapons is ipso facto a criminal.
Once again, Israel plays at its favorite double game: When it wants to, the struggle with the Palestinians is a war, which allows it to use the laws of war; when the mood fits her, it is crime suppression. Enemy fighters are never considered to be soldiers, when they are caught; they are always criminals. They don’t get the protections enjoyed by soldiers, even if all they did was resist the Israeli army, but are tried as common criminals. So, on the one hand Israel holds the West Bank under “wartime powers”; on the other hand, anyone objecting to this military occupation is a felon = according to Israeli law, which has no validity in the territories.
The injustice in Abu Sisi’s case is particularly striking: Israel, after all, keeps claiming she does not control the Gaza Strip any longer. And yet, it dares to try a Gazan according to Israeli law, something it did not do when it occupied the place (then, Palestinians were subject to military law). Abu Sisi’s kidnapping highlights the fact that the Israeli occupation in the Strip did not end; it was just mutated.
The kidnapping also sheds an unusually ironic light on one of Israel’s regular claims: That courts in other countries are disbarred from extending their jurisdiction to visiting IDF gunmen. Israel itself, of course, thinks it has precisely this right, and that it extends not just to visitors but to people it brought over by force.
These contradictions are simply not seen by most Israelis. They consider Israel to be the eternal victim, and hence as a country to whom normal rules do not apply. Later, they are puzzled – if they stop at that station at all, before arriving at their final destination of whiny victimhood – when the rest of the world considers Israel to be the neighbourhood bully.
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From the Archives
Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
- UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
- UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
- Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
- It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
- UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
- Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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