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The Palestine Papers and What They Reveal About the US/Israeli Agenda

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON | CounterPunch | January 25, 2011

Many people told them so — told them, meaning told the United States and Israel and even the overeager Palestinian leadership, that the Oslo agreement in1993 wasn’t fair, that it made too many demands of the Palestinians and virtually no enforceable demands of Israel; that the United States, no honest broker or neutral mediator, was looking out only for Israel’s interests and cared nothing for Palestinian concerns; that the peace process breakdown at Camp David in 2000 was not the fault of the Palestinians but was the responsibility of President Clinton and his “Israeli lawyer” advisers for representing only Israel’s needs; that while Clinton demanded Palestinian concessions, he was winking at Israel’s steady expansion of settlements and land grabs in Palestinian territory; that Clinton’s two successors did the same.

Many analysts told them that hopes for a genuine two-state solution died in the 1990s — indeed, were never realistic — because Israel, with U.S. knowledge and support, was swallowing Palestine, eating the pizza they were supposed to be negotiating over, as many Palestinians have said.  But no one in power in the United States or the international community or in the media listened.

Someone may have to start listening.  This U.S. complicity in Israeli expansionism, and the desperate acquiescence of the Palestinian leadership in Israeli demands for its surrender, have now been exposed in the massive document leak by al-Jazeera.  Dubbed the Palestine Papers, the collection of almost 1,700 documents was obtained from unknown, possibly Palestinian, sources and covers a decade of “peace process” maneuvering.  So far, there is only silence from the Obama administration, which is implicated in the documents along with the Bush and Clinton administrations.  But reaction around the world is voluble and hard to ignore.

Palestinians, the documents show, offered compromises that verge on total capitulation.  At a time in 2008 when talks with then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were coming to a head and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was pushing hard, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat and his colleagues offered Israel the 1967 borders, the Palestinians’ right of return, and Israeli settlements on a silver platter.  The Palestinians would have agreed to let Israel keep all settlements in East Jerusalem except Har Homa; allowed Israel to annex more settlements in the West Bank (altogether totaling over 400,000 settlers); agreed to an inequitable territorial swap in return for giving Israel prime West Bank real estate, and settled for the return of only 5,000 Palestinian refugees (out of more than four million) over a five-year period.  And still Israel rejected the package of compromises, which they said “does not meet our demands” — presumably because their principal desire is that the Palestinians simply disappear.

The Palestinian eagerness to offer Israel such massive compromises has been the most prominent story from the Palestine Papers thus far, but the story of the pressure one U.S. administration after another has exerted on Palestinian negotiators to make these concessions and accommodate all Israel’s demands shows U.S. conduct throughout almost two decades of negotiations to be perhaps the most cynical, and indeed the most shameful, of the three parties.

United States negotiators, from Bill Clinton’s team, through Rice, to Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell today, have consistently treated the Palestinian leadership with humiliating derision.  In the fall of 2009, Hillary Clinton asked Erekat why the Palestinians were, as she remarked snidely, “always in a chapter of a Greek tragedy.”  Mitchell treated Erekat with similar contempt.  During a meeting in 2008, Rice dismissed a Palestinian request for compensation for refugees forced to flee their homes in 1948 — a demand that goes to the heart of Palestinian grievances — with the remark that “bad things happen to people all around the world all the time.”

Policymakers clearly couldn’t be bothered.  Scat, these Americans said to the pesky Palestinians in effect; we’re not interested in your silly grievances.  In a blunt commentary on al-Jazeera, former CIA officer Robert Grenier has written that his reaction to what the Palestine Papers reveal about U.S. conduct is “one of shame.”  The U.S., he says, has always followed a path of political expediency, “at the cost of decency, justice and our clear, long-term interests.  More pointedly, the Palestine papers reveal us to have . . . demanded and encouraged the Palestinian participants to take disproportionate risks for a negotiated settlement, and then to have refused to extend ourselves to help them achieve it, leaving them exposed and vulnerable.”  The papers “further document an American legacy of ignominy in Palestine.”

Shameful indeed.  A London Guardian editorial captures the essence of U.S. policy as it has been pursued since the first days of the Obama administration and indeed since the first days of Israel 63 years ago: the Americans’ neutrality, the Guardian writes pointedly, “consists of bullying the weak and holding the hand of the strong.”

It may be too much to hope for serious change in this U.S. policy anytime soon, but the Palestine Papers revelations may at least open discussion on the wisdom of continuing to pursue a policy that virtually everyone throughout the world recognize as a “legacy of ignominy.”

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and the author of several books on the Palestinian situation, including Palestine in Pieces, co-authored with her late husband Bill Christison.  She can be reached at kb.christison@earthlink.net.

January 25, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Would isolation of the US persuade Obama not to veto?

By  Alan Hart | January 23, 2011

Despite strong US opposition, a proposed resolution condemning Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank did make it to the UN Security Council. It was not put to a vote and no vote is expected for some time, if ever, because of the probability as things stand of an American veto. But given growing global support for the resolution, there is a case for wondering if President Obama can remain Zionist-like in his own implicit defiance of international law on Israel’s behalf.

Introduced by Lebanon, the resolution states that “Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace”. And it demands that Israel cease “immediately and completely” not only all settlement construction in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem, but also “all other measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the territory, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions.”

US position ridiculous

Washington had hoped that signalling its opposition to the proposed resolution would be enough to cause its Palestinian and other Arab sponsors to back away from taking it to the Security Council. Deputy American UN Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo said the US opposed bringing the settlement issue to the Council “because such action moves us no closer to a goal of a negotiated final settlement and could even undermine progress towards it”. She also said the Security Council should not be the forum for resolving the issues at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In my view that has to be among the most ridiculous statements any diplomat has ever made in any place at any time.

When the Arab sponsors discovered that they do have testicles and refused to be intimidated by Uncle Sam, the result was a huge embarrassment for Obama because, as noted by Tony Karon in an article for Time, the resolution’s substance “largely echoes the administration’s own stated positions.” In Haaretz under the headline “Settlements issue isn’t Israel’s problem, it’s Obama’s”, Natasha Mozgovaya was more explicit. The resolution has put Washington “in the awkward position of having to veto a resolution it absolutely agrees with”.

That was why a number of former senior US diplomats and officials wrote to Obama urging him to support the resolution. They included former Reagan Defence Secretary Frank Carlucci and former assistant secretaries of state Thomas Pickering and James Dobbins. They said the resolution is not incompatible with negotiating an end to the conflict and does not deviate from the US commitment to Israel’s security. They added:

The proposed resolution is consistent with existing and established US policies; deploying a veto would severely undermine US credibility and interests, placing us firmly outside of the international consensus, and further diminishing our ability to mediate this conflict.

USA internationally isolated

How far outside the international consensus the US already is on account of its unconditional support for Israel right or wrong was demonstrated by the fact that the resolution attracted the support of 120 nations. Diplomats were certain that the US was the only one of the five permanent members on the 15-country Security Council with veto power that would have vetoed if the resolution had been put to a vote when it was introduced. In other words, without a US veto it would have passed. That would have more or less confirmed Israel’s pariah status in much of the world and just might have been a game-changer.

In contrast to the Zionist lobby in America which has naturally been urging – ordering? – Obama to veto, J Street, the “dovish” Jewish advocacy group which is pro-Israel and more or less anti-AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], is among those who understand that a veto would not be in America’s own best interests. Or Israel’s, despite what its deluded leaders assert to the contrary. In a statement J Street said:

As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States… Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made. While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a US veto of a resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy”.

Because J Street almost certainly speaks for far more silent and troubled American Jews than AIPAC does, that’s quite an important statement.

The advocacy group Americans for Peace Now was more explicit in its message to Obama. It not only urged him to avoid vetoing the resolution, it also said this:

It is indefensible that the Netanyahu government, heedless of the damage settlement activity does to Israel’s own interests and indifferent to the Obama administration’s peace efforts, has not only refused to halt settlement activity, but has opened the floodgates, including in the most sensitive areas of East Jerusalem. In this context, the move by the United Nations Security Council to censure Israel’s settlement activity should surprise no one… Vetoing this resolution would conflict with four decades of US policy. It would contribute to the dangerously naive view that Israeli settlement policies do no lasting harm to Israel. And it would send a message to the world that the US is not only acquiescing to Israel’s actions, but is implicitly supporting them.

It might well have been their fear of a Tunisian domino effect that helped to embolden the regimes of the sponsoring Arab states to defy a US administration on this occasion. Their challenge to America’s unconditional support for Israel was, as Tony Karon noted, “a low-cost gesture that will play well on the restive street”. At least for a while, I add. (The truth about the Arab street is that for the past 40 years very many people on it have been humiliated and angered not only by Israel’s arrogance of power and American support for it, but also by the complete failure of their own governments to use the leverage they do have to put real pressure on the US to oblige Israel to end its occupation of all the Arab territory it grabbed in 1967.)

Crunch time for Obama?

If the sponsoring Arab regimes have the will to keep the heat on Washington over the resolution and insist that there must be a vote on it at some point in the not too distant future, and if the number of nations who support the resolution stays firm and better still increases, crunch time for Obama on the Israel-Palestine conflict will arrive.

If and when it does he will have three options: to veto; to order America’s vote in the Security Council to be cast for the resolution; or to abstain. An American abstention would have the same practical effect as a “Yes” vote – the resolution would be passed.

A veto would protect Obama from the wrath of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress. But it would also propel America further down the road to isolation, perhaps to the point where, like Israel, it was regarded as a pariah state by much of the world. Can Obama or any American president really afford that?

But an American vote for the resolution or even an abstention would, of course, put Obama into head-on confrontation with the Zionist lobby. Could he come out of it a winner (and, some will add, remain alive)?

My crystal ball doesn’t tell me the answer, but it does indicate how he could be the first American president to break the Zionist lobby’s stranglehold on America policy for the Middle East. If he went over the heads of Congress and used his rhetorical skill to explain to his people why it is not in America’s own best interests to go on supporting Israel right or wrong, there’s a chance that he could win the argument. Americans are not stupid. What they are, most of them, is extremely gullible because of the way they have been misinformed, lied to, by a mainstream media which, for a number of reasons, are content to peddle Zionist propaganda.

It’s your call, Mr President. The fate of the region – the Middle East – and quite possibly the whole world will be determined by it.

Footnote

If the US endorses the Whitewash Israeli inquiry into Israel’s deadly attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla last May, we’ll know that the prospects of Obama putting America’s own interest first at crunch time are very, very remote, to say the least.

January 23, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Why Obama’s “new thinking” initiative on Middle East peace is doomed to fail

By Lawrence Davidson | January 22, 2011

According to Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in foreign policy matters and writing in Politico (13 January 2011), the Obama administration is seeking “new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the peace process” in the Middle East. This is because the president and his counsellors are “utterly stuck” following the failure of last year’s efforts to strong-arm Mahmoud Abbas and bribe Binyamin Netanyahu into negotiations. Quoting an administration consultant, Rozen tells us “there is no pretence of progress. With the State of the Union coming up and the new GOP [Grand Old Party – the Republican Party] Congress, they [the administration] are taking a few weeks to regroup and solicit ideas to push forward and … to give a real jump-start” to the negotiation process”.

On the surface this would appear to be welcome news. The White House entourages having this revelation that their process, and that of their predecessors too, have all failed and so we need some new, progressive thinking about peace in the Holy Land. Maybe there should be a new approach that would play to the leverage the US can bring to bear on both parties (and not just the Palestinians). But then Rozen proceeds (in a completely dead pan style) to explain to us how the administration is going about its search for “new ideas from outside experts”.

Two separate efforts have been set up to brainstorm these new ideas:

1. “One task force has been convened by Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley”. Who are they? Berger was national security adviser to Bill Clinton. He was a “prominent actor at the Camp David 2000 Summit”. What about Hadley? He was assistant to Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz during George W. Bush’s first term of office and then national security adviser to the president during Bush’s second term. In these positions he worked closely and comfortably not only with Wolfowitz, but also with men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

2. “A second effort [is] led by Martin Indyk.” And who is Martin Indyk? Indyk served twice as US ambassador to Israel as well as being a member of the National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. Before that he was deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and served eight years as the executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which he helped co-found. WINEP is supported by AIPAC. According to Rozen’s report, one of the first things Indyk has done in his search for “new ideas” is to seek out, among others, “senior NSC Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross”. And who is Dennis Ross? Ross was Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy in the 1990s. Before that he was on Ronald Reagan’s NSC and, along with Indyk, helped co-found WINEP.

These are the people who the Obama administration is looking to for new thinking about the peace process. One is left simply amazed at this development. Almost, but not quite, speechless. For all these men – Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross – are strongly biased in favour of Israel, and among the folks who have been running the US side of the peace process at least since the 1980s. They are not “outside experts” at all. They are retreaded inside “experts” whose records, with very minor exceptions, in regard to the peace process, are ones of failure. Going to these people for “new ideas” that will “jump-start” peace talks in the Middle East is like going to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia for a forward-looking and progressive take on the US Constitution. Such an effort is a standing contradiction. It is a rigged game designed to get you the opposite of what you claim to seek.

The unavoidable question is why is the Obama administration wasting its time and our money doing this? The answer has to be first and foremost domestic politics. Although Barack Obama would, understandably, still like to make a positive impact on the Palestinian-Israeli impasse, he is convinced that any effort in this regard must conform to the wishes of domestic political forces led by the Zionist lobby. For instance, what would happen if he decided that all those listed above were hopeless failures and, instead of going to back to them, he was going to turn to, say, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University? Khalidi is undoubtedly an expert on the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli question. However, he is also very much in favour of justice for the Palestinians. If President Obama was to consult Khalidi there would be an immediate knee-jerk reaction in Congress consisting of quite literal screaming and yelling. AIPAC would call Obama a man seriously lacking in judgment and Khalidi a friend of terrorists. The president’s possibilities for re-election would, allegedly, recede dramatically. On the other hand, there is no doubt that he would get “new ideas” from an “outside expert”.

The political pragmatist might argue, what good are “new ideas” if they cannot be implemented? But this position accepts the same assumption noted above, that any US president must be tied down by the political power of the Zionist lobby. It is, in fact, an assumption that must be challenged if any future progress is to be made. Thus, the president should take a chance. He should consider making a new and forceful initiative and demand Israeli compliance like Eisenhower did at the end of the Sinai Crisis of 1956. He should go to the American people and explain what he is doing and why. He should use every presidential prerogative there is, including the negative ones, to assure Israeli cooperation, etc. Oh, this is political suicide, answers the political pragmatist; it will never work. But, as is obvious, nothing else has worked to date. We are spending enormous sums to subsidize Israeli obstinacy and, according to General David Petraeus, the man who leads the American effort in Afghanistan, doing so is helping to kill American soldiers. So, go ahead Mr President, take the bull by the horns already.

Alas, he will not. And Rozen’s report is proof positive that the president will not do this. He is first and foremost a domestically-oriented politician cut out of a very standard mould. Politically, then, it has been judged safer to resurrect the dead in the form of Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross. So, there you have it. What is necessary for success in the peace process is always assumed to equal political failure at home. On the other hand, political success at home (which entails letting the Zionist lobby set the criteria for what is possible) equals continued failure of the peace process. It also equals ever increasing danger for US interests in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This latter equation is not based on an assumption. It is a historically demonstrated fact.

This is why we fail. No one wants to seriously test the old standing assumptions. Our political system is ossified. It is trapped in a lobby-driven, financially-corrupt rut. And until we find a way out of it we are doomed to go round in circles. That is what the administration’s pseudo effort at seeking “new ideas from outside experts” amounts to, going in a circle. Round and round and round and round.

January 21, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Self-fulfilling prophecy: Dennis Ross Doesn’t Think Anything Can Get Accomplished

By Ali Gharib | Lobe Log | January 19th, 2011

I was struck by an article by Nathan Guttman in the legendary Jewish Daily Forward about Dennis Ross and George Mitchell jockeying for the position of Obama Administration’s point-person in the Middle East peace process. The whole thing is a fascinating read, but this line really jumped out at me:

Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.

I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.

So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.

On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensure the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)

Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.

Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:

“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”

In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:

“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”

But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):

“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”

Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.

The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.

Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.

Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism’s] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).

Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”

But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)

Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):

[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …

Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.

Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.

After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:

The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”

The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.

OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.

In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:

Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.

This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.

But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.

Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there  is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”

This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.

But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.

See Also:

Who Is Dennis Ross?

March 8, 2009

January 19, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Court Rules Government Can Continue To Suppress Detainee Statements Describing Torture And Abuse

ACLU | January 18, 2011

WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court today ruled that the government can continue suppressing transcripts in which former CIA prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to obtain uncensored transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used to determine if Guantánamo detainees qualify as “enemy combatants.”

“The American people have a right to know what the government has done in their name, and these transcripts, which include the direct testimony of the victims themselves, are essential to a full understanding of the Bush administration’s torture program,” said Ben Wizner, Litigation Director of the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the appeal for the ACLU. “The court’s decision undermines the Freedom of Information Act and condones a cover-up. These transcripts are being suppressed not to protect national security, but to shield former government officials from accountability.”

The ACLU lawsuit sought transcripts of statements made by Guantánamo prisoners concerning the abuse they allegedly suffered while in U.S. custody. While the CIA released heavily-redacted versions of the documents in June 2009, it continues to suppress major portions of the documents, including detainees’ allegations of torture.

Since the ACLU first filed its FOIA request for release of the transcripts, several developments have undermined the government’s claims that it can continue to withhold the documents: in January 2009, President Obama issued an executive order prohibiting the coercive interrogation techniques described in the suppressed transcripts and ordered the closure of the CIA’s overseas prisons; in April 2009, the government declassified four Justice Department memos that purported to authorize the brutal interrogation techniques to which the detainees were subjected; also in April 2009, the New York Review of Books published a detailed report by the International Committee of the Red Cross based on firsthand accounts of these detainees about their abuse in CIA custody; and in August 2009, the government declassified large portions of a report by the CIA’s Inspector General and other CIA and Justice Department documents that provide additional details about the interrogation methods to which the detainees were subjected.

Despite these developments, in October 2009 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the government’s motion to dismiss the case without even reviewing the documents in question in order to determine if they were properly withheld. Today’s appellate court ruling allows the government to continue withholding the documents.

“The notion that the CIA can classify torture victims’ descriptions of their own first-hand experiences is dangerous and far-reaching,” said Wizner. “No court has ever held that unconfirmed allegations offered by detainees concerning the treatment to which they themselves were subjected could be classified and suppressed.”

Attorneys on the case, ACLU, et al. v. DOD, et al., are Wizner and Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU National Security Project, Lee Gelernt of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and Arthur B. Spitzer of the ACLU of the National Capital Area.

Today’s ruling is available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/american-civil-liberties-union-et-al-v-department-defense-et-al-dc-circuit-court-0

More about the ACLU’s CSRT FOIA is at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/csrtfoia.html

January 19, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israeli bulldozers do the talking

By Khaled Amayreh | Al-Ahram | January 13, 2011

Israel this week demonstrated once again its determination to scuttle any genuine peacemaking effort that might lead to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.

Israeli bulldozers and huge hydraulic jackhammers descended on the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah to demolish the Shepherd Hotel, a huge complex dating back to the 1930s. Part of the structure served as home to the former grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The doomed structure thus had a lot of historical significance related to the history of the Palestinian struggle.

The demolition was the latest step by Israel to consolidate Jewish hegemony over the occupied Arab town and obliterate its erstwhile Arab- Islamic identity. The forced Judaisation of the city — holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews — is done feverishly through shadowy deals and dubious expropriation practices in which deception, cheating and trickery loom large.

Moreover, Zionist circles in cooperation with the Israeli government and Jewish settler interests have allocated hundreds of million of dollars for the purpose of channelling Arab-owned property to Jewish interests all over East Jerusalem. The demolition of the Shepherd Hotel took place despite international — including American — objections.

However, given the generally ineffectual nature of these objections, the Israeli government has grown accustomed to taking them lightly, calculating that they are only meant for public relations consumption and that in no way do they constitute a credible challenge to Israel’s settlement policy.

According to reliable Israeli sources in Jerusalem, the Israeli municipal authorities are awaiting an opportune time to carry out further large-scale demolitions of Arab homes in the Silwan neighbourhood. “If the government finds out that international reactions, especially US reactions, are weak as usual, then it will mean a kind of go-ahead signal for the demolitions,” said the source that was not authorised to speak to the media.

“They [the pro-settler Municipal Council of the city] want to desensitise international public opinion to accept [their] reality and come to terms with the fact that Israel will have its way in Jerusalem.”

Reactions to the latest provocation in East Jerusalem have been “normal”, whether from the Palestinian Authority (PA) — which as usual appealed to “the international community” to pressure Israel — or from EU, UN and Arab states, which more or less repeated the same old platitudes pertaining to Israel’s settlement policy being unlawful and counterproductive to peace.

Saeb Ereikat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, urged the West to act on its condemnation of Israeli provocations. “The UN and governments around the world, including the US and the UK, have already condemned plans to demolish this particular hotel. We call on the world to take a strong stand in defence of their positions. This intransigent and illegal behaviour on behalf of Israel must not be allowed to proceed unchecked.”

Speaking in desperate tone, Ereikat said Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was undercutting and corroding international efforts to create a Palestinian state. “While Netanyahu continues his public relations campaign regarding the peace process, on the ground he is rapidly moving to prevent the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

“Israel continues to change the landscape of Jerusalem aiming to change its status and turn it into an exclusive Jewish city. This process of cleansing and colonisation must be stopped to change the dark reality of Israeli occupation into a free and sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has been trying to give the impression that diplomatic movement was underway, probably to create a public relations counterbalance to settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Netanyahu met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo this week. He also asked for a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, ostensibly for the same reason. Mubarak did urge Netanyahu to reverse present Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the peace process. Netanyahu heard Mubarak’s appeal but didn’t listen to it. For as soon as he returned to Israel, the demolitions in East Jerusalem took place.

Meanwhile, Israel is about to dispatch an envoy to Washington to assure the Obama administration that the Netanyahu government is still committed to the peace process. This comes in the aftermath of the clarion failure of the Obama administration to convince Israel to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories, even in exchange for huge diplomatic inducements and military incentives.

Some analysts believe that the obsequious American behaviour towards the Netanyahu government, especially the excessive patience displayed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has further emboldened Israel and encouraged the Israeli leadership to ignore US pressure. “I am sure that Mrs Clinton dreads Israeli wrath and displeasure more than the Israelis dread American wrath and displeasure,” said one veteran European journalist based in East Jerusalem.

The US reaction to the demolition of the Shepherd Hotel as well as the latest coldblooded killing of innocent Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including farmers tilling their land and old men sleeping in their beds, has been characteristically hollow and wrapped in diplomatic jargon.

Meanwhile, Clinton put the peace process on the backburner as she toured Gulf Arab emirates and sheikhdoms, inciting them against Iran’s nuclear programme. Predictably, Clinton implied that Israel posed no threat to the Arabs and that the real common enemy of both Israel and the Arabs is Iran. Clinton went as far as discrediting statements by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan in which he said that Iran wouldn’t have nuclear weapons capability before 2015.

A few weeks ago, Clinton dismissed the charge that “unilateral Israel actions” were derailing the peace process. “Bilateral negotiations,” she said, “are the only way to reach peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” One PA cabinet minister commented on Clinton’s remarks, saying: “This is very much like telling a rapist and his victim to sort it out among themselves.”

January 15, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama’s Comfort Zone: King of Collaboration

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | January 12, 2011

No matter what Barack Obama says in his State of the Union Address later this month, it is clear where he is headed: ever rightward. His appointments tell the tale. Obama also gave the game away – that he would govern from the center-right and attempt a grand consensus with the GOP – in the weeks before he was first sworn into office, January 20, 2009. That is, his appointments of Bill Clinton’s Wall Street deregulation crowd to head economic policy and his retention of George Bush’s Secretary of Defense to guard and expand the empire, should have signaled to every sober observer that Obama’s political orientation might differ dramatically from his predecessor’s in tone, but not in substance. The problem was, there were very few sober Left political observers around two years ago, and nearly all Black folks were falling down drunk on ObamaL’aid – a brain-softening condition that persists among many, to this day.

In the intervening 24 months, the Right has achieved a near-miraculous comeback, a reversal of fortune that could not have happened without considerable assistance from Mr. Obama. By positioning his administration to the Right of center from the vey beginning, becoming more intimately identified with Wall Street bankers even than Bush, and waging relentless war on the Left half of his party, Obama reduced fellow Democrats to a state of demoralized confusion, leading to catastrophic defeat. Defeat, that is, for the party, but not for the president, who has at last arrived in his comfort zone.

Indeed, in order for Obama to reach his comfort zone, it was necessary that the Democrats be defeated. Only then could New Democrat Obama’s collaboration with the GOP in furtherance of corporate rule appear to be an act of statesmanship, a grand compromise (as the tax deal was pitched) in the interest of orderly government by the “grownups.”

With Obama’s appointment of JP Morgan Chase executive William Daley as his chief of staff and Gene Sperling to head the National Economic Council, the White House is tooled to coordinate even more seamlessly with Wall Street. Both are seasoned operatives in subverting government to private purposes, having made their bones in Bill Clinton’s administration, where Daley was the indispensable man in passing the Clinton/Republican NAFTA bill despite the opposition of 60 percent of Democrats in the House. Both are now rich banksters specializing in moving effortlessly from the boardroom to wherever the public’s money is kept.

Economist Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, doesn’t mind the money Sperling made from Goldman Sachs. His problem with Obama’s new top economic advisor is:

“Sperling saw nothing wrong with the stock market bubble that laid the basis for the 2001 recession. The economy did not begin to create jobs again until two and a half years after the beginning of this recession and even then it was only due to the growth of the housing bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the growth of that bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the financial deregulation of the Clinton years which, by the way, helped make Goldman Sachs lots of money. And, he saw nothing wrong with the over-valued dollar which gave the United States an enormous trade deficit. This trade deficit undermined the bargaining power of manufacturing workers and helped to redistribute income upward.

“In short, Sperling has a horrible track record of supporting policies that were bad for the country and good for Wall Street.”

Which makes him perfect for Barack Obama, who is Wall Street’s guy by choice, and always has been. In fact, it is disrespectful to Obama to argue that his consistent appointment of Clinton’s clique of deregulating Wall Street warriors as his economic generals is not reflective of the president’s own worldview. Either Obama is his own man, or he is a hireling, a whore, and a mere figurehead.

I operate on the assumption that Obama is a purposeful, talented, and extremely effective center-right politician straight out of the Clinton Democratic Leadership Council mold who is determined to shape all of the public sector to finance capital’s advantage. He has chosen the best men for the damnable job.

With Wall Street’s hegemony at the commanding heights of the world’s sole superpower unchallenged, the crisis of finance capital has become a crisis of the U.S. state and a threat to every other capitalist economy and state on the planet. But of course, Wall Street calls that an opportunity. Not an opportunity, mind you, to invest in anything remotely productive. The team that brought us NAFTA in order to export the U.S. manufacturing sector, and destroyed the financial regulatory infrastructure of the New Deal so that Wall Street could dominate every aspect of American economic and political life, has no interest in productive enterprise or good jobs creation.

And neither does Barack Obama – or else he wouldn’t have appointed Daley and Sperling or the 2009 crew. All of which should be perfectly obvious, except to the mush-brains who are still sipping from vinegary old bottles of ObamaL’aid.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

January 12, 2011 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

The Coming Internet National ID Card

Economic Policy Journal | January 9, 2011

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said, according to CBS News TechTalk.

It’s [the Commerce Department] “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which  U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months.

CBS goes on, “We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

Don’t believe this for a nanosecond.

According to CBS, Schmidt stressed that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the internet. “I don’t have to get a credential if I don’t want to,” he said. There’s no chance that “a centralized database will emerge,” and “we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this,” he said.

The anonymity under this program, mark my words, will be the phony “freedom option” that the government now always uses when they want to take away some of your freedoms. It is all part of the ‘nudge’ philosophy of the White House adviser and evil puppet master, Cass Sunstein.

What they do is ‘nudge’ you in the direction they want you to go in and offer a phony distasteful alternative. I was among the first to warn about this in relation to TSA body scanning versus the “groping” option. It looks like it’s coming to internet ID. It’s not clear how they will do it, but the default for most of the internet will be the ID option. The opt-out anonymity option will be difficult and distasteful, that’s how government works when Cass Sunstein gets involved. For all practical purposes, internet anonymity will be gone.

January 10, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Occupation of Iraq destroys women’s lives

Serene Assir, The Electronic Intifada, 10 January 2011

More than seven years after the US- and UK-led invasion of their country, Iraqis continue to endure an occupation that has systematically violated their rights to life, dignity, self-determination and economic development. The occupation has been and continues to be so destructive and so violent that one in four Iraqis are estimated to be dead or displaced. One in five Iraqis has been made a refugee or an internally displaced person (IDP).

In particular, the role and situation of women and girls has declined precipitously compared to prior to the invasion. From torture to rape to assassination, from forced separation for mixed couples to women and their children enduring the death of their husbands and fathers, from a loss of educational rights to expulsion from the workplace and public life, and from sexual slavery to forced flight or enforced disappearance, for the past seven years Iraqi women and girls have endured the most terrifying of fates. They are living at the mercy of an occupation that both seeks to terrorize them into submission, and to use them as objects for the terrorization of the whole of Iraqi society.

No security

Dr. Souad al-Azzawi, who authored a study on Iraqi women entitled “Deterioration of Iraq women’s rights and living conditions under occupation,” published in January 2008, told The Electronic Intifada: “The most significant loss that Iraqi women have suffered is a complete and total loss of security.” She explained that the loss of security entails both the loss of physical security and “the economic, social and civil securities Iraqi women were so accustomed to prior to the occupation.”

In fact, it appears that the loss of physical and other aspects of security have a Catch-22 effect on the lives of women. The lack of legal and institutional support for women by an Iraqi puppet government which is at best ineffective has meant that in the vast majority of cases the criminals, mafias, militias, death squads, US occupation forces and Iraqi police and army forces committing crimes against women are not held accountable for their actions. This has in turn encouraged the development of a situation characterized by lawlessness and criminality, in which women are prime targets. As such, many women have been forced to leave their jobs and quit their education, for fear that they may be the next victim of rape or assassination.

According to al-Azzawi, Iraqi women have had to resort to “the relative security of their homes,” often taking their children out of school too if they were the only parent able to accompany them there and back.

Echoing al-Azzawi’s words, an Iraqi refugee speaking on condition of anonymity said that she was forced to leave Iraq precisely because of death threats issued against her by militias who had found out she was actively working as a journalist seeking to expose the injustices taking place against women. Had she stayed in Iraq, the threats likely would have been fulfilled.

“Not only was I being targeted, but I was also without protection, given that Iraq has no government to speak of,” she explained. She added that “I could have been killed at any moment, and no one would have been held accountable for it. It was for one reason alone that I fled: because I had no choice.”

Criminal levels of poverty

The figures speak for themselves. According to a dossier on Iraqi women published by the BRussells Tribunal, prior to the invasion 72 percent of working women were government employees. The dismantlement of state institutions immediately after the invasion meant that these women became unemployed. Instability and ineffective institutions in Iraq render it impossible to pinpoint the total rate of unemployment today, but estimates range from 15 percent to 70 percent. The few stable jobs that exist, according to the dossier, are usually given to men, though a growing number of female-headed households means that many women need to take extraordinary risks in order to try and cater for their children (“Iraqi Women Under Occupation” [PDF]).

The same economic insecurity affects Iraqi refugee families. Aseer al-Madaien, the Protection Officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – Syria, says that out of 139,000 registered Iraqis in Syria, 28 percent are households headed by women. In total, estimates for the total number of displaced Iraqis, including both refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), range up to almost five million, according to the international organization Medecins Sans Frontieres, which believes that there are 2.5 million Iraqi IDPs and 2.3 million refugees.

IDPs suffer both extreme vulnerability and insecurity, as they seek refuge in the homes of relatives and friends, said Hana Al Bayaty, member of the Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal. Many of them are the victims of ethnic cleansing, whereby a country once free of sectarianism is increasingly witnessing the targeting of persons on the basis of their religion or ethnicity. Mixed marriages in these conditions are all too often broken up by force, according to a report published by the UN-affiliated IRIN humanitarian news agency (“Mixed Marriages confront Sectarian Violence,” 6 April 2006).

The majority of Iraqi refugees have headed to neighboring countries Syria and Jordan, where they are not allowed to work, as they are legally considered “guests.” In 2007, the UNHCR reported that an estimated 40 percent of Iraq’s middle class had fled the country. Not only have almost half of those with the qualifications and experience to help rebuild Iraq left the country, but they are also suffering from the most extreme form of disempowerment, according to Al Bayaty.

Al-Azzawi explained that “For the educated middle class, this situation is shattering as everything we have worked so hard to earn and build up over decades of war and sanctions is being brought down by military force before our very eyes.”

Unable to work legally, it is often refugee women who take upon themselves the burden and the risk of working as they are less likely to be asked for documentation on the streets of Amman, Damascus and beyond, and they thereby hope to be less likely to be deported.

Unemployment levels in Syria and Jordan, however, mean that even illegal work is hard to come by. It is because of this that the phenomenon of forced prostitution is becoming increasingly rife. The growing problem of sex trafficking is partly caused by poverty.

According to al-Azzawi, the lack of work permits, qualifications and opportunities “leads some women to prostitution in order to feed their children and their families.” In other cases, the sheer lack of protection faced by some women push them into prostitution. Problems in such cases include threats of kidnapping issued against women should they not accept to prostitute themselves. These threats are issued especially against women whose husbands are dead or missing. “The women of Iraq live in a very fragile situation as a result of the American occupation’s crimes,” al-Azzawi said.

Death, torture and enforced disappearance

No statistical reference can adequately convey the sheer suffering experienced by the people of Iraq, as a whole, from the genocidal sanctions period through the invasion and ensuing occupation. Current estimates place the number of dead at anywhere between 1.5 million and 2.5 million.

According to Iraqi human rights analyst and advocate Asma al-Haidari, “Up to one million Iraqis have been forcibly disappeared.” Behind the enforced disappearances are the US army, Iraqi government forces including the army and police, and al-Qaeda and other militias that operate freely across the country, according to a presentation given by Dirk Adriaensens, member of the BRussells Tribunal Executive Committee, at a London conference organized by the International Committee Against Disappearances on 9-12 December 2010. According to calculations by Adriaensens, based on UNHCR statistics, 20 percent of internally displaced Iraqi families have reported cases of missing children (“Enforced Disappearance. The Missing Persons of Iraq” [PDF]).

It is also understood that, given that there is a very real and justified fear of retaliation against families who report the disappearances of their loved ones, many others suffer in silence. Thousands of detainees, some of them in secret, illegal prisons, according to al-Azzawi, are women. Estimates published in 2008 by the Iraqi Parliamentary Women’s Committee and the Iraqi Ministry of Women’s Affairs indicate that between one and two million Iraqi women are widows.

Inside Iraq’s jails, legal or not, cases of torture and sexual abuse have been widely reported. Revelations by WikiLeaks published on 22 October 2010 were described by Iraqi activists such as Sabah al-Mukhtar, president of the Arab Lawyers’ Union, as just “the tip of the iceberg,” as he said on an Al-Jazeera English interview on 24 October. According to al-Azzawi, women are usually jailed on trumped-up charges of terrorism, where there is no proof and while there is no adequate legal system to ensure their right to a fair trial. “Many are awaiting execution,” al-Azzawi added.

Further, when it is the man who disappears, whether he is dead or missing, women and their families have to fend for themselves in a hellish situation. Out of this horror comes forth one of the more obtuse trends, inexistent in Iraq up until 2003, of families giving their daughters away in early marriage for fear of being unable to adequately support them.

One immediate effect of this phenomenon is the fact that girls aged 13, 14 and 15 sold into early marriage lose their right to education. As figures currently stand, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report published on 1 September 2010, for every 100 boys in school, there are only 89 girls (“Girls Education in Iraq 2010” [PDF]).

“Lots of those little girls are very bright and are willing to finish their education if they are allowed to,” said al-Azzawi.

Worse still is the flourishing of what are known as “pleasure marriages.” These are short-term marriages conducted out of court, whereby separation is also very simple. It is a practice that Iraqi women’s rights advocates describe as linked to prostitution, because of the wrongful abuse of the practice by men in power, often blackmailing fathers into giving their daughters away in a “pleasure marriage,” and also because once a girl or a woman has married in this way and has received alimony for her short-term commitment, she will find it very difficult to reintegrate back into her family.

“Many girls are forced into prostitution and ultimately sex trafficking this way,” al-Azzawi added.

Forced Islamization of society

It is deeply telling that Iraqi society is becoming forcibly Islamized by militias tied to the Iraqi puppet government, which is dependent upon the United States for its survival. Meanwhile, Washington claims to be fighting a war on Islamic terrorism. The reality, as is frequently the case, is the precise opposite. Previously a secular state, Iraqi society is becoming forcibly transformed into a theocracy. In such systems, women and girls inevitably lose.

The results of the proliferation of fundamentalist militias are varied. While reports of Christian women veiling in order to avoid attacks are troubling in the Iraqi context, what is potentially much worse is that the notion of an Iraqi state for all its citizens is fast disappearing. Not only does this mean that Iraqi girls are no longer safe on the streets; it also means that if the occupation fulfills its goals, Iraqi “career women” may be a thing of the past.

Al-Azzawi notes that “Economically the country has lost a huge, skilled working force, which is exactly what the occupation planned to do, and the lives of millions of working women and families were shattered.”

Considering that there is not a single right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the US occupation has not violated — as the International Initiative to Prosecute US Genocide in Iraq team found when working in 2009 to bring a legal case for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against four US presidents and four UK prime ministers — it is amazing yet encouraging that the US occupation’s goals have failed.

Not only is the US administration under President Barack Obama still battling to maintain control over a country whose people resist in the name of their dignity and their love for Iraq, but many of the most outspoken and brilliant advocates for Iraqis’ rights in general are in fact women.

“I have much hope for Iraq,” said human rights advocate Asma al-Haidari, “Nothing will make me lose hope.”

Serene Assir is a Lebanese independent writer and journalist based in Spain.

January 10, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

US sets up center for ‘secret war’

Press TV – January 6, 2011

The US administration is ramping up a “secret war on terror groups” in hot spots around the globe by establishing a new military targeting center, officials say.

According to incumbent and former US officials, the center, run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), keeps an eye on the growing use of special operation strikes against individuals.

“The new center would be a significant step in streamlining targeting operations previously scattered among US and battlefields abroad and giving elite military officials closer access to Washington decision-makers and counter-terror experts,” the officials revealed to the Associated Press.

“The center is staffed with at least 100 counter terror experts fusing the military’s special operations elite with analysts, intelligence and law enforcement officials from the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies,” they said.

The new military center focuses on “the offensive end of counter-terrorism, tracking and targeting terrorist threats that have surfaced in recent years from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia and other hot zones.”

The revelation comes while the US military has already increased the number of special operations and commando raids in Afghanistan.

A surge in unauthorized CIA-operated drone attacks in Pakistan along with NATO operations along the the country’s border has sparked criticism from officials in Islamabad and given rise to the anti-US sentiment in the affected tribal regions.

“We’ve gone from 30-35 targeted operations a month in June 2009 now to about 1,000 a month,” said NATO spokeswoman Maj. Sunset Belinsky.

The raids, which Washington claims to be aimed at weeding out pro-Taliban militants, often come at night and often claim many civilian lives in Pakistan.

US officials noted that several other centers dubbed military intelligence “fusion” offices are already operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The creation of the center, according to military officials, was an idea of JSOC’s current commander, Vice Adm. Bill McRaven.

Previously McRaven had set up a military system called “counter-network” using unmanned planes, satellites and human intelligences to carry out ground operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“While directly run by JSOC, the center’s staff is overseen by the Pentagon, while congressional committees have been briefed on its operations,” officials said.

January 6, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Will Zuma’s Foreign Policy on Palestine Take a Leap Forward?

By Iqbal Jassat – Palestine Chronicle – January 2, 2010

Pretoria – If Karima Brown is correct in her evaluation of President Jacob Zuma’s canny ability to gain ascendancy despite teetering on the brink, would it be an unreasonable expectation to have him propel South Africa to take a more hands-on approach regarding apartheid Israel?

I raise this question in respect of what is generally perceived to be South Africa’s weak and indecisive foreign policy that, barring occasional censure of Israeli conduct, seems to be largely silent and ineffective.

Brown, a highly respected journalist and commentator, in reviewing Zuma’s troubled past, points out how he bounces back to not only providing leadership to a fractured alliance, but also to effectively marginalize threats from a variety of internal threats.

Nevertheless, this otherwise fine analysis lacks a significant dimension: Zuma’s foreign policy!

Given that our advocacy work revolves around issues of Islamophobia and a number of themes related to the “war on terror” and the manner whereby rogue states such as Israel exploit these to shield their cowardly oppression from public scrutiny, the Media Review Network has always maintained that South Africa’s foreign policy initiatives to assist Palestine have been inadequate.

Current developments in the region along with the right-wing Netanyahu regime’s to scuttle America’s “peace” endeavours, makes an independent intervention by the Zuma presidency imperative and urgent.

Some cynics may think it ridiculous to imagine Zuma succeeding while powerful America cannot! Others may argue that it’s unthinkable for any developing country to arouse the wrath of Zionist lobbies that wield significant clout in the corporate environment. Yet other skeptics may wonder why on earth South Africa would venture into territory that may result in severe backlash not only from Israel, but also from so-called “frontline” Arab states whose frontline status derives from capitulating to the apartheid regime!

Notwithstanding the mythical creation of a wide array of convoluted and complex issues, I am convinced that a greater number of people require South Africa’s political, business and religious leadership – along with civil society and social movements – to reaffirm their collective moral authority by demanding the end of Israel. Indeed by being categorical in this demand insist too that all the inhabitants of Israel, the Occupied Territories and the millions of Palestinian refugees reclaim their right to live in equality and dignity within a single democratic state.

It’s a paradigm unique to South Africa and thus easier for leadership to undertake. After all it required the end of South Africa during the apartheid era for a new country to emerge wherein a Bill of Rights and Constitution guarantee life, liberty and more to all its citizens.

Demanding that Israel de-links from ideological values as abhorrent as apartheid and abandons Bantustan strategies whereby Palestinians are hostage to perpetual oppression could be an elementary, yet essential initial step. If it’s true that today one cannot find any South African who rationalizes apartheid’s legitimacy, then surely it ought not be difficult for Zuma to speak on behalf of the entire country in denouncing apartheid Israel and her repugnant human rights violations!

If anti-apartheid campaigns were initiated in Europe and elsewhere by the African National Congress [ANC] to successfully isolate racism and punish its perpetrators through sporting and cultural boycotts, it is nor far-fetched to advocate that similar campaigns be orchestrated and led against Israel today by the ruling party being the ANC.

During 1996, two years into the Nelson Mandela presidency, Edward Said expressed hope that the unworkability of Oslo embodied the end of the two-state solution. The challenge he identified was to find a peaceful way in which Jews, Muslims and Christians could coexist as equal citizens in the same land.

Fourteen years later, with Zuma having consolidated his leadership, it is an opportune time for him to chart a decisive foreign policy designed to urgently end repressive Israeli conduct and restore justice for Palestinians.

As Said would say: “The time has come to put Palestine back in the center as an ideal for individual action and individual commitment to principle in the same way that Mandela’s actions and principles inspired the anti-apartheid movement”.

Indeed, capitulation by the Obama administration has signaled that the time for South Africa to adopt a new policy towards Palestine has arrived.

– Iqbal Jassat is chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN), an advocacy group based in Pretoria, South Africa. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: http://www.mediareviewnet.com.

January 5, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

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