Early release for soldier who killed British activist
Ma’an – 19/07/2010
Bethlehem – An Israeli soldier convicted of shooting dead a British peace activist has been granted an early release from prison, the Israeli press reported Monday.
A military committee accepted Taysir Hayb’s appeal, and he will be free in one month, the Israeli news site Ynet reported Monday.
Hayb shot Tom Hurndall, who died aged 22, during an incident on Gaza’s southern border.
Witnesses reported that the British citizen was watching children play on a street in Rafah when Israeli soldiers opened fire. Most of the children fled, but three, aged between four and seven, were paralyzed by fear.
Hurndall took one of the children to safety and was returning for the two others when Hayb shot him in his forehead.
After a two hour delay at the border, Hurndall was taken to hospital, where he remained in a coma until his death nine months later.
Hayb, an award-winning marksman, faced court after intense pressure from the British government and Hurndall’s parents and in his initial testimony, claimed that he had aimed four inches from Hurndall’s head but missed.
He also claimed Hurndall was wearing military fatigues, although photographic evidence showed he was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket to show he was a foreigner.
The soldier later changed his testimony and “admitted to firing in proximity to an unarmed civilian as a deterrent,” an Israeli army statement at the time said.
An Israeli military court convicted Hayb in 2005 and sentenced him to eight years in prison. During the trial, Hayb said that a policy of shooting unarmed civilians existed at the time.
Hurndall’s killing came one month after US activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a military bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, and one month later British journalist James Miller was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in the same area.
A British inquest in 2006 found Hurndall was intentionally killed. “Make no mistake about it, the Israeli defense force have today been found culpable by this jury of murder,” the family’s lawyer Michael Mansfield said after the hearing.
In his appeal for early release, Hayb told the committee he is engaged and wishes to start a family, Ynet reported.
In journals released by Hurndall’s family since his death, the young photographer wrote, “I want to be proud of myself. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven’t done.”
The Real U.S. Government
By Glenn Greenwald | July 19, 2010
The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she’s easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation — if not the best — with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government: what the article calls “Top Secret America.” To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents: the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this “hidden world, growing beyond control” — as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration’s escalating war on whistle blowers:
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.
Virtually every fact Priest and Arkin disclose underscores this point. Here is their first sentence: “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” This all “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle. Consider this: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.” To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State. Here’s but one flavoring anecdote:
Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.
“You can’t find a four-star general without a security detail,” said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. “Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, ‘If he has one, then I have to have one.’ It’s become a status symbol.”
What’s most noteworthy about all of this is that the objective endlessly invoked for why we must acquiesce to all of this — National Security — is not only unfulfilled by “Top Secret America,” but actively subverted by it. During the FISA debate of 2008 — when Democrats and Republicans joined together to legalize the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program and vastly expand the NSA’s authority to spy on the communications of Americans without judicial oversight — it was constantly claimed that the Government must have greater domestic surveillance powers in order to Keep Us Safe. Thus, anyone who opposed the new spying law was accused of excessively valuing privacy and civil liberties at the expense of what, we are always told, matters most: Staying Safe. […]
Long before the Priest/Arkin article, Tim Shorrock has been documenting this sprawling, secretive, merged public/private world that combines unchecked surveillance and national security powers with enormous corporate profits. So long as the word Terrorism continues to be able to strike fear in the hearts of enough citizens and media stars — as Communism did before it — the political class, no matter who is elected, will be petrified to oppose any of this, even if they wanted to, and why would they want to? They wouldn’t and they don’t. And it thus grows and becomes more powerful, all justified by endless appeals to The Terrorists.
That’s why it is difficult to imagine — short of some severe citizen unrest — how any of this will be brought under control. One of the few scenarios one can envision for such unrest involves growing wealth disparities and increasingly conspicuous elite corruption. In The New York Times today, investment banker and former Clinton Treasury official Roger Altman announced that the alleged “tension between President Obama and the business community” can be solved only if the political class is willing to “fix Social Security” — i.e., to slash Americans’ retirement security. Sooner or later (probably sooner), one way or another (probably this way), that’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. As George Carlin put it several years ago, in an amazingly succinct summary of so many things:
And now, they’re coming for your Social Security money – they want your fucking retirement money – they want it back – so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It’s a Big Club: and you’re not in it.
That’s really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable — as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still?
How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?
The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little. The New York Times‘ Peter Baker had a good article this weekend on how totally inconsequential squabbles dominate the news more or less continuously: last week’s riveting drama was the bickering between the White House and Nancy Pelosi over Robert Gibbs’ warning that Democratic control of the House was endangered. Baker quotes Democratic strategist Chris Lehane as follows: “Politics in D.C. have become Seinfeldesque. Fights about nothing.”
If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media — as I am — what’s most striking aren’t the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some “outrageous” snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some “crazy,” attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!). I can’t recall an incident that better captures our political culture than this, from a Politico report on one of last week’s fascinating Royal Court dramas — the insult-trading between Palin and Mitt Romney:
Asked about the comments by POLITICO, a longtime Palin aide unloaded on Romney’s staff. . . . “For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A Palin aide, hiding behind Politico-granted anonymity, complaining that petty comments were made anonymously by a Romney aide: a perfect expression of what our politics are. The Drudge and Politico sewers still rule our world — “fights over nothing” — and happily distract us from Top Secret America, what it does and what it takes.
And whatever these petty distractions fail to achieve, active media distortion takes care of the rest. This superb article by Mark Prendergast, the Ombudsman for Stars & Stripes, details the billions of dollars secretly (and probably illegally) spent by the Pentagon — much of it on private contractors — to subject not only foreign nationals but also American citizens to pure propaganda campaigns. The Pentagon propaganda program exposed by David Barstow is but a representative sliver of the weapons used by the National Security State and its private partners to control media behavior and shape public opinion. Billions upon billions of dollars are spent for this propagandistic purpose at exactly the time that real journalistic outlets are failing. Television journalists think they’re covering war zones when they submit to Pentagon embedding and then broadcast what they’re allowed to see, while repeating government lies about war without challenge. And when all else fails, we’re told to look over there at all those Bad, Evil things done by those Other Countries (hey, look at Pakistan, whose citizens are pumped full of myths and disinformation while their wealthy manipulate the law so as to not pay their fair share of taxes!! — and Iran detains people without charges and China tortures!! — can you believe them?).
Meanwhile, the Real U.S. Government — the network of secret public and private organizations which comprise the National Security and Surveillance State — expands and surveils and pilfers and destroys without much attention and with virtually no real oversight or accountability. It sucks up the vast bulk of national resources and re-directs the rest to those who own and control it. To their immense credit, Dana Priest and William Arkin will spend the week disclosing the details of what they learned over the past two years investigating all of this, but the core concepts have long been glaringly evident. But Sarah Palin’s Twitter malapropism from yesterday will almost certainly receive far more attention than anything exposed by the Priest/Arkin investigation. So we’ll continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark — bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating — without much bother from anyone.
Qualitative Military Edge — assuring Israeli capacity for brutality with impunity
By Paul Woodward on July 19, 2010
On October 15, 2008, just three weeks before the US presidential election, George Bush signed into law the Naval Vessel Transfer Act which had been sponsored by one of Israel’s most loyal supporters in the US Congress, Rep. Howard Berman.
The new law, which from its title might have been assumed to relate primarily to the sale of ships from the US Navy to foreign governments, actually had a much more important purpose: to place every American president under a legal obligation to ensure that Israel maintains its military dominance over the Middle East.
What had previously been a matter of foreign policy, suddenly became law — law written to meet the interests of a foreign government.
Israel’s regional hegemony is legally enshrined in the concept of Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge” (QME). The US Government must now guarantee that “the sale or export of the defense articles or defense services will not adversely affect Israel’s qualitative military edge over military threats to Israel.”
The law states:
[T]he term ‘qualitative military edge’ means the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors. [Emphasis mine.]
Andrew J Shapiro is the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. One of his primary responsibilities is to ensure that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge. Does he serve the US government or the Israeli government? It’s far from clear.
This is how he presented the United States’ obligation to serve Israel’s interests in a speech he delivered at the Brookings Institute in Washington on Friday:
For decades, the cornerstone of our security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge — a commitment that was written into law in 2008. Israel’s QME is its ability to counter and defeat credible military threats from any individual state, coalition of states, or non-state actor, while sustaining minimal damages or casualties. The Obama Administration has demonstrated its commitment to Israel’s QME by not only sustaining and building upon practices established by prior administrations, but also undertaking new initiatives to make our security relationship more intimate than ever before.
Each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge. At the same time, QME considerations extend to our decisions on defense cooperation with all other governments in the region. This means that as a matter of policy, we will not proceed with any release of military equipment or services that may pose a risk to allies or contribute to regional insecurity in the Middle East.
The primary tool that the United States uses to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge is security assistance. For some three decades, Israel has been the leading beneficiary of U.S. security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing program, or FMF. Currently, Israel receives almost $3 billion per year in U.S. funding for training and equipment under FMF. The total FMF account is $5 billion annually and is distributed among some 70 countries. So it is a testament to our special security relationship that each year Israel accounts for just over 50 percent of U.S. security assistance funding distributed through FMF.
The Obama Administration is proud to carry on the legacy of robust U.S. security assistance for Israel. Indeed, we are carrying this legacy to new heights at a time when Israel needs our support to address the multifaceted threats it faces.
For Fiscal Year 2010, the Administration requested $2.775 billion in security assistance funding specifically for Israel, the largest such request in U.S. history. Congress fully funded our request for FY 2010, and we have requested even more — $3.0 billion — for FY 2011. These requests fulfill the Administration’s commitment to implementing the 2007 memorandum of understanding with Israel to provide $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years.
This commitment directly supports Israel’s security, as it allows Israel to purchase the sophisticated defense equipment it needs to protect itself, deter aggressors, and maintain its qualitative military edge. Today, I can assure you that — even in challenging budgetary times — this Administration will continue to honor this 10-year, $30 billion commitment in future fiscal years. [Emphasis mine.]
Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin challenged Shapiro during Q&A:
[I]t pains me to hear you sound more like an agent of the Israeli government than a U.S. representative because as you travel around the world you see that this “special relationship” really endangers us, makes us more hated around the world. So I wonder if you would be willing to step in other shoes and go to Gaza, see the results of the Israeli invasion there, see the destruction, talk to people in Gaza, talk to the elected government, which is Hamas. You don’t have to like them to talk to them. I also wonder if you’ve spent any time with people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to see what it feels like for Palestinians, the daily humiliations they suffer.
And I also wonder, given the financial crisis here at home and the great needs of impoverished nations around the world, couldn’t you think of a better use of $3 billion than giving it to a wealthy country like Israel that is abusing the human rights of Palestinians on a daily basis?
Benjamin drew a round of applause — Shapiro declined to respond directly to her challenge.
As Shapiro noted, the concept of Israel’s QME has been in use for decades, but it was only when the Bush administration let Israel draft American law, that QME turned into a license to use force with impunity.
In January 2008, William Wunderle, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and Andre Briere, a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, wrote in a paper for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
The US commitment to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME) is a long-standing tradition that every president since Lyndon Johnson has maintained and reiterated. The basic principle behind this commitment is simple: Israel is a bastion of liberal representative government in the Middle East, and, as such, its continued survival is a vital national interest of the United States. To ensure this longtime ally’s continued existence in a sea of nations that reflexively call for its destruction, Israel must be able to defend itself militarily and deter potential aggression. In this effort, Israel will always be militarily outnumbered with regard to the artillery, tanks, and combat aircraft that can be deployed by a coalition of Arab states. Israel’s continued survival can be ensured only if it is able to maintain qualitative military superiority, relying on superior weaponry, tactics, training, leadership, and other factors of military effectiveness to deter or defeat its numerically superior adversaries in the Middle East.
In other words, the US policy advocated that Israel should be able to counter a quantitative disadvantage with a qualitative advantage. It said nothing about supporting Israel’s use of that advantage at minimal cost. The expression after all was qualitative military edge — not supremacy.
These analysts noted however that:
Israel defines QME as “the ability to sustain credible military advantage that provides deterrence and, if need be, the ability to rapidly achieve superiority on the battlefield against any foreseeable combination of forces with minimal damage and casualties.”
The Israeli phrasing went straight into US law which says that Israel must maintain the ability to use military force “while sustaining minimal damages and casualties.”
Let’s put that in context. The law was signed just two years after Israel had visibly lost its qualitative military edge in Lebanon in 2006 when it faced Hezbollah, and less than three months before it used the assault on Gaza to once again demonstrate its ability to wreak massive destruction while sustaining minimal damages and casualties.
The war on Gaza, which President-elect Obama watched in silence, showed not merely the brutality that Israel is willing to use under America’s political protection, but the extent to which Israel’s military agenda is empowered through its ability to control the United States Government.
The war on Gaza was QME in action.
De-classified Vietnam-era Transcripts Show Senators Knew Gulf Of Tonkin Was A Staged False Flag Event
Elected Reps. chose to hide details from American public for fear of reprisals from “the big forces” that run the media and the presidency
Steve Watson | Infowars.com | July 15th, 2010
Over 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts released this week by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee highlight the fact that several Senators knew that the White House and the Pentagon had deceived the American people over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The latest releases, which document skepticism over the pretext for entry into the Vietnam war, date from 1968.
Four years into the war, senators were at loggerheads with Lyndon B. Johnson. At the time Foreign Relations Committee meetings were held behind closed doors.
It would take over thirty years for the truth to emerge that the Aug. 4, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, where US warships were apparently attacked by North Vietnamese PT Boats – an incident that kicked off US involvement in the Vietnam war – was a staged event that never actually took place.
However, the records now show that at the time senators knew this was the case.
In a March 1968 closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of former vice president Al Gore, noted:
“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,”
Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968:
“In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them,”
Other senators were keen to withhold the truth about Tonkin in order not to inflame public opinion on the war:
Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, stated, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.”
Mansfield was referring to the proposed release of a committee staff investigation that raised doubts over whether the Tonkin incident ever took place.
The committee decided in the end to effectively conceal the truth, with Senator Church noting that if the committee came up with proof that an attack never occurred, “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.”
He also noted that if the senators were to follow up on their skepticism over Tonkin, “The big forces in this country that have most of the influence and run most of the newspapers and are oriented toward the presidency will lose no opportunity to thoroughly discredit this committee.”
The LBJ Presidential tapes, declassified and released in 2001, prove that LBJ knew the Tonkin incident never happened. After dressing down his Defence Secretary Robert McNamara for misleading him, Johnson then discussed how to politically spin the non-event and escalate it as justification for air strikes.
“You just came in a few weeks ago and said they’re launching an attack on us – they’re firing at us,” Johnson tells McNamara in one conversation, “and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
The NSA also deliberately faked intelligence data to make it appear as if two US ships had been lost in the “attack”.
Johnson used the 1964 false flag event to expand dramatically the scale of the Vietnam War by ushering in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as well as to rope in much needed domestic support with the Congress and public.
Perhaps if the Foreign Relations Committee hadn’t been so afraid of “the big forces” controlling America, a large percentage of the almost 60,000 American soldiers and 2 million Vietnamese people wouldn’t have lost their lives.
Sadly, modern day elected representatives have failed the American people in exactly the same way over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Seafair ‘No Protest Zone’ Would Violate Constitution says ACLU, Demonstrators
By Rick Anderson | Seattle Weekly | July 12, 2010
Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard call it a safety zone, a watery sector extending 100 yards from Pier 66 into Elliott Bay, where few boaters dare to go. To critics, it will be a no-protest zone, at least for 12 hours beginning at 8 a.m. August 4, when it’s closed off to protect Navy warships here for Seafair. According to Coast Guard documents, it will be a onetime, temporary measure. But the government has also filed a proposal to make the no-go zone, used occasionally in the past, a permanent rule to be invoked during the Fleet Week Maritime Festival. The Navy would thus find it easier to avoid Glen Milner and his noisy boatloads of Ground Zero anti-war protesters, who have typically shown up on festival day to protest the government armada.
“The Navy often states it exists to defend our freedoms but this proposed [permanent] no protest zone shows how false that is,” says Ground Zero leader Milner, who has been busted in the past by the Coast Guard, among others, for his non-violent protests. “The zone amounts to institutionalized harassment and violates our civil rights.”
Michelle Jensen, a Seattle attorney representing ACLU of Washington, calls it a “defacto no-protest zone,” saying it creates “an impermissible restriction on protesters’ speech rights.” That was true when the USCG imposed the zone in some earlier years, she says. Now that the government is moving to make the zone permanent, she states in a letter to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, “we are prepared to litigate its constitutionality.” Read her legal argument here.
Milner says his group’s opposition and legal threats regarding the permanent zone – proposed by the government in February – seemed to have stalled that measure. He sees the temp-zone plan, announced a few weeks ago, as an end run. Coast Guard spokesperson Ashley M. Wanzer says the service is still mulling over the permanent proposal and didn’t know when a final decision would be made. The USCG considers such a zone necessary to the security and safety of boaters and the Navy ships, she said.
Anti-war demonstrators have been floating out with protest signs to meet the Navy fleet since Seafair 2000, says Milner. In past years, Navy Trident submarines, complete with nuclear warheads, and warships equipped to fire radioactive munitions have sailed into the downtown Seattle pier. The boats of protesters, says Milner, have regularly been boarded by the Coast Guard, preventing Ground Zero from demonstrating its concerns about war, particularly the nuclear kind.
The Coast Guard first established a 400-yard no protest zone “box” in 2008 surrounding Pier 66, where the Navy band and officers assembled to greet the fleet. “The Coast Guard,” says Milner, “never explained how vessels in Elliott Bay could endanger Navy officers on the rooftop of Pier 66 especially when Seafair, as a public event, invites the public to both locations.”
Though the zone is now reduced to 100 yards, his group of demonstrators – familiar sights at the gates of the Bangor N-sub base – still can’t get close enough to gain attention, says Milner. “The Coast Guard did not mention in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that a violation of the safety zone could bring an arrest and a charge resulting in up to six years in jail and/or a $250,000 fine.
“They make the rules, enforce the rules, and then prosecute violators in their own Coast Guard court system,” he says. “It shows us what a true police state would look like if the Coast Guard were in charge.”
The Dwindling of Afghanistan’s Coalition of the Willing
By DEEPAK TRIPATHI | July 13, 2010
The British government’s decision to withdraw troops from Sangin in Helmand province marks a watershed in the relentless conflict in Afghanistan. The military mission has been very costly for the United Kingdom, with a third of the total casualties sustained in one district alone. More than a hundred lives of soldiers lost and many more wounded coming home is a sign of how difficult the mission has been. In a classic display of guerrilla tactics of asymmetrical warfare, the armed opposition has refused to fight a modern army equipped with high-tech weaponry on its enemy’s terms. Instead, the insurgents have fought on their terms, using rudimentary explosive devices and small weapons with devastating effect. Reaction of Afghans in Sangin will shock many in Britain.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph (July 7, 2010), Ben Farmer reported local residents saying little that is complimentary about the British. One resident openly complained that, in their four-year deployment in Sangin, the British brought only fighting and too little development. The previous Anglo-Afghan wars have left a particularly bitter legacy, although there is also a tendency that things look far better on the other side. Afghanistan remains a fragmented country like it has been for centuries. Rubbing salt in British wounds, an Afghan from a small neighboring settlement said that areas under American control had done better. Ask people in US-controlled areas and their reaction would likely be the opposite. Afghans regularly protest against civilian deaths at the hands of US-led occupation forces all over the country, although many die in suicide attacks directed against people supposed to be cooperating with NATO and the US-installed government in Kabul. Among the latest this month were anti-US and anti-government demonstrations in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Residents come out to protest against civilians killings in the south and the east. News travels fast in that devastated country.
‘Afghanistan: Now It’s America’s War,’ said the Independent newspaper’s front-page story loudly in black. For eight years, the British people’s growing unease had been ignored. The United Kingdom, with a population of 62 million and fewer than 200000 regulars (and 42000 volunteers) in the armed forces, had been punching way above its weight. Former prime minister Tony Blair’s personal kinship with George W Bush in his ‘war on terror’ cost the United Kingdom dearly, in economic, political, moral terms. With Blair’s New Labour losing the May 2010 general election, it was relatively easier for the emerging Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government to face up to the reality of the Afghan conflict. The inevitable was bound to happen.
There has been a distinct cooling in the relationship between London and Washington since President Obama’s inauguration. Partly it is because President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are no longer in power. But equally significant, Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, and Obama have not made a good start. The Conservative Party is generally pro-military and, in opposition in parliament, voted for war against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Liberal Democratic Party, with a much more democratic structure, has significant sections in its membership opposed to, or circumspect about, war. The overall effect of a coalition between the two parties now runs counter to Britain’s continuing involvement in the Afghan conflict that has taken a heavy toll. The rhetoric about continued military involvement in Afghanistan is gloomy. Official statements emphasize the need for British troops to come home as soon as Afghanistan is ‘stable’. What it means remains undefined. The timescale often mentioned is 3-4 years, meaning before the next election.
Initial encounters have a determining effect on relations between leaders. From this perspective, Obama and Cameron did not appear to connect well. Of course, diplomatic niceties were maintained. The British are particularly adept at that. But the difference of emphasis in Washington and London over Afghanistan cannot be hidden. And the megaphone diplomacy over the BP oil spill laid bare the reality that the days of ‘special relationship’ – an exaggerated claim – were decidedly over. President Obama did not hesitate to resort to raw nationalism undermining that ‘special relationship’ to deflect domestic criticism of his handling of the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In doing so, Obama stepped back a decade into the past before British Petroleum and Amoco merged to form an international oil giant that was regarded as much American as it was British until the accident. He resorted to new rhetoric, way below his previous standards, to speak of an assault on US shores (not true because the rig that broke down was extracting oil within US continental waters). The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP was owned by Transocean, a company that traces its origins to Alabama in the 1950s. With its headquarters now based in Switzerland and offices in the United States and other countries, Transocean quenches the business ethos of ‘drill baby drill’ very well. And Obama’s ‘kicking ass’ remark was not the sort of political language heard in Europe. Senior figures, including ex-diplomats and politicians, began to react publicly, calling for the need to ‘send a message’ to the Americans. A telephone call from the British prime minister David Cameron followed. The conversation was courteous, the message clear. The oil disaster was saddening and frustrating. But it would be in no one’s interest to crush BP and to let the temperature rise any further. Obama responded that he had no interest in undermining the value of BP, but that was precisely the result. Obama was accused of holding ‘his boot on the throat’ of pensioners whose incomes depended on investments in the company.
Expediency, always a strong motive, propels political leaders to do the unexpected. They are not averse to injecting political venom into the body of an ally when they want to deflect domestic criticism. Eight years on, the ‘coalition of the willing’ President George W Bush assembled following his infamous threat ‘you’re either with us, or against us’ to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, that alliance is unraveling. And we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of yet another phase of great power adventurism in Afghanistan.
Deepak Tripathi set up the BBC Bureau in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and was the resident correspondent in Kabul. His latest book Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan is available from Amazon.com. He can be reached at: DandATripathi@gmail.com.
The spot-and-shoot game, remote-controlled killing
By JONATHAN COOK – July 13, 2010
It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.
The aim: to kill terrorists.
Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.
Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people — Palestinians in Gaza — who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.
The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.
The system is one of the latest “remote killing” devices developed by Israel’s Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.
According to Giora Katz, Rafael’s vice-president, remote-controlled military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.
The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a population less ready to risk death in combat.
Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an American newspaper: “We’re trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield … We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk.”
Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned last month of the danger that a “PlayStation mentality to killing” could quickly emerge.
According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing – using the occupied Palestinian territories, and especially Gaza, as testing laboratories.
Remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from repressive regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries around the globe.
“These systems are still in the early stages of development but there is a large and growing market for them,” said Shlomo Brom, a retired general and defence analyst at the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The Spot and Shoot system — officially known as Sentry Tech — has mostly attracted attention in Israel because it is operated by 19- and 20-year-old female soldiers, making it the Israeli army’s only weapons system operated exclusively by women.
Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices because of a shortage of male recruits to Israel’s combat units. Young women can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo of risking their lives, said Mr Brom.
The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the fence around Gaza and, if authorised by an officer, execute them using their joysticks.
The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along Israel’s other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to be several dozen.
The system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but operators were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army admitted using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two Palestinians several hundred metres inside the fence.
The Haaretz newspaper, which was given rare access to a Sentry Tech control room, quoted one soldier, Bar Keren, 20, saying: “It’s very alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants this job. It’s no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a Sony PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it’s for defence.”
Audio sensors on the towers mean that the women hear the shot as it kills the target. No woman, Haaretz reported, had failed the task of shooting what the army calls an “incriminated” Palestinian.
The Israeli military, which enforces a so-called “buffer zone” — an unmarked no-man’s land — inside the fence that reaches as deep as 300 metres into the tiny enclave, has been widely criticised for opening fire on civilians entering the closed zone.
In separate incidents in April, a 21-year-old Palestinian demonstrator was shot dead and a Maltese solidarity activist wounded when they took part in protests to plant a Palestinian flag in the buffer zone. The Maltese woman, Bianca Zammit, was videoing as she was hit.
It is unclear whether Spot and Shoot has been used against such demonstrations.
The Israeli army claims Sentry Tech is “revolutionary”. And that will make its marketing potential all the greater as other armies seek out innovations in “remote killing” technology.
Rafael is reported to be developing a version of Sentry Tech that will fire long-range guided missiles.
Another piece of hardware recently developed for the Israeli army is the Guardium, an armoured robot-car that can patrol territory at up to 80km per hour, navigate through cities, launch “ambushes” and shoot at targets. It now patrols the Israeli borders with Gaza and Lebanon.
Its Israeli developers, G-Nius, have called it the world’s first “robot soldier”. It looks like a first-generation version of the imaginary “robot-armour” worn by soldiers in the popular recent sci-fi movie Avatar.
Rafael has produced the first unmanned naval patrol boat, the “Protector”, which has been sold to Singapore’s navy and is being heavily marked in the US. A Rafael official, Patrick Bar-Avi, told the Israeli business daily Globes: “Navies worldwide are only now beginning to examine the possible uses of such vehicles, and the possibilities are endless.”
But Israel is most known for its role in developing “unmanned aerial vehicles” – or drones, as they have come to be known. Originally intended for spying, and first used by Israel over south Lebanon in the early 1980s, today they are increasingly being used for extrajudicial executions from thousands of feet in the sky.
In February Israel officially unveiled the 14 metre-long Heron TP drone, the largest ever. Capable of flying from Israel to Iran and carrying more than a ton of weapons, the Heron was tested by Israel in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008, when some 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
More than 40 countries now operate drones, many of them made in Israel, although so far only the Israeli and US armies have deployed them as remote-controlled killing machines. Israeli drones are being widely used in Afghanistan.
Smaller drones have been sold to the German, Australian, Spanish, French, Russian, Indian and Canadian armies. Brazil is expected to use the drone to provide security for the 2014 World Cup championship, and the Panamanian and Salvadoran governments want them too, ostensibly to run counter-drug operations.
Despite its diplomatic crisis with Ankara, Israel was reported last month to have completed a deal selling a fleet of 10 Herons to the Turkish army for $185 million.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Costa Rica’s Opposition Rejects Entry Of US Naval Forces
Inside Costa Rica | July 3, 2010
As is customary, the US asks for authorization of Costa Rica’s legislature before entry of any US warship and soldiers in Costa Rican waters. And as customary, the Costa Rica legislature grants its permission, as was the case on Friday.
The permission allows the entry of 46 US war ships and 7.000 Marines for the balance of the year (July 1 to December 31, 2010).
The permission granted by the Costa Rica legislature could include docking of the USS Freedom (pictured above) on Costa Rica’s shores. Opposition parties say the decade old agreement was to allow entry of US coast guard vessels and not war ships.
Costa Rica’s opposition, however, see it different, describing the permission as illegal and in violation of national sovereignty.
The main opponents to the granting of the authority is the Partido Acción Cuidadana (PAC), the Frente Amplio (FA) and the Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC), arguing that the destructive force of the ships and manpower, that includes helicopters, is disproportianate to the threat caused by drug traffickers.
The 46 ships carry some 200 helicopters and war planes and includes the USS Freedom, combat submarines and a hospital ship.
Luis Fishman, head of the PUSC party and presidential candidate in the past elections, said the legislative approval was like handing over a “blank cheque”.
“We cannot support the illegal, we cannot allow our Constitution to be trampled”, said Fishman.
The PAC and the FA recalled that the bilateral agreement signed 10 years ago allowed the entry of coast guard vessels, but not war ships that have the capacity for military confrontations and war.
FA legislator José María Villalta questioned the conditions under which the permission was granted, since US personnel “will enjoy freedom of movement and the right to carry out the activities needed to fulfill their mission”.
The FA also urged consideration of the geopolitical situation in which naval forces will be allowed to enter a region considered by Washington as part of its sphere of influence.
The legislator recalled that the US applies in the region a “strategy of complete dominance”, which includes offensive actions such as the coup d’etat in Honduras and the installation of military bases in Colombia.
Opposition Deputies said they may take action, that could include an appeal with the Constitutional Court, against the decision of the Legislative Assembly since the permission for the ships, airships, helicopters and marines to enter the country violates the agreement reached a decade ago.
The bombs that remain
By Eva Bartlett | IPS | July 7, 2010
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GAZA CITY – At precisely 12 noon on a Thursday afternoon, among the rolling sandy hills in southern Gaza, a controlled explosion destroys another round of white phosphorous shells left in Gaza following the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza.
Explosives experts from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and the United Nations Mine Action Team (UNMAT) are working together to eliminate the remainders of a deadly Israeli attack. The Israeli bombings from land, sea and air left behind large amounts of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in civilian areas.
In a precise, technical routine which takes into account all possible dangers to the MAG and UNMAT workers as well as Palestinian residents living in Gaza, the explosives experts are, detonation by detonation ridding Gaza of the remaining white phosphorous shells.
In order to deprive them of oxygen, shells are first sealed in plaster casts, then moved into large sand-filled containers, until their day of detonation.
Controlled detonations occur twice weekly, coordinated with the Hamas government and the Israeli army, whose war planes fly over the detonation site during the afternoon.
On the day of the seventh round of UXOs to be detonated, there are eight shells to destroy. Two are completely full and six are broken open but unexploded.
Inside each shell are 122 sponges soaked with the lethal chemical, designed to scatter far upon explosion.
“Some white phosphorous shells can be only liquid,” explains Mark Buswell, MAG’s technical director. “But the kind used in Gaza were sponges, more difficult to get rid of.”
The use of sponge-filled white phosphorous shells by Israel’s in its attack on Gaza 18 months back also meant that the probability of injuring civilians was greater.
The controlled detonations stop these shells harming civilians in the future and allow the lethal chemical weapon to burn off in containment pits in the ground, far enough away from the nearest houses to cause harm.
Twenty minutes after the first detonation, when the majority of the thick, white smoke has burned off and dissipated, MAG technicians prowl for stray sponges, move them to the pit, and re-ignite them together.
A solitary clump burns in five to ten minutes, although if covered by sand it can lie dormant for days, re-igniting with the poke of a child’s stick or kick of a shoe.
Jim Hill, a Canadian medic working with MAG in Gaza, explains their work. “We are here in case there are injuries from white phosphorous burns, smoke inhalation or unexpected detonations resulting in injuries.”
Hill and other medics accompany the team as it slowly safeguards sites where the rubble clearance has finally begun, well over a year after the destruction.
With over 4,000 houses completely destroyed and 16,000 houses partially or badly damaged, the risk of UXOs is huge.
Buswell says their work is only just beginning.
Israel’s 23-day-war on Gaza December-January 2008-2009 killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, and left more than 5,320 wounded. Among the casualties were those hit or affected by white phosphorous bombings.
“When white phosphorus lands on skin it burns deeply through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn until deprived of oxygen,” says Amnesty International.
Dr. Nafez Abu Shaban, head of the Burns Unit in Al-Shifa Hospital of Gaza City, told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) that he was seeing patients “who sustained severe burns due to which the muscles and body cells are completely destroyed.”
Among Israeli soldiers’ targets were homes, schools where thousands of Palestinians were taking refuge, UN buildings storing humanitarian aid, and hospitals. Over half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 medical centres were destroyed or damaged.
The Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City and the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Centre east of Sheyjayee — housing over 50 patients, the majority invalid and dependent on life-support machinery — suffered multiple bombings, including direct white phosphorous hits.
Israeli officials first denied using white phosphorous but later admitted and justified its use as a smokescreen for soldiers.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says its use among a concentration of civilians is “simply prohibited”, and notes that white phosphorous can spread up to several hundred square metres, with the “potential to cause particularly horrific and painful injuries or slow painful death.”
Over a year after the Israeli war on Gaza, the risk of UXO poses as real a threat as the fresh bombings.
These UXOs may detonate even decades later, MAG notes. In rural areas farmers ploughing or workers scavenging stones and steel can inadvertently set the bombs off. The anti-tank mines used by Israeli soldiers to demolish houses, and several of which remain, pose a risk to workers removing rubble or to families returning to their homes to sift for belongings.
As of August 2009, the UN reported 12 people killed from UXO explosions, six of who were children. Twenty-three were reported injured, including four children.
In March 2010, UNMAT and MAG began to destroy the 343 UXOs collected so far, including white phosphorous shells.
Mark Buswell compared the threat of an explosion in Gaza to “an explosion which could damage a city centre area the size of the City of London (2.6 square kilometres)”.
Welcome to smart bombs
Ramzy Baroud | 6 July 2010
Cluster bombs are in the news again, thanks to a recent report from Amnesty International. The human rights agency has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen.
Initially, there were attempts to bury the story, and Yemen officially denied that civilians were killed as a result of the December 17 attack in southern Yemen. However, it has been impossible to conceal what is now considered the largest loss of life in one single US attack in the country. If the civilian casualties were indeed a miscalculation on the part of the US military, there should no longer be any doubt about the fact that cluster munitions are far too dangerous a weapon to be utilised in war. And they certainly have no place whatsoever in civilian areas. The human casualties are too large to justify. Yemen is not alone. Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan are also stark examples of the untold loss and suffering caused by cluster bombs.
Meanwhile, the unrepentant Israeli army will not consider dropping the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas altogether. Instead it is pondering ways to make them ‘safer’. The Jerusalem Post reported on July 2 that the army “has carried out a series of tests with a bomblet that has a specially designed self-destruct mechanism which dramatically reduces the amount of unexploded ordnance.” During the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon in 2006, Israel fired millions of bomblets. Aside from the immediate devastation and causalities, unexploded ordnance continues to victimise Lebanon’s civilians, most of whom are children. Dozens of lives have been lost since the end of this war.
In Gaza, the same terrible scenario was repeated between 2008 and 2009. Unlike Lebanon, however, trapped Palestinians in Gaza had nowhere to go. Now Israel is anticipating another war with the Lebanese resistance. In preparation for this, an Israeli PR campaign is already underway. It seeks to convince public opinion that Israel is doing its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. “Ahead of a potential new conflict with Hezbollah, the IDF has decided to evaluate the M85 bomblet manufactured by the Israeli Military Industries,” reports the Jerusalem Post. Of course, Israel’s friends will be pleased by the initial successes of the Israeli army testing.
Under pressure to ratify the agreement, these countries are only too eager to offer a ‘safer’ version of current cluster bomb models. This would help not only to maintain the huge profits generated from this morally abhorrent business, it would also hopefully quell growing criticism by civil society and other world governments.
In December 2008, the United States, Russia and China, among others, sent a terrible message to the rest of the world. They refused to take part in the historic signing of the treaty that banned the production and use of cluster bombs.
In a world that is plagued by war, military occupation and terrorism, the involvement of the great military powers in signing and ratifying the agreement would have signaled – if only symbolically — the willingness of these countries to spare civilians’ unjustifiable deaths and the lasting scars of war. Fortunately, the refusal didn’t completely impede an international agreement. The incessant activism of many conscientious individuals and organisations came to fruition on December 3 and 4 in Oslo, Norway, when ninety-three countries signed a treaty banning the weapon.
Not surprisingly, the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan – a group that includes the biggest makers and users of the weapon — neither attended the Ireland negotiations of May 2008, and nor did they show any interest in signing the agreement in Oslo.
Most countries that have signed the accords are not involved in any active military conflict. They are also not in any way benefiting from the lucrative cluster munition industry.
But without the involvement of the major producers and active users of the weapon, the Oslo ceremony remained largely symbolic. However, there is nothing symbolic about the pain and bitter losses experienced by the many victims of cluster bombs.
According to the group Handicap International, a third of cluster-bomb victims are children.
Equally alarming, 98 per cent of the weapon’s overall victims are civilians. The group estimates that about 100,000 people have been maimed or killed by cluster bombs around the world since 1965.
Unlike conventional weapons, cluster bomblets survive for many years, luring little children with their attractive appearance. Children often mistake the bomblets for candy or toys.
Recently, some encouraging news emerged from the Netherlands. Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, urged his country’s House of Representative to ratify the Convention, which bans the production, possessions and use of such munitions. The ban leaves no room for any misguided interpretations and does not care for the Israeli army’s experimentations. In his speech, Verhagen claimed, “Cluster munitions are unreliable and imprecise, and their use poses a grave danger to the civilian population…Years after a conflict has ended, people – especially children – can fall victim to unexploded submunition from cluster bombs.”
To date, the agreement has been signed by 106 countries and ratified by 36 – and will enter into force on August 1, despite the fact that the big players refuse to take part. The Netherlands’ push is certainly a step in the right direction. But much more remains to be done.
The onus is also on civil societies in countries that are yet to ratify the agreement or sign it in the first place. “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men (and women) to do nothing.” This holds as true in the issue of cluster bombs, as in any other where human rights are violated and ignored.
Ramzy Baroud is a distinguished Arab American commentator and author, most recently, of ‘My father was a freedom fighter’ published by Pluto Press
France probes US submarine link to fishing boat sinking
BBC | July 2, 2010
An investigation into claims that a US nuclear submarine accidentally sank a French fishing boat in 2004, killing five sailors, is to be reopened.
A French appeals court appointed two magistrates to relaunch a probe into the loss of the Bugaled Breizh off the Cornish coast in January 2004.
In particular, they have been asked to try and identify what US submarines were in the vicinity at the time.
The sinking happened a day before Nato military exercises began in the area.
Submarine expert Dominiques Salles said in May the sinking could have been caused by a US nuclear attack submarine.
He suggested the sub may have been spying on a top secret consignment of military grade plutonium, shipped from the French port of Cherbourg to Japan on board a British nuclear transport vessel.
An inquiry in 2008 concluded a nuclear submarine snagging the boat’s trawl was the “highly probable cause” of the sinking, but the judges recommended the investigation be wound up, with no guilty party traced.
Mr Salles’ findings were submitted in a report that had been commissioned by appeal judges in Rennes last November.
The 72ft (23m) Bugaled Breizh, which means “child of Brittany” in Breton, was based at the small port of Loctudy.
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China names world’s ‘hacking empire’
RT | March 15, 2022
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February. … continue
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