Gazan Engineer Formally Charged By Israel
By Circarre Parrhesia – IMEMC & Agencies – April 05, 2011
Dirar Abu Sisi, the Gazan engineer who was abducted by Israeli security personnel whilst traveling by train through the Ukraine, has been formally charged by an Israeli court on Monday.
The charges include belonging to a militant group (Hamas) and involvement in the firing of rockets into Israel form the Gaza Strip, which is charged as attempted murder.
It is claimed that Abu Sisi was in charge of the Hamas military academy and that he was responsible for upgrading the abilities of the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, increasing their range and ability to pierce through armored military vehicles.
Abu Sisi’s lawyer, Smadar Ben-Natan, stated that Abus Sisi had confessed to charges, but that these confessions came under severe duress from interrogators that Ben-Natan claims was tantamount to torture, but that she could not go into detail as to the confessions due to the gag order imposed in Israel.
Abu Sisi’s sister, Suzanne, has stated that her brother is not involved in any political faction and that his work was as the director of Gaza’s only power plant. She stated that he took the position prior to Hamas’ election victory, and continued his role subsequently.
April 5, 2011 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment
Another war on Gaza?
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2011
In recent weeks an escalation in violence between Israel and Palestinian resistance factions in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of more than a dozen Palestinians, the youngest of them 10-year-old Mahmoud Jalal al-Hilu.
Does this escalation increase the likelihood of another large-scale assault on Gaza similar to “Operation Cast Lead” in winter 2008-2009 that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians? There are worrying signs Israel — by its words and deeds — could be laying the ground for an attack.
The ratchet of violence took another turn in the small hours of 2 April when Israel carried out an air attack on the Gaza Strip killing three members of Hamas’ military wing.
Israel did not claim that the three Hamas men were engaged in any hostile activity at the time they were killed (riding in a car), but a statement from the Israeli army alleged that they were “planning to kidnap Israelis over the upcoming Jewish holiday of Passover” — several weeks in the future.
Israel’s latest attack constituted an extrajudicial killing, in which Israel, the occupying power, acted as judge, jury and executioner, issuing allegations for which it offered no evidence, after it had already carried out the death sentence. Under international law, this is a war crime.
Global media tend to report these events as Israeli “retaliation” for Palestinian attacks, but a close reading of Israeli media presents a very different picture: deliberate provocation and escalation by Israel.
On 23 March, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that, “The current tensions began exactly a week ago when Israel launched an air attack on a Hamas base in the ruins of the settlement of Netzarim, killing two Hamas men. That attack came in response to a Qassam [rocket] fired from Gaza that landed in an open area.” Palestinians responded with a barrage of 50 projectiles into Israel.
Israel then “launched a series of air attacks in which a number of Hamas militants were wounded.” And on 22 March Israeli forces launched the shelling which killed Mahmoud al-Hilu and three other civilians, allegedly in response to mortar fire from an olive grove on the Gaza side (“A small war is starting along Gaza border“).
On 24 March, Issacharoff and Harel observed, “Despite the escalation, Hamas does not seem to want large-scale clashes yet. The organization actually has good reasons to believe that Israel is the one heating up the southern front. It began with a bombardment a few weeks ago that disrupted the transfer of a large amount of money from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, continued with the interrogation of engineer and Hamas member Dirar Abu Sisi [whom Israeli agents kidnapped from Ukraine] in Israel, and ended with last week’s bombing of a Hamas training base in which two Hamas militants were killed. It is noteworthy that Hamas has not fired at Israel over the past two days, even after four Palestinian civilians were killed by errant IDF [Israeli army] mortar fire on Tuesday [22 March]” (“Hamas not likely behind Jerusalem bombing“).
Issacharoff and Harel added in a 25 March analysis that the Israeli attack on the Hamas outpost at Netzarim “is believed to have been authorized by the defense minister and the chief of staff, who should have known there would be people at the outpost during the day and that causing casualties would have different consequences than a routine attack on empty offices. Israel assumed — mistakenly — that Hamas would not respond to the bombing. In fact, Hamas responded by firing 50 mortar shells on Saturday morning” (“Escalation approaching“).
It is difficult to believe, especially in light of the extrajudicial executions on 2 April, that Israeli leaders did not know that killing Palestinians would prompt further retaliation from the Palestinian side. It seems very likely this was their intention.
These events are worryingly similar to the sequence that preceded “Operation Cast Lead.” After a bloody spring of 2008 in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed and injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, Israel and Hamas negotiated a mutual ceasefire beginning on 19 June 2008. By Israel’s own admission, this mutual truce resulted in a 97 percent reduction in rockets being fired from Gaza over the subsequent four months, and none of the handful of projectiles that were fired were launched by Hamas, nor did they cause any injuries to Israelis.
A mutually agreed ceasefire proved to be the most effective way to achieve the goal Israel claimed was most important: protecting Israeli civilians from rocket fire from Gaza. But on the night of 4-5 November 2008, Israel decided to end the truce. As The Guardian reported on 5 November 2008, “A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory” (“Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen“).
Then, just as it has with its latest attack, Israel justified the killings with the unverifiable claim that those it killed were involved in a plot to kidnap Israelis.
On 21 March, amid the escalating violence, Hamas’ military wing itself stated that it would be willing to abide by another mutual truce if Israel agreed to one, but Israel showed no interest (“Gaza: Hamas calls for truce,” Ma’an News Agency, 21 March 2011).
Israel’s seemingly constant and deliberate provocation of violence along the border with Gaza comes against a backdrop of belligerent statements and propaganda exercises by Israeli leaders. On 15 March, Israel intercepted a ship en route from Turkey to Alexandria in Egypt, which it alleged without providing evidence, was carrying arms destined for Gaza.
Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told Israel Radio on 23 March that Israel may have to carry out another large scale attack on Gaza to topple Hamas, adding, “I say this despite the fact that I know such a thing would, of course, bring the region to a far more combustible situation.”
Culture minister Limor Livnat warned, according to Haaretz, Israel might have no choice but to carry out “Operation Cast Lead 2.”
Shalom, reversing the facts and laying the blame for the escalating violence on the Palestinians, put the possibility of a renewed war on Gaza in an overtly political context. Hamas, the vice premier claimed, according to Haaretz, “might have opened a new front with Israel ‘to stop any possibility of dialogue among the Palestinians or to come to the intra-Palestinian negotiation in a far stronger position'” (“Netanyahu: Israel will continue to operate against terrorists in Gaza,” 23 March 2011).
In other words, according to Shalom, it is the continued strength of Hamas that prevents an intra-Palestinian reconciliation on terms favorable to the Israeli-backed Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) of Mahmoud Abbas.
Whether Israel is deliberately laying the ground for a new assault on Gaza, or stumbles into one — if the current escalation does not stop — any such attack must be understood in political terms. It would be an effort to finish the unfinished business of destroying Hamas and any other island of Palestinian resistance.
The commitment of any significant Palestinian group to resistance — political or military — remains a major obstacle to the full legitimation of the warm embrace between Israel and the Abbas-led PA, whose extent was recently laid bare in the Palestine Papers. Indeed the relationship is so friendly that last October the top echelons of the PA in Bethlehem received then Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi — who commanded Operation Cast Lead — as their honored guest, even providing him with a guided tour of the Church of the Nativity (“Israeli army chief visits Bethlehem,” Ma’an News Agency, 3 October 2010).
Ironically, Hamas remains much less intransigent than Israel, as evidenced by the movement’s repeated offers of ceasefires which Israel rejects or violates; its constant noises about “reconciliation” with Abbas without insisting that the latter terminate his “security” relationship with Israel; and its embrace of the defunct “two-state solution.” Despite these unacknowledged political concessions, Hamas retains a military capability that Israel is unwilling to tolerate either as a challenge to itself, or to the PA.
Until now, there have been good reasons to believe Israel would hesitate to launch a new major military assault on Gaza. It is still suffering the diplomatic and political fallout of Cast Lead, including the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, as well as its massacre of nine activists aboard the Mavi Marmara during last spring’s Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
Without exaggerating the risks, the constraints on Israel may be loosening. In the wake of the revolution in Egypt and amid the political upheaval in the Arab world, some Israelis may think they have a “last chance” to act in the interregnum before a new and less friendly government is seated in Cairo. Western and Saudi military interventions in Libya and Bahrain respectively have also provided new respectability to using military force for political ends.
International complicity also continues to send Israel a clear message that its impunity is guaranteed. The Obama administration’s recent veto of a UN Security Council resolution that merely restated US policy on Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank was one sure sign that Israel still has a blank check from the United States.
Tragically, the biggest contributor to renewed confidence in Israel that it could once again get away with murder in Gaza, may be Judge Richard Goldstone himself. Israeli leaders have seized on his apologetic 1 April op-ed in The Washington Post as vindication and proof that Israel never committed war crimes in Gaza, and was the victim a “blood libel,” as Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli occupation army volunteer and The Atlantic blogger put it.
While Goldstone was clearly trying to appease Zionists who subjected him to an intense campaign of personal vilification and ostracism his article did not in fact repudiate one single concrete finding in the report that bears his name (“Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes,” 2 April 2011).
Two important analyses of Goldstone’s op-ed, and how it is in no way a repudiation of the Goldstone report, appeared on Mondoweiss on 2 April: “What the Goldstone op-ed doesn’t say” by Yaniv Reich, and “Goldstone op-ed praises Israeli investigation of Gaza war crimes, but UN committee paints a different picture,” by Adam Horowitz. Goldstone’s op-ed is the personal opinion of one person. The Goldstone report, an official UN document authored by a commission, remains a compendium of acts by Israel — and indeed by Hamas — uncontradicted by any new evidence, much less by Israel’s self-serving “investigations.”
Yet as we have sadly learned so many times, proper analysis and respect for basic facts have little bearing in the “fog of war,” especially when Israel is that party that launches that war.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
April 4, 2011 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Challenging the evangelical bias against Palestinians
By Aziz Abu Sarah | +972 | April 4, 2011
Last week Ynetnews.com published an article by Johnnie Moore, a Christian evangelical pastor and vice president of Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the world, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell). Moore was visiting Israel with a group of students on a trip that ended 24 hours before the bombing in Jerusalem. A Christian tourist was killed in the bombing, and Pastor Moore was moved to write about the terror attack and his views on Israel and the Palestinians. The article, entitled “No Excuse for Brutality,” was one-sided and inflammatory, asserting that Palestinians are entirely to blame for the conflict.
Normally, as a Palestinian I would brush off such an article as an example of the natural, emotional responses that arise from tragedies and traumas like last month’s bombing. However, Moore’s article is more than a reactionary piece; his comments also reflect the views of many Christian evangelicals in the United States. As a result, I feel it is important to respond to some of the points Moore raised.
Moore opened his article by claiming that the media is biased against Israel, and has justified the terror attack. The effort of some media outlets of putting the attack in context is not to be interpreted as a bias. The political stalemate, the continuation of the occupation, the confiscation of land and demolishing of Palestinian homes, and the “price tag” attacks by settlers executed all over the West Bank explains the rise of violent tendencies. These things should not be used as a justification but rather provide contextual analysis for the cycle of violence endemic to the conflict.
Moore writes that the Jerusalem bombing “should be an embarrassment to every supporter of the Palestinian cause. Instead… this act of war will be met with cheers in Hamas’ training camps even as Palestinian leaders give lip service to the international community and condemn the attacks in English, while praising them privately in Arabic.” This is problematic, first because many supporters of the Palestinian cause did view the bombing as shameful, and second because Moore assumes that the Palestinians are praising the attack in Arabic. As a writer for Al-Quds I can testify that Arab leaders condemned the attack in Arabic just as they did in English, and many Palestinians were outraged by the bombing.
In fact, those who criticize the Palestinian Authority for failing to prevent attacks like these should take a hard look at the situation in the West Bank. The PA controls around 14% of the West Bank, and cannot even issue a building permit for most Palestinians. However, it is expected to police the West Bank in ways that even Israel, with its vastly superior training and weaponry, has been unable to do.
Perhaps the most ill-informed statement in Pastor Moore’s article is his statement that “I knew the message [of Israeli victimization] was understood when one of our students asked, ‘I see Palestinian neighborhoods all over Israel, what is the problem with Israelis having neighborhoods (settlements) within Palestinian areas?’ [The student’s] point was poignant as it highlighted Israel’s preparedness to live in peace with its neighbors and the refusal with which this has been met.”
The comparison between settlements and Arab villages in Israel shows a complete lack of knowledge of historical context. This is not surprising, as few American Christians are familiar with the Palestinian narrative. Palestinian villages in Israel were all founded long before the 1948 war, and since the formation of the Israeli state the Israel government has not allowed new Arab towns to be created within its borders.
On the other hand, in the Palestinians territories (which currently comprise only 22% of the area of the British mandate for Palestine), all Israeli settlements were built in the last 44 years. Moreover, settlements in the West Bank are generally built on privately owned Palestinian land that has been confiscated, while Arab towns in Israel were not built on confiscated land. Another important fact is that Prime Minister Fayyad has indicated on more than one occasion that Jews are welcome to become Palestinian citizens in any future Palestinian state.
Ironically, Moore and his student also seem unaware that many of the “Arab neighborhoods” in Israel are populated by Palestinian Christians. This is a common oversight in American Christian rhetoric about Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Americans do recognize the existence of Palestinian Christians, it is often only to use their situation to support anti-Muslim propaganda. For example, according to a poll conducted by Zogby International, 45.9% of Americans blame Muslims for the Christian immigration out of the Holy Land, while only 7.4% of Americans cite Israeli restrictions as contributing to Arab Christian immigration. However, when Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem were asked about the primary cause for Christian immigration out of the area, 78% cited Israeli restrictions as their reason for leaving.
Ultimately, Dr. Moore concludes that Israel has a right to exist without the threat of terrorism. There is nothing wrong with this idea: Moore is completely correct in saying that Israel has that right to exist free from fear. However, rights are symmetrical, and Palestinians also have the right to live free of fear and free from the yoke of occupation.
Palestinians often feel the West views Palestinian rights as less important than Israeli rights, and that our blood is valued less than Jewish blood. When American Christian leaders like Moore write articles condemning bombings in Israel but are silent about bombings in Gaza (the most recent of which resulted in the death of 3 children), it tells Palestinians that we are viewed as sub-human. However, we also bleed, just as we care for the blood of others. I myself felt disgusted at the Itamar attack and the bombing in Jerusalem.
I must say that I don’t understand Christians who value the life of one group over another. Even if American Christians consider Muslims as enemies, in the New Testament Jesus commanded his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. The word he used for “love” in Greek (agapao) means to entertain or to welcome in. This concept seems to be in direct opposition to the doctrine of Islamophobia spread by many Christian evangelical groups in the United States. Moreover, Isaiah says “”Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” The scripture does not apply only to Jews, to the “foreigner” and “alien.” Hundreds of millions of Americans profess to be Christians and believe in the divine inspiration of these verses, so where are these “believers” when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Moore’s article is a reminder that many American Christians view supporting Israel as a tenant of faith, without thinking critically about the theological and practical implications of this viewpoint. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.” Like many Christian groups who visit Israel, Moore’s group did not bother to visit any Palestinian towns. My guess is that neither Moore nor any of his church members have ever even met a Palestinian. Perhaps then their demonization of Palestinians is unsurprising.
When I was ten, my brother was murdered by Israeli soldiers. As a result, I understand how easy it is to seek revenge and find justifications for violence. As Solomon said, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” However, I long to see more religious people practice these verses which speak of justice as a higher form of religion, and I long for the day when religion becomes more a tool for bringing people together than for dividing them. On that day the prophecy of Isaiah will be realized “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”
Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem who spends his time between Jerusalem and Washington D.C. Aziz is a columnist with Alquds Newspaper and is the director of the Middle East Projects at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Aziz runs alternative tours to Israel and the West-Bank through MEJDI a social enterprise he co-founded. His blog can be found at http://azizabusarah.wordpress.com
April 4, 2011 Posted by aletho | Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Elliot Abrams’ Plan For Syria
“If Tunisia can move toward democracy, Algerians and Egyptians and even Libyans will wonder why they cannot. This kind of thing may catch on.” – Elliott Abrams, January 7, 2011
By Tony Cartalucci | Activist Post | March 29, 2011
Degenerate globalist co-conspirator Elliot Abrams, has been consistently supporting the recent conflagration throughout the Arab world and is pushing for ever-expanding US meddling in the region. In his recent piece, featured in the Washington Post titled “Ridding Syria of a Despot,” he fleshes out what is a fairly predictable plan of action already taking shape against the Bush-era “Axis of Evil” member.
Elliot Abrams is a member of the corporate-financier Council on Foreign Relations, a Project for a New American Century signatory, and former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush. He was convicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra conspiracy and promptly pardoned by George Bush Sr. He would later go on to be implicated for his involvement in the 2002 Venezuela coup attempt against Hugo Chavez. His history of betraying and disgracing his country, and getting away with it, is probably why he feels perfectly comfortable making broad, sweeping threats toward entire nations today.
Elliot Abrams recently issued a personal threat to Libya’s Qadaffi and his intelligence chief, stating that they would both meet the “same fate as Saddam Hussein” if any American is attacked in the wake of increasing US threats and actions against Libya. He also had weighed in on Egypt in his piece “Less ‘Engagement,’ More Democracy” in the New York Times. In this piece he criticizes the current policy of engaging as equals with nations he deems as repressive regimes and calls for a revisit to George Bush’s “freedom agenda.” In other words – the export of “democracy” that has brought America the trillion dollar military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya at the cost of thousands of US soldiers’ lives and the lives of millions of foreigners killed, maimed, or displaced.
It should be no surprise then that Abrams, who has never shouldered a rifle for his nation himself, is more than eager to move on to Syria with a myriad of aggressive attacks on its sovereignty prepared and ready in hand.
Abrams calls on the White House and Congress to condemn Syria, in particular the Assad government. He suggests that Syria be immediately brought before the UN Security Council, who just recently finished extra-legally ordaining the war with Libya. The Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court are also mentioned as possible avenues to pressure Assad and the Syrian government.
Regarding the newly US-reordered Tunisia and Egypt, Abrams suggests they convene the Arab League and expell Syria as a member, as he claims they just did to Libya. Abrams’ suggestion echos fellow globalist policy wonk Kenneth Pollack’s proposal in his Brookings Institute report, “Bifurcating the Middle East.” Bifurcate, meaning to “divide,” indicates the classic gambit of divide and conquer is in play. Pollack, like Abrams, suggests that the “Arab street” after being “reformed” be rallied against states like Libya, Syria, and of course, Iran.
Abrams also suggests that Europe begin acting against Syria. Nicolas Sarkozy of France seems to have gotten the memo and is already making lofty threats toward Syria, including threats of military action, citing the ongoing atrocity in Libya as a stern warning for other Arab nations to consider. Sanctions are also being pushed by Abrams, but to what extent the Europeans are willing to carry them out remains to be seen.
Finally, Abrams suggests that the US pull its ambassador from Syria, reiterating his belief that it was a mistake in the first place to show this token sign of mutual respect for the sovereign nation. He concludes with a breathtakingly absurd display of patriotism and propaganda by stating, “Our principles alone should lead us to this position, but the memory of thousands of American soldiers killed in Iraq with the help of the Assad regime demands that we do all we can to help the Syrian people free themselves of that evil dictatorship.” And ‘help’ the US is doing, with the entire opposition being funded, defended, supported, and even partially based out of the United States and England.
Strange that Abrams has implicated Assad as complicit in killing US troops in Iraq, when Abrams himself and his “Neo-Con” cabal have hands-down done more to send US troops off to their needless deaths with their willful lying regarding WMD’s, than any Arab with a Kalashnikov. Also interesting, considering his statement, is Abrams’ support for the armed campaign in Libya, where the US is currently providing air support and arms for Al Qaeda linked rebels who themselves have sent fighters to Iraq to kill American troops, on record.
Of course, Abrams is writing for the impressionable readership of the Washington Post, so this blinding hypocrisy is most likely fodder strictly for the public’s consumption. However, sweeping aside the propaganda, we see a very real strategy already beginning to play out in regards to Syria. Let us remember that this is already a plan in motion, and recognize the surprise displayed by our feckless “leadership” as the poorly-feigned act that it is.
March 29, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment
Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics
By James Petras | 03.25.2011
One of the basic flaws of the arguments of critics of Euro-US wars is their resort to clichés, generalizations and arguments without any factual bases.
Introduction
The most common line on the US-Euro war on Libya is that it’s “all about oil” – the seizure of oil wells.
On the other hand Euro –US, government spokespeople have defended the war by claiming it is about “saving civilian lives facing genocide”, an act of “humanitarian intervention”.
Following the lead of their imperial powers, most of what passes for the Left in the US and Europe, ranging from social democrats, Marxists, Trotskyists and other assorted progressives claim to see and support a revolutionary mass uprising and not a few call for active intervention by the imperial powers, or the same thing, the UN, to presumably help the “social revolution” defeat the Gaddafi dictatorship.
These claims and variations of these arguments are totally without substance and belie the true nature of US-UK-French imperial power, based on rising militarism as evidenced in all the ongoing wars over the past decade (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.). What is revealing in the context of militarist intervention in Libya is that all the major countries which refused to engage in the war are motivated by a different type of global expansion: economic and market forces. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Germany, the most dynamic capitalist countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are, in part, all opposed to the self-styled “allied” military response because they see (with solid reasons) no threat to their security, an open door for access to oil, a favorable investment climate and no signs of any progressive democratic outcome among the disparate elites competing for power and Western favor among the media labeled “rebels”.
(1) The Six Myths about Libya: Right and Left
The principle imperial powers and their mass media mouthpieces claim they are militarily assaulting Libya for “humanitarian reasons”. Their recent past and present history argues the contrary. Interventions in Iraq resulted in over a million killings, four million displaced civilians and the mass destruction of an entire civilization including water, electricity, research centers, museums…
Similar outcomes resulted from the invasion of Afghanistan. What was dubbed a humanitarian intervention resulted in a human catastrophe. In the case of Iraq the road to imperial barbarism began with ‘sanctions’, progressed to ‘no fly zones’, then to partition, then to invasion and occupation and the unleashing of sectarian tribal warfare among the ‘liberated’ rebel para-military death squads. Equally telling, the imperial assault against Yugoslavia, also justified as a “humanitarian war” against a “genocidal regime”, led to the 40 day massive bombing and destruction of Belgrade and other major cities, the imposition of a gangster terrorist regime (KLA) in the separatist province of Kosova and a huge US military base in the latter.
The bombing of Libya has destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports, communication centers as well as military targets. The sanctions and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and exodus of hundreds of thousands of African, Middle Eastern and North African immigrant workers and technicians, devastating the economy and creating mass long-term unemployment. Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘moderate’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, leads directly to bombing terrestrial civilian as well as military targets, onward to overthrowing the government. The imperial warmongers attacking Libya, like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian gesture: they are destroying the civilian lives they purport to be saving – as was the case in Vietnam earlier.
(2) War for Oil or Oil for Sale?
One of the most often repeated clichés by leftists is that the imperial invasion is about “seizing control of Libya’s oil and turning it over to their multi-nationals”.
The facts on the ground tell us a different story: the multi-national oil companies of Europe, Asia, the US and elsewhere have already “taken over” millions of acres of Libyan oil fields, some are already pumping and exporting oil and gas and are reaping hefty profits for almost the better part of a decade. Multi-national corporate (MNC) “exploitation by invitation” – from Gaddafi to the biggest oil companies- is an ongoing process from the early 1990’s to the present day. The list of foreign oil majors engaged in Libya exceeds that of most oil producing countries in the entire world. They include; British Petroleum with a seven year license on two concessions with one billion dollars in planned investments. Each concession involves BP exploiting enormous areas of Libya, one the size of Kuwait, the other the size of Belgium (Libyonline.com). Five Japanese firms, including Mitsubishi and Nippon Petroleum, Italy’s Eni Gas, British Gas and Exxon Mobil secured exploration and exploitation contracts in October 2010. In January 2010, Libya’s oil concessions mainly benefited US oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum. Foreign multi-nationals gaining contracts also include Royal Dutch Shell, Total (France), Oil India, CNBC (China), Indonesia’s Pertamina and Norway’s Norsk Hydro (BBC News, 10/03/2005).
Despite sanctions imposed by Reagan in 1986, Halliburton has worked on billion dollar gas and oil projects since the 1980’s. During former Defense Secretary Cheney’s tenure as CEO of Halliburton, he led the fight against sanctions, arguing that “as a nation (there is) enormous value having American businesses engaged around the world” (Halliburtonwatch.com). Sanctions against Libya were lifted under Bush in 2004. During the current decade Gaddafi invited more foreign companies to invest in Libya than any other regime in the world. Clearly, with all the European and US imperial countries already exploiting Libya’s oil on a massive scale the argument that the “war is about oil” doesn’t hold water or oil!
(3) Gaddafi is a Terrorist
In the run-up to the US military assault, Treasury led by Israeli super-agent Stuart Levey, authored a sanctions policy freezing $30 billion dollars in Libyan assets claiming Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant (Washington Post, 3/24/11). Yet precisely seven years earlier, Cheney, Bush and Condoleezza Rice took Libya off the list of terrorist regimes and told Levey and his minions to lift sanctions. Every major European power followed suite: Gaddafi was welcomed in European capitals, prime ministers visited Tripoli and Gaddafi reciprocated by unilaterally dismantling his nuclear and chemical weapons programs (BBC, 9/5/2008). Gaddafi bent over backwards in co-operating with Washington’s campaign against groups, movements and individuals on Washington’s arbitrary “terror list” – arresting, torturing and killing Al Qaeda suspects; expelling Palestinian militants and criticizing Hezbollah, Hamas and other Israeli adversaries. The United Nations Human Rights Committee gave Gadaffi a clean bill of health. Western elites welcomed Gaddafi’s political turnabout but it did not save him from a massive military assault. Neo-liberal reforms, political apostasy, anti-terrorism, eliminating weapons of massive destruction, all weakened the regime, increased its vulnerability and isolated it from any consequential anti-imperialist allies. Gaddafi’s concessions made his regime an easy target for militarists in Washington, London and Paris.
(4) The Myth of the revolutionary Masses
The Left, including the principle social democratic, green and even left socialist parties of Europe and the US, tail-ending their imperial mentors, and susceptible to the massive media propaganda campaign demonizing Gaddafi, justified their support for military intervention, in the name of the “revolutionary people”, the peace-loving masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing popular militias to “liberate the country”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The root base of the armed uprising is Benghazi, a hotbed of tribal backers and clients of the deposed King Idris who ruled with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backward state, who gave the US one of its biggest air bases (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean basin. Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) are neo-liberal expats who promoted the Euro-US military invasion and can only envision coming to power on the bases of Western missiles .They look forward to dismantling the public oil companies engaged in joint ventures with foreign MNC. All independent observers report the lack of any clear reformist set along revolutionary organization or social-political democratic movement.
The armed militias in Benghazi are reportedly more active in rounding up, arresting and executing any members of Gaddafi’s national network of civilians active in his “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling them “fifth columnists” than in engaging the regimes armed forces. The top leaders of the “revolutionary” masses in Benghazi are two recent defectors of what the Left dubs Gaddafi’s “murderous regime”, Mustafa Abdul Jalil a former Justice minister (who prosecuted dissenters up to the day before the armed uprising), Mahmoud Jebril a top Gaddafite neo-liberal prominent in inviting multi-nationals to take over the oil fields (FT, March 23, 2011, p. 7) and Ali Aziz al-Eisawa, Gaddafi’s former ambassador to India who jumped ship when it looked like the uprising would succeed. These self-appointed leaders of the “rebels” are staunch backers of Euro-US military intervention just as they previously were long-term backers of Gaddafi’s dictatorship and promoters of MNC takeovers of oil and gas fields. The heads of the “rebels” military council is Omar Hariri and General Abdul Fattah Younis former head of the Ministry of Interior, both with long histories (since 1969) of repressing any democratic movements. It is not surprising that these top level military defectors have been totally incapable of arousing their troops, conscripts, to engage the loyalist forces backing Gaddafi and all look forward to riding the coattails of the Anglo-US-French armed forces.
The absence of the minimum of democratic credentials among the leaders of the anti-Gaddafi rag tag forces is matched by their abject dependence and subservience to the imperial armed forces to bring them to power. Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Sahara Africans, their false accusations that they are suspected “mercenaries”, augurs ill for any possible new democratic order, or the revival of an economy dependent on immigrant labor, any vestige of a unified country and anything resembling a national economy.
The composition of the self-appointed leadership of the “National Transitional Council” is neither democratic, nationalist nor capable of uniting the country. Least of all are they capable of creating jobs lost by their armed power grab and sustaining the paternalistic welfare program and the highest per-capita income in Africa.
(5) Al Qaeda
The greatest geographical concentration of Al Qaeda terrorists is precisely in the areas dominated by the “rebels” (Cockburn: Counterpunch, March 24, 2011). For over a decade Gaddafi, in line with his embrace of the Bush-Obama “anti-terrorist” agenda, has been in the forefront of the fight against Al Qaeda. They have now enlisted in the ranks of the “rebels” fighting the Gaddafi regime. Likewise, the tribal chiefs, fundamentalist clerics and monarchists in the East have been active in fighting a “holy war” against Gaddafi and welcome arms and air cover from the Anglo-French-US “crusaders”, just as the Taliban and the Islamic fundamentalists welcomed military support from the Carter-Reagan White House to overthrow a secular regime in Afghanistan. The imperial intervention is based on ‘alliances’ with the most retrograde forces in Libya, with uncertain outcomes as to the future composition of the regime, and the prospects for political stability allowing Big Oil to return and exploit energy resources.
(6) “Genocide” or Armed Civil War
Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at the violent seizure of power. Unlike other autocratic rulers, Gaddafi had secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the population on the bases of a well-financed welfare and housing program. Violence is inherent in any armed uprising and once one picks up the gun and tries to seize power, there is no basis for claiming one’s “civil rights” are being violated. The rules of warfare come into play, including the protection of non-combatants-civilians-as well as respect for the rights and protection of prisoners of war.
The unsubstantiated Euro-US claims of “genocide” amplified by the Western mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons are contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between one side and the other.
Truth is the first casualty of civil war and both sides have resorted to monstrous fabrications of victories, casualties, demons and angels.
The fact of the matter is that this conflict began as a civil war between two sets of elites: an established paternalistic burgeoning neo-liberal autocracy with substantial popular backing and the other, a western imperialist financed and trained elite backed by an amorphous group of regional tribal, clerical and neo-liberal professionals lacking democratic and nationalist credentials
Conclusion
If not humanitarianism, oil or democratic values, what is the driving force of Euro-US imperial intervention?
A clue is in the selective bases of armed intervention. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, ruling autocrats allied with and backed by Euro-US imperial rulers’ arrest and murder peaceful protestors, with impunity. In Egypt and Tunisia, the US financially backs a conservative self-appointed civil-military junta, to block a profound democratic, nationalist, social transformation in order to facilitate neo-liberal economic “reforms” run by pro-imperial electoral officials. While liberal critics accuse the West of “hypocrisy” and “double standards” in bombing Libya but not the Gulf butchers, in reality the imperial rulers are using the same imperial standards in each region. They defend autocratic strategic client regimes where they possess air force and naval bases, run intelligence operations and logistic platforms to pursue ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to threaten Iran. They attack Libya because it still refuses to collaborate with Western military operations in Africa and the Middle East.
The key point is that while Libya allows most of the big US-European oil multi-nationals to plunder its oil wealth, it is not yet, a strategic geo-political imperial asset. As we have written in many previous essays the driving force of US empire building is military not economic. In fact billion dollar economic interests were sacrificed in setting up sanctions against Iraq and Iran; the Iraq war shut down most oil exploitation for over a decade.
The Washington led assault on Libya – the majority of air sorties and missiles are carried out by US warplanes and submarines – is part of a general counter-attack against the most recent Arab popular pro-democracy movements. The West is backing the repression of pro-democracy movements throughout the Gulf; it is financing the pro-imperial, pro-Israel Egyptian junta; it is intervening in Tunisia to ensure that any new regime is “correctly aligned”. It backs Algerian despotism and Israel’s daily assaults on Gaza. And now, in Libya, it backs an uprising of ex-Gaddafites and right-wing monarchists who promise to militarily align with the US-European empire builders.
Dynamic market driven global and regional powers refuse to join in this conflict which jeopardizes their access to oil, including current large scale exploitation of energy sources under Gaddafi. Germany, China, Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil are growing at fast rates by exploiting new markets and natural resources, while the US, English and French spend billions in wars that de-stabilize markets and foment long-term wars of resistance. They recognize that the “rebels” are not capable of a quick victory, or of creating a stable environment for long-term investments. The “rebels” in power would become political clients of their militarist imperial mentors. Moreover, the military thrust of the imperial invaders has serious consequences for the emerging market economies. The US supports holy-roller rebels in China’s Tibetan province and Uyghur separatist “rebels” elsewhere. Washington and London back separatists in the Russian Caucasus. India is wary of US military support for Pakistan and its claims on Kashmir. Turkey opposes Kurdish separatists backed by US supplied arms to their Iraqi counterparts.
The Libyan precedent of imperial armed invasion on behalf of separatist clients bodes trouble for the market driven emerging powers. It is an ongoing threat to the burgeoning Arab freedom movement. And the death knell to the US economy; three wars can break the budget sooner rather than later. Most of all, the invasion undermines efforts by Libya’s democrats, socialists and nationalists to free the country from dictatorship and imperial backed reactionaries.
March 28, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Gaddafi, Libya, Middle East, Muammar Gaddafi, Stuart Levey | Leave a comment
Israel, right or wrong
By Paul Balles | MyCatbirdSeat | March 26, 2011
A staunch defender of anything Israel does, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen feeds Jewish paranoia, distorts Palestinian history and attacks Israel’s critics.
“If I were an Israeli, I’d be worried. If I were an Arab, I’d be insulted. If I were a critic only of Israel, I’d be ashamed.”
Thus concluded Richard Cohen in the Washington Post (Monday, February 28, 2011)
What Cohen would be worried about is what he perceives as anti-Semitism in the Arab world, fuelled in WWII by the Muslim cleric Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
According to Cohen, al-Husseini “the titular leader of Muslim Palestinians, broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, recruited European Muslims for the SS, exulted in the Holocaust and after the war went on to represent his people in the Arab League.”
Cohen not only faults Arabs for their support of al-Husseini, but for Cohen’s conclusion that “The Arab world is saturated by Jew-hatred.”
This is a propaganda line that serves no other purpose but to instill fear in Jews everywhere.
Voices like Cohen’s–and there are many–have a much greater impact on Israelis and their worldwide supporters than any biased statements made by a single Muslim cleric.
But then Zionists in America feed their own paranoia by deceiving themselves and distorting reality in their image twisting house of mirrors.
Cohen says “If I were an Arab I’d be insulted.”
To Cohen, an Arab should be insulted by al-Husseini seeking support from the Axis of Germany and Italy prior to WW II.
In 1941, al-Husseini sought a public declaration of support from the Axis nations for: 1) Arab independence from British and French rule; 2) the freedom for the independent Arab nations to unite in some form; 3) and for the elimination of the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Why should those goals give cause for anyone except an Israeli to suggest that Arabs should be insulted?
Instead of putting al-Husseini’s mission to save Palestine for the Palestinians into proper perspective, Cohen attempts to distort history.
Al-Husseini also sought military and financial assistance for an Arab uprising that he promised he could unleash, though only in conjunction with the Axis declaration.
Finally, Cohen crows “If I were a critic only of Israel I’d be ashamed.”
If American supporters of Israel were more critical of Israel when Israel deserves it, there would be little call to complain of the crimes committed by Israelis.
Israel stands in constant denial of any wrong-doing, whether the wrong happens to be killing by the Stern Gang, apartheid treatment of Palestinians, murders in Gaza or illegal Jewish settlements.
If the rest of the world attempts to pass a resolution finding Israel guilty of wrong-doing, the US, under Zionist control, vetoes it. This has happened 36 times in the past four decades
Jews who criticize anything that Israel does, no matter how horrendous, have been dubbed “self-hating Jews”.
Major U.S. Jewish organizations, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are committed to defending Israel whether right or wrong.
“Any time you engage in an activity critical of Israel you are trying to destroy the state of Israel,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said.
Israel isn’t even able to accept criticism by Zionist Jews. Judge Goldstone is a case in point. He was severely faulted for identifying wrongdoing by Israel in Gaza even though his investigation was thorough and fair.
While Israel continues with apartheid practices, illegal settlements, and attempts to get the US to bomb Iran, its blind supporters promote anti-Semitism.
It’s time for reflection and self-criticism. Thinking like Richard Cohen’s only increases fear by Jews and disdain by others.
March 26, 2011 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Is Robert Fisk a Psychologist?
By Kim Petersen / Dissident Voice / March 21st, 2011
Much of what journalist Robert Fisk writes strikes a congruent cord with me; however, there are patches of his writing where he brays discordantly. In his recent article,1 Fisk launched into an ad hominen-laced tirade against Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Writes Fisk, “Gaddafi is a fruitcake and … he probably does occasionally chew carpets as well” and “Gaddafi is completely bonkers, flaky, a crackpot on the level of Ahmadinejad of Iran and Lieberman of Israel…” Yes, Fisk did add in Lieberman, but the implication is that Arab rulers are flakes while flakes do not become rulers in Israel.
Fisk avers that seldom do fruitcakes rule in Europe: “The Middle East seems to produce these ravers – as opposed to Europe, which in the past 100 years has only produced Berlusconi, Mussolini, Stalin and [Hitler] …”
Fisk acknowledges that “there is a racist element in all this.”
And for Fisk, the apple does not fall far from the tree, as he describes Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, as “crazed” and states the father-son “should meet their just rewards, along with their henchmen?”
Did Fisk ever write that Bush Sr and Bush Jr “should meet their just rewards, along with their henchmen?” Does Fisk ever describe the mercenaries2 of the US, UK, Canada, etc. as “henchmen?” Is this not tendentious reporting, if not racist?
When did Fisk become a psychologist?
What makes western rulers such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Stephen Harper saner than Gaddafi? Was aggressing Iraq on a contrived pretext and slaughtering upwards of a million Iraqis and forcing millions more to become refugees sane?
Can mass murders be sane? Is not mass murder the apical quintessence of sociopathology? Meanwhile, the killing continues under Obama whose sanity Fisk has never called into question.
Fisk’s entire piece is tinged with bias and demonization. For example, he writes of “Gaddafi’s tanks,” but would he write of “Blair’s tanks,”3 Cameron’s planes, or Obama’s warships?
What are readers supposed to deduce from Fisk’s superfluous ad hominem? Has he lost a journalistic marble or two?
That Arabs are saddled with authoritarian rulers is immensely due to western states foisting such rulers upon the people, as Fisk well knows.
Instead of rabbiting on about the mental delusions of Arab or Iranian rulers, Fisk might define sanity for his readers and what makes western rulers such as Bush, Blair, Cameron, Obama sane versus Middle Eastern rulers. Otherwise, he is casting stones from a glasshouse.
Fisk realizes that the invasion of Libya now is “a Nato force committed to regime-change…”; however, he does not delve much into the more important matter of whether regime change is legitimate or sane.
He does address whether “we” should be the ones to invade. In doing so he neglects recent history when he writes: “However bad our behaviour in the past, what should we do now?” He finds such a question is too late. Late or not, surely a retreat into a distant past is unnecessary when invasions/occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and succor to coups in Honduras and Venezuela are current history. And there is the decades-old, ongoing western — overt and tacit — support for the dispossession of, discrimination against, and killing of Palestinians.
Gaddafi may well be mentally unbalanced, but he is not launching insane massive invasions of far-flung countries. Criticizing his long tenure as a “leader” in Libya is also fine; however, this criticism should be applied equally to other countries. There is virtually no US criticism of the unelected Abdullahs in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, the unelected king Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain, nor was there of the despotic ruler of Egypt — Hosni Mubarak.
Surely what “we” should not be doing now is focusing on psychologically assessing the mental fitness of rulers from afar, while giving free passes to “our” own rulers who are, at a minimum, accomplices in mass killing. As for colonially created nation states, I submit what they should do now is try to undo the monumental crimes they committed against Indigenous peoples whose land they stole and remain in occupation of before passing judgement on others.
- Robert Fisk, “First it was Saddam. Then Gaddafi. Now there’s a vacancy for the West’s favourite crackpot tyrant,” Independent (UK), 19 March 2011.
- Mercenary is arguably an apt term for fighters in western “volunteer” militaries because surely a number of them enlisted for a paycheck
- My internet search turned up nothing attributable to Fisk on this nor for “Blair’s warships,” “Blair’s ships,” “Blair’s planes,” and since the British public is Fisk’s main readership, this search was deemed sufficient. I leave it to more diligent readers to try and snoop out such a quotation.
~
Kim Petersen can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org.
March 21, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
A Gazan’s Reflection on the Murder of Jews in Itamar
By Samah Sabawi | Palestine Chronicle | March 20, 2011
The morning news of the Itamar murders broke out, I got a call from my father, a man from Gaza whose entire life was derailed by Israel’s occupation of his land. He was fuming: “nothing could justify these murders” he yelled “even if we were to bring up the occupation, the harassment, the brutality of Israel’s army and settlers – the minute we entertain an act so criminal as to kill a baby in cold blood, we become no better than those whose acts we despise.” I posted his comment on my Facebook wall.
A day later, some of my Jewish friends sent me messages inquiring if it was true that Palestinians in Gaza celebrate the killing of Jews. One of them asked “Is there a custom to give out sweets after such events?” The messages came with several links. I expected to see the usual pro-Israel hasbara sites but to my surprise one link was to the Australian Herald Sun which lead me to an article titled ‘White House Condemns Killing’.
The article had no mention of any Gaza celebrations, but was accompanied by a large AFP credited photo of a man standing in a street in Gaza offering a small platter of sweets to two somber looking Hamas Policemen. The only reference or clue to celebration came in the photo caption: ‘A Palestinian man distributes sweets in the streets of the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on March 12, 2011 to celebrate an attack which killed five Israeli settlers at the Itamar settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus.’ I did some more research and found that the same article also appeared on Perth Now, News.com.au and The Daily Telegraph.
From here I began an extensive search on the internet. There were references to Gaza’s celebrations in a variety of international media websites including Fox News and Washington Post, but all the references pointed to one original source – three photos by AFP cameraman posted on Getty images, so I followed the trail.
The three original photos starred the same man with the same small sweet platter. In the first shot, he offers the platter to the two policemen; in the second he offers it to a man in a car at a traffic light who looks a bit confused but is accepting the offer of sweets; and in the third photo, the same man offers the small platter of sweets to an old lady sitting on a pavement. The backdrop of the photos revealed nothing more than an average busy day in a street in Gaza with the normal amount of traffic, a few cars, vans etc. There was nothing in the photos to convey a sense of joy or celebration: there were no crowds, no smiling faces, no banners, no flags and no scarfs… in fact, no people appeared in the photos except for the man with the platter and his subjects. This was highly unusual for a Gaza celebration.
But even if we were to assume that this lone man with the sweet platter was genuinely celebrating, how on earth does something like that make international media? One Palestinian man in a population of 1.5 million offering a tray of deserts? Did the same newspapers that published these photos also publish photos of busloads of Israeli tourists standing on a hill top celebrating while watching phosphourous rain fall on Palestinians during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2009? The double standard here is astonishing.
It mattered little that no Palestinian faction claimed responsibility and even Hamas issued a statement saying that Palestinians do not target children. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview on Israel Radio: “Scenes like these – the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered – cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry.” The frenzy of demonisation continues even though until this article was written there was no real proof that any Palestinians were involved in the murder.
The photos of so called ‘Gaza celebrations’ are becoming an internet sensation because they offer desperately needed proof that Palestinians are evil in nature. One headline from a hasbara site read “How do you start a party in Palestine? You kill a Jewish family.”
The campaign to demonise is indeed in full swing and seems to have no moral boundaries. Barely had the blood of the murdered children dried up the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs in Israel hastened to release the graphic images of the murdered children to be used as fodder in the war to demonise the Palestinian people. The minister – who authorised the release – stated in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz “on the internet the images are really catching on and circulating”. After all, what could be worse than people who murder children and then celebrate?
See also:
We planned the Purim party, then my partner actually read the Book of Esther…
and
Minorities feel rising tide of bigotry in Australia
March 20, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment
Sinking Liberty
Who will write the final chapter on Israel’s 1967 confrontation with the U.S. Navy?
By Philip Giraldi | American Conservative | March 17, 2011
The attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967 has almost faded from memory, but new evidence suggests that the White House might actually have had prior knowledge that the ship would be struck by Israel’s armed forces. In the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. Naval vessel in peacetime, 34 American sailors and civilian personnel were killed and 171 more wounded in the two hour assault, which was clearly intended to sink the intelligence-gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
The Israelis and their supporters in the United States have always claimed the attack was a tragic mistake while many of the surviving Liberty crew believe that it was anything but: They assert that the vessel was flying an oversized American flag and was clearly identifiable as a U.S. Navy vessel. The ship’s commanding officer, Captain William McGonagle, was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in keeping the ship afloat, though President Lyndon Baines Johnson broke with tradition by refusing to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, or to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in an unpublicized presentation at the Washington Navy Yard.
The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident and a hastily-convened court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry’s senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a “deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew,” also described how “President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The court’s findings were rewritten and sections relating to possible war crimes, such as the machine-gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his father’s footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona has used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public.
One of the more intriguing allegations surrounding the Liberty incident is the claim that a United States Navy submarine was in the area when the attack took place. A number of submarine crewmen have surfaced anonymously to say that they were on one of several subs reported to be in the area on intelligence-gathering missions. Some stated their belief that photos were taken of the attack itself, but, fearing reprisals from the government, none would go public with their claims.
More recently, a crewman on the USS Amberjack, a diesel-powered intelligence-gathering sub, has provided an account of his ship’s activities on that day in June to two Liberty survivors. The sailor, Larry Bryant, agreed to go on radio with survivors Phil Tourney and Ron Kukal to discuss his experiences but inexplicably got cold feet and broke off contact. However, several extended phone conversations had already provided some intriguing insights into what had taken place.
Several Liberty crewmen reported seeing a periscope during the attack and it has generally been assumed that it was Israeli, but according to Bryant, it was actually the USS Amberjack. The submarine was near enough to the incident to clearly hear throughout the ship the reverberations of every round fired into the Liberty’s hull. The sub’s crew knew that a U.S. Navy vessel was under attack, but the Amberjack was only lightly armed and in no position to intervene. The sub remained immobile between the Liberty and some of its attackers and the sub’s crewmen feared that they themselves might be hit by the the Israeli warships’ torpedos.
As Larry Bryant was a crewman, he had no idea why the submarine was in that spot on that day, but he did note how the sub had raised its periscope and was observing the attack as it unfolded. More interestingly, the submarine had been equipped with a platform for the mounting of a video camera, which operated through the periscope and the Amberjack both filmed and photographed the entire incident. Some crewmen noted that the Liberty’s large American flag was clearly visible through the periscope during the attack, disputing the subsequent Israeli contention that the ship was not flying any flag.
The Amberjack’s Captain August Hubal, now retired and living in Virginia, has denied that his ship was anywhere near the Liberty on June 8th, but his account is contradicted by the ship’s log which confirms that it was indeed in the area. Hubal, who was described by Bryant as an obsessive, “by the rules” officer who would go to his stateroom and blow his brains out if so ordered, later warned his crew to forget about their role in the Liberty attack or face the consequences. The photos and videos of the incident made by the Amberjack were subsequently couriered to Washington by a ship’s officer, where they were turned over to the Pentagon.
Part of Hubal’s reluctance to discuss what he was doing on that day might be traced to the fact that his vessel was carrying out a clandestine operation in Egyptian waters as part of the Naval Security Group, which was affiliated with the codebreakers of the National Security Agency. Several civilians on the sub were performing the same tasks as their counterparts who were intercepting and decoding radio transmissions on board the Liberty. The Amberjack was equipped with a snorkel, which enabled it to sit on the bottom of the sea immobile and listen to electronic transmissions for long periods of time.
Confirmation that the Amberjack was in the area and that it had made a film and photo record of the attack suggest a number of lines for further inquiry. First and foremost has to be the issue of possible prior knowledge or even connivance by the White House in what was about to take place. Was it happenstance that the submarine was in the same location as the Liberty or was it by design? Was there any advance notice to Washington that an attack might take place? Could the USS Liberty have been an intended victim of a false flag simulated Egyptian attack, leading to American involvement on behalf of Israel in the fighting? Though that line of inquiry might appear implausible, the White House ordered the return of US warplanes sent to assist the Liberty, suggesting that Johnson knew who the attackers were in spite of the fact that the Israelis had covered over their aircraft markings in an apparent attempt to blame the Egyptians. One might also recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Was the video equipment part of the ship’s standard espionage gear or was it installed just prior to the Liberty attack? Was the filming of the attack done on an opportunity basis or was it planned? Was it possibly intended to provide evidence of Egyptian aggression, played for all its worth on the nightly news in America? Most importantly, where are the video and other photos today and why were they not produced at the board of inquiry or subsequently?
To those who object that Lyndon Baines Johnson would not have sunk so low as to allow an American warship to be attacked, it should be observed that LBJ’s refusal to allow air cover might mean that the situation was being managed to produce a “correct” outcome. One might also recall that Lyndon Johnson was possibly the most pro-Israel president in American history, tilting heavily towards the Jewish state on foreign policy issues starting with his time as a congressman all the way through his years in the White House. When he was president he declared a “strategic alliance” with Israel.
The Amberjack story, for all those who would like to see the Liberty saga end either in exonerating Israel or in proving its guilt, provides closure. The attack took place 44 years ago. Whatever classified information or sources and methods used by the intelligence community worth protecting then are surely well beyond their shelf life now. It is time to open the files fully. The activity of the Amberjack, including its classified logs and whatever film and photos it might have taken, should be made accessible, together with the testimony of surviving crewmen. And when that material is fully digested, there should be another court of inquiry to look in the matter finally and completely, incorporating the testimony of all the surviving Liberty crewmen, particularly those who were not heard the first time around because they were in hospital or were restrained by orders not to discuss the incident.
WikiLeaks has demonstrated that the United States has a secret government that operates with little in the way or transparency or restraint. Unfortunately, it has had that kind of government for a long time, and the fate of the USS Liberty could be a manifestation of how the White House might actually have colluded in the deaths of American servicemen and then engaged in a cover-up to conceal what it had done. It’s time to open the windows and introduce a breath of fresh air. Lyndon B. Johnson is gone and so is his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, both of whom left the USS Liberty to its fate. But there are many survivors who are still looking for answers. It is time to provide what they need and give them peace.
March 19, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment
UN votes for Libya air strikes
By Richard Seymour | LENIN’S TOMB | March 17, 2011
As if I didn’t see this coming a mile off:
10 in favour, zero against, five abstentions. So the vote went exactly as predicted. “The resolution 1973/2011 is adopted.,” says the chairman.
This could get very ugly. The resolution authorises a whole series of military measures short of ground invasion, including air strikes. The worst case scenarios? Not that air strikes will kill civilians – that is absolutely guaranteed, and thus constitutes an aspect of even the best case. Not that the war will escalate – that is not a dead cert, but a strong probability. However, it’s also unlikely to involve a ground invasion, which I need hardly say would be catastrophic. The worst case scenario seems to be that this will fuel the centrifugal forces tending toward partition between a ‘Western’ allied statelet in the east, and a rump dictatorship in the west. Qadhafi has spent years deliberately ‘underdeveloping’ the east to punish these regions and tribal federations for their tendency toward rebelliousness, leaving towns and cities that should be as rich as those in the Gulf states desperately poor, surrounded by shantytowns and slums – and so he has laid the material basis for such divisions. Imperialism creates divisions where none existed before (look at Iraq). This is how it always operates. So it’s implausible that where there already are such divisions, and where such divisions have a direct bearing on the conflict underway, that imperialist intervention would not exacerbate them. This may be the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the Libyan revolution. That’s a worst-case scenario.
The best-case scenario is that people are killed to little avail, and the former regime elements in the transitional leadership have just diverted energies and initiative down a blind alley. I suppose you might object that the best-case scenario is that the air strikes exclusively kill the bad guys, turning the initiative in favour of the revolutionaries, allowing them to seize power, build a liberal democratic state, and the cavalry heads home. And the band played, ‘Believe it if you like’. Look, I’d like to believe it. I’d also like to believe that Obama is a socialist, Hillary Clinton a feminist, and David Cameron a salesman for unsecured personal loans. But the occasions in which imperialism has directly assisted a revolutionary process are rather infrequent, wouldn’t you say? In fact, I suspect you’d be struggling if I asked you to name one.
I’m also afraid that all the talk about the inaction, delaying, dilly-dallying and procrastination of the ‘international community’, not to mention the demonology about Russia and China obstructing the good guys once again, has played straight into a very familiar war narrative. Just when you’ve uttered your last “but why won’t they DO something?”, just when you’re about to give up and lapse into foul depression, the good guys come to the rescue. It’s like 1941 all over again. There was never any doubt, as far as I’m concerned, that the US would support a no-fly zone if it could be suitably internationalized and involve support from the miserable dictatorships of the Arab League. And no one will be tasteless enough to point out that those very same states are currently butchering their populations with the arms and financial assistance of the imperial powers commanding this coalition of the willing. Because that would just be sour grapes.
March 18, 2011 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment
The Korean War: The “Unknown War”
The Cover-up of US War Crimes
By Sherwood Ross | March 16, 2011
The Korean War, a.k.a. the “Unknown War,” was, in fact, headline news at the time it was being fought (1950-53). Given the Cold War hatreds of the combatants, though, a great deal of the reportage was propaganda, and much of what should have been told was never told. News of the worst atrocities perpetrated against civilians was routinely suppressed and the full story of the horrific suffering of the Korean people—who lost 3-million souls of a total population of 23-million— has yet to be told in full. Filling in many of the blank spaces is Bruce Cumings, chair of the Department of History at the University of Chicago, whose book “The Korean War” (Modern Library Chronicles) takes an objective look at the conflict. In one review, Publishers Weekly says, “In this devastating work he shows how little the U.S. knew about who it was fighting, why it was fighting, and even how it was fighting.
Though the North Koreans had a reputation for viciousness, according to Cumings, U.S. soldiers actually engaged in more civilian massacres. This included dropping over half a million tons of bombs and thousands of tons of napalm, more than was loosed on the entire Pacific theater in World War II, almost indiscriminately. The review goes on to say, “Cumings deftly reveals how Korea was a clear precursor to Vietnam: a divided country, fighting a long anti-colonial war with a committed and underestimated enemy; enter the U.S., efforts go poorly, disillusionment spreads among soldiers, and lies are told at top levels in an attempt to ignore or obfuscate a relentless stream of bad news. For those who like their truth unvarnished, Cumings’s history will be a fresh, welcome take on events that seemed to have long been settled.”
Interviewed in two one-hour installments by Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, producers of Comcast’s “Books of Our Time” with the first installment being shown on Sunday, March 20th, Cumings said U.S. coverage of the war was badly slanted. Hanson Baldwin, the military correspondent for The New York Times, described “North Koreans as locusts, like Nazis, like vermin, who come shrieking on. I mean, this is really hard stuff to read in an era when you don’t get away with that kind of thinking anymore.” Cumings adds, “Rapes were extremely common. Koreans in the South will still say that that was one of the worst things of the war (was how) many American soldiers were raping Korean women.”
Cumings said he was able to draw upon a lot of South Korean research that has come out since the nation democratized in the 1990s about the massacres of Korean civilians. This has been the subject of painstaking research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul and Cumings describes the results as “horrific.” Atrocities by “our side, the South Koreans (ran) six to one ahead of the North Koreans in terms of killing civilians, whereas most Americans would think North Koreans would just as soon kill a civilian to look at him.” The numbers of civilians killed in South Korea by the government, Cumings said, even dwarfed Spaniards murdered by dictator Francisco Franco, the general who overthrew the Madrid government in the 1936-1939 civil war. Cumings said about 100,000 South Koreans were killed in political violence between 1945 and 1950 and perhaps as many as 200,000 more were killed during the early months of the war. This compares to about 200,000 civilians put to death in Spain in Franco’s political massacres. In all, Korea suffered 3 million civilian dead during the 1950-53 war, more killed than the 2.7 million Japan suffered during all of World War II.
One of the worst atrocities was perpetrated by the South Korean police at the small city of Tae Jun. They executed 7,000 political prisoners while Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military officials looked on, Cumings said. To compound the crime, the Pentagon blamed the atrocity on the Communists, Cumings said. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff classified the photographs of it because they make it clear who’s doing it, and they don’t let the photographs out until 1999 when a Korean finally got them declassified.” To top that off, the historian says, “the Pentagon did a video movie called ‘Crime of Korea’ where you see shots of pits that go on for like a football field, pit after pit of dead people, and (actor) Humphrey Bogart in a voice-over says, ‘someday the Communists will pay for this, someday we’ll get the full totals and believe me we’ll get the exact, accurate totals of the people murdered here and we will make these war criminals pay.’ Now this is a complete reversal of black and white, done as a matter of policy.” Cumings adds that these events represent “a very deep American responsibility for the regime that we promoted, really more than any other in East Asia (and that) was our creation in the late Forties.” Other atrocities, such as the one at No Gun village, Cumings terms “an American massacre of women and children,” which he lays at the feet of the U.S. military.
Initially, reporters from U.S. magazines’ “Look,” “Saturday Evening Post,” “Collier’s,” and “Life,” could report on anything they saw, the historian said. They reported that “the troops are shooting civilians, the South Korean police are awful, they’re opening up pits and putting hundreds of people in them. This is all true.” Within six months, though, U.S. reporters were muzzled by censors, meaning, “you can’t say anything bad about our South Korean ally. Even if you see them blowing an old lady’s head apart, you can’t say that.” Even though his writings on Korea years after the war ended were not censored, New York Times reporter David Halberstam wrote a book on the Korean War (The Coldest Winter) in which “he doesn’t mention the bombing of the North (and) mentions the three-year U.S. occupation of South Korea in one sentence, without giving it any significance,” Cumings said. Besides rape, the Pentagon was firebombing North Korean cities more intensively than any of those it firebombed during World War II. Where it was typical for U.S. bombing to destroy between 40 and 50 percent of a city in that war, the destruction rate in North Korea was much higher: Shin Eui Ju, on the Chinese border, 95 percent destroyed; Pyongyang, 85 percent; and Hamhung, an industrial city, 80 percent.”By the end of 1951, there weren’t many bombing targets left in North Korea.”
Cumings believed that Douglas MacArthur, the General who commanded U.S. forces in Korea was prejudiced against Asians and badly underestimated their fighting capabilities. On the day the North Koreans invaded the South in force on June 25, 1950, MacArthur boasted, according to Cumings, “‘I can beat these guys with one hand tied behind my back’ and within a week he wants a bunch of divisions, and within a month he’s got almost all of the trained American combat forces in the world either in Korea or on their way to Korea.” MacArthur’s slight of the fighting trim of North Korean units was shared by other high American officials. “(John Foster) Dulles, (then U.S. delegate to the United Nations) even says things like, ‘They must put dope into these guys (because) I don’t know how they can fight so fanatically.'” Cumings goes on to explain, the North Korean soldiers “had three or four years of fighting in the Chinese Civil War (for the Communists), so they were crack troops, and our intelligence knew about these people but completely underestimated them, and a lot of Americans got killed because they underestimated them.” Again, when the CIA had warned MacArthur that 200,000 Chinese troops were crossing the border into North Korea, MacArthur said, “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry about it, Chinamen can’t fight.” However, the Chinese routed U.S. forces, clearing them out of Korea in two weeks. “Sometimes I wonder why the world isn’t worse off than it is,” the historian reflected, “because people make such unbelievably stupid decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people (based) on stupid biases.”
The U.S. use of air power to inflict widespread devastation had a profound impact on future North Korean military practice. To escape the rain of death the North Korean military—starting at the time of the Korean War—built 15,000 underground facilities, putting whole factories, dormitories, and even airfields underground. “So you have jets flying into the side of mountains,” Cumings says, as well as 1 million men and women under arms in a nation of 24 million—so that one in every 24 people is in the military. The U.S. military believes the North Koreans have built their nuclear weapons facilities underground—plural, that is, as it is possible they have one or two backups if a facility is destroyed by an enemy attack. While the U.S. today is concerned that North Korea is developing the means to deliver a nuclear weapon, Cummings said the country “has been under nuclear threat since the Korean War. “Our war plans, for decades, called for using nuclear weapons very early in a new war. That’s one reason there hasn’t been a new war,” Cumings said. The armistice that terminated the peninsular war banned the introduction of new and different quality weapons into the region but the U.S. in violation of the pact inserted nuclear-tipped “Honest John” missiles into Korea in 1958. “They said, ‘Well, they’re (always) bringing in new MiGs and everything, so we can do this.’ But to go from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons essentially obliterated the article of the (armistice,) Cumings said. The U.S. has relied so heavily on nuclear deterrent in Korea that one retired general said it has reached a point where “the South Korean army doesn’t think it has to fight in a new war because we’re going to wipe out the North Koreans,” Cumings continued.
The historian said the North Koreans detonated their first nuclear device in 2006—-of about one-half kiloton equivalent (compared to the 20-kiloton bomb that leveled Hiroshima). Three years later, they detonated a 4- to 5-ton kiloton range bomb that could “certainly blast the hell out of a major city.” While Cumings doubts the North Koreans have yet to miniaturize a bomb so that it can ride on one of their medium-range missiles, there is nothing stopping them from, say, putting such a device aboard a freighter and detonating it upon reaching its port of destination. Cummings noted the North Koreans are “very good at manufacturing missiles” and have medium-range missiles “that are among the best in the world outside of the American bailiwick.” These are sold to Iran and Pakistan and, if fired from Korea, could reach all of Japan and the U.S. base on Okinawa, as well as all of South Korea. Any new war on the Korean peninsula, the historian says, “would be an absolute catastrophe” even though the general consensus is that the North Koreans have been unable yet to miniaturize a nuclear warhead.
Getting back to the Korean War, historian Cummings believes that all parties to the war bear some responsibility for its outbreak: “What they did was take an existing civil conflict that had been going on five years and take it to the level of a conventional war, and for that, they bear a lot of responsibility.” Both sides initiated pitched border battles from 1947 onward and the general in charge of the U.S. advisory group said “the South Koreans started more than half of these pitched battles along the 38th parallel border with North Korea between May and December of 1949,” Cumings discovered. “Hundreds of soldiers were dying on both sides and in August there nearly was a Korean War, a year before the one we know…(as the North Koreans pushed) down to the Ongjin Peninsula in the Yellow Sea south of the 38th Parallel” (but which is not contiguous to the rest of South Korea.)
Both the North’s Kim Il-sung and the South’s Syngman Rhee wanted to fight all-out at the time but were restrained by their American and Soviet advisers, respectively. The following year, after his troops came back from China, Kim Il-sung stationed his crack Sixth Division just north of Seoul and when hostilities broke out captured the South Korean capital in just three days. The South did not develop the kind of military that the North Koreans did, and this is one of the truly hidden aspects of the Korean War. …The North Koreans had tens of thousands (50,000)of fighters in the Chinese Civil War they sent across the border as early as Spring of 1947,” Cumings said. This gave the North Koreans a cadre of battle-tested fighters that routed the Seoul government’s troops.
Because of the troops North Korea furnished the Chinese Communists, deep ties were forged between the two countries. “China was a kind of reliable rear area for training and for cementing a very close relationship,” Cumings said. “Our people in Washington (didn’t) begin to understand this….There (were) a lot of hard-liners in the Chinese military that really liked North Korea.” Nor did U.S. intelligence apparently take into account how repressive U.S. actions in South Korea might make its citizens unwilling to fight all-out for a U.S.-backed government run by strongman Rhee. American military officials in South Korea in the late Forties “were outlawing left-wing parties, knocking over left-wing people’s committees and things like this, for two years” on their own initiative, Cumings said. But the development of the containment doctrine and the start of the Cold War in 1947 put the official U.S. imprimatur on their ad hoc policies.
~
Sherwood Ross formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. He is a media consultant to MSLAW. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
The Massachusetts School of Law, producers of “Educational Forum,” is purposefully dedicated to providing a quality, affordable education to students from minority, low-income, and immigrant households who would otherwise not have the opportunity to obtain a legal education. Through its conferences, publications and broadcasts, the law school also provides vital information on important issues to the public.
March 17, 2011 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Douglas MacArthur, Korea, Korean War, North Korea, South Korea, United States, World War II | Leave a comment
Leading to War (2008)
By argonium79 | March 15, 2011
How does a government lead its people to war? How does it communicate to its citizens — and to the wider world — the reasons and rationale for initiating military conflict? What rhetorical devices and techniques are employed? And how is a nation brought to support the profound decision to wage war against another nation? These are the questions that LEADING TO WAR seeks to explore.
This 72-minute film shows the evolution of the United States government’s case for military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime, leading to the Iraq War which began in 2003.
LEADING TO WAR is comprised entirely of archival news footage — without commentary, without voiceover — presented chronologically from President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2002 (the “axis of evil” speech), and continuing up to the announcement of formal U.S. military action in Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Covering these 14 months, the film presents selected interviews, speeches, and press conferences given by President Bush and his administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, as well as by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others.
This compressed, chronological view offers a unique opportunity to examine the media record from a historical perspective, allowing the material to speak for itself. Footage was licensed from major news sources, including ABC, AP, BBC, CNN, ITN, and NBC.
LEADING TO WAR is also intended as a historical record for future generations, who will not have had firsthand experience of the precise, incremental steps taken by the government in presenting its case for war.
March 16, 2011 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment
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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.
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