UN report debunks Israel’s Naksa propaganda
By Alex Kane | June 15, 2011
Immediately after the Israeli military reportedly killed dozens of unarmed demonstrators in the occupied-Golan Heights on June 15, Israel’s propaganda machine went into high gear. Newly-released details from a United Nations report authored by the Secretary General clearly show that the Israeli spin on the Naksa protests was just that: spin.
The principle claim was that the Israel Defense Forces only shot at the bottom half of protesters’ bodies, and therefore did not kill them. Instead, as a New York Times report put it, the Israeli military said that “10 protesters were killed after they threw makeshift firebombs and started a fire that set off land mines near the border town of Quneitra, on the Syrian side of the lines.”
It turns out that there was indeed a fire that killed demonstrators, according to the UN. But according to published accounts of Ban Ki-Moon’s report on the demonstrations, it was Israeli weaponry that caused the fire which ultimately killed protesters.
A UN report on the Naksa day events said the IDF used tear gas, smoke grenades and live fire to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the ceasefire line.
It stated: “Several anti-tank mines exploded due to a brush fire apparently started by tear gas or smoke grenade canisters near UNDOF facilities at Charlie Gate, resulting in casualties among protesters.”
The brush fire was put out by Syrian and Israeli fire squads, and UNDOF, the report read.
Meanwhile, the Zionist blogosphere is all over this story by Michael Weiss of the Telegraph that purports to show Syrian state documents proving that “Assad orchestrated Nakba Day raids” on the Golan Heights. Weiss, who works for a pro-Israel advocacy group, claimed that the document was authentic and originated from the “‘Office of the Mayor’ in Al-Qunaitera province.” But blogger Richard Silverstein throws cold water on Weiss’ report, writing that it was Israeli intelligence–which has a history of pushing false stories in the media–who leaked the memo to him.
The West’s Obscene Demonization of Gaddafi
By Glen Ford | BAR | June 15, 2011
The slander campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi has reached way beyond the realm of the ridiculous, and can only be described as obscene. We are now supposed to believe that Colonel Gaddafi, himself, ordered his soldiers to rape hundreds of women. There is not one bit of hard evidence that such mass rapes have occurred, but that does not seem to matter to a corporate media that are bent on glorifying the Benghazi-based rebels and demonizing Gaddafi and his soldiers. Amnesty International, an organization that is decidedly hostile to Gaddafi’s government, admits that it cannot find evidence of mass rapes by the Libyan armed forces. And the man in charge of the United Nations’ human rights investigation in Libya told journalists that “massive hysteria” was behind the rape charge. Nevertheless, the western media repeat the baseless allegations ad nauseam, like young boys telling dirty stories.
The International Criminal Court, which specializes in prosecuting Africans who get on the wrong side of the United States, speaks vaguely of being in possession of evidence, but it turns out that the allegations come from one Libyan woman, who claims that she sent out inquiries about sexual assaults to 70,000 women, that 60,000 of them responded, and 259 reported they had been abused. But when investigators asked this solitary source to show them the questionnaires, as investigative reporter Russ Baker tells us, she could not produce the evidence. And it is a mystery how she could have mailed out and gotten back tens of thousands of questionnaires, when Libya’s postal system had been shut down by the war.
This war was launched on the basis of an imaginary massacre of Libyan civilians by Gaddafi’s forces – which, of course, never happened – and is now fueled by a campaign of demonization and a depraved indifference to the truth.
Certainly since 2001, the world has been subjected to a massive U.S. psychological assault, a vast disinformation operation in which the corporate media act as megaphones for government liars.
The invasion of Iraq was launched by lies about weapons of mass destruction. When the lies fell apart, American politicians justified the war by saying it was worth it to get rid of the monster, Saddam Hussein. Saddam was so thoroughly demonized that any amount of maiming and death would be acceptable to erase him from the scene. If Saddam Hussein was the Devil, himself, then there could be no limits on military efforts to eliminate him. Now, the same kind of dehumanizing psychological offensive is directed at Moammar Gaddafi, who is depicted in comic-book style as a puppet master of mass rape, so that whatever death and destruction is rained down on Libya by NATO, it will have been “worth it.” This is a profoundly dangerous way for a superpower to behave. It fills the population with a bloodlust that cannot be easily controlled. The U.S. government, with plenty of help from the media, is telling Americans that those who oppose U.S. policies in the world are savages. That’s what the white settlers said about the Indians, and we know how that ended.
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Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
Peter Dale Scott | The Aasia-Pacific Journal | June 13, 2011
It is a troubled Time for NATO’s campaign against Libya. President Obama has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their tepid response “is putting the Libya mission and the alliance’s very future at risk.”1 Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, “Mr Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been rebuffed by the White House.”2
The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going begins to get tough, the professional p.r. campaigns get going, often with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite, and “she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.”3
Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl, that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government.4
The history of American foreign interventions is littered with such false stories, from the “Remember the Maine” campaign of the Hearst press in 1898, to the false stories of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, 1964. We know furthermore that in their Operation Northwoods documents, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 proposed a series of ways, some of them lethal, to deceive the American people in order to engineer a war against Cuba.5
Since the fiasco of the false Iraqi stories in 1990-91, these stories have tended to be floated by foreign sources, usually European. This was conspicuously the case with the forged yellowcake documents from Italy underlying Bush’s misleading reference to Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union address.6 But it was true also of the false stories linking Saddam Hussein to the celebrated anthrax letters of 2001. (Their anthrax was later determined to have come from a U.S. biowarfare laboratory.)7
This recurring history of falsified stories to justify interventions should be on our minds as we now face the allegations, as yet neither proven nor disproven, that Gaddafi has been using rape as a method to fight insurrection, and may have been guilty of raping victims himself. These charges were made on June 8 by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who claimed (according to Time Magazine)
there were indications that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered the rape of hundreds of women during his violent crackdown on the rebels and that he had even provided his soldiers with Viagra to stimulate the potential for attacks.*
According to Time, the rape stories are being circulated by doctors who claim to have met and treated patients but do not have patients’ permission to reveal their identities. Earlier, according to a Libyan doctor interviewed in an Al Jazeera video, “many doctors have found Viagra and condoms in the pockets of dead pro-Gaddafi fighters, as well as treated female rape survivors. The doctor insists this clearly indicates the Gaddafi regime is using rape as a weapon of war.”9
But what of Moreno’s charge that “Now we are getting some information that Gaddafi himself decided to rape, and this is new.”10 This is a sensational charge: until we learn there is a reliable source for it, one can suspect it was made to grab headlines.
One problem in investigating these charges is that Libyan culture is so unkind to rape victims that they are reluctant to come forward. Researchers for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were unable to find one woman who said she had been raped. A U.N. human rights investigator, Cherif Bassiouni, told Agence France-Presse that the rape and Viagra stories were being circulated by the Benghazi authorities as “part of a ‘massive hysteria.’” In fact he had discovered only three cases.11
Military conflict of course is normally accompanied by rape. What might constitute a war crime would be whether (to quote Time) Gaddafi “had provided his soldiers with Viagra.” Moreno actually said, according to the Associated Press, that “some witnesses confirmed that the [Libyan] government was buying containers of Viagra-type drugs ‘to enhance the possibility to rape.’”
Others have objected that the purchase of Viagra-type drugs falls far short of indicating a war crime. Former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in Tripoli on an investigative mission, has pointed out in her emails that to date the one army known to have distributed Viagra as part of its war operations is the U.S. Army – as a bribe to entice information from aging tribal leaders in Afghanistan.12
Time’s subtle enhancement of Moreno’s claim – from purchasing Viagra to providing it to soldiers, reminds us of the sorry record of the U.S. mainstream media in circulating past false stories to justify war. It is painful to say this, but virtually every major U.S. military intervention since Korea has been accompanied by false stories. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo should be pressed to come forward quickly with the supporting evidence for his charges, which should be based on more than the testimony of doctors working for the Benghazi regime.
Notes
1 “Gates rebukes NATO allies, warns of ‘dismal’ future,” Agence France-Presse, June 10, 2011.
2 “The billion dollar war? Libyan campaign breaks Pentagon estimates costing U.S. taxpayers $2 million a day,” London Daily Mail, June 9, 2011.
3 “No Casus Belli? Invent One,” Guardian (London), February 5, 2003.
4 Ted Rowse, “Kuwaitgate – killing of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers exaggerated,” Washington Monthly, September 1992.
5 Scott, American War Machine, 195-201.
6 Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 97.
7 Consider the following story in the London Daily Mail by Simon Reeve: Iraq has been identified as the most likely source of the anthrax used to terrorise America during recent weeks. New plans are now being considered for retalia tory military strikes against Saddam Hussein, according to American government officials. Although studies of the anthrax spores sent through the mail are continuing, American scientists have discovered “hallmarks” that point to Iraqi involvement. American investigators are increasingly convinced that the anthrax was smuggled into the US and mailed to a number of targets by unidentified “sleeper” supporters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. (Simon Reeve, “Scientists Link Iraq to Anthrax Terror Attacks,” Sunday Mail.
8 [London], October 28, 2001; discussed in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 194-95). [The example is also interesting in its fusing of Saddam and Al Qaeda, in fact bitter rivals]
9 Karen Leigh, “Rape in Libya: The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Time, June 9, 2011.
10 Washington Post Blogpost, March 29, 2011.
11 Agence France-Presse, June 9, 2011.
12 “UN investigator casts doubt over Libya mass rape claims,” Agence France Presse, June 9, 2011.
13 Toby Hamden, “CIA give Afghan warlords Viagra in exchange for information on Taliban,” Telegraph [London], December 26, 2008.
Uncivilized Relations: Israel Confronts its Neighbours
By Brenda Heard / Dissident Voice / June 9th, 2011
Photo credit – Amelia Opalinska
The turmoil that has beleaguered the Middle East for decades has been described many ways. On the 5th of June, however, the terminology turned vulgar. This enduring conflict was publicly characterized as a ‘war between the civilized man and the savage’. Boldly announced with a plea to ‘support Israel/defeat Jihad’, the full page advertisement ran in the New York Post’s special section covering the city’s ‘Celebrate Israel’ parade.
Declaring the Muslim people ‘savage’ is, of course, just a school-yard taunt from Islamaphobe Pamela Geller, who gleefully takes credit for the advertisement. Had her rant been limited to her own blog, we might easily dismiss it. The problem lies in its acceptance into mainstream discourse. The Post may be tabloid journalism, but its paper edition remains the seventh most popular paper in America. And this sort of crude advertisement for a political cause panders to a public comfortable with the mind-set of ‘don’t bore me with the details’.
But the details are critical if we are to consider a conflict that has taken thousands of lives. How can we, for instance, reconcile the concept of ‘civilized’ with the reality of shooting unarmed protesters? The advertisement asks us to accept Israel as ‘civilized’; yet as these very words were first read, Israeli soldiers were shooting into a crowd of Syrian-Palestinians, killing 24 and injuring another 350.
Even if we were to set aside troublesome issues of borderlines and occupation zones, lethal violence hardly qualifies as a civilized response to what was unmistakeably only a symbolic demonstration. It had been loudly announced in advance. Had the protesters indeed posed a physical threat, then they might have been easily overpowered and arrested by the Israeli military on hand. But that would have been a sensible—a civilized—means of containing the situation.
The deadly violence chosen by the Israeli forces on the 5th of June mirrors the same used just three weeks prior, during the Nakba demonstrations. And these echo hundreds and hundreds of instances when Israeli forces have brazenly attempted to destroy anything and anyone deemed inconvenient. Perhaps the most egregious example, though, happened 29 years ago during the first week of June 1982.
In a defiant escalation of the Zionist occupation of Southern Lebanon in place since March 1978, the Israeli government and military flagrantly snubbed the ruling of the United Nations. Using brute force, the Israeli forces intensified efforts to gain territory and to obliterate any resistance to their project. Despite the presence of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) as international peacekeepers, the Israelis insisted on their own form of deadly control.
On 4 June 1982 Israel conducted air raids in and around Beirut.* Together with its mercenary militia, Israeli ground forces also engaged in intense artillery fire in Southern Lebanon. Both the Secretary General of UNIFIL and the President of the UN Security Council issued urgent appeals to ‘adhere strictly to the cease-fire that had been in effect since July 1981 and to refrain immediately from any hostile act likely to provoke an aggravation of the situation’.
By way of answer, the next day Israeli forces amplified their intent. They multiplied air strikes. They increased artillery fire on the ground with added naval artillery power. Again, UNIFIL reiterated its call for a simultaneous cessation of hostilities. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 508, calling for all parties ‘to cease immediately and simultaneously all military activities within Lebanon and across the Lebanese-Israeli border’.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed. The Israeli Representative, however, stated the Resolution would have to be brought before the Israeli Cabinet.
Despite UNIFIL’s continued efforts throughout the night of 5 June, Israeli air strikes resumed shortly after 0600, the morning of 6 June—precisely the deadline given in Resolution 508 to cease fire.
The Chairman of the PLO informed UNIFIL that ‘in spite of heavy Israeli air-strikes after the scheduled time of the cease-fire, he had given orders to all PLO units to withhold fire for a further, unspecified period’. When UNIFIL then met later that morning with the chief of the Israeli military forces, the agenda was the implementation of Resolution 508.
Instead, UNIFIL was informed that Israel was launching a military operation into Lebanon within half an hour. UNIFIL was warned to stay out of the way. UNIFIL protested, to no avail:
Israeli ground forces, including a very large number of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, moved into Lebanese territory in strength. . . . UNIFIL troops attempted to prevent the entry and advance of the Israeli forces. On the coastal road, for example, Dutch soldiers planted obstacles before advancing Israeli tank column; one tank was damaged; the obstacles, however, were pushed aside, as was the Dutch guardhouse. Tank barrels were pointed at UNIFIL soldiers during the entire encounter, likewise, in the other battalion areas, obstacles were forcibly removed and bulldozed. At Khardala Bridge, a small Nepalese position stood its ground for two days, despite harassments and threats. On the morning of 8 June, their position was partially destroyed/and some 100 Israeli tanks began to cross the bridge. Despite the efforts of UNIFIL, from the start of the invasion, the overwhelming strength and weight of the Israeli forces precluded the possibility of stopping them, and UNIFIL positions in the line of the invasion were thus overrun or by-passed.
Later that day, the UN Security Council met again and unanimously adopted Resolution 509, demanding the withdrawal of Israeli military forces and cessation of all military activities.
Contrary to the Resolution, on 7 June, Israeli forces—comprising more than two mechanized divisions, with full air and naval support—expanded their positions northward and waged intense fighting.
On 8 June, the Security Council met again, but no resolution was adopted, because of the negative vote from the US. At the same time, Israeli forces resumed their pattern of blocking movement of UNIFIL forces and took prisoner 62 Lebanese Army soldiers who were serving under the operational command of UNIFIL. When UNIFIL demanded their return, the Israeli military released them to its mercenary militia instead. This common ruse was vigorously protested. Again to no avail.
And so this pattern of lawlessness continued, bringing years of violent rampage through Lebanon. There was nothing civilized about it. Just as there was nothing civilized in the recent shooting of protesters in Lebanon and Syria. When advertisement-maker Pamela Geller suggests otherwise, the facts fail to substantiate her claim.
In her review of the Celebrate Israel parade, she refers several times to the event in religious terms. God was smiling on the paraders, she tells us, providing them with sunshine for their pro-Jewish rally. Syrians and Palestinians, on the other hand, she classifies as interchangeable Muslims, Jew-haters, Nazis upon whose Nakba bund rallies God frowned upon with torrential rains. The celebration, it seems, had little to do with a political entity, and much to do with being a so-called chosen people. A so-called civilized people.
But in civilized society, we might counter, we co-exist not by the rule of force, but by the rule of law. In civilized society, God—whether we accept ‘God’ as a concept or as a reality—represents justice and righteousness. It is a gross distortion of civilized thought to imagine God laying down bets on his favourite football club and then fixing the game for a good laugh. No, in a civilized society, we take responsibility for our actions.
*The details of the events of June 1982 are documented in the ‘Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’, S/15194/Add.1, 11 June 1982, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/7264B57A6DD3E85B8525701B0072A4F5
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Brenda Heard is the founder and director of Friends of Lebanon, London. She can be contacted at: mail@friendsoflebanon.org.
Interview: Antony Loewenstein on Palestine’s struggle in Australia
Sarah Irving | The Electronic Intifada | 8 June 2011
Antony Loewenstein (antonyloewenstein.com) is a writer and journalist based in Sydney, Australia and a founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices. His first book, My Israel Question, was an Australian best-seller and was short-listed for the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; an updated third edition was published in 2009. His second book, The Blogging Revolution, about the Internet in repressive regimes, was released in 2008 and an updated second edition will be out later this year.
Loewenstein has written widely about the recent furor over the vote by Marrickville Council in Sydney to observe a full boycott, divestment & sanctions (BDS) strategy on Israeli products. After vitriolic attacks in the Australian press, especially Murdoch-owned newspapers such as The Australian, and hostile statements by federal and state-level politicians, a second council vote rescinded the BDS motion, while affirming the council’s support for the aims of the BDS movement. The Green Party mayor of Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, who had backed BDS, lost the ensuing state election to Australian Labor Party candidate Carmel Tebbutt, although she did achieve a large swing to the Greens.
In articles for Australian publications such as New Matilda and Crikey, Loewenstein has accused the mainstream press of “misrepresentations and outright falsehoods” in its reporting of the Marrickville affair, noting that “there have been dozens of articles in the Australian recently calling the Greens ‘extremists,’ implying the party is anti-Semitic, claiming BDS is akin to genocide, extensively quoting the Labor and Liberal parties (who unsurprisingly both condemn BDS) and the Zionist lobby (who again oppose it) (“Where are the Arab voices in Aussie BDS debate?,” 15 April 2011).
Sarah Irving interviewed Antony Loewenstein for The Electronic Intifada.
Sarah Irving: One of the odd things about the Marrickville episode is that there was very little media coverage of the actual decision by the council to observe the BDS call. The press storm suddenly erupted about six weeks later, when the campaign for the New South Wales state elections really kicked off. Although the focus was on the boycott of Israel, was this really an Australian political issue?
Antony Loewenstein: I think that analysis is probably pretty true. When the BDS motion was announced in December it almost went unnoticed. I think what changed was three things. First, a state election was coming in March. Second, the Green Party in Australia in the last nine months or so has gone from being an important third player to very important third player.
They partly assist in the federal balance of power — there are independents as well — and there was, predictably, from the Australian Labor Party, the [right-wing] Liberal Party and from the Murdoch press, a sense that the Greens need to be “cut down to size.” A federal Labor minister, Anthony Albanese, got involved, saying that the Greens were being extreme and so on. His wife, Carmel Tebbutt, was running against Fiona Byrne, the Green mayor of Marrickville, for the state legislature. Albanese didn’t mention this rather important detail when the press covered the issue, that his wife was running, which almost smacks of dishonesty, and the fact that the Murdoch press didn’t mention it either shows how dishonest they are.
So it was almost like there was a federal intervention in the debate and it was seen as a perfect way to try and divide and conquer the Greens. You had senior federal ministers, Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister and now foreign minister, and Barry O’Farrell, then the state opposition leader and now Liberal state premier, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke — this litany of hacks who had spent most of their professional lives demonizing Arabs and who were now asked to speak on the Arab-Palestinian question. Arabs and Palestinians were largely ignored.
I suppose it was seen as a potentially effective way to divide and conquer the Greens and to show anybody who seriously thought about speaking up for Palestinians that this is what happens to you. You will be punished and attacked and defamed and often given no right of reply. That’s the message, and a lot of people I’ve spoken to in the last few months who might once have spoken out now won’t, or didn’t, because they’ve been scared off. That includes trade unions who supported BDS. Many of the unions in the country last year came out in support of BDS — it was partial BDS, more often the settlement boycott, but it’s a start. There were attempts to get them to say something, to speak out in support of Marrickville Council. But there was deadly silence. Not least, in my guess, because of their connections to the Labor Party.
Sarah Irving: Was the rabid reaction to the Marrickville boycott vote by much of the mainstream press, whether Rupert Murdoch-owned or not, in keeping with their usual stance on Israel and the Palestinians?
Antony Loewenstein: The Murdoch press is obviously known in Britain and America — it’s not confined to Australia — for being pretty antagonistic towards Arabs and Muslims. It’s very much signed up to the whole “War on Terror” rhetoric and all which that means. The “War on Terror” has been wonderful for the Murdoch empire’s business, as we’ve seen most recently with Bin Laden’s death.
We also have a situation in Australia which is not unique to us, where the vast majority of politicians and an awful lot of journalists and editors are sent on trips by the Zionist lobby to Israel. They go there semi-regularly, they spend five or six days there, they will spend maybe five minutes in Ramallah [in the occupied West Bank] if they’re lucky. But most of their time will be in Israel hearing about the great threat from the Arabs, the Iranian threat, peace is a long way off — blah blah blah.
They’ll then come back and talk about a two-state solution and the glories of peace. It reflects badly on the hundreds of journalists and editors who’ve been flown to Israel by the lobby and who have not said, “can I do my own thing?”
The idea of simply having your hand held like that is incomprehensible to me. You are a sycophant. They are often people who have critical faculties on other issues, but they go to Israel and they are almost guaranteed to be publishing propaganda when they return. The last trip went late last year, about ten people went, including some good journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald, and before they went I said on my website that we can guarantee one thing: when they get back, they’ll be talking about Iran, [that] Iran’s a threat. And that’s what they wrote. They admit that “sure, there’s an issue with Palestine, but Iran is the problem.” It’s almost like there is an unspoken obligation to your host for having wined and dined you for a week.
So most of the media has “form” in one way or another. I wouldn’t say that the reaction to Marrickville was more extreme than usual but I would say that there was little or no context about why BDS is not an idea put forward by neo-Nazis, which is the impression you’d have got by reading the press, and that it has growing support. But the latter is in some ways the Achilles’ heel — that the boycott is getting international support, which is exactly why there was this attempt to crush it here. The people who follow this issue know what’s happening in parts of Europe and Britain and even some parts of the US. This was a perfect opportunity, so they thought, to crush it here before it really took off. A local Sydney council was a perfect way to do it, and the fact that there was a Green mayor, even better.
SI: The extreme press response is being widely seen amongst Australian activists as having been a tactic to scare other public bodies, such as universities or councils, away from considering BDS policies. Has it worked for the moment?
AL: Put it this way: those unions which signed up last year have not rescinded their BDS motions. But they haven’t said much about it publicly either. I did notice, though, that the Maritime Union of Australia put out a statement supporting partial BDS, which is the first one I’ve seen for a while. Essentially it was saying that “Palestine’s got a problem, we support BDS, bring it on.” It didn’t mention Marrickville specifically. And while the Maritime Union is not one of the top unions in the country it does have a sizable membership. The other unions have been conspicuous by their silence, and I think that’s probably because they want to remain a bit quiet because of the Australian Labor Party, which goes to show how morally bankrupt the ALP has become.
SI: Was the mainstream press and political reaction to the Marrickville vote part of a wider systemic attitude towards BDS in Australia?
AL: Yes. I don’t necessarily see it as part of a coordinated campaign against BDS. By that I mean I don’t think there was a meeting in a room between the Israel lobby, the Murdoch press and and Labor Party. They don’t even need to do that. It doesn’t need to happen that way.
There’s a sense that the Palestine debate in Australia is one that’s largely about excluding the voice of Palestinians. There are recent exceptions, not least because of a handful of pro-Palestinian groups who’ve been pro-active in lobbying the mainstream media to get some representation. But there is an ingrained racism in the corporate press in Australia. Very few non-Anglo figures appear in the papers or on TV regularly. You hear very few Arab voices in general; it’s not just about Palestinians. I think there is a deliberate exclusion. As in many countries, the media is largely run by old white men.
In some ways what happened in the Arab revolutions should have given them, you would think, unique opportunities to have people speaking in their own voice from Tunisia and Libya. There have been Tunisians and dissident Libyans and Egyptians in our media, but largely it is still white journalists going to country X to write about it. When was the last time the Australian media had a major Egyptian, Libyan or Tunisian activist or nongovernmental organization writing in our papers, in their words? It’s happened, but very rarely.
The Palestinian issue is very similar. The idea of even suggesting that journalists should include Arab voices within the Marrickville story barely occurred. Sure it was about local politics as well, but the idea that you’d write about Palestine and not even think, “Gee, what does an Arab think?” It’s almost like the worst example of what happens in the New York Post or on FOX — and it wasn’t all in the Murdoch media, I might add.
The Palestinian question here is also about US foreign policy and Australian policy, which is that we are essentially a client state of the US and proud of being so. The Australian government talks about being independent but is quite the opposite. Australia has framed its world-view around receiving protection from America. There’s an unspoken idea that if we get invaded by Indonesia or China or some other other “Asian” country, who’s gonna protect us? America, allegedly.
So in order to stay in line with US policy, the Palestinian question here seems to be based around deliberately ignoring what Israel is doing in Palestine. So when you have pro-BDS types, whether Palestinians or Jews, saying BDS is necessary because of how Israel behaves, because there is a lack of legality, because there is impunity for occupation crimes, a lot of people in the media often say “that’s just ridiculous.” They’ll come out with the usual lines about Israel being a democracy. There is a line of ignoring what occupation means; it’s barely used as a word. It’s a “territorial dispute” and we’re engaged in a “peace process” and Abbas is “talking to the Americans” and so on.
SI: Even in the left-of-center, “alternative” media — online publications such as New Matilda and Crikey — there was only some coverage of Marrickville, BDS and the press response, and much of it was coming from you, Antony. Would they have covered the story if you hadn’t pitched it to them?
AL: There’s really a couple of issues here. Within many activist groups it seems like there’s an element of either naivete or of defeatism — they think “well they wouldn’t publish this anyway, so why bother?”
I’m not saying everyone thinks like that, but I’m not the only person who could be writing about this. I’m not Arab or Palestinian. Obviously I’m Jewish and I’m engaged because of that issue, feeling that “my people” are committing crimes in “my name,” which is a pretty awful feeling. But I do know a number of cases where Palestinians tried to get in those publications and didn’t succeed. I don’t know about the facts behind that. I can’t speak for those publications. I also think that even in some “alternative” publications here there is a degree of wariness about the issue. It’s seen as two rabid sides and that we need some “moderation.”
I would also like some other Jewish voices, younger Jewish voices, to be speaking out. There are some, but so few. You don’t hear in Australia, as you do in the UK and America, those Jewish dissident voices. I think it reflects badly on how unimportant real human rights are for the majority of Jewish people in Australia. Some of them might campaign about refugees or indigenous issues, which are important, but for me the real test of someone’s conscience is how they deal with issues that are close to home. I’m not saying that other issues don’t matter, but it’s how you deal with an issue which affects you, which is close to your family. That’s the real test of someone’s personality and sadly the majority of Jews here are failing by ignoring the issue, or campaigning against it, or staying silent. It’s disappointing and frustrating.
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, co-authored with Sharyn Lock, was published in January 2010. Her new edition of the Bradt Guide to Palestine is out in November 2011, and her biography of Leila Khaled in spring 2012.
Antony Loewenstein’s website can be found at antonyloewenstein.com.
‘Fayyadism’ revealed: UN report throws cold water on the economic mirage in the West Bank
By Adam Horowitz | Mondoweiss | June 8, 2011
In recent years it has become popular among liberal commentators in the US to celebrate Salam Fayyad and his plan for Palestine. Despite evidence of widespread human rights abuses under his watch, or more accurately at his and US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton’s command, Fayyad’s state building plan has been lauded, mainly because it prioritizes building the Palestinian economy over securing Palestinian rights. In the words of the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen “he’s getting things done, improving people’s lives, and Palestinians are tired of going nowhere.”
This perspective has been best summarized by none other than Thomas Friedman, who has dubbed the phenomena “Fayyadism.” Here Friedman describes Fayyadism as only he can:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider Middle East what off-Broadway is to Broadway. It is where all good and bad ideas get tested out first. Well, the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former I.M.F. economist, is testing out the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever. I call it “Fayyadism.”
Fayyadism is based on the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.
Fayyad, a former finance minister who became prime minister after Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007, is unlike any Arab leader today. He is an ardent Palestinian nationalist, but his whole strategy is to say: the more we build our state with quality institutions — finance, police, social services — the sooner we will secure our right to independence. I see this as a challenge to “Arafatism,” which focused on Palestinian rights first, state institutions later, if ever, and produced neither.
Things are truly getting better in the West Bank, thanks to a combination of Fayyadism, improved Palestinian security and a lifting of checkpoints by Israel. In all of 2008, about 1,200 new companies registered for licenses here. In the first six months of this year, almost 900 have registered. According to the I.M.F., the West Bank economy should grow by 7 percent this year.
The last point is the most common one raised by Fayyad’s supporters. This economic growth is supposed to prove Palestinians worthiness for a state in international eyes, and was even been seized upon by Benjamin Netanyahu in his recent address to Congress as a sign that the occupation is not a hinderance to Palestinian aspirations. After giving Fayyad props for leading the charge, Netanyahu also took credit for the Palestinian’s economic growth
We’ve helped, on our side, we’ve helped the Palestinian economic growth by removing hundreds of barriers and roadblocks to the free flow of goods and people, and the results have been nothing short of remarkable. The Palestinian economy is booming. It’s growing by more than 10 percent a year. And Palestinian cities — they look very different today than what they looked just few — a few years ago. They have shopping malls, movie theaters, restaurants, banks. They even have e-businesses, but you can’t see that when you visit them.
It all sounds wonderful, but it isn’t true.
I’m not saying that there aren’t restaurants or banks, and it is even possible that the Palestinian economy grew 7% by some measure in the West Bank during the last year, but a new UN report released today reveals the truth behind the sloganeering. The report issued by UNRWA shows that unemployment in the West Bank stands near 24%, and is even higher for refugees, while the “West Bank miracle” is based almost entirely on international aid. From Reuters:
The report by the agency UNRWA shows that unemployment in the second half of 2010 grew much faster than employment, and average purchasing power continued to decline.
Of six major private sector activities, only two recorded employment gains during the second half of last year. Overall, one in four Palestinians in the workforce was unemployed.
“While there was modest employment growth, such growth was on the wane in 2010 while the number of unemployed accelerated in the second half of the year,” said author Salem Ajluni.
The report’s findings challenge assertions that the Palestinian economy is growing, helped by the removal of Israeli roadblocks and other movement restrictions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech to the U.S. Congress last month that the Palestinian economy was booming.
Palestinian policymakers have projected growth of 7 percent in 2011 for both the West Bank and Gaza, though they point out that high growth rates in recent years have largely been dependent on international aid for the Palestinians.
The UNRWA report said: “The average broad refugee unemployment rate rose by more than a percentage point to 27.9 percent relative to first-half 2009 as compared to 24.1 per cent rate for non-refugees.”
A UNRWA spokesman goes on to say, “The occupation and its related infrastructure such as settlements and settler-only roads that encroach on and divide Palestinian land, settler violence and the West Bank barrier have diminished prospects for Palestinians in general and especially for refugees.”
This really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Last year around this time Save the Children UK released a report saying that poverty was worse in parts of the West Bank than in Gaza. Still, I imagine it might come as a shock to some on the Times editorial page. Although international aid has made some enclaves in the occupied territories, especially parts of Ramallah, feel as though they’re booming, this money has flowed mostly through the Palestinian Authority patronage system and enriched a few. This story would have been more obvious if reporters had traveled a bit off the beaten path, but I guess that’s a bit too far off Broadway.
US Raid Gets Much Credence in Gullible-minded America
By Kim Petersen / Dissident Voice / June 6th, 2011
The gullibility of many Americans is rooted in deep distrust of the Islamic countries, a desire to protect their nuclear hegemony, impressions of world events, and devotion to preachings of hard-line priests.
It was all a done deal, Bob Smith sniffed. The US got their bogeyman in Abbottabad.
To Bob, the secret night raid by U.S. commandos, the staccato bursts of gunfire, the crash of the stealth helicopter and the reported killing of the al Qaeda leader in a whitewashed compound were pure gospel. The Americans had proven to the world that terrorism exists everywhere in Pakistan.
“Next we’ll go in and take control of their nuclear weapons,” the 20-year-old college student said as he walked along a cement path near the campus.
In Washington and across the country, almost all Americans are thoroughly convinced that Bin Laden was killed in a raid May 2. A poll conducted by USA Today/Gallup found that 54% of Americans believe bin Laden’s death will make the US safer from terrorism while 28% fear it will be less safe. There was no need to ask whether they believed Bin Laden was assassinated last month by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs (just like there is no need to ask who masterminded 9-11). Results indicate that at least 82% believe bin Laben to have been killed. Some people say that Bin Laden should have been killed earlier.
Such acceptance of official accounts is usual in a country with a collective propensity to get swept up by corporate media and government declarations, analysts say. The profound gullibility shared by many Americans is rooted in their deep trust of the United States government, their desire to protect their country’s nuclear hegemony, their impressions of world events outside the US, and their devotion to the preachings of hard-line priests.
The gullibility, analysts say, gives life to acceptance of the government line nurtured by free but reckless media that provide exposure for Christian-minded observers and others willing to mute skepticism. Many television talk shows try to gobble up ratings with sensationalism and demonization of the Islamic world. The result, analysts say, is often too much scapegoating and not enough self-examination of America’s own problems, a form of denial.
One of the country’s top terrorism conspiracy theory purveyors is US defense secretary Robert M. Gates who wears a trademark dark suit and tie and routinely appears at US government press conferences. In February on YouTube, Gates breathlessly talked of a real problem of anti-Americanism in Pakistan. Thus, the Democrat-Republican axis seeks to wrest control of the Islamic world by secretly supporting terrorist groups within these countries to foment civil war.
The above was a tweaking of page one of a online piece in the Los Angeles Times that palpably exposes the bias and animus toward US-government declared enemies.1 Far worse, it points to a propensity for some readers to uncritically accept printed word as fact.
The Times reporter uses the pejorative “conspiracy theorists” to describe the wide swath of Pakistanis who doubt the official US account about the purported assassination of Osama bin Laden. He thereby ignores the lies of the US government regarding Saddam Hussein having weapons-of-mass-destruction, yellow cake from Niger, dodgy British dossiers, and a history of war pretexts.2 So the skeptics are derided as conspiracy theorists.
Mainly, I substituted the word “Pakistan” with “America” and “conspiracy” with “gullibility.” Critically minded readers will easily recognize the corporate media stenography for the US government line on the conspiratorial war-on-terrorism. When many people continue to believe the official government lie after years and years of mendacity, what conclusions should one draw?
- Alex Rodriguez, “Bin Laden raid gets little credence in conspiracy-minded Pakistan,” Los Angeles Times, 31 May 2011
- Kim Petersen, “Grasping at Straws: Searching for a War Pretext,” Dissident Voice, 4 March 2003.
US says dropping bombs is not war, but guessing a computer password is
By Ethan A. Huff – Natural News – June 5, 2011
The US government sure has an interesting way of defining war these days. Just a few months after the Obama administration played word games with the public by insisting that air strikes in Libya were just “kinetic military action,” not acts of war, the Pentagon has now come on the record stating that it will treat all acts of cyber-hacking against the US as “acts of war.”
The announcement came on the heels of a supposed cyber-attack that occurred a few weeks ago against defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Officials say when hacking incidents like this occur in the future, retaliation in the form of reverse cyber-attacks, economic sanctions, and even “military strike[s]” may take place.
“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response,” said Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman. “All appropriate options would be on the table.” A White House statement also said the US plans to “respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country,” implying that computer hackers could soon face retaliatory attacks by the US military.
So when the US decides to invade foreign nations, often times without necessary congressional approval, it is just a simple act of exerting kinetic energy. But when a computer hacker correctly guesses a password and breaches the security protocols of the US government or one of its contracted companies, this is an act of war. And so it goes in the arbitrary world of the military-industrial complex, where definitions of war are applied only when it benefits the corporate oligarchy.
In truth, this latest cyber fear mongering out of the Pentagon is just another excuse for those running the US government to widen the scope of those it considers to be terrorists and enemies of the state. And now that the announcement has been made, you can expect to hear about many more “cyber-attacks” that will predicate convenient excuses to launch new kinetic military actions against nations, groups, and perhaps even fellow American citizens.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-…
Seymour Hersh and Iranian Nukes: A Primer
Daniel Luban | LobeLog | June 4th, 2011
Seymour Hersh’s new piece in the New Yorker has generated a fair amount of buzz, so much so that Iran hawks have quickly leaped into action to try to discredit it. Virtually none of the criticism of Hersh’s piece has actually addressed the substance of his article, however, and since the article is subscription-only, it’s possible that not many people have actually gotten a chance to read it. It may therefore be worthwhile simply to spell out what Hersh’s piece actually says.
By far the most significant revelation in the piece concerns the recently-completed 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). NIEs represent the consensus judgments of the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, and as such their findings frequently have major political ramifications. The 2007 NIE was particularly important (and contested), for it concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and found no evidence that the program had resumed.
Predictably, the 2007 NIE elicited howls of outrage from hawks who have been pushing military action against Tehran, and in the years since they have constantly attempted to discredit it. It’s worth making clear, however, just what the NIE did and didn’t say. It found no evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program — that is, a nuclear program with elements that had no conceivable civilian uses (e.g., nuclear warhead design). The NIE never claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program entirely, only that none of the nuclear program’s projects were unambiguously military in scope. Thus, to point to the fact that Iran continues to enrich uranium as evidence that the 2007 NIE has been discredited, as the Iran hawks have frequently tried to do, simply misses the point; the NIE did not suggest that Iran had stopped enriching uranium.
Nor did the NIE claim that it’s inconceivable that the Iranian regime ultimately seeks a nuclear weapon. It’s quite plausible that the regime does (not least, to deter U.S. or Israeli military action). What the NIE claimed was that there was no hard evidence or smoking gun proving that this was the case. Thus the relevant question is not whether we believe in our heart of hearts that Iran is seeking nukes, but whether there is any incontrovertible evidence that it is. This question is particularly salient in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence fiasco. In the runup to war, most people (including many war opponents) suspected that Saddam Hussein had WMD programs of some kind, but the U.S. would have been better served to put less weight on such suspicions and more weight on the actual evidential record.
So what does the Hersh piece actually say? The biggest revelation is that despite four years of intense political pressure from Iran hawks pushing the intelligence community to renounce the 2007 NIE, the just-released 2011 NIE continues to find no clear evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. According to Hersh, analysts at the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in particular have pushed back against this political pressure; in fact, the DIA analysts suggest that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was primarily directed at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not Israel, and was abandoned following the fall of Saddam.
Typically, a declassified version of the NIE is released for public consumption. This has not been done with the 2011 NIE, however, for reasons that are unclear. It’s possible that the Obama administration fears a political backlash along the lines of the 2007 version, or that it is worried that publicizing the new NIE would undercut its relatively hard-line stance on Iran. Regardless, the fact that a declassified version of the NIE has not been released means that Hersh’s piece is the first time the public is hearing about it.
In light of this, it is obvious that most of the criticism of Hersh’s piece completely ignores its central contention. The issue, once again, is not whether we should believe in our heart of hearts that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. The issue is whether the U.S. intelligence community has found any incontrovertible evidence that this is the case. If Hersh’s account of the 2011 NIE is correct, the intelligence community has not, and this is a fact that surely deserves to be mentioned in discussions of the Iranian nuclear issue.
The Imperialist Crime Cover-Up
What Does the ICC Stand For?
By DIANA JOHNSTONE | CounterPunch | June 2, 2011
Last May 16, Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, officially sought an arrest warrant for Libyan leader Moammer Kadhafi for “crimes against humanity”. Also accused were the leader’s son Seif al-Islam Kadhafi and Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi.
U.S. jurist David Scheffer told Agence France Presse: “NATO will doubtless appreciate the ICC investigation and indictment of top Libyan leaders, including Kadhafi.”
Well, yes. And nobody is better placed to know what NATO appreciates than David Scheffer.
The day before, Tripoli had made yet another offer of a truce, calling for an end to NATO bombing and for peace negotiations with the armed rebels based in Benghazi. NATO’s response took the form of the ICC indictment. When NATO bombs a country to unseat a leader, the targeted leader must be treated like a common criminal. His place cannot be at the negotiating table, but behind bars. An international indictment handily transforms NATO’s military aggression into a police action to arrest “an indicted war criminal” – an expression that evacuates the presumption of “innocent until proven guilty”.
This is a familiar pattern.
On March 24, 1999, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in support of armed Albanian rebels in Kosovo. Two months later, in mid-May, as the bombing intensified against Serbia’s infrastructure, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Louise Arbour, issued an indictment against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity. All but one of the alleged “crimes against humanity” took place in Kosovo during the chaos caused precisely by the NATO bombing.
On March 31, 2011, NATO began bombing Libya, and this time the International Criminal Court was even faster. And the charges were even less substantial. Ocampo said that there was evidence that Kadhafi personally ordered attacks on “innocent Libyan civilians”.
In Libya as in the Kosovo war, the accusations are those made by armed rebels supported by NATO, with no discernible trace of independent neutral investigation.
In the spring of 1999, David Scheffer, who was then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Ambassador at large for War Crimes, visited Louise Arbour and provided her with NATO reports on which to base her indictments. Indeed, Scheffer had earlier helped set up the ICTY as instructed by Ms Albright. The May 1999 accusations served their main immediate purpose: to block negotiations and to justify NATO’s continued bombing. As Madeleine Albright put it, “We are not negotiating with Milosevic… The indictments, I think, clarify the situation because they really show that we are doing the right thing in terms of responding to the kinds of crimes against humanity that Milosevic has perpetrated.” (See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, PlutoPress, 2004, pp.141-145.)
To sum up, in both cases an “international criminal tribunal/court” intervenes in the midst of a NATO bombing to accuse the leader of the country being bombed of “crimes against humanity” based on flimsy evidence provided by NATO itself or by its rebel clients.
Thus the International Criminal Court turns out to be a continuation of the ICTY, that is, an instrument not of international justice but the judicial arm of Western intervention in weaker countries. The ICC could well stand for Imperialist Crimes Cover-up.
It certainly does not deserve its official title, since it studiously ignores truly “international” crimes, such as U.S. and NATO aggression or the many massacres of civilians that result. Rather, so far the only alleged crimes it has undertaken to prosecute have all been the result of internal conflicts taking place in countries on the African continent. In short, the ICC so far acts mainly as a way of putting political pressure on, or justifying military action against, weak governments the Western powers want to replace with leaders of their choice.
Concerning the Kadhafi indictment, Scheffer is quoted by AFP as saying that the move might increase pressure on Kadhafi to think about finding refuge in a country that has not agreed to ICC jurisdiction. This is a senseless remark, since Libya itself has not agreed to ICC jurisdiction. Nor has Sudan, which has not prevented the ICC from going after its president, Omar Al Bashir, even though the ICC is supposed to apply only to countries that have recognized its jurisdiction. But non-recognition of ICC jurisdiction proves to be of no protection for weak countries.
Just as NATO and the ICC continue to pursue Kadhafi on the pretext that he is “killing his own people”, in Afghanistan NATO armed forces continues to kill people who are not their own, with impunity.
The ICC has developed into one of the most blatant illustrations of double standards. The United States manipulates the ICC without recognizing its jurisdiction, and having further protected itself by bilateral agreements with a long list of countries that provide immunity for United States citizens as well as by Congressional laws to protect U.S. citizens from the ICC.
Other NATO countries have recognized ICC jurisdiction, but there is no sign that they will ever be troubled by the international court.
Last Sunday, two notoriously nonconformist French lawyers, Jacques Vergès and former foreign minister Roland Dumas, announced that they intended to bring a lawsuit against President Nicolas Sarkozy for “crimes against humanity” in Libya. At a press conference in Tripoli, Dumas deplored that the NATO mission to protect civilians was killing them, and said he was ready to defend Kadhafi at the ICC. Meanwhile, the two lawyers intend to represent the families of victims of NATO bombing in litigation against Sarkozy in French courts. “We are going to break through the wall of silence,” announced Vergès.
There is more solid evidence of the civilian victims of NATO bombing, including the three baby grandchildren of Moammer Kadhafi, than of the “crimes against humanity” attributed by Ocampo to the Libyan leader. But the French public has been mesmerized by the propaganda portraying Kadhafi as a bloodthirsty ogre whose only desire is to “kill his own people”. Since most people in the West know absolutely nothing about Libya, anything goes.
On Monday, as France and Britain prepared to send in combat helicopters to support the armed rebels and hunt down Kadhafi, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that Kadhafi’s “reign of terror is coming to an end”. The real “rain of terror” is the rain of NATO bombs falling on defenseless Tripoli, with the clear intention of terrorizing Libyans into surrendering to the NATO-backed rebels. And there is no sign of it ever coming to an end.
~
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
Obama On Iran: X Times Zero Is Greater Than Zero
Moon of Alabama | June 1, 2011
With regards to Iraq’s non-existing WMDs, which were used to launch a war on it, the Bush administration’s sell-points were not so much single pieces of (false) evidence, the Uranium from Nigeria, the bio-weapon trucks, the Antrax scare, but the sum of all of these pieces.
Even people who did not believe every single piece of the evidence could be convinced by pointing to the sum of them. A lot of dirt was thrown at Saddam’s Iraq and for a lot of onlookers the amount of dirt thrown, even as it didn’t stick, was enough to make Iraq look dirty.
In responses to the new Sy Hersh piece on the non-existence, which U.S. intelligence agencies confirm, of an Iranian military nuclear program, the Obama administration is now using exactly the same tactics. It asserts that the validity of each single piece of evidence is not relevant, it is simply the sum of them which makes Iran dangerous.
In a Politico piece the administration responds directly to the Hersh piece:
“There is a clear, ongoing pattern of deception, and Iran has repeatedly refused to respond to the IAEA’s questions about the military dimensions of [its] nuclear program, including those about the covert site at Qom,” the senior administration official added. “These examples and more make us deeply skeptical of Iran’s nuclear intentions.”
The communicated strategy here is: “It is the sum of the evidence (about some of which we will not tell you), not the single explainable pieces, which makes Iran guilty.”
It therefore does not matter to the “senior administration official” that the Qom site was not secret at all. Iran declared the then still empty site to the IAEA on September 21 2009 and the Obama administration revealed it as “secret” only on September 25 2009. But that false evidence is only part of a pattern of other (likely also false) evidence and that is the reason, says Obama, why we must eventually bomb Iran.
In the New York Times the propagandist William J. Broad lets the administration make the same point:
The seven categories of technology all bear on what can be interpreted as warhead design: how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, make conventional explosives that can trigger a nuclear blast, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction and design nose cones for missiles.Two diplomats familiar with the evidence, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity under the usual protocol, emphasized that no single one of the technologies stood out as indicating bomb work. Some, they conceded, have peaceful uses.
But the totality of the evidence, they said, suggested that Iran has worked hard on multiple fronts to advance the design of nuclear arms.
“It’s the whole variety of information,” one of the diplomats said. “You have to look at the whole thing.”
(Notice how Broad hides his sources as “diplomats” not as “foreign diplomats” as the NYT usual does when they are not U.S. administration officials.)
But despite what those administration stooges say, the “totality of the evidence” is not greater than zero when each and every evidence point is zero. Any of the “seven categories of technology” has peaceful or non nuclear military purposes. Some of them are even very unlikely to be used in a military nuclear program.
A few weeks ago a scare was made of evidence of uranium deuterite as a neutron generator in an Iranian bomb. As the Arms Control Wonk Jeffery Lewis pointed out:
This method is incredibly unique. Not only are there no civilian uses for imploding uranium deuteride to generate a burst of neutrons, NOT EVEN THE OTHER NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAMS CONSIDERED THIS APPROACH.
Why, if Iran were to build a bomb, would it use an unproven technology no one else has ever used for this purpose? Would you introduce some obscure new physics into your very first bomb if all the other experienced bomb builders used other better and by now well known, readily available and reliable methods? That is again not credible as evidence. But to the Obama administration that does not matter.
Their new selling point is not the credibility of their alleged evidence, they even confirm that there is none, their selling point is the pattern THEY create by introducing all kinds of dubious technical evidence to make their case.
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From the Archives
After all I am a Proper Zionist Jew
October 27, 2009 | Gilad Atzmon
I am a Holocaust survivor
Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap (1), the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas (2) and the one about the death march (3). I just managed to survive them all.
In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow survived the horror against all odds. I even manage to love my neighbour. In spite of all the fearful, traumatic indoctrination I miraculously managed to master my cheering alto saxophone rather than the sobbing violin. … continue
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