Ali Abdallah Saleh has not tired of playing the al-Qaeda card to retain any toehold of power in Yemen well after he was ostensibly reduced to an honorary president by the Gulf Initiative.
Sanaa – “Either me, or al-Qaeda” has long been the message Saleh has sought to press home.
He did that last May in the southern governorate of Abyan, when he ordered security forces in Zinjibar to keep the town gates open and mount no resistance against an invasion by hundreds of armed men. The regime later said they belonged to al-Qaeda.
Saleh was at it again last month, shortly before his departure to the US for medical treatment, though the stage-management this time was dire.
A tribal sheikh named Tareq al-Dahab, who wields considerable clout within his heavily-armed and famously fierce clan, descended on the town of Radaa, 170 km southeast of Sanaa in the governorate of al-Bayda. Units of the Central Security Forces and Republican Guards deployed in the vicinity but put up no resistance.
With nothing standing in their way, Dahab and his men moved into the town as though on a picnic or hunting trip. They went on to occupy it completely and proclaim an Islamic Emirate.
The group proceeded to the main al-Ameriyah Mosque, where in between performing sunset and evening prayers, Dahab delivered a sermon. It featured a pledge of allegiance to Nasser al-Wuhayshi and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, respectively the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Dahab also announced a number of administrative decrees. In a bid to curry favor with local people, he ordered gasoline station owners to slash fuel prices to what they had been before the outbreak of Yemen’s youth-led popular revolution last year.
The gunmen then made for al-Ameriyah Castle, an ancient fort overlooking the town. But they did not stop there. Over the course of the next two days, Dahab and his fighters took over the rest of the town, including the central prison, where they released all the inmates.
According to Yemen’s Deputy Information Minister, Abdu al-Jundi, the jailbreak was intended to recruit more members for the group. Weapons were given to any convicts who were willing to join. That was denied by Dahab, however, who issued a statement claiming he had only freed two of his own followers from the prison.
Dahab later released a video recording of himself proclaiming that “the Islamic Caliphate is coming, even if we must sacrifice our souls and our skulls for its sake!” He pledged to liberate the entire Arabian Peninsula, after first “bringing about the rule of Islamic sharia in Yemen in line with the wishes of the people.”
Meanwhile in Sanaa, the military commission set up in accordance with the Gulf Initiative to oversee ending “armed manifestations” in urban areas convened. It reviewed efforts to get barricades dismantled and armored vehicles taken off the streets of the capital and of Yemen’s third-largest city, Taiz. The Commission issued a statement applauding the progress made in this regard and announced that a fact-finding mission would be formed to look into the developments in Radaa.
But local tribal leaders had other ideas about what needed to be done.
Conditions in the town had deteriorated sharply, the security forces having disappeared after allowing Dahab and his fighters to take over. People were out on the streets guarding their homes and shops with whatever weapons they had at hand.
Particularly alarming was the presence of all those freed convicts among the gunmen. Many of the released prison inmates had committed revenge-killings, or been convicted of serious crimes such as rape, murder, and armed robbery. They included 165 men who had been formally sentenced to death.
Local sources said that Dahab’s men did not enter the town en masse, as media reports suggested, but collected there over a period of time. Local sheikhs repeatedly approached the authorities about the growing numbers of armed strangers appearing in the town, but their complaints went unheeded.
The sheikhs met to consider the situation and decided to issue an ultimatum. Dahab and his followers were given three days to leave Radaa, or be expelled by force. Dahab requested an extension to allow for negotiations with the sheikhs on a mutually-acceptable solution without having to resort to arms. Eventually, under tribal pressure, he agreed to pull out his men, in exchange for the authorities acceding to a number of demands he put forward – notably the release of his youngest brother Nabil from the Political Security Prison in Sanaa.
A bigger surprise was sprung by another brother, Khaled al-Dahab, when he revealed in remarks to the press that Tareq al-Dahab had long worked closely with Saleh’s national security apparatus and his former interior minister. The question was immediately raised whether Dahab was truly affiliated to al-Qaeda or had been acting at the behest a security agency.
Al-Dahab has never been outside Yemen and his name has never been linked to al-Qaeda or its operations. His only connection to the group is that his sister used to be married to Anwar al-Awlaqi, the radical preacher believed to be a leading light of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was killed in an American drone strike last year.
Hilal conceded that the group does operate in nearby areas and in other parts of Yemen – unlike many opposition supporters, who deny that al-Qaeda exists at all in the country and claim it is a fiction invented by Saleh to serve his purposes. But it was clear from the way Radaa was taken over that the group involved was connected to Saleh’s regime, he said.
“He wants to cause renewed confusion in the country and take it back to square one,” Hilal charged.
Another journalist, Khaled Abd al-Hadi of the opposition Yemeni Socialist Party newspaper al-Thawri, agreed that it was unreasonable to deny that al-Qaeda had established a permanent presence in Yemen.
But he said that the regime was playing a major role in developments, and al-Qaeda was seeking to exploit the breakdown of security in the country to extend its control to new areas.
This could have grave consequences, he warned. The group could try to move on Dhamar to the northwest of Radaa, a town inhabited mainly by members of the Zaydi sect and home to a Zaydi religious center. That would be seen as launching “a clearly sectarian war,” he said.
“There are armed Zaydi tribes in Dhamar province, fierce fighters. They are will not stand back in the face of any attack on them,” he said.
The suspicion that Saleh has a hand in such schemes is widely shared. Even an official of Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC) party, speaking to Al-Akhbar on condition of anonymity, charged that prior to departing Yemen, Saleh had taken a number of measures “as part of an attempt to plunge the country into chaos.”
This despite the immunity he received from prosecution for anything he may have done during his 33 years in office.
Meanwhile, the alarm has been raised about the reported arming of GPC members, especially in Taiz and the city of al-Dalei south of the capital.
Informed sources say the main immediate objective is to foil the early presidential elections scheduled for February 21, in a bid to take Yemen, as Hilal put it, ”back to square one.”
Britain’s former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency Peter Jenkins has said that Iran has honestly and sincerely been cooperating with the UN nuclear watchdog.
Jenkins made the remarks in a recent interview with the BBC Persian service in reply to a question about claims that Iran has not provided answers about the alleged weapons studies.
Jenkins, according to a translation of his comments, said that he does not think that is the case and that he believes Iran has been honestly and sincerely cooperating with the IAEA and its inspectors.
On the main bone of contention between Iran and the West, he said that the West maintains that Tehran should halt the uranium enrichment component of its nuclear program, but Iran is opposed to such a view.
And Iran is right according to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because every country has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under the NPT, Jenkins stated.
Britain’s former representative to the IAEA also commented on the pressure exerted and the sanctions imposed by the West on Iran, saying that experiences of the past few years have shown that the continuation of this trend cannot help resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
It would be better if the Western countries learn a lesson from their past mistakes and engage in open negotiations with Iran, he stated, adding that a peaceful solution can be worked out to Iran’s nuclear issue based on the NPT.
Asked about the fact that he used to believe that Iran’s nuclear activities have a military dimension, Jenkins said that he used to think that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but the reports prepared by U.S. intelligence institutions and the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear activities made him change his mind.
The US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) is asking supporters to sign a pledge to defend civil and human rights as it was revealed last week that the lead government prosecutor of the Holy Land Five has been assigned to the ongoing secret investigation against anti-war and international solidarity activists across the US.
USPCN is a Palestinian formation aimed at unifying Palestinians in the Shatat (exile) in support of self-determination and the right of return and ending the Zionist occupation and colonization of Palestine.
The FBI and other federal agencies, in a coordinated raid in September 2010, burst into the homes of prominent organizers in the Midwest and harassed activists across the country. In the following months, subpoenas were delivered to a total of 23 activists; all of us have refused to testify, saying that we are being targeted because of our political work which is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Veteran Chicano liberation, anti-war and immigrant rights activist Carlos Montes was also raided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department last May. Montes is named in one of the search warrants served in Minneapolis in September 2010, and when he was in custody the FBI questioned him about his political associations.
He was charged with trumped-up technical firearms code violations related to his participation in protests decades ago. (For more information about Montes and this attack on him, see this good backgrounder by Chris Hedges: “Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale.”)
In solidarity with the 23, we will defend our constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly. We will stand up to any escalation of the attacks on human rights activists.
We will join in the National Day of Protest when any of the 23 human rights activists are ordered to appear in front of the Chicago Grand Jury or indicted.
Lead prosecutor of Holy Land Five now part of secret investigation
It was revealed last week that not only is the the investigation into the anti-war and solidarity activists ongoing, but Barry Jonas, the lead prosecutor of five men associated with the Holy Land Foundation, is now working on the investigation under US District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago.
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), once the largest Islamic charity in the US, was shut down by the Bush administration in December 2001 and indictments came down a few years later. After a first trial resulted in a hung jury that favored toward acquittal, a second trial resulted in the conviction of the five men, who were given sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years in prison.
The HLF was not accused of directly financing terrorist violence, but of supplying funds to Hamas-controlled charitable societies and committees. The US government has argued that providing humanitarian aid to victims of war or natural disasters is a crime if provided to or coordinated with a group labeled as a foreign terrorist organization.
The charitable groups, known as Zakat Committees, identified in the indictment have been funded by the US and the defense denied that the committees are controled by Hamas. The Hamas party won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and the Gaza Strip has been subjected to a devastating siege of collective punishment following the Hamas government’s takeover of the territory’s internal affairs.
All of the major Palestinian political parties, except for Fatah, is on the State Department’s terrorist organization list, essentially criminalizing an entire people. Of course I don’t have to point out the hypocrisy of criminalizing Palestinian political groups while the US funds the Israeli occupation to the tune of $3 billion a year and provides Israel with diplomatic cover at the United Nations.
Charity treated as “local face of terrorism”
Holy Land Foundation co-founder Ghassan Elashi is currently serving a 65-year sentence in a Communications Management Unit — self-contained detention centers where communication is severely restricted and monitored, and which are disproportionately populated by Arabs and Muslims. He provides a revealing testimony in Patriot Acts, describing how the HLF and his family company, InfoCom, which was raided days before the 11 September 2001 attacks, became the “local faces of terrorism.” It was at one point even speculated whether the 11 September attacks were in reprisal for the raid on the company.
Elashi also describes how the government agencies who raided the HLF’s offices in December 2001 had neither a search warrant or a court order to seize its contents.
The injustices against the HLF continued during the trials. During the first trial, Elashi recounts, “the prosecutors focused on the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Palestinian elements, and specifically Hamas, as opposed to the actions of the HLF or the defendants themselves.”
Elashi adds:
One government witness testified in detail about suicide bombings claimed by Hamas, and prosecutors were also allowed to present to the jury numerous images and statements made by individuals other than us. For example, they showed pictures of the aftermath of suicide bombs, and videos of Palestinian school ceremonies in which children played the roles of suicide bombers, complete with suicide belts. None of the videos came from the HLF’s files. The videos depicted events that happened years after the HLF closed, and there is no evidence that the defendants attended these ceremonies.
Yet all attempts by our attorney to show the jury fundraising videos demonstrating the HLF’s charity work were met with objections from prosecutors and the judge. The judge even deemed the evidence irrelevant.
Like in the Chicago trial of US Palestinians Muhammad Salah and Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar a few years back, the prosecution’s star witness in the HLF trial was an “anonymous expert who worked with the Israeli secret intelligence.” His real name was not revealed to the court and the defense attorneys were severely limited in what they were allowed to ask during cross-examination. “This is the first time in history the US court had allowed an expert witness to testify with an anonymous name,” Elashi recounts in Patriot Acts.
Elashi also recalls that after the first trial, none of the defendants were found guilty of any of the 197 counts against them. However, the prosecution had more tricks up its sleeve, as Elashi recalls:
Prosecutors then asked the judge to poll the jurors. The judge agreed, and one of the jurors changed their mind. Suddenly there was confusion in the court. Some of the marshals told us that they had never seen such a thing in their lives. The judge then ordered the jurors to go back to the deliberation room and come out with a final verdict … This time one of the jurors changed their minds … the final verdict was a hung jury on all counts for all defendants, except [Mohammad] Elmezain, who was acquitted on all counts, with a hung jury on one count. The judge then announced a mistrial. A mistrial meant of course that prosecutors decided to retry the case.
A second trial resulted in guilty verdicts on all counts and lengthy prison sentences for the five men.
Palestine solidarity construed as material support for terrorism
The injustice of the trial, convictions and sentencing of the Holy Land Foundation five gives an idea of what anti-war and international solidarity activists are in for should they be put on trial.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts’ Privacy Matters blog published a spot-on analysis last week on “International solidarity and the First Amendment in the crosshairs,” saying thatgovernment prosecutor Barry Jonas’ involvement“suggests that criminalizing support for Palestine could be at the top of the grand jury’s agenda.”
The post also states:
Since the Holy Land Foundation case was decided, prosecutors have obtained a new weapon to use against international solidarity activists like those at the receiving end of grand jury subpoenas. The Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 in the case of Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project was the culmination of 12 years of litigation over the interpretation of the “material support to terrorism” provision of the 1996 Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act to include the categories of giving “expert advice or assistance,” training, service and personnel.
The case revolved around groups that were helping the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) develop non violent ways of getting its message across and an organization that maintained that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) should be the recipient of aid for northern Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the deadly tsunami.
In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court in June 2010 carved out a frightening new exception to the First Amendment. Basically it says that if a person or organization has carried out some kind of activity that was somehow “coordinated” with a group that has been listed by the Secretary of State as a terrorist organization, then that person or organization can be prosecuted for giving “material support” to terrorists. That activity can be wholly peaceful, have peacemaking or humanitarian relief as its goal, and involve nothing more than words.
The Supreme Court’s constitutionally vague decision gives the government a powerful tool to prosecute international solidarity activists. As the ACLU-Mass blog notes:
If the African National Congress were still on the State Department’s list — it was taken off by an Act of Congress as a 90th birthday present to Nelson Mandela in 2008 — then, theoretically at any rate, anyone from this country who worked with Mandela, or enabled Mandela’s voice to be heard could have faced criminal charges.
While in its June 2010 decision the Supreme Court declared that it was not criminalizing independent advocacy of ideas or opinions, ACLU-Mass notes that this was “overlooked in Boston where, in December 2011, a federal jury found Tarek Mehanna guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists without any kind of demonstrated link being made to a terrorist organization.”
Ideological war
The (mis)application of anti-terror legislation is something that I have been scrutinizing on my blog, focusing on the case of three young North Carolina Muslim men who were indicted, convicted of and received decades-long sentences for conspiracy to provide material support for foreign terrorist organizations and, in two of their cases, for conspiracy to kill, kidnap, harm or maim persons in a foreign country.
However, the government did not identify which specific groups the men were plotting to provide material support for. The indictment instead uses the word jihad over and over again, as though that was a specific crime codified in US law, and refers to generic mujahideen (repeatedly mis-transliterated from Arabic as mujihadeen in the indictment, revealing US attorneys’ complete ignorance with the subject matter). Mujahideen roughly translates to “holy warrior” but does not refer to any specific group of people.
During the sentencing hearings for the three young North Carolina men, which I covered for The Electronic Intifada, statements made by government prosecutors suggested that it was ideology on trial. One of the defendants’ sympathies with Iraqis resisting US occupation forces in Fallujah was treated as evidence of him being sympathetic with terrorism. In one of the other men’s hearing, a US attorney referred to the US military as the “arm by which we have fought radical Islam all over the world.”
The North Carolina defendants were conflated with parties fighting the US military overseas, suggesting that the US government views the prosecution of US Muslims as the “domestic” front of the war on terror, and that ideological opposition to US foreign policy is “evidence” of “terrorist” leanings.
Never-ending “war on terror”
The dangers posed to civil liberties by the indefinite, ideological “war on terrorism,” which has no geographic boundaries, have been particularly felt by Arab and Muslim communities in the US. Environmental and animal liberation activists have also been treated as domestic terrorists, and now Palestine solidarity activists are under threat of being prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation. (Of course, Palestine activism in the US has been criminalized for decades — see this story I co-authored with my colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman for a bit of that history.)
The US State Department has said more than once that organizers with the US Boat to Gaza may be investigated for violations of material support to foreign terrorist organizations. US Congress late last year introduced a bill seeking to investigate the US Boat to Gaza.
Meanwhile the flow of money and arms to Israel goes unabated, and groups raising money to fund Israeli settlements enjoy tax-exempt status, just to identify but some of the double standards of what constitutes material support for “terror.”
The situation on the ground grows ever worse in Palestine, and Arab and Muslim communities face increased injustice in the US. It’s our job to raise our voices both in support for boycott, divestment and sanctions measures on Israel — including cutting off US aid — and in support of the civil liberties of those being repressed in the US.
CAIRO: A new poll published by Gallup revealed that some 70 percent of Egyptians surveyed oppose United States economic aid to Egypt. The poll, conducted in December 2011, also said that Egyptians are against direct aid to civil society organizations in the country.
“This rebuke of US financial support may be a challenge for Egypt’s newly elected parliament and its future president as the government attempts to bolster the nation’s financial stability,” wrote Gallup in their report published on Monday.
Egyptians were not against international economic assistance altogether, however, showing signs of support from international aid groups.
Gallup reported that around 50 percent of the country favoring aid and assistance from international institutions.
Egypt’s ruling military junta and the interim government appointed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) had initially rejected assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but has since reversed their opposition.
Last month, Masood Ahmed, Director for the Middle East and Central Asia Department for the IMF, was in Egypt to discuss a potential $3.2 billion IMF loan to Egypt.
“Egyptian leaders’ ability to attract foreign aid and investment will be important to collecting the capital needed to move the nation’s economy forward,” Gallup continued.
Civil society groups have received tens of millions of dollars from the US since the January 2011 uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak, but in the past month, the military rulers have cracked down on local and international NGOs, sending some 43 employees to a criminal court on Sunday to face charges for illegal funding.
Among those sent are 19 Americans, 5 Serbians, two Germans, three Arabs and the remaining Egyptians. Sam LaHood, the son of US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has made headlines recently after being barred from leaving Egypt, was among those charged.
The spat over American citizens being barred from leaving Egypt has left a diplomatic row between the military junta here in Egypt and the American government.
A senior State Department official said last week that a “handful of US citizens have opted to stay in the embassy compound in Cairo while awaiting permission to depart Egypt.”
The official, who was not allowed to discuss the matter on the record, would not say whether Sam LaHood, the son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, was among those at the embassy.
LaHood said last week that he fears he could be jailed for up to five years after being barred from leaving the country earlier this month.
“As Egypt’s new parliament begins its work and the country’s citizens prepare for presidential elections, many Egyptians are suffering from the day-to-day realities of unemployment and price inflation. According to Gallup’s most recent survey in December 2011, Egyptians are most likely to name inflation and lack of money as the biggest problem facing their families; the second is lack of jobs,” added the report on the implications for Egypt’s future.
(Ben White, Palestinians in Israel. Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy, Pluto Press, London 2012, 128 pp., 13 Pounds.)
With the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to the outbreak of the so-called peace process between Israel and the occupied Palestinian people, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) abandoned its initial political goals (to realize the right of return of Palestinian refugees and to liberate Palestine from Zionist colonization) for some privileges and turned itself into an obedient servant of the colonizers. Whereas the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat tried to get back some territory from Israel to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Israel, although suffering under discrimination as second-class citizens, demand Israel to become finally “a state for all its citizens” instead of staying a “Jewish State”. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the non-Jewish inhabitants have been subject to a second-class status in most walks of life.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer specializing in the subject of Palestine/Israel. In his previous book “Israeli Apartheid” he showed that Israel established its special kind of “Israeli apartheid” that differs in its sophistication from the petty apartheid in South Africa under the white racist regime. His current book deals with the Palestinians living in Israel and their plight. It was overdue, that someone as competent as White would shed some light on Israel’s discriminatory treatment of some 20 per cent of its citizens. In comparison to their fellow countrymen in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), who live a life in extreme oppression; Israeli Palestinians might be designated as “Palestinians de luxe”.
The well-known Israeli Palestinian Knesset member Haneen Zoabi contributed a fine foreword in which she demanded full citizenship rights and added; “These taken for granted demands, for the indigenous people and for ‘full citizenship’, are suffice to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of the entire Zionist project, and to relegate it to the status of a racist, colonialist venture.” Israeli Palestinians demand from the State of Israel no less than to become the “state of all its citizens”. According to Zoabi, this demand “has forced the Jewish state to admit the primacy that it grants to Jewish-Zionist values over democratic values and to recognize the impossibility of coexistence between the two”. Currently, Israel is a democracy sui generis.
For making such demands, MK Zoabi and also the author came under attack by Zionist propagandists in Israel and Great Britain. Yaniv Halili wielded in “ynet” the worn Zionist “argument”, accusing both of “anti-Semitism”. Zionist defenders of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights, contempt for international law and the United Nations, can only “justify” the morally bankrupt policies of the “only democracy in the Middle East” by slandering people who merely describe the horrible reality. The infamous Zionist lobby in Great Britain attacked the British branch of amnesty international, because it had dared present White’s book, and called for a “balanced” debate. The problem with Zionist slanderers is not their meanness – any rational person will immediately discount their arguments – the real problem lies with the non-Zionist citizens or politicians who are afraid of standing up to such intimidation, because they fear being accused of “anti-Semitism” or threatened in their career.
Ben White brings the discrimination of the forgotten minority of Israel´s colonization project in Palestine, to light. The author pursues two aims: First, he wants to show how Israel relates to its Palestinian citizens, and second, he attempts to demonstrate that “denying democracy has been part of the Zionist colonization of Palestine from the very beginning”. For White, Israel’s definition as “Jewish and democratic” is the central contradiction and the heart of the conflict.
In seven chapters White describes the manifold discrimination against what some Israelis call “Israel’s fifth column”. To preserve their status of second-class citizens, Israel developed a sophisticated set of laws that apply to Jews only. This Palestinian minority is seen by Israel’s power elite as a “demographic threat” to “Jewish majority rule”. The author shows that Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which solemnly promises to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” is not considered by the Israeli High Court as “constitutional law”. White quotes Ari Shavit’s article “Formative words” in the daily Haaretz saying: “The state it declared was not a state of all its citizens. It was not even a Jewish-democratic state, but a Jewish state, pure and simple.” In the last phrase of this sentence lies Israel’s ongoing dilemma and its inherent contradictions. That is why many Israelis and Jews around the world call Israel an “ethnocracy” rather than a “democracy”.
The rest of the book deals with the implementation of Israel’s institutional discrimination. One of these discriminatory laws is the “Absentee Property Law” passed in 1950. This law regulates the exclusion of Palestinians from land acquisition and the “mechanism of expropriation” to realize the permanent alienation of (Palestinian absentees) land in favor of the Jewish state”. (24) According to White, there are numerous other laws to be used to confiscate land, such as the “Emergency Land Requisition of 1949”, or article 125 of the Emergency Regulations of 1948. This law enabled an area to be declared “closed” and then, using the “Land Acquisition” law of 1950 to designate the land as “uncultivated” and expropriate it for Jewish-only use, writes the author. It should come to no one’s surprise that current Israeli President Shimon Peres called this judicial sophistry a means of “directly continu(ing) the struggle for Jewish settlement and Jewish immigration”. (25) The Israeli land regime was finally completed in 1960, with the passing of Basic Law: Israel Lands 1960.
The campaign entitled “Judaising of the Galilee” overlaps and echoes and “judaisation” of occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. This strategy goes along with “day-to-day racism”, a phenomenon widely cited by White. (54) Israeli newspapers periodically, including recently, report the most outrageous racist statements by rabbis, who do not mind to cite biblical texts in justification. It should be noted, that there has been no outcry by Zionist politicians against such overt racism. The author cites opinion polls showing “deep-seated levels of anti-Arab racism” in the population. (56) Such racism is reflected, among other things in the “judaisation program” against the Bedouins in the Naqab desert and the refusal to “recognize” certain Arab villages.
Systemic discrimination is described by White in areas such as education, budgetary allocations to Palestinian communities in the Galilee and petty discrimination at all levels of society. Just being an Arab disqualifies a person from serving in the Israeli military, except for members of the Druze minority. With these disqualifications goes the loss of privileges granted to Jewish soldiers and veterans.
Summing up his findings, the author tries to remain objective by writing that there might be some “logic” to the Israeli argument in “justifying” its racist policies towards the Palestinians in the OPT by pretending that the occupied territories might be “disputed” or that there might be “security concerns”. The fallacy of these arguments is revealed when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians in Israel. Israeli politicians and their friends in the U. S. and Western Europe often point out as evidence for Israeli democracy the presence of Israeli Arabs in the Knesset. However, they ignore the fact that these Arab MKs are subjected to regular slander and threats by their right-wing Jewish “colleagues” to have their parliamentarian immunity lifted or their citizenship withdrawn. It is true that “Arabs and Jews” in Israel share the same beaches, work at the same hospitals, and may travel on the same buses. The relative absence of such petty racism hides, however, the more fundamental and pernicious discrimination against Palestinians enshrined in legislation and administrative practices.
White ends his book by quoting a revealing statement of Shmuel Dayan, General Moshe Dayan’s father, who admitted in 1950: “Maybe (not allowing the refugees back] is not right and not moral, but if we become just and moral, I do not know where we will end up.” The ongoing Zionist colonization dilemma could not be better phrased.
For democrats, who are interested in the reality and the functioning of the “Jewish and democratic” State, this book can be an eye-opener.
An investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed that the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to rescue victims or were attending funerals.
The report was published days after US President Barack Obama claimed that the drones had “not caused a huge number of civilian casualties” in Pakistan.
However, according to research by the Bureau, it was stated that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. The report claims that: “A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.”
The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16, 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor and at least 29 people died in total.
The Bureau reports that along with Taliban militants, locals said that six ordinary villagers also died that day. They were identified by Bureau field researchers as Sabir, Ikram, Mohib, Zahid, Mashal and Syed Noor.
Interestingly, the reports also reveal that often when the US attacks militants in Pakistan, the Taliban seal off the site to retrieve the dead. However, “an examination of thousands of credible reports relating to CIA drone strikes also shows frequent references to civilian rescuers. Mosques often exhort villagers to come forward and help, for example – particularly following attacks that mistakenly kill civilians.”
Quoting Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra- judicial Executions, the report states that “Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying. To target civilians would be crimes of war.” Heyns is calling for an investigation into the Bureau’s findings.
The Bureau’s report also states that according to Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution, the US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground.
Aside from Pakistan, there is also debate over the use of drones in Yemen, Somalia and Libya. The Bureau’s report in the Sunday Times claims that three US citizens were also killed by missiles fired from drones in Yemen last September.
Three years ago this past weekend, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued his now infamous memo on transparency and open government, which was supposed to fulfill his campaign promise to lead the “most transparent administration in history.”
Instead, his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress.
In 2009, Obama made FOIA reform the centerpiece of his open government agenda. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” he said, while laying out principles he wished to see his agencies adopt in the proceeding months.
In March of 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder issued what the Justice Department called “comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines.” Holder ordered that all executive branch departments and agencies were to apply “a presumption of openness” in response to FOIA requests.
In 2010, EFF’s senior counsel David Sobel testified to Congress, calling on Obama to lead by example if they wish to change the FOIA process.
Unfortunately, secrecy won out in the Obama administration almost immediately. In the early months of his presidency, a court ruled that the administration would have to turn over photos related to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in response to a FOIA request. Knowing they’d likely lose the appeal, Obama supported a new law that could keep information secret even when FOIA would otherwise require disclosure. The bill’s only intention was to create a way to shield photographs of detainee abuse from public disclosure.
President Obama also refused at first to release White House visitor records, a practice for which his predecessor, George W. Bush, was pilloried. The Obama Administration appealed a court’s ruling that the visitor logs were subject to FOIA. In September 2009, Obama reversed course and agreed to voluntarily release White House visitor records going forward. But in 2011, the Administration was still fighting in court to keep the logs before Obama’s reversal a secret.
The Associated Presslooked at the administration’s commitment to transparency in 2010 and concluded Obama was using FOIA exemptions to withhold information from requesters more than Bush did in his final year, despite receiving fewer overall requests. And one of the most frequently used exemptions was one Obama explicitly told the agencies not to use: the “deliberative process” exemption, which allows the government to withhold documents dealing with its decision making process. In Obama’s first year in office, the use of the exemption skyrocketed from 47,395 times in 2008 to 70,779 times in 2009.
Worse, more than a year after Obama and Holder’s memos, a National Security Archive study found “less than one-third of the 90 federal agencies that process such FOIA requests have made significant changes in their procedures.” Even FOIA requests on transparency were held up:
The AP is still waiting–after nearly three months–for records it requested about the White House’s “Open Government Directive,” rules it issued in December directing every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public.
Yet around the same time, when President Obama was asked a question at a townhall about why his administration wasn’t more transparent, he responded by saying it was the most transparent in the modern era.
The administration’s release of White House visitor records—the same records they went to court to fight to keep secret.
The President also bragged: “We’ve revamped the classification system so it’s not used to hide things that might be embarrassing to us.”
Which, of course, is not true either. As EFF has pointed out, government secrecy and over-classification has reach absurd levels under Obama.
More damage was done to FOIA in the Dodd-Frank bill. A little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation stated that the SEC “no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.” Other media organizations have lodged public complaints about FOIA procedure at the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and even agencies dealing with health and scientific issues like the EPA and NASA.
EFF has experienced many of these problems first hand. When we sued the FBI after it was revealed they were systematically abusing their National Security Letter authority, the bureau redacted the vast majority of the thousands of pages requested. In another case, it was clear the FBI was arbitrarily redacting information when it wasn’t appropriate. The DHS singled out EFF, along with other activist groups and media representatives such as the ACLU, EPIC, Human Rights Watch, and AP, for an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests. EFF sued just to find out the names of the members of Obama’s Intelligence Oversight Board.
But by March 2011, only 49 of the 90 federal agencies had followed any “specific tasks mandated by the White House to improve their FOIA performance.” The National Security Archive found in July that federal backlogs of FOIA requests are growing. A Study released in December of this year by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org found the administration was withholding information using nine of the most common exemptions 33% more than George Bush’s last full year in office.
But perhaps the worst violation of Obama’s open government principles was the deplorable attempt by the Justice Department to change the DOJ’s own FOIA regulations. Under the proposed rule, instead of refusing to confirm or deny a document is in the Department’s possession, the agency could “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.” The Los Angeles Times called it an “outrageous proposal” that “provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA.” After near universal outcry, including pressure from Congress, the Justice Department scaled back its rules. But as the Sunlight Foundation said, the Justice Department’s revised FOIA rules were still “worse than reported” and allow reviewers to dismiss requests for a host of trivial reasons. Obama’s Justice Department seemed intent on killing the very law it championed at the start of his administration.
The Freedom of Information Act has been hailed by open government advocates as “one of the most significant laws ever passed by the U.S. Congress,” yet its passage and survival has been fought by Presidents for more than forty years. The bill, as a significant check on executive power and secrecy, was originally opposed by Lyndon Johnson, yet was signed into law in 1966. When Congress strengthened the act after the Watergate scandal, President Ford vetoed it on the advice of his then-chief of staff Dick Cheney. Thankfully, Congress overrode his veto. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese was so opposed to FOIA, despite its being law for more than 20 years, he wrote a memo telling the Justice Department to essentially disregard requests it disliked.
President Obama promised to change all that. Unfortunately, it’s clear many of his pledges have been broken or ignored, turning his declaration that he would lead the “most transparent administration ever” into a punch line rather than a re-election slogan.
Should Mitt Romney make it to the White House, his Middle East policy and plan for Iran may be as hawkish as that of Bush Junior, thanks to Eliot Cohen.
In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school’s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.
Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Her classmates were shocked. It was the first time in 45 years that a simulation concluded with the deployment of a nuclear weapon.
That year, Karlin received a plum job in the Bush administration’s Department of Defense where, according to her bio she was “intimately involved in formulating U.S. policy on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestinian affairs.” Lebanon was a special area of focus for Karlin. She claims to have helped structure the Lebanese Armed Forces and coordinated relations between the US and Lebanese militaries.
According to the former SAIS student, Karlin was a favorite of Eliot Cohen, an ultra-hawkish professor of strategic studies at SAIS, which is regarded in American foreign policy circles as a training ground for the neoconservative movement. Through Cohen’s connections among the neocons occupying key civilian posts in Bush’s Defense Department, the former student claims Cohen was able to arrange an attractive sinecure for Karlin. Besides Karlin, the ex-SAIS student told me Cohen has promoted the career ambitions of many former pupils, including Kelly Magsamen, who worked under Cohen in the Bush administration and now oversees the Iran portfolio in the Obama administration’s State Department.
Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers. He is the primary author of Romney’s foreign policy white paper, which attacks Obama for “currying favor with [America’s] enemies” and “ostentatiously shunning Jerusalem.”
The paper urges a policy of regime change in Iran including possible coordination with Israel on military strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. It is an aggressive Republican election season document presenting a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism as the antidote to a sitting president Cohen accused of “unilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere.” More importantly, it suggests that a Romney administration’s foreign policy might look remarkably similar to – and perhaps more extreme than – that of the Bush administration.
Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s School of Government who has been on the receiving end of aggressive attacks by Cohen, called Cohen “a classic neoconservative.” Walt said, “He is constantly fretting about alleged U.S. vulnerabilities, consistently supportive of increased defense spending, and generally inclined to favor U.S. intervention in other countries. Second, like virtually all neoconservatives, he is also deeply attached to Israel, as well as to the United States. I do not question his patriotism, but I think he tends to see U.S. and Israeli interests as more-or-less identical and doesn’t see a trade-off between support for one and support for the other.”Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is credited with playing a central role in the push for invading Iraq. In 1990, Wolfowitz secured a position for Cohen working beside him on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Three years later, when Wolfowitz was appointed dean of SAIS, he began using his influence to propel Cohen’s career. According to a former State Department official who graduated from SAIS, it was through the beneficence of Wolfowitz that Cohen earned an endowed teaching position at SAIS as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies.
In 1997, Wolfowitz and Cohen joined forces to form the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative umbrella group that served as the key non-governmental vehicle for promoting the case for invading Iraq after 9/11. In the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Cohen took to the media to map out the next phase of a grand global military venture that he coined, “World War IV.”
Describing Iraq as “the big prize,” Cohen urged a unilateral invasion of Iraq that would advance the ambitions of the now-discredited political charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Like so many of his neoconservative peers, Cohen claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime maintained “a connection with the 9/11 terrorists.” With the war deteriorating into a chaotic bloodbath and as his own son was called up for duty, Cohen criticized the Bush administration for “happy talk and denials of error.” However, he refused to admit fault for his role in selling Americans on the invasion.
Despite mildly dissenting from the White House line, Cohen continued his ascent, replacing Philip Zelikow as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2007. According to the former State Department official, Rice had almost no role in Cohen’s appointment. Instead, Cohen was recommended for the position by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Cheney’s daughter headed the Iran Syrian Operations Group, a newly created, neoconservative-inspired initiative burrowed within the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time of Cohen’s appointment, Rice was attempting to open diplomatic lines to Iran, North Korea, and Syria – a move Cohen and the Cheneys fiercely opposed.
A few months after Bush left office, the former State Department official said Cohen and Wolfowitz rewarded their neoconservative fellow traveler Eric Edelman – a former Defense Department official during the later Bush years – with a visiting scholarship at SAID. In private, Johns Hopkins alumni expressed outrage at the installment of Edelman, a career diplomat with no academic background, accusing the neoconservatives of exploiting SAIS to create a system of political patronage.
Cohen’s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv. There, on the top floor of one of the office buildings known as “HaKirya,” is the office of one of Cohen’s former pupils, Aviv Kochavi. Kochavi is now the director of Israeli military intelligence, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in the country. In 2006, Kochavi, who also holds a philosophy degree, boasted to the Israeli architect and anti-occupation activist Eyal Weizmann about how he and his troops crushed Palestinian resistance cells in Nablus through the use of “inverse geometry” and “micro-tactical actions” inspired by the theories of post-structuralist philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari. On February 2, Kochavi appearedat the annual Herzliya Conference to issue grave warnings about the rapid progress of Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that sanctions and diplomacy have failed, and that more aggressive action might be required.Despite Cohen’s deep Israeli ties, he has proven extremely sensitive to critiques of the connection. When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter a professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, published their widely debated paper on the Israel lobby in 2006, Cohen authored one of the first attempts to discredit their thesis about a loose coalition of individuals and organizations creating political pressure to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Cohen accused the authors of “kooky academic work” and “obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.”
“Cohen’s rather hysterical reaction to our work was both typical and easy to explain,” Walt remarked. “Given that he and other neoconservatives had played a key role in convincing George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, he was understandably upset when we pointed this out and provided extensive documentation of their role in the run-up to this disastrous war. He could not refute our logic or our evidence, however, so he chose to misrepresent our views and smear us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.”
With the last battalions of US troops preparing to redeploy from Iraq to other conflict zones, Cohen is homing in on Iran. In a September 2009 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed diplomacy and sanctions as feasible means of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program,” he wrote. “The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.” While not ruling out the necessity of an American strike on Iranian facilities, Cohen advised that the “US actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic…through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.”
As tensions between Israel and Iran rise to unprecedented levels, and Israel’s leadership beseeches the US to join a military strike on Iran, Cohen’s visions of regime change seem closer to realization than ever before. For him and the neoconservative policy elite, a Romney victory in November might deliver the next “big prize.”
Late last year, the Central Intelligence Agency explained to Judge Kessler of the US District Court in Washington DC that releasing the final volume of its three-decade-old history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle would “confuse the public,” and should be withheld because it is a “predecisional” document. Wow. And I thought that I had heard them all.
On the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the release of a five-volume CIA history of the Bay of Pigs affair. In response to the lawsuit, the CIA negotiated to release three volumes of the history — the JFK Assassination Records Review Board had already released Volume III– with limited redaction, currently available on the National Security Archive’s website. At the time, the Director of the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation project, Peter Kornbluh, quipped that getting historic documents released from the CIA was “the bureaucratic equivalent of passing a kidney stone.” He was right. The Agency refused to release the final volume of this history, and the National Security Archive is not giving up on the fight.
Keet it secret!
Volume five of the history, written by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer –who sued the CIA himself to release the history in 1987, and lost– is described by the CIA as an “Internal Investigation document” that “is an uncritical defense of the CIA officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs operation… It offers a polemic of recriminations against CIA officers who later criticized the operation and against those U.S. officials who its author, Dr. Pfeiffer, contends were responsible for the failure of that operation.”
While Dr. Pfeiffer’s conclusions may or may not be true, FOIA case law appears to be pretty clear that Americans –who funded the operation and Dr. Pfeiffer’s histories– have the right to read this document and decide for themselves its merits. Despite the claims of the CIA’s chief historian David Robarge, the document should not remain in the CIA vaults because its conclusions “could cause scholars, journalists, and others interested in the subject at hand to reach an erroneous or distorted view of the Agency’s role.” Historians, after all, are well trained in treating documents –especially CIA hagiographies sources– skeptically.
To prevent the public from reading this volume, the CIA has argued that because it is a draft, it is a predecisional document and can be denied under exemption b(5) of the FOIA. Except –as Davis Sobel, counsel to the National Security Archive points out inourmotions– the case law states otherwise.
President Obama instructed every agency (yes, even the CIA) to “usher in a new era of open government” and apply a “presumption of disclosure… to all decisions involving FOIA.” In response to this instruction, the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy –responsible for enforcing FOIA throughout the government– issued its own guidance to agencies (yes, even the CIA), explaining:
“A requested record might be a draft, or a memorandum containing a recommendation. Such records might be properly withheld under Exemption 5, but that should not be the end of the review. Rather, the content of that particular draft and that particular memorandum should be reviewed and a determination made as to whether the agency reasonably foresees that disclosing that particular document, given its age, content, and character, would harm an interest protected by Exemption 5. In making these determinations, agencies should keep in mind that mere “speculative or abstract fears” are not a sufficient basis for withholding. Instead, the agency must reasonably foresee that disclosure would cause harm…
For all records, the age of the document and the sensitivity of its content are universal factors that need to be evaluated in making a decision whether to make a discretionary release.” *
As the D.C. circuit recognized, “the Supreme Court has pointed out that the ‘expectation of the confidentiality of executive communications [] has always been limited and subject to erosion over time…”” (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice (D.C. Cir. 2004.)
Even presidential records are barred from being withheld under “predecisional pretenses” after a period of time. The Presidential Records Act expressly states that exemption b(5) cannot be invoked to withhold records once the president has been out of office twelve years. If the presidential communication and work process is not threatened by this provision, there is no reason that the CIA’s history staff should be.
And there is a good chance that the history is not even a predecisonal document. The burden rests on the CIA to point to the specific decision that the history is “decides” to make it a predecisional document. And so far they have not. Their case rests on the speculative and abstractfear of “discrediting[ing] the work of the CIA History Staff in the eyes of the public or, worse, in the eyes of the Agency officers who rely upon CIA histories.”
Even if parts of the document truly are predecisional, only they can be withheld, the facts leading up to that decision –and histories are (hopefully) based primarily on facts– must be released.
To wit, draft histories have frequently been released under FOIA. In 2010, the Department of Justice released portions of pages of a candid history of Nazi-hunting (and Nazi-protecting) clearly marked DRAFT. (The unredacted version of the report was subsequently leaked– no prosecution by the Obama administration for that one… yet.) Moreover, the CIA previously disclosed Volume IV of this history in draft form (with a disclaimer)! This final volume to the CIA’s history remains one of the few –perhaps the only– government produced product chronicling the doomed invasion which remains classified; the public should be allowed to see its contents.
“Trust us. You don’t need to read it for yourselves.”
The National Security Archive’s case is a strong one. I’m confident that Judge Kessler will require a de novo review of the document leading to its eventual release.
On the other hand, the CIA’s “confuse the public” defense appears is as weak as it is insulting.
—————————
*It’s certainly not clear why DOJ attorneys would agree to argue this case for the CIA, especially after Eric Holder sent a government-wide memo which promised to defend denials of FOIA requests only when disclosures would truly harm agency interests. What is more clear is the reason why many agencies have failed to implement the Obama FOIA reforms –the Department of Justice has done a poor job implementing them within its own divisions, and the DOJ Office of Information Policy has done a poorer job forcing other agencies to comply with the law.
As the Archive’s counsel David Sobel put it, “This case is yet the latest example of the Obama administration failing to deliver on its promise of ‘unprecedented’ transparency. It’s hard to understand how the release of this document, after all these years, could in any way harm legitimate government interests.””
A former U.S. police chief – whose “horrific” crackdown on protesters in Miami in 2003 drew condemnation from the Amnesty International- is now on the ground in Bahrain to train the security forces in the Persian Gulf nation, a human rights activist says.
The Bahraini government which has been repressing anti-regime protesters since mid-February last year now has one of America’s “most notorious police chiefs” to train its security forces, Mohammed Malik, who is also an organizer of Occupy Miami, told Press TV’s U.S. Desk.
“We continue to see the crackdown and this is an embarrassment to be an American and see that,” Malik said.
John Timoney was chief of the Miami Police for seven years and his heavy-handed policing of protests around the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000 and the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit meeting in Miami in 2003 has made him controversial.
In the latest example of mainstream media warmongering, in today’s Washington Post David Ignatius writes,
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.
Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.
When reading reports like the one Ignatius has filed here, it should always be remembered that what is being so nonchalantly discussed as a point of perturbation for a beleaguered Leon Panetta is, without doubt, the willful and active commission of a war crime. Not only that, but – in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal – initiating a war of aggression, as Israel would undoubtedly be doing by unilaterally and illegally bombing Iran, is “the supreme international crime.”
Ignatius, despite his clear intent of beating war drums under the guise of disinterested journalism, acknowledges repeatedly that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and has no nuclear weapons program. While the bogus Israeli claim of Iran reaching a “zone of immunity” (the new Barakian term forwhatuntilrecentlywasominouslycalledthe “point of no return“) is noted by Ignatius, it’s followed by the claim that this spooky “zone” would enable Iran to “commence building a nuclear bomb.” Which means it’s not currently doing that. Ignatius even reiterates the fact that – per U.S. (and Israeli and IAEA) intelligence – Iran is not building a bomb. Which means this is all speculative. Which means any potential attack would be “preventative” and not based on any immediate threat. Which means it would be totally illegal under any possible reading of international law.
Ignatius writes that “Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action.” There’s that “existential threat” again! Y’know, the one that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former Mossad chiefs Meir Dagan and Ephraim Halevy, current Mossad chief Tamir Pardo say doesn’t actually exist. Just today, Ynet reported that former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz also repeated the assessment that Iran poses no such threat to Israel. “The use of this terminology is misleading. If it is intended to encourage a strike on Iran, it’s a mistake,” he said.
Nevertheless, Ignatius repeats this absurdity as if it’s an uncontroversial fact. It appears that, for Beltway reportage, “If Netanyahu says it, it must be true!”
Ignatius goes on, “Administration officials caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”
Does that refer to an aggressive, first-strike on Israel by Iran? If so, this is a fabricated premise that no one actually considers to be a danger (Iran’s “defensive military doctrine” is well-documented and consistently reaffirmed by U.S. intelligence) and is an action Iran has repeatedly said it would never commit. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s head of state and commander-in-chief, has stated unequivocally that “the Islamic Republic has never threatened and will never threaten any country.” Meanwhile, just the mere threat of military attack by Israel is a clear violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter.
So, essentially, Ignatius is crafting a strawman in order to beat the American warrior chest much like Hillary Clinton did in 2008 when she declared that, if Iran attacked Israel and she were president, she would order the U.S. military to “totally obliterate” Iran. How’s that for a genocidal, “wipe off the map” fantasy?
Ignatius also suggests there are currently only two ways out of the current crisis: Iran could “finally open serious negotiations for a formula to verifiably guarantee that its nuclear program will remain a civilian one; or the United States could step up its covert actions.”
Anyone familiar with the 2007 Work Plan that Iran and the IAEA agreed to, knows that this has already happened and that the IAEA consistently confirms that Iran’s nuclear program is not militarized. The “verifiable guarantee” is the presence of IAEA cameras and inspectors at Iran’s safeguarded facilities. What would make Iran’s program even more “verifiably” civilian in nature would be for the international community – including the U.S. – to accept Iran’s numerous offers to invest in and partner with its program, thereby making it virtually impossible for Iran to weaponize. These overtures have been consistently rebuffed or ignored.
The other option, of course, is more “covert actions” – in other words: drone surveillance and industrial sabotage. Those pesky little murders and explosions that leave widows and orphans and which, in any other context – if any other country’s citizens were the victims of such summary executions – would be unconditionally and unequivocally condemned as terrorism.
Sure, Ignatius ends with the off-hand comment that Netanyahu is vacillating and that “top Israeli intelligence officials remain skeptical of the project” – the “project” of course being shorthand for an act of aggressive war (again, “the supreme international crime”).
Concluding with requisite Beltway fear-mongering, Ignatius warns that “senior Americans doubt that the Israelis are bluffing” and are “worrying about the guns of spring — and the unintended consequences.”
At this point, with three decades of war threats, devastating sanctions that amount to the collective punishment of the Iranian people for the crime of overthrowing the Shah, and propaganda about Iran’s ever-imminent hell-bending drive for atomic weaponry with which to evaporate poor little (nuclear-armed and super-power funded) Israel, how can any of the “consequences” honestly be referred to as “unintended”?
I suppose it would be lovely for Israel (and its many cheerleaders here in Congress and the media) if it were able to bomb whomever they want whenever they want, killing thousands upon thousands, with impunity and without any repercussions – that’s what it’s been doing in Gaza and Lebanon for years. But Iran is not ghettoized and occupied, demilitarized and defenseless, blockaded and besieged. Iran, unlike the usual victims of Israeli and American bullets and bombs, can actually fight back if it’s attacked.
That’s what frustrates warmongers from Foggy Bottom to Herzliya so much.
This is what happens when you demand speedy production in an era of politicized regulation
By Meryl Nass, MD | February 12, 2022
All these tragedies have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes. Most occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987.
With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most using a shortened path for FDA review. Recalls and market removals of approved products are much more common than they used to be. We can only expect more of these disasters in the future, especially if the products are mandated for everyone. … continue
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With the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to the outbreak of the so-called peace process between Israel and the occupied Palestinian people, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) abandoned its initial political goals (to realize the right of return of Palestinian refugees and to liberate Palestine from Zionist colonization) for some privileges and turned itself into an obedient servant of the colonizers. Whereas the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat tried to get back some territory from Israel to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Israel, although suffering under discrimination as second-class citizens, demand Israel to become finally “a state for all its citizens” instead of staying a “Jewish State”. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the non-Jewish inhabitants have been subject to a second-class status in most walks of life.
Keet it secret!
“Trust us. You don’t need to read it for yourselves.”
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