The atrocities of Operation Condor – the U.S.-backed covert plan by Argentina, Chile, Brazil Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia to eliminate left-wing influence in Latin America – have been gradually revealed through declassified documents that detail the diplomatic maneuvering and state terror that left tens of thousands of people killed, tortured and disappeared.
Argentina is estimated to have the highest death toll with over 30,000 dictatorship opponents killed and disappeared. The Videla dictatorship in Argentina worked in close collaboration with Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had ushered in a violent neoliberal experiment in Chile and a far reaching network of international surveillance to keep tabs on, and eliminate, any traces of organised resistance to the dictatorship that had the potential to form abroad.
U.S. intelligence was deeply involved in the propping of dictatorships in Latin America in particular after Chile’s Unidad Popular led by Salvador Allende triumphed at the polls. Declassified documents have shown that the U.S. knew about the tactics used by the Argentinian dictatorship – emulated after Chile’s practice of disappearing opponents into the ocean, packaged and thrown off helicopters provided by the U.S. In some cases, the death flights also served as a murder practice – some victims were thrown into the ocean drugged, yet still alive.
Recently, it has also been revealed that U.S. intelligence surveillance over the extent of human rights violations in Latin America was aided by Germany and Switzerland. A Swiss company, Crypto AG, was jointly owned by the U.S. and West Germany. The company was then acquired by the participating countries in Operation Condor and later incorporated into the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) technology.
News reports have revealed that the Swiss government was knowledgeable about the CIA operations conducted through Crypto AG, which makes the country complicit in the dealings of Operation Condor and sheds doubt about Switzerland’s purported political neutrality, a stance which has enabled it to embrace duplicity and serve both oppressor and the oppressed.
Eventually, the surveillance technology targeted over 100 countries. Swiss media have reported that along with Sweden, Israel and Britain, Switzerland was privy to the information compiled through the operation. The Swiss government has launched an investigation into the case and the company’s licence has been suspended.
Among the intelligence gathered by the U.S. through the surveillance programme was the plan for the assassination of Chilean diplomat and ambassador to the U.S. in the Allende era, Orlando Letelier, who was murdered by a car bomb in Washington in 1976. Michael Townley, a CIA agent who also worked for the Pinochet dictatorship’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) was responsible for placing the bomb underneath Letelier’s vehicle. The murder was directly ordered by Pinochet. Operation Silence, in which efforts were made to prevent judges from investigating dictatorship crimes in the 1990s, resulted in the murder of Townley’s DINA partner, Eugenio Berrios, a chemist tasked with producing sarin gas for the dictatorship. Berrios’s body was discovered, heavily mutilated, in Uruguay, thus eliminating the possibility of further evidence being given in the Letelier case.
The link between Chile and Argentina in terms of dictatorship cooperation to eliminate opponents resulted in the killing and disappearance of Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) militants.
Revelations regarding Crypto AG will likely add to the level of U.S. complicity in Operation Condor, apart from other forms of political violence globally which were aided by the CIA. In Latin America, particularly given the current turbulence from coups, such as in the case of Bolivia, to popular mobilisation as we are seeing in Chile, the news regarding surveillance is likely to have an impact on both current happenings and in terms of the region’s collective memory.
Military public land grabs and intrusions into civilian spaces are raging in the West. Wild landscapes are targeted for huge seizures of public land, increases in hideously loud war plane overflight impacts, or development of facilities like threat emitters. The military already has seized vast areas of the American West for use as ground and air ranges. … Full article
The Richard Lugar Lab is fast becoming a topic of household conversation in both Georgia and the Russian Federation, because increasing numbers of people care that it is not a public health facility, as claimed, but a threat to the population and humanity as we know it.
The Caucasus region is an ideal location for the United States to outsource its ‘grey zone’ research to. Many of the most ‘attractive’ viruses and bacteria for weaponization occur naturally in this region, so they can be studied in their natural habitat. The region is also known for its thriving black market economy and trafficking, as the lack of democracy and a civil society makes it easier to hide things from the world.
But what is now concerning US officials is the attention Russia is paying to the topic of bio weapons and other related medical programmes. What has been uncovered so far demonstrates that the question is NOT whether the US is in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty BUT to what degree.
The US has long tried to deflect attention from these programmes. American journalist and Bureau Chief for Veterans Today in Georgia, Jeffrey Silverman, a long time resident of Georgia, is again in the cross fire for his articles and series of recent TV interviews, having endured a long series of indignities, and downright illegal acts, at the hands of his own government and embassy.
But the new attacks on Silverman coincide with recent revelations in the Russian media. Igor Giorgadze, the former State Security Minister of Georgia, dropped a bombshell in mid September when he leaked documents containing information about “a laboratory located near Tbilisi named after US Senator Richard Lugar”, and how some experiments had turned deadly.
Various media groups describe such breaking stories as recurring disinformation, and further claim that there is no factual evidence that the US is building biological laboratories in the Caucasus region in order to use it as a testing site. The same media groups also denied that the US was losing the Vietnam War and declared the well documented CIA human rights abuses in places like Paraguay weren’t happening either.
But Giorgadze, a former Georgian State Security Minister, and Silverman beg to differ. They claim that such labs and related medical projects may have secretly conducted experiments on people, some of which have had fatal outcomes.
Right or Wrong Person to Ask?
Giorgadze has asked Donald Trump to launch an investigation into the experiments conducted by the laboratory. This really has some in Georgia concerned, as Trump is no fan of Big Pharma. He recently stated that the much touted flu shot is the greatest scam in medical history, created by Big Pharma to make money off vulnerable people and make them sick.
US-government funded media watchdogs and strong-arm agencies have fought back by using Homeland Security to harass Silverman when he traveled to and from the United States earlier this year, when he was finally allowed to make his first trip home in over 14 years. On both arrival and departure he was subjected to repeated body and bag searches, including seizures of his phone and personal documents, in direct violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Such frontal attacks on this journalist date back to when the first stories about the Lugar laboratory, and the nefarious research linked with it, broke in Georgia in 2013. As he has since backed up many of his allegations with actual documents, there has been a concerted effort to discredit him, not only in Georgia but in the international media.
Silverman continues to publish in the Georgian language media, and has described how the concentration camp patients of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele can be compared to the civilians residing close to the Lugar laboratory, as they [too] did not understand the threat they were under until they were placed in the medical experiment section death camps—when it was too late.
“I am warning those who live near the Lugar Laboratory that they are under a big risk. The locals who settled there were misled that this was an ordinary laboratory and nothing else.”
Georgy Iremidze, head of the Georgian based Patriot news agency, which is labelled pro Russian by the same detractors, adds to the debate:
“On paper, the lab is run by the Georgian government, or rather the Ministry of Health. But in reality, it is operated by the American government. The idea is that, if something goes wrong, the Georgian government will take the blame so that the American government can stay under the radar”.
A Lot for Nothing
The United States has provided a total of US $350 million for the construction and technical equipping of the laboratory. In 2013 the laboratory was allegedly subordinated to the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health (NCDC), and from 2018 the Government of Georgia will assume responsibility for the full funding and operation of the Lugar center and laboratory network, or so we are told.
However it is only the US which has an interest in building such laboratories. Other countries would face sanctions from more powerful neighbours, who can build worse facilities of their own, for doing so. The US wants to flout the Biological Weapons Convention and then claim, if caught, that this is something only dubious, less-developed, “ignorant” countries do, as it usually does when questions are asked in places like Syria and Iraq.
The Lugar Laboratory is located not far from Tbilisi International Airport. This means that loading weaponized agents and moving viruses and bacteria around the world is expedited. It is conceivable that the United States may be trying to continue its losing battle in Syria by using biological and chemical weapons, as military planes, which are based at NATO airfields, have been landing at the airport with increasing regularity for no other apparent reason.
The same deadly and especially dangerous pathogens could also be targeted, as an aggressive act, against Turkey and the Russian Federation. The US has a history of doing this, and we might recall the Swine Flu outbreak in Russia 12 years ago.
Even unsuspecting humans could be weaponized and board civilian fights, just as was described in Station 11, a work of fiction, and how the Georgian flu killed over 95 percent of the world’s population. Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, “Station Eleven,” begins with a spectacular tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.
It is standard medical practice that nothing that is injected into the body should be used past its expiration date. But the US military, and other organizations like MARFOREUR, USAMRIID, ClinicalRM, WRAIR, and DTRA, are being accused of giving many such preparations to allied countries as “aid”. They have been widely used on the general population in Georgia, even children, without the victims’ full knowledge and informed consent.
When questions are asked, it funnels this aid not through medical bodies but TMC Global Professional Services. This company has overseas offices in nine countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and two offices in the US, in Virginia and New Mexico. Most of its work is as a US Government contractor on Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) programmes, with national laboratories and other DoD customers. For example, it manages an international project at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant site (ChNPP).
Too Many Roads Lead to Rome
The Myth Detector claims to have debunked “disinformation” spread around the Hepatitis C elimination programme on several occasions—but it fails to mention the nexus of this programme to TMC. Nor does it give, or investigate, the technical backgrounds of those doing the debunking, who just post pre-written statements provided by their Embassy contacts or PR staff working in the Lugar lab.
It is not difficult to expose those actually working in these military projects at the management level. Silverman was once hired by International Crisis Group, ICG, and the French government to look at the links of these researchers. He soon discovered how the Lugar and partner projects are connected to American, European and other scientific centres.
All the highly skilled professionals in the TMC office in Georgia left in 2010 to form a new organisation, Sigma. The most high profile of these was Richard Mah, who had worked at Los Alamos. You do not leave the golden handcuffs, and diamond pension, of a US defence contractor to start a company from scratch unless you feel too compromised to stay with that contractor. But nobody is interviewing Mah, or the main TMC person in Georgia nowadays, Giorgi Begiashvili, before claiming “disinformation”.
Day Late and Fact Short
The US can get away with violations of treaty law because what it addresses has been superseded by new developments and changed beyond recognition. It has often been observed that when a certain narcotic is made illegal, another one comes along which is equally deadly but gets round the laws as written. Claims that any treaty violations are accidental are difficult to disprove because such violations are so widespread as to be unavoidable.
The US bio weapons legislation is codified in Section 817 of the Patriot Act. It effectively gives the US immunity from violating its own bioweapons laws, despite the fact that such a national law cannot override an international treaty that country is bound by. Specifically, it states that “the prohibitions contained in this section shall NOT apply to any duly authorised US governmental activity.”
Prior to enactment of the Patriot Act, federal law proscribed the use of biological agents or toxins as weapons, in 18 U.S.C. 175. This outlaws possession of a type or quantity of biological agents or toxins that cannot be justified for peaceful purposes. In short, what is being done for the purpose of military use, offensive, is now being justified under the guise of peaceful purposes.
Regardless of the ledger of truth and innocence, a public debate has begun which is cross cultural and beyond borders. As a result of it, some of what goes on behind closed doors, under the flimsy disguise of public health protection and non-proliferation of bio weapons and especially dangerous pathogens, is now out in the open.
One only needs to look more closely at what has been done in Georgia at various DOD funded labs and medical projects. There is a long list to explore, including deaths from experimental TB antibiotics, a succession of dodgy programs doctors refuse to talk about, and various experimental treatments on what is often an unsuspecting population.
If you do not wish to believe Silverman or the Russian media, enough can be gleaned from open sourced academic materials which clearly demonstrate that proper procedures for informed consent are not being implemented. These shine light on what appear to be “backhanders” paid by and to various funding agencies, the UN, the US State Department, Big Pharma and various partner organizations, including the Ministry of Health, various American universities and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia.
Information is now being shared with the Congressional Oversight Budget Office, about the apparent planting of false and misleading information. However, all this demonstrates is that US-funded disinformation oversight is in fact blatant disinformation itself, as anyone who has lived in a country on which the US has an “official narrative”, such as Georgia, has always known.
Not only are some of these new generation bacteria agents and especially dangerous pathogens so evolved that there is no antibiotic or other treatment that can save a patient. Often the cure is only available in the form of bacteriophage preparations, as also is being produced in Tbilisi Georgia on the first floor of Building B at Eliava Institute.
It comes as no coincidence that the US Department of Defense and other agencies have also poured money into improvement of infrastructure at the laboratories on the second and third floors, where the planned production area is housed. These laboratories are used to produce bacteriophage on short notice and will be used for phage concentrate production that is used in the final phage product.
Founded in 1923, the Eliava Institute is a world renowned institution working in the field of Applied Microbiology, Virology and Infectious Immunology. Bacteriophage research and application is its main direction.
Henry Kamens is a columnist and expert on the Central Asia and Caucasus regions.
Nine years ago, on February 14 of 2011 to the date, massive anti-government protests swept Bahrain.
Yet the common narrative of Bahrain’s uprising as on the backburner of the failed Egyptian movement downplayed the real significance of Bahrain in struggle. Rather than writing it off as a failed after effect of the 2010-2011 Arab Spring protests, Bahrain should be recognized as a struggle of liberation against Western imperialism and occupation on par with the Palestinian struggle.
With a long, established root in history, and as the Resistance Axis scales up the regional call to expel US occupation following the assassination of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, Bahrain deserves increasing attention.
Bahrain is a Persian Gulf island under the monarchist rule of the Al-Khalifa clan that had ruled Bahrain over two centuries, soon receiving the support of Britain following an 1820 treaty with the Al-Khalifa monarchs.
Post-Cold War, the United States would eclipse Britain as the main imperialist backer of Bahrain’s monarchy in the Middle East. As Britain tightened its relationship with Bahrain in 1919, it had also carved out the blueprint for the occupation of Palestine in 1917 under the Balfour Declaration.
The movement in Bahrain was brutally suppressed not just because of its uprising against one monarchy, but because of the unrelenting popular consensus by demonstrators for a government that is anti-Zionist, anti-American, and democratic. These calls were met with a brutal crackdown by Saudi-backed authorities that intervened a month later to quell the popular revolt.
Western media narratives had cast Bahrain’s uprising in the shadow of Egypt’s failed ‘revolution,’ relegating it to the backburner of a co-opted Arab “Sting.”
Bahrain may not have the highest number of American troops occupying the tiny island, with just neighboring Kuwait and Qatar hosting up to 13,000 US occupying forces each. Yet the tiny island, packs over 7,000 US troops, stationed, as of January 2020, in a tiny 765 km2 area.
It also has been made home to a US naval base since 1947, the oldest of its kind in the Middle East, established one year before the 1948 Nakba, the year the illegal Zionist occupation was made legitimate in the eyes of the so-called “international community.”
The United States’ Navy 5th Fleet, established in Bahrain in 1944 as the largest combat fleet in the world was only reestablished in 1995 after being inactive for 48 years. Yet it has situated itself as the useful output of US regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, where the “area of responsibility for American fleets shuttling aircraft carriers and destroyers include pretty much every West Asian nation along the Red Sea, Gulf of Oman, Persian Gulf, and some of the Indian Ocean.
Poised for the US to have an easier shot at a number of nations under its threat, occupation, or watch, from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or Yemen, to a station to safeguard its the regimes it backs, like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE, its positionality is becoming even more critical in light of the US’s assaults, sea and land alike, against Iran.
History: Previous uprisings
To understand the reason behind the Western/Gulf insecurity behind popular uprisings in Bahrain, historically, one must draw upon the history of resistance against the monarchist elite in Bahrain.
An approximately 5-year uprising that began in 1994, the “uprising of dignity” by a coalition of both Shia and leftist factions against the ruling regime.
In 2006, the Al Bandar report revealed Saudi plans of sowing the seeds of sectarian tension in Bahrain, where a nearly $3 million financing of secret cells in the Bahraini government and its intelligence apparatuses, government-operated cover-NGOs, and sectarian propaganda was aimed at an intentional targeting of Bahrain’s more than 70% Shia majority.
That same year, Sheikh Abdul Amir al-Jamiri, a main spiritual leader of Bahrain’s Shia, passed away after decades of commitment and leadership to bringing justice to Bahrain. Al-Jamiri, the main leader of the mid-90s uprising, was credited for bringing secular leftist and Shia factions together in a unified call against a regime that, in its monarchy, was in service of capitalism, imperialism, and Zionism.
Yet al-Jamiri’s passing would later inspire the unified call for reform and revolt 17 years later. Unfortunately, Bahrain’s opposition coalition would accept the concessions put forth by the then-new emir Hamad al-Khalifa, enshrined in Bahrain’s 2001 National Action Charter.
Like the many agreements and negotiations handed to the Palestinians, this agreement, while bringing the country back to some provisions in the previous constitutional rule the monarchy clan stamped out in 1975, had the effect of doing little to curtail the economic and political supremacy of the monarchy and its systematic oppression of its majority population.
The Bahrain-Palestine connection
Both the oppressed of Bahrain and occupied Palestine have suffered for decades under the US’s ambitions to use their lands as military bases, supporting and backing neo-colonial regimes to help instill their political, economic, and military hegemony.
The illegitimate governments of both countries continue to US hegemony by, obviously, their military role as US-military bases but also for their benefits for US-dominated capitalism. For example, the Zionist entity’s tech sector has found its footing and high dependency on the U.S. economy. According to a December 2019 report by the ‘Israeli’ Ministry of Finance, US investments accounted for 35% of those in ‘Israeli’ tech in 2018, with the total amount of Israeli investors being lower at 30%. In Bahrain, the royal family has amassed at least $40 billion alone from 2000 to 2010 from land-grabbing schemes for development, both buying properties from the UK and brokering free-trade agreements with the US.
The result, in taking the lion’s share of land available for people’s commerce and trade, has caused a hike up in land and property prices, compounding the existing and intentional economic conditions of high native unemployment (at 35%) that afflicts the local youth. The Bahraini regime has accomplished essentially what the Israeli regime has in its occupation of Palestine: the weaponization of land grabbing as a regime-building tool as well as flooding the country with cheap, foreign labor effectively barring the native underclass from any economic agency or access.
More significant is the tactic and prevalence of arbitrary and forced detention endemic to the preservation of both US-backed regimes. Bahrain is the top country globally for political prisoners, with over 14,000 cases of arbitrary detention between 2011 and 2019 alone. This includes the detention of over 1,700 children. The Zionist entity, similarly, replicates this tactic and these projections: since 1967, the occupation has arrested over 800,000 Palestinians, including 50,000 children, with over 1,250 minors under arbitrary detention between 2011 and 2018 alone.
Characteristic of the Zionist and Bahraini regimes, in addition to their routine arbitrary detention of civilians and children, is their brutal imprisonment and torture of movement leaders and dissidents; especially those that have played vital roles in uniting the opposition.
This is exemplified by the detention of Marwan Barghouti or Khalida Jarrar in occupied Palestine or Ayatollah al-Qassem and Ebtisam el Sayegh in Bahrain. These are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of leaders and activists that have endured torture, repeated arrests, in order to quell the rich ideological leadership committed to resistance to occupation and oppression in both the Bahraini and Palestinian nations.
Both the Deal of the Century and the recent uptick in torture against Bahraini prisoners of conscience can give their thanks to the acceleration of support and reinforcement from the United States under the Trump administration.
The Obama administration did no more than offer a trickle of lip-service criticism against the Zionist and Bahraini regimes in his time in office, countered anyway by his first-term Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s warm embrace of both: Clinton has always considered herself a “strong supporter” of the Occupying Entity as she did commend Bahrain’s king.
While the US’s arms sales to Bahrain had somewhat halted under Obama’s term, which had otherwise undergone the steady increase of bombings and drone warfare in the Middle East, due to human rights concerns, the Trump administration had carried out $5 billion in sales of Lockheed’s F-35 fighter jets to the monarchy in 2017.
In 2009, the Bahraini government had planned to spend a billion on security and defense in the country, looking to several Saudi and American defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, for its purchases.
Just as Trump unveiled and greenlit his development-oriented “Deal” for Palestine, he had also, greenlit massive torture, along with arms sales, to the Zionist, Saudi, and Bahraini regimes.
As one torturer famously said to el Sayegh: “Do you know that we have a green light from Trump?”
Similar to how the Zionist entity employs its handsome security packages–a 2018 gift of $38 billion over 10 years–towards brutal neighborhood raids in the West Bank, its next site of total mass expulsion thanks in part to the Deal, Bahrain too has put Trump’s generous donations and pledges to mass raids.
Like the Zionist entity, the Bahraini regime regularly engages in mass-raids. Shortly after the 2011 uprising, over 430 members of the opposition Al-Wifaq party, also teachers, clinicians, and day-laborers were violently arrested in night raids.
The largest and most brutal case came shortly after Trump’s May 2017 “green light.” Bahrain’s security forces raided Sheikh al-Qassem’s home, shot and killing five demonstrators and arrested 286.
As Sondoss Al Assad, a Lebanese journalist who focuses especially on Bahrain wrote in a recent article for American Herald Tribune:
“Blessed by Trump’s Green Light, Manama has intensified its brutal measures, which also met out collective reprisal against scores of peaceful opposition figures and human rights advocates.”
Just last June, the convening to pass the Zionist-American “Deal of the Century” was hosted in Bahrain, signifying the tight-knit connection both the Zionist and Bahraini regimes have in extending their influence in the Levant and Persian Gulf fronts, transforming the lands they occupy into development enterprises as well as American military bases.
A Bahraini man Monday was sentenced three years for burning the flag of the illegal Zionist entity at an anti-’Israel’ demonstration last May. Bahrain, through history and in its present, is truly emblematic of, as Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a February 16th speech, ‘a treachery platform conspiring against the Palestinian cause.”
For this reason, it is imperative that both Bahrain and occupied Palestine be at the heart of the Middle East’s liberation struggle. It is expected that the Deal will ignite an intifada and regional rejection that has been consistently brewing in occupied Palestine. At the same time, a regional consensus amongst the resistance axis to expel American presence and forces from all Arab and Muslim soil, particularly in Iraq, will be crucial in Bahrain, and draw the curtains of occupation on both these two birth-sites of US and British imperialism in the region.
The Trump-Kushner ‘Peace’ Plan is slick and businesslike, with an aura of objectivity and balance – but it’s exactly the opposite, and something about it stinks.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump are always accompanied by their shared comfort animal, the elephant in the room (Photo-collage by If Americans Knew)
There is a giant herd of elephants circling the Trump-Kushner Peace Plan, and they’re not going away. The fragrance of pachyderms is unmistakable, but Trump administration, the Netanyahu government, and Israel partisans have decades of experience in ignoring whatever is inconvenient to their agendas.
And while the Trump administration claims it wants a future of peace, this Plan will not bring peace.
Because, elephants.
Elephants from the get-go
Shortly after the Plan’s release, Kushner boasted on Fox & Friends, “This is an 80 page proposal, with a map. Never been done before.” Pachyderm prints are on every page (and the map), starting with the very first sentence:
“Israelis and Palestinians have both suffered greatly from their long-standing and seemingly interminable conflict.”
To start the document with this statement is to ignore a fundamental truth: the creation of Israel – the Zionist project – wreaked havoc on the people of Palestine, and continues to do so today.
Yes, both sides have suffered, but only one side has lost its homeland, lived under decades of injustice and oppression, and is being slowly starved and poisoned.
“Since 1946, there have been close to 700 United Nations General Assembly resolutions and over 100 United Nations Security Council resolutions in connection with this conflict.”
Missing factoid: Almost every one of the 800+ resolutions (Kushner left out 45 UN Human Rights Council resolutions) connected with this conflict, was critical of Israeli policies and actions that defied international law.
“These resolutions have not brought about peace.”
The resolutions have not brought about peace because (elephant alert) Israel has defied every one of them.
Elephants in basic assumptions: Palestinians “need” the Plan
The basic premise on which the Trump-Kushner Plan is based shows disdain for fundamental facts:
Palestinian society is languishing because of Israel’s policies – not some deficiency in Palestinians or their leadership.
Blaming Palestinian resistance
“For comprehensive peace to be achieved, it is up to the Palestinian people to make clear that they reject the ideologies of destruction, terror and conflict.”
Palestinian people aren’t committed to conflict – they are committed to resistance against occupation and apartheid (resistance is legal, but occupation and apartheid are illegal). For comprehensive peace to be achieved, Israel must abandon the elephants of discrimination and violence, and adhere to international law.
Blaming Palestinian backwardness
“The economic plan will empower the Palestinian people to build the society that they have aspired to establish for generations. It will allow Palestinians to realize a better future and pursue their dreams…By developing property and contract rights, the rule of law, anti-corruption measures, capital markets, a pro-growth tax structure, and a low-tariff scheme with reduced trade barriers, this initiative envisions policy reforms coupled with strategic infrastructure investments that will improve the business environment and stimulate private-sector growth.”
This suggests that the Palestinian people have been unable to build a great society because they lack a pro-growth tax structure and other first-world, art-of-the-deal schemes. While Kushner’s words dazzle, they ignore the myriad, incessant turmoil and economic hardship created by occupation, apartheid, and blockade. Israel has initiated wars, withheld food and medicine, and traumatized generations of Palestinians.
A 2016 publication by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted:
The relationship between the Israeli economy and that of the Occupied Palestinian Territory remains that of two dissimilar and unequal economies, whereby the large, dominant economy practices policies that keep the small economy weak and dependent…depriving the Palestinian people of their ability to produce and, in the process, cultivating a dependence on the Israeli economy and donor aid.
Without the occupation, the Palestinian economy could easily produce twice the GDP it currently generates, while the chronic trade and budget deficits, as well as poverty and unemployment, could recede and the economic dependence on Israel could end.
The elephant of occupation: Palestinian men line up at the Eyal checkpoint (one of about 150) in the northern occupied West Bank city of Qalqiliya. Thousands of Palestinian men arrive at the checkpoint before dawn due to the long delays that keep them waiting for hours as they attempt to enter Israel for work. (Daniel Tepper)
Blaming Palestinian ineptness/laziness
“This Vision has been developed to reduce over time the Palestinians’ dependence on aid from the international community.”
UNCTAD reported in 2019 that between 2000 and 2017, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank cost the Palestinian people approximately $47.7 billion – over $2.5 billion a year. As Israel controls agriculture (more below), exports, natural resources, and tourism, it deliberately siphons money away from the Palestinian economy and into its own coffers.
The way to reduce Palestinians’ dependence on aid is to free them from occupation and blockade so they can work and produce, instead of standing at checkpoints and fighting a system that is stacked against them.
Blaming Hamas
“Gaza has tremendous potential but is currently held hostage by…terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction… [that are] fueling a war machine of thousands of rockets and missiles, dozens of terror tunnels and other lethal capabilities… Gaza is run by terrorists who provoke confrontations that lead to more destruction and suffering for the people of Gaza…
As a result of Hamas’ terror and misrule, the people of Gaza suffer from massive unemployment, widespread poverty, drastic shortages of electricity and potable water, and other problems that threaten to precipitate a wholesale humanitarian crisis.”
While Hamas’ rule leaves much to be desired, Hamas is not the cause of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. Gaza is under a brutal blockade because its people dare to resist the de facto occupation of their land. Some militants shoot mostly-homemade rockets toward Israel in defiance – these “lethal” rockets (which began after Israeli violence) have killed about 50 Israelis in 19 years, while Israel’s army (the most powerful in the Middle East) has killed over 7,000 Gazan Palestinians in the same time period and at least 461 West Bankers and East Jerusalemites.
Elephant of disproportionate force: Scene of destruction in Gaza during Israel’s 2014 invasion, in which 2,200 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed. (Jehad Saftawi/IMEU)
In the rush to demonize Hamas, Israel and its supporters (including Jared Kushner) once again disregard inconvenient facts: Hamas’ efforts are nothing more or less than resistance against oppressive, illegal Israeli policies; Hamas operations have been restrained; and – contrary to Israeli hype – its actions are not provocations but responses to Israeli provocation (not the least of which is the catastrophic blockade); Hamas has on multiple occasions offered long-term ceasefire deals, to which Israel has responded with violence; and most brokered ceasefires (79%) have been broken by Israel.
Hamas and other resistance groups’ actions have been less deadly than Israel’s by a large margin. Witness these statistics from Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem:
“Peacetime,” Sept 2000 – Dec 2008
136 Israelis killed (14 by rockets)
3,000 Gazans killed
Israeli incursion into Gaza, 2008-9 (“to stop rockets”)
9 Israelis killed (4 by rockets)
1400 Palestinians killed
“Peacetime,” 2009-2012
3 Israelis killed (by rockets)
291 Palestinians killed
Israeli incursion into Gaza, 2012 (“to stop rockets”)
6 Israelis killed (by rockets)
174 Palestinians killed
“Peacetime,” 2012-14
1 Israeli killed (not by a rocket)
27 Palestinians killed
Israeli incursion into Gaza, 2014 (“to stop rockets”)
72 Israelis killed (17 by rockets)
2,200 Palestinians killed
Gaza/Israel since 2014
5 Israelis killed (1 by Gazan sniper, 4 by rockets)
over 400 Gazans killed (most by Israeli snipers)
It is perhaps not surprising that multiple human rights organizations have placed the blame for the humanitarian crisis squarely on Israel’s shoulders.
Elephants in basic expectations of the “Peace” Plan
Basic expectations of the Kushner Plan are unsound, blatantly partisan, and tell only the convenient parts of the story:
There will be no population transfer
“Peace should not demand the uprooting of people – Arab or Jew – from their homes. Such a construct, which is more likely to lead to civil unrest, runs counter to the idea of co-existence.”
This is a handy position to take after Israel has illegally transferred 600,000 Jews onto West Bank and East Jerusalem land stolen from Palestinians. “No population transfer” would have been a useful policy in 1948, to stop the Zionist army from depopulating hundreds of Palestinian villages and exiling 750,000 Palestinians, and then refusing to allow them to return. Transfer of population into occupied territory has been against international law since the Fourth Geneva Convention was ratified in 1949.
The transfer of Israeli Jews from their settlements back to Israel (also stolen) no doubt would cause “civil unrest,” but it was a grave error to position them in someone else’s land to begin with.
As an aside, when Palestinians participated in civil unrest circa 1939, protesting British rule and the population transfer of Jews into Palestine, they were brutally suppressed. In 1987, Israeli soldiers employed “force, might, and beatings,” in addition to live ammunition to subdue unarmed demonstrations against the occupation. The Great March of Return in Gaza, a massive and ongoing peaceful protest, has been answered with sniper fire. When Palestinians are the ones with grievances, no attempt is made to appease and avoid civil unrest.
Elephant of brute force in the Great March of Return: Palestinian protesters flee as Israeli forces shoot tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and live ammunition along the border with the Gaza Strip on May 4, 2018. Palestinians were demonstrating against the illegal Israeli blockade, then in its eleventh year. The blockade, the protest, and Israel’s violent repression are ongoing. ((Mahmud Hams / AFP/Getty Images))
Israel will sacrifice historical claims
“This Vision provides for the transfer of sizable territory by the State of Israel [to the Palestinians] – territory to which Israel has asserted valid legal and historical claims, and which are part of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people — which must be considered a significant concession.”
This statement completely ignores Palestinians’ legal and historical claims to the land – their ancestral homeland. And while the claim of Jewish Israelis is based on a religious document and a short-lived mini kingdom 3,000 years ago, Palestinians have lived on the land recently enough to have Ottoman-era ownership records and deeds. Meanwhile, Israel controls all of the land. A large number of Palestinians have expressed willingness to settle for just 22% of what was once theirs. Is this not a significant concession on the part of Palestinians?
Of course, resolving a problem with these complexities isn’t easy, but no resolution will be valid when the arbiter is disingenuous.
Normalization as a starting point
“Since the moment of its establishment, the State of Israel has not known a single day of peace with all of its neighbors…The United States will strongly encourage Arab countries to begin to normalize their relations with the State of Israel…These countries are expected to end any boycott of the State of Israel and oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (commonly referred to as BDS) movement and any other effort to boycott the State of Israel.”
The statement that “Israel has not known a single day of peace with all of its neighbors” provokes another elephant alert: Israel started or caused its wars (Israel launched the Six Day War, the 1973 war was waged by countries trying to regain land that Israel had unlawfully taken over, and Israel has invaded Lebanon several times). In addition, both Jordan and Egypt recognized Israel long ago.
Ordering Arab neighbors to normalize relations with Israel in the current environment overlooks the legitimate reasons for the global BDS movement: Israel’s noncompliance with international law (not anti-Semitism).
Conflict with Israel’s neighbors was inevitable since the state was created on land belonging to another people group, who were pushed out to become a burden on their neighbors.
First Israel must make the appropriate changes. Then its neighbors – and the world – may consider normalizing relations.
Elephants in the education plan
“The [education] initiative will empower the Palestinian people to realize their ambitions. Through new data-driven, outcomes-based education options at home, expanded online education platforms, increased vocational and technical training… students can fulfill their academic goals and be prepared for the workforce.”
Again, the Trump-Kushner plan neglects the true reason why Palestinians can’t “realize their ambitions.” Under occupation, students often can’t get past checkpoints in time for classes; school days are regularly interrupted by Israeli military tear gas attacks or invasions, followed by arrests of students and/or teachers; a huge number of students have been traumatized by Israeli violence.
Against the odds, Palestinians have among the highest literacy rates in the world, and Gaza has one of the highest rates of PhD holders per capita in the world.
“While Palestinians have among the highest graduation rates in the region, many Palestinian schools are stretched beyond their capacity, with too few teachers and classrooms to support their students.”
In this statement, the Plan glosses over the fact that Palestinian students are succeeding at an impressive rate under impossible conditions. Their academic achievements should lead to a prosperous society, but it does not – because of the elephants.
The statement also fails to mention that overcrowding is due to Israeli forces’ regular practice of demolishing and refusing building permits for West Bank schools. In Gaza, over half of the schools were damaged during an Israeli assault in 2014 – and many are still not rebuilt, since Israel regularly blocks the delivery of construction materials.
Elephant of Israeli bombing of schools: Palestinians go through the rubble in a classroom at the Abu Hussein UN school in Jebaliya refugee camp which was hit by an Israeli tank strike, 2014. (AP)
“Unfortunately, Palestinians currently experience one of the highest youth-unemployment rates in the world… By providing the Palestinian public sector with policy advice on best practices, encouraging private-sector attention to this problem, and promoting a comprehensive strategy to empower youth and women, more women and youth will join the Palestinian labor force.”
Senior Advisor Kushner is under the impression that Palestinians can’t flip their graduates into successful careers because they need foreign billionaires to give them advice. This is the height of arrogance.
Elephants in the agriculture plan
“While agriculture accounts for approximately eight percent of Palestinian employment, this sector has not met its potential due to limited access of Palestinian farmers to land, water, and technology. An improved business environment in the West Bank and Gaza and access to more land will create an enormous opportunity for farmers to expand their operations.”
Why in the world would Palestinian farmers have “limited access” to their own land? It’s a simple question with a simple answer: Israel has built a wall that separates farmers from much of their farmland. The International Court of Justice declared the wall illegal in 2004 (when it was less than half built) and ordered it torn down. In spite of this, Israel has continued construction along a route that effectively severs Palestinians from the nearly 10% of West Bank land – much of it agricultural – that lies outside the wall.
Elephant of essential imprisonment: A portion of the separation wall near Qalqiliya (Reinhart Krause, Reuters)
A 2016 publication by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted some of the measurable effects of the occupation on Palestinian agriculture:
Since the onset of the occupation in 1967, the Palestinian people have lost access to more than 60 per cent of West Bank land and two thirds of its grazing land. In Gaza, half of the cultivable area and 85 per cent of fishery resources are inaccessible to Palestinian producers…
The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reports that inside the wall, the Israeli expropriation for expanding illegal Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads “includ[es] the most fertile and best grazing land.”
For those Palestinians who are able to access their land during the harvest season, much or all of their crops can be lost “due to violence and threats by settlers” – who are aided and abetted by the Israeli military.
All told, the occupation caused a drop in agricultural sector from over half of the Palestinian GDP prior to 1967, to just 6% by 2012.
In addition, Israeli military and illegal settlers destroy or vandalize infrastructure, buildings, and water systems, and the Israeli government restricts the import of fertilizers, seedlings, and certain types of livestock, ensuring “that most of the advantages present in the Israeli agricultural sector are beyond the reach of Palestinian farmers.”
Again, the assistance Palestinians need is not advice from billionaires, but freedom from Israeli domination and oppression.
Elephants in the water and wastewater plan
“The parties [must] recognize mutual water rights… [s]hared aquifers… and jointly seek to provide easily available, reasonably priced water to both parties.”
The wording in this statement suggests that Israel and the Palestinians endure roughly equal water hardship and suffer from exorbitant prices.
In reality, one of the “parties” already has more than enough water, the other too little, too expensive, and too toxic. Again, UNCTAD spells out the cause:
Palestinian farmers are denied the right to construct wells to meet the growing demand for water, even when that water originates almost entirely in the West Bank… [O]rganizations, such as Oxfam, report that Palestinian assets, including sources of water, have often been vandalized by Israeli settlers…
Environmental degradation is also caused by settlers, through the discharge of untreated wastewater into nearby wadis and release of solid domestic and industrial waste from settlements onto Palestinian lands. In addition, several incidents of dumping of hazardous and toxic waste in the West Bank have been documented.
Israel confiscates 82% of Palestinian groundwater for its own use or that of its settlers, piping it efficiently to Israelis, but avoiding Palestinian villages. Many poor Palestinian families spend up to 40% of their meagre income on trucked-in, high-priced water.
In addition, the Israeli military routinely destroys Palestinians’ own water pipes and wells. And as a variation on the theme, the Israeli military uses skunk water to break up protests or as collective punishment. (some US police forces have imported the product).
In Gaza, the situation is even more dire, with 97% of its water unfit for human consumption, thanks in great part to Israeli restrictions on import of supplies needed for wastewater treatment.
Israeli forces sprayed skunk water on children, homes and streets in the Qitoun neighbourhood of Hebron on two school days in the first week of November, 2015. (www.cptpalestine.com)
Elephants in the healthcare plan
“The [healthcare] program will provide new resources and incentives to transform the Palestinian healthcare sector and ensure the Palestinian people have access to the care they need within the West Bank and Gaza. This program will rapidly increase the capacity of Palestinian hospitals by ensuring that they have the supplies, medicines, vaccines, and equipment to provide top-quality care and protect against health emergencies.”
Once again, the Kushner Plan insinuates that Palestinians lack proper health care because they lack enlightenment or competence.
These are some of the factors that have caused an infant mortality rate in the Palestinian territories of 18.8 per 1,000 births (in Israel mortality is 3.7/1,000), and an average life expectancy for Palestinians of 74 (vs. 83 for Israelis).
Elephants in the sports and athletics plan
“[S]ports and athletics can help Palestinian youth foster new ties…and Palestinian teams can be a source of entertainment and pride for all Palestinians. This project will expand options for competitive, healthy activities for Palestinians through the construction of public athletic facilities in the West Bank and Gaza. This project seeks to inspire the next generation of Palestinian athletes dreaming to be on, and training for, future Palestinian teams competing on the world stage.”
Sports and competition are already in the hearts of Palestinians – they don’t need Jared Kushner to inspire them. What they do need is an end to the occupation that denies them permits to participate in events, holds them back from competing in the Olympics, and maims their bodies. Even children playing soccer on the beach are unsafe under Israeli oppression.
The Palestine Amputee Football Association, with multiple teams in Gaza, aims to play at international level. Gaza is home to a disproportionate number of amputees, many of whom lost their limbs because Gaza’s medical facilities are strained and patients are often denied permits to leave Gaza for further treatment. (cdni.rt.com)
Elephants in the transportation plan
“[Palestinians face] transportation challenges. The lack of ports has raised the costs of Palestinian economic activity. Though the State of Palestine will include Gaza, security challenges make the building of a port in Gaza problematic for the foreseeable future.”
This notion is illegal according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Gaza has 25 miles of shoreline, but the Israeli-American coalition would forbid Palestinians from building a port. This is not how self-determination and sovereignty work. The Plan would essentially enforce the devastating, 13-year-old, illegal blockade, and license the now 53-year de facto occupation, as Israel would control all Palestinian imports and exports.
Conclusion
“Generations of Palestinians have lived without knowing peace, and the West Bank and Gaza have fallen into a protracted crisis.”
Did Palestinian bad luck cause them to “fall” into a “protracted crisis”? No, Palestinians have had a protracted crisis forced upon them – by Israel. They have resisted in every way they know how, but to no avail.
Reading the Kushner Plan, one would never know that the devastation, the desolation within Palestinian society was created by Israel. In 181 pages and a map, there is no acknowledgement that the Zionist project brought great injustice to generations of Palestinians.
“Yet the Palestinian story will not end here. The Palestinian people continue their historic endeavor to build a better future for their children.”
Correct: Palestinians have endeavored for generations to build a future that includes justice, freedom, and equality – and they have no intention of giving up.
“If implemented, Peace to Prosperity will empower the Palestinian people to build the society that they have aspired to establish for generations. “
Incorrect: Palestinians don’t need a plan imposed on them by Western businessmen – they need justice, freedom, and equality, which Israel has steadfastly withheld.
“Ultimately, however, the power to unlock it lies in the hands of the Palestinian people. Only through peace can the Palestinians achieve prosperity.”
A better statement might be, “Only through justice can there be peace and prosperity. Israel and the US have the power to bring justice.”
“While the vision is ambitious, it is achievable. The future of the Palestinians is one of huge promise and potential. The Palestinian story does not end here. Their story is just being written.”
The story is just being written…by a partisan, privileged group that has nothing but disdain for the Palestinian people. They promise no peace, only more elephants.
The climate change movement has long warned that, as global temperatures rise, we run the risk of releasing vast reserves of trapped methane into the atmosphere and bringing about the end of days. New research says: probably not.
Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York studied methane emissions from a period in Earth’s history which bears many similarities to our current climate, examining ice cores taken from the last period of deglaciation some 8,000 to 15,000 years ago.
By closely examining air samples extracted from these frozen ice cores, the researchers found that even if the methane in these vast stores is released, it won’t actually reach our atmosphere.
“Our data shows we don’t need to be as concerned about large methane releases from large carbon reservoirs in response to future warming,” said Vasily Petrenko, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Rochester. “We should be more concerned about methane released from human activities.”
When carbon-based life (plants and animals) decays, the remains freeze and the carbon contained within becomes trapped in the permafrost seen across regions including vast swathes of Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada.
Later, when the water in this permafrost melts, the soil becomes waterlogged and creates the ideal breeding ground for microbes that consume the newly-thawed carbon and produce methane.
Meanwhile, in the oceans, methane hydrates – formed under immense pressures at low temperatures – are found in sediments on the ocean floor along the subaquatic borders of the continents. If ocean temperatures rise, the current theory goes, these hydrates will destabilize and release the methane gas into the atmosphere, wreaking havoc around the globe.
The team took ice core samples from the Earth’s past to see just how much methane from these ancient deposits is actually released during periods of warming, and found that the actual amount of emissions from ancient carbon reservoirs was quite small.
“The likelihood of these old carbon reservoirs destabilizing and creating a large positive warming feedback in the present day is also low,” said Michael Dionysus, a graduate student involved in the research.
Instead, the researchers argue that numerous natural ‘buffers’ actually prevent the majority of the carbon from reaching the atmosphere.
In the case of methane hydrates, most of the greenhouse gas is dissolved and oxidized by microbes in the oceans long before it makes it to the surface. The same goes for deeper deposits of methane in permafrost, which the researchers believe are consumed by bacteria in the soil and turned into carbon dioxide.
Almost from the beginning of the US-supported regime-change project in Syria, US policymakers have incorporated several kinds of planning for what is called “transitional justice” into their pursuit of the project. Transitional justice (TJ) is a field that came into great vogue in the mid-1990s, after two key developments in the post-Soviet world: (1) the UN Security Council’s creation of a special International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and (2) the agreement of the African National Congress in South Africa to negotiate an end to the Apartheid system– but with the proviso that the most heinous of the rights violators of the Apartheid era all ‘fess up to all their actions in a specially created Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); and if those confessions were deemed full and heartfelt, then the perpetrators could escape prosecution for their actions.
From the early 1990s, these two approaches to TJ were in tension with each other; and that tension has lain at the heart of the rapidly burgeoning field of TJ projects ever since.
For its part, the prosecutorial/criminal-justice approach claimed descent from, crucially, the two US-dominated international courts established immediately after WW-II, in Nuremberg, and Tokyo. (The above photo is of Herman Goering on the stand, in Nuremberg.) The creation of ICTY was followed, two years later, by the Security Council’s creation of a parallel special court for Rwanda; and meantime, a broad movement emerged to press for the establishment by treaty among nations of a permanent “International Criminal Court” (ICC) which could hold accountable perpetrators of the worst forms of atrocities– described as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide– in a criminal proceeding. In 1998, 120 governments adopted the “Rome Treaty” that established and set the rules for this court. In 2002, the requisite 60 countries had ratified the Rome Treaty and the ICC came into existence, headquartered in The Hague.
I have reflected at length in many earlier writings (including this 2006 book and these earlier articles: 1, 2) on some of the shortcomings of the ICC and the criminal-justice approach it adopts to dealing with the aftermath of atrocities. Suffice it here to note the following:
The United States is not a member of the ICC; but all the presidents since 2002 have on occasion sought to use the investigative, international arrest, and prosecutorial powers of the ICC, or to threaten their use, against political figures around the world they are opposed to.
The whole prosecutions movement since the creation of ICTY has claimed descent (and therefore a strong degree of legitimacy) from the whole Nuremberg/Tokyo Trials legacy. But all the “modern” international courts have omitted from their actual charge-sheets one of the key acts– perhaps the key act– prosecuted at Nuremberg and Tokyo: the crime of aggression, that is, the act of launching an aggressive war. The Rome Treaty listed the crime of aggression as potentially on the ICC’s docket, but its signatories have failed to reach agreement on how to define it and thus it has not in practice been chargeable.
In March 2003, eight months after the ICC formally came into existence, the United States launched a massive, quite unjustified (and militarily successful) war of regime change in Iraq– a war that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later admitted lacked any legitimacy.
One of the early acts of the “Coalition Provisional Authority” through which the US military ruled Iraq after the invasion was to establish a special tribunal to try former president Saddam Hussein and his top associates. After the CPA set up an Iraqi government (though still under its own control), this government adopted the trial plan, renaming the body the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal. Saddam was captured by US soldiers in late 2003 and sent for trial by the SICT; in November 2006, it sentenced him to death. He was held in a prison inside the US military’s “Camp Justice.” On December 30, 2006 he was taken to a scaffold earlier than the Americans had planned by a group that included SICT officials and members of Shiite militias. There, he was hanged to the jubilation of many of the witnesses, who also circulated cellphone videos of the event. Saddam’s very unseemly execution capped off a trial that had been marred throughout by grave irregularities.
This political background should be borne in mind when considering the legitimacy (or even, the utility) of any plans to use prosecutorial TJ mechanisms in connection with US-led regime-change projects in the present era– in Syria, Venezuela, or anywhere else.
In June 2019, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton published a broad and detailed description in The Grayzone of the work of several organizations that have as their mission the collection of evidence of war crimes and other atrocities committed in Syria and to some extent also Iraq, and the compilation of this evidence into forms that can help (or even spur) the prosecution of alleged perpetrators by international courts.
Most of these organizations are funded by Western governments. Most were also, like the Syrian Network for Human Rights, founded at, or shortly after, the time that Secretary of State Hillary of Clinton and Pres. Barack Obama committed Washington to full support of the regime-change project in Syria. Other such organizations include:
the “Commission for International Justice and Accountability”, an organization founded by an enterprising Canadian investigator called Bill Wiley, that has received funding from Canada, the EU, numerous European countries, and the United States. CIJA got a massive boost in visibility in the United States after the New Yorker published a serious of materials about it written by Ben Taub. In this one, Taub breathlessly described how, “At an undisclosed location in Western Europe, a group called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is gathering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government… “
The Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC), which states explicitly on its website that it was founded in 2012 by the “Group of Friends of the Syrian People”– that is, the coalition of governments united in their project to overthrow the Syruian government. On its website, SJAC states that it was founded in The Hague and moved in 2016 to Washington DC, where it “is currently registered as a nonprofit corporation.” However, no organization of its name comes up in standard searches of nonprofits, while SJAC is currently listed as a project of the old cold-war organization, IREX.
Chart from p.50 of the Day After Project’s report
During their early years in existence, these organizations had as their goal the collection, preservation, and organization of materials that could, after the opposition’s overthrow of the government, serve in a war-crimes court as evidence of the organization by Syrian government officials of broad patterns of gross abuse.
The work of these documentation organizations was also inspired by “The Day After Project”, a project the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace launched in late 2011 to plan for what decisionmakers in Washington all confidently expected would be the imminent fall of the Assad government. The Day After Project’s final report (PDF) was launched in August 2012, ostensibly by the all-Syrian group of 45 individuals who co-authored it. It contained a lengthy section on “Transitional Justice”, complete with a complex organogram showing how all the proposed parts of this project should be managed.
That was still the heyday of the thinking in official Washington that “Assad will fall any day now!” Washington– like Paris, Ankara, Doha, and other anti-Assad capitals– was full of very busy, Ahmad Chalabi-style Syrian exiles (often being handsomely paid by their Qatari, Saudi, or Emirati backers) who had managed to persuade themselves and numerous “locals” in those Western countries that any day now they would be riding into Damascus to take over the whole Syrian government. Well, in March 2003, Ahmad Chalabi did at least manage to get back to Baghdad in the wake of the US invasion of the country– though once he arrived, it was patently clear he had never enjoyed anything like the degree of popular backing within Iraqi society that he had long claimed to have. Regarding Syria, the earnest bands of exiles who were making detailed plans for their own imminent return “home” never even made it. They were unable to persuade a US government and public that had already been badly duped once, back in 2003, that the claimed “sins” of the Syrian government were bad enough to warrant a full-scale U.S. invasion– especially one that this time around (unlike in 2003) threatened to trigger a serious global showdown with a now more confident and capable Russia.
Yes, under Obama and Clinton, Washington did give the anti-Assad fighters some serious shipments of arms, along with strong political backing; and they and the Israelis did from time to time launch one-off strikes against Syrian military bases. But Obama and Clinton never signed off on a full-throated military campaign against Assad; and the anti-Assad rebels proved quite incapable of actually persuading enough Syrians to come over to their side, to win. The sides settled into a very lengthy and draining stalemate, during which the government side slowly proved able– with the help from international allies on whom it was quite legitimately able to call– to retake parts of Syria that had earlier been taken over by the foreign-armed (and increasingly jihadi-controlled) rebels.
Today, nine years into the conflict in Syria, there is no hope at all of the opposition seizing Damascus. And within the anti-Assad camp itself, extremist jihadis affiliated with either ISIS or Al-Qaeda long ago took over control, snuffing out the hopes of the Washington establishment that “moderate rebels” of the kind now firmly ensconced in Western think-tanks can ever become a significant force inside Syria. All the plans that those “moderate rebels” had made for the imminent establishment of an anti-Assad “special war-crimes court” like the one that earlier tried Saddam Hussein, or for other mechanisms of post-victory “transitional justice”, have to them a quality that is either robotic or slightly other-worldly.
Last week I went to the launch at a Qatari-funded think-tank called the Arab Center of Washington of a book called Accountability in Syria: Achieving Transitional Justice in a Postconflict Society. I guess the Qatari funding has been running a bit low, because there were no free copies of the book being handed out, and only one sample copy that attendees could take a glance at. It costs $90. Rush right over to the link above to buy your copy!
The three panelists were: the book’s editor, Radwan Ziadeh, a longtime regime-change advocate whose only listed professional achievement is his longtime gig as a “Senior Fellow” at the Arab Center; Mai el-Saadany, a US-trained Syrian-American lawyer who now works at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy; and Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, who until recently was Government Relations Director and Senior Political Adviser for the Syrian American Council, one of Washington DC’s principal regime-change organizations. Ghanem, who still has a (presumably nicely funded) affiliation with the UAE-funded Atlantic Council, is now doing a Master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia.
At one level, it was kind of a sad event. When Ziadeh started talking, he recounted that work on the book had started back in 2015– at a time when it may have been possible for regime-change advocates still to imagine that one day soon, just possibly, they could seize power in Damascus. (Hence, the reference in the book’s sub-title to a “Postconflict society.”) Poignantly, he spoke about how back then, “Aleppo”–actually, just that small portion of East Aleppo that the opposition still controlled– was becoming a center of evacuation, and how Ma’aret al-Numaan, in the opposition fighters’ Idlib redoubt, was a center of evacuation today.
In both instances, as the government regained control of terrain previously held by the jihadi extremists, the government allowed the opposition fighters and any civilians who chose to leave, to do so, and indeed, facilitated their departure. This is in notable contrast to the bloodthirsty actions the jihadi oppositionists have always taken toward the residents and defenders of areas that they’ve overtaken. But the video footage of desperate civilians fleeing in advance of the Syrian army’s arrival always looks pretty heart-wrenching.
(The videos widely circulated in the west notably do not depict the civilians who stay in the areas being brought back under Syrian government control– or, the earlier presence and activities of any of the jihadi fighters, some of whom who are Syrian and many of whom are not, who had controlled these areas so brutally over the preceding few years.)
When Mai el-Saadany spoke she stated confidently that, “The time for justice is now… We can’t afford to wait until the conflict ends.” She said that both the International Criminal Court and the UN’s doctrine of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) had proven useless in protecting Syria’s people; but that even without those tools there were three “accountability tools” the Syrian oppositionists could use: Documentation; a couple of different UN inquiry/documentation mechanisms; and prosecutions outside Syria, such as the one brought against two former Syrian officials by a court in Germany, last October.
When she talked about documentation, el-Saadany singled out for special praise the efforts of a group called Bellingcat–and of The New York Times.
For his part, Ghanem focused on the contribution he had made to the Accountability in Syria book, in which he looked at what he described as the “sectarian cleansing” that he saw the Syrian government as undertaking in formerly opposition-held areas over which it regained control. He accused “the Assad regime” of being dominated by Alawites and of engaging in “sectarian cleansing or demographic engineering” against “communities” in these areas, though he did not name these “communities.” He said he had been very proud to have gotten reference to this phenomenon included in the “Caesar Act”— a US sanctions measure against Syria that was signed into law in late December.
The most interesting part of this sad gathering came toward the end ( at 1h24m on the video.) A questioner had asked how the panelists thought that the kinds of “accountability”mechanisms they favored could be applied to other perpetrators of atrocities in Syria, “such as in the Turkish-controlled areas, or the SDF”, in addition to the government. At that point, Ziadeh almost completely lost it. The other two panelists, much better qualified and better prepared professionals than he, had both expressed their support for the idea that all accused perpetrators of significant atrocities, whatever their political alignment, should be subjected to the same accountability measures. (This is, after all, a key tenet to the whole field of transitional justice… Heck, in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even some of the excesses of the ANC came under the same kind of scrutiny as the gross tortures of the Apartheid regime.)
Ziadeh argued that only the “Assad regime” should be addressed by any accountability mechanisms. “The Syrian government– it became not a rogue state, but deep sectarian militias, that has no regard for the life of any Syrian” he said. “It’s impossible to think of having a political settlement with this kind of militia in control of Syria… What’s the end answer? No Syrians nor anyone else have any answer for that… There is nothing to talk about! There is nothing to leverage or negotiate about. I am very pessimistic. There is no soon, any hope of a political settlement of the conflict.”
The other two panelists hewed more closely to the standard TJ script. Both argued that, while there is no “false equivalence” between the violations committed by the “Assad regime” and those committed by other parties, still, all violators should be held accountable.
Ghanem had earlier argued that accountability-seeking mechanisms could be used as “leverage” for the Syrian opposition in a future negotiated settlement. The relationship between pressure for “accountability” and momentum toward negotiations is a complex–and, as I demonstrated in this recent article, “Syria: Peacemaking or prosecutions?”, often an inverse–one. (When I wrote that piece, in early November, the prospects for reaching a negotiated political transition in Syria seemed greater than they do today.)
One misapprehension into which all three of the panelists at the Arab Center event seemed to have fallen was to conflate the idea of “accountability” almost completely with the path of criminal prosecutions. But as anyone who has studied the TJ field knows, there are numerous other mechanisms that have been used to enact accountability other than Western-style courts of law. South Africa’s TRC was one such mechanism. It was widely (and correctly) lauded for helping enable South Africans to make the transition from a deepseated system of colonial expropriation and Apartheid to a much more inclusive system that enabled the “White” colonists to remain in the country on a basis of political equality with its indigenes– and to achieve this without triggering a massive new race war between those two sides (though the transition was accompanied by very lethal fighting between the two major Black African political forces.)
The main premise of the TRC was that as part of the transition to political equality, it was necessary to draw a line under the violence of the past and to offer a full amnesty from prosecutions for all the perpetrators of that violence provided they (a) had stopped committing it; and (b) provided a full description of the violent acts they had committed, such as could help bring a degree of legal and emotional “closure” to survivors of the violence and others bereaved by it or otherwise affected by it.
The exact terms of the TRC’s “deal” with former perpetrators were painstakingly negotiated among the parties to the transition– principally, the Apartheid era’s ruling National Party and the anti-Apartheid African National Congress (ANC). The Apartheid government possessed overwhelming military and socioeconomic force throughout the whole of South Africa; and it would never have agreed to end Apartheid and transition to a one-person-one-vote system in South Africa if its leaders had not been offered an amnesty. If there had been no TRC, the whole of Southern Africa might still be riven with terrible conflicts, to this day. The “offer” of amnesty was backed up by the existence in the country of a fairly well-functioning judicial system. But the main factor motivating perpetrators to come forward and participate in the often riveting public hearings that the TRC held all around the country was the desire most of them felt to allow their families, their communities, and their country to move forward.
In my 2006 book, Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations after Genocide and WarCrimes, I looked at the effectiveness of South Africa’s TRC and compared it with the very different post-conflict mechanisms that, in that same period of 1992-94, had been adopted by Mozambique and post-genocide Rwanda. Those two other cases effectively “bracketed” what the South Africans agreed to do. In Rwanda, the post-genocide government was heavily inclined towards prosecutorialism, supporting both the creation and work of a UN-established International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the use of a very broad campaign of national-level prosecutions of suspected genocidaires. In Mozambique, by contrast, an extremely lengthy and ugly civil war was brought to an end in 1992 when the two main parties to it, the ruling Frelimo movement and the opposition Renamo, were brought together in a negotiation conducted by a Vatican-sponsored peace group and agreed to end their combat on the basis of a blanket amnesty for previous perpetrators of violence from both sides. The United Nations then stepped in with a broad program for demilitarization, demobilization, and reintegration into their home societies of the former fighters from both sides (DDR).
Intense inter-group conflict of any kind of course inflicts massive damage on a country’s economy, including its most basic infrastructure, so societies emerging from such conflicts have numerous, extremely pressing human and economic needs. In this context, the relative costs– and therefore, also opportunity costs– of the TJ mechanisms used are definitely a factor. I used public documentation to calculate the costs of these mechanisms as follows (p.209):
Each case completed at the ICTR : $42,300,000
Each amnesty application at the TRC: $4,290
Each case in Rwanda’s planned “local-style” gacaca courts (projected): $581
Mozambique: each former fighter demobilized/reintegrated: $1,075
South Africa: each former fighter demobilized/reintegrated: $1,066.
In that concluding chapter of the book, I presented (pp.212-13) a critique of the degree of “accountability” that advocates of prosecutorialism judge that their favored approach provides, noting that the kind of personal “accountability” required of perpetrators by a court of law is very thin indeed compared with, for example, that required in TRC or other similar mechanisms.
I also presented (p.241) a list of nine “meta-tasks” that, based on my previous analysis in the book– and on my own experience of having lived and worked in an area wracked by civil conflict, during the first six years of Lebanon’s civil war– I concluded that societies recovering from grave inter-group conflict need to undertake. It runs as follows:
Top rank (all of equal urgency):
Establish rigorous mechanisms to guard against any relapse back into conflict and violence.
Actively promote reconciliation across all inter-group divisions.
Build an equality-based domestic democratic order that allows for nonviolent resolution of internal differences and respects and enforces human rights.
Restore the moral systems appropriate to an era of peace.
Reintegrate former combatants from all the previously fighting parties into the new society.
Start restoring and upgrading the community’s physical and institutional infrastructure.
Start righting the distributional injustices of the past.
Second rank (of somewhat less urgency):
Promote psychological healing for all those affected by the violence and the atrocities, restoring dignity to them. (If the top-rank tasks are all addressed, those moves will anyway do much to achieve this; but it will probably need continuing attention.)
Establish such records of the facts as are needed to meet victims’ needs (death certificates; identification of the burial sites; etc) and to start to build a record for history.
In the real world, decisions on what to do with individuals accused of having committed grave infractions nearly always get made in the context of a negotiation over the nature and terms of a major societal transition to a new political order. “String ’em all up on the lamp-posts!” or “Line ’em all up and shoot them!” are versions of one notable, non-negotiated type of such decision– and a type that notably doesn’t augur well for the political tone of the new order. In Syria, the way that ISIS or the bunch of Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadis who currently control Idlib treat accused government supporters who fall under their sway definitely falls into this category.
Negotiating an end to a conflict– or acting with restraint in the event no negotiation proves possible– nearly always augurs a better outcome. At the end of WW-II, in the Asian theater, the Japanese Emperor was able to negotiate surrender terms on fairly favorable terms that ensured his dynasty’s continuation in office (and his own exculpation from responsibility for any of Japan’s preceding war crimes)–but in return for allowing the Americans and their allies to set up an international criminal tribunal to try certain Japanese decisionmakers, and numerous other concessions. In Germany, there was no negotiated end to the fighting; and the Russian, French, and British leaders (whose peoples had suffered most gravely from the Nazis’ actions) were all baying for extreme retribution. But the US public was relatively distant from the battlefield. That allowed Secretary of War Henry Stimson and President Harry Truman– both of whom were also aware of the disastrous sequelae of the punitive approach the victorious Allies had imposed on post-WW-I Germany– to argue for, and implement, the much more restrained approach to post-war justice that the Nuremberg trials represented.
Recent developments in Syria make the prospect of a negotiated end to the country’s lengthy civil war seem more remote today than they did a few months ago. The country’s 22 million people have been held in the vice of this conflict, and victim to the wiles of numerous outside actors and interveners much more than to those of any domestic actors, for nine long years. (This was also, interestingly, the case in Mozambique. Much of the terrible violence that Renamo used in its campaign to control as many Mozambicans as possible as a way of pressuring and overthrowing the Frelimo government had been organized and underwritten by South Africa’s Apartheid. The intra-Mozambican negotiations that brought an end to the war only made progress after a weakened South Africa started to withdraw that support.)
Throughout the first six years of Syria’s civil war, the determination of the United States and several allied governments (Turkey, Qatar, the Saudis, the UAE) to accept nothing less than the complete overthrow of the Assad government stymied all attempts by the United Nations and others to attain a negotiated end to the war. After Pres. Trump assumed office, he was less devoted to total “regime change” than Pres. Obama had been… and since late 2018 or so, the UAE has pulled back from its focus on regime change. Turkey also, from the Astana Agreement of September 2018 on, was clearly exploring some kind of “regional super-powers mega-deal” with Russia and Iran, that could help ramp down, or even bring to a negotiated end, Syria’s civil war.
More recently, though, Trump has pulled back from his fondness for a pullback from Syria. And perhaps he has started to see US military involvement in Syria as helping to serve his broader campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran? Turkey has also pulled back from its commitment to Astana and is currently squaring up for a possibly broader military clash with Syrian government forces?
So the prospect for a negotiated settlement to the Syrian civil war has receded some. But it has certainly not disappeared completely. If nine years of slogging fighting– accompanied by terrible, unspeakable atrocities being suffered by people from all “sides”–has not succeeded in bringing about a “decisive” victory for any side, then surely an end to this war that is negotiated in some way is the only reasonable path, and the only path that can draw a line under the suffering of the past nine years? A viable negotiating forum has already been established by the United Nations. Let us hope it can complete its work as soon as possible, and that as part of this process the negotiators can find a list of mutually acceptable ways to deal with the whole range of transitional justice issues. And these, as noted above, go considerably further than the kinds of war-crimes trials so beloved by the Western media.
In recent months, the US Air Force has issued calls for ethnic Russians to provide DNA samples for a mysterious “research” program. US Air Force Captain Beau Downey claimed that the samples were required for “locomotor studies to identify various biomarkers associated with trauma.”.
“The request (by the research centre) did not specify where the samples should be received from, but to continue the study, similar samples were required. Since the supplier originally provided samples from Russia, suitable for the initial group of diseases, the control group of the samples should also be of Russian origin.
The goal is the integrity of the study, not the origin (of the samples)”
However, given the fact that the US military has attempted to obtain Russian DNA samples without the permission of the Russian government and furthermore, given the low state of Russia-US relations, many are questioning whether the sought samples are intended to be part of a biogenetic weapons program.
Biogenetic weapons are defined as biological agents designed to inflict debilitating diseases or other internal bodily afflictions on a specific group of people, based on a shared genetic code.
While it is unclear if such a weapon has ever successfully been developed, the US and Israel have in the past, attempted to create such a devastating bio-genetic weapon.
In the late 1990s, it was reported that Israel had successfully created a biogenetic weapon which was specifically designed to target Arabs and only Arabs.
“According to a Jerusalem Post report quoting the London-based Foreign Report, Israel has successfully developed what is being called an ‘ethnic-bullet’, which will target only Arabs. The report quotes an ‘unconfirmed report’ which originated in South Africa, which details how Israeli scientists have made a biological weapon tailor made to attack targets with the Arab genetic system. Long-term studies of Iraqi Jews was credited with providing the genetic code needed to target Arabs. According to the report, the ethnic-bullet program was originally developed for use in Apartheid South Africa for use against blacks. Scientist in both countries worked together towards the development of the Israeli program. Israeli officials declined to confirm the existence of the ‘ethnic bullet,’ but one told the newsletter: ‘We have a basket full of strategic surprises which we will not hesitate to use if we feel that the State of Israel is under serious threat”.
The popular US based technology magazine Wired, also ran a story on Israel’s biogenetic weapons program in 1998. The story reads,
“ISRAEL IS REPORTEDLY developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, according to a report in London’s Sunday Times. The report, citing Israeli military and western intelligence sources, says that scientists are trying to identify distinctive genes carried by Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.
The ‘ethno-bomb’ is reportedly Israel’s response to the threat that Iraq may be just weeks away from completing its own biological weapons.
The ‘ethno-bomb’ program is based at Israel’s Nes Tziyona research facility. Scientists are trying to use viruses and bacteria to alter DNA inside living cells and attack only those cells bearing Arabic genes.
The task is very complex because both Arabs and Jews are Semitic peoples. But according to the report, the Israelis have succeeded in isolating particular characteristics of certain Arabs, ‘particularly the Iraqi people.’
Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli parliament, denounced the research in the Sunday Times. ‘Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied.’
Last month, Foreign Report claimed that Israel was following in the ignominious footsteps of apartheid-era research, in their supposed efforts to develop an “ethnic bullet.”
A year later, a report from Reuters citing British scientists, confirmed that such a biogenetic weapon was possible given the advanced state of genetic mapping, although the report neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an Arab killing Israel biogenetic weapon.
Russians are therefore clearly worried that the US military intends to collect samples of Russian DNA in order to engineer a biogenetic weapon similar to the ones Israel is said to have created in the 1990s. The fact that genetic mapping technology has advanced even further since the 1990s, makes this fear all the more magnified.
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union feared that the AIDS virus was created in a US military bio-weapons lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. While the story was dismissed by the US as geo-political propaganda, many black Africans and African-Americans continue to believe that the CIA had a hand in either creating or weaponising the AIDS virus. To this day, AIDS continues to disproportionately effect black men across the globe.
The notion that AIDS was part of a CIA experiment aimed at population modification, was spoken of widely in the 1980s. The American musician Frank Zappa even wrote a musical about the alleged phenomenon called ‘Thing Fish’.
In the year 2000, the neocon think-thank that would provide the George W. Bush administration with many important advisers, the Project for the New American Century published a report which spoke of the desirability of weaponising genetically mapped biological agents for use in 21st century warfare. This was one of the factors leading to Russia banning the export of domestic DNA samples in 2007, as was reported in Russian mainstream media at the time.
While exporting Russian DNA samples remains illegal in most circumstances, the US military is still keen on flaunting Russian law.
President Vladimir Putin has responded to the latest attempts by the US military to collect Russian DNA samples in the following way,
“Do you know that biological material is being collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical regions of the Russian Federation? The question is – why is it being done? It’s being done purposefully and professionally. We are a kind of object of great interest.
Let them do what they want, and we must do what we must”.
The latter part of Putin’s statement derives from the Melian Dialogue of the Athenian historian Thucydides. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts Athenian envoys trying to convince the small island of Melos to surrender its sovereignty or be destroyed. The dialogue includes a famous line which is usually translated as “The strong do as they will and the weak submit as they must”.
Putin therefore is suggesting that no matter what the US has in store for Russia, the leadership of the Russian Federation is able and willing to take defensive matters in any scenario. The seemingly cautious statement from Putin, is actually incredibly forceful when read carefully.
Based on past experiences, the US is not operating under innocent intentions and therefore, Russia should not take any chances.
Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement Ziad al-Nakhala speaks during a televised speech broadcast live from Gaza City on February 19, 2020.
The secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement says the Tel Aviv regime’s plan to return to “the policy of assassinations” against distinguished figures of Palestinian resistance groups in the Gaza Strip cannot terrorize Palestinians to acknowledge US President Donald Trump’s so-called deal of the century on the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The policy of assassinations will not make the Palestinian people give up their rights, nor will it manage to break up the resistance front. We will respond to any assassination in time, and any act of aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip will be met with resistance that the occupation [Israel] has not experienced before,” Ziad al-Nakhala said in a televised speech broadcast live from Gaza City on Wednesday afternoon.
He added, “The threats of enemy leaders will not intimidate us, nor will make us accept what they have crafted and called the deal of the century. They will not make us relinquish our historical rights in Palestinian lands and al-Quds (Jerusalem).”
‘Oslo Accords bore nothing for Palestinians other than humiliation’
Nakhala also censured the Oslo Accords signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli regime more than two decades ago, stating that the set of agreements brought nothing for Palestinians other than humiliation, shame and delusions.
“We presented our history as well as our children, and sacrificed them on the altar of delusion of peace. We reaped nothing other than despair that was represented by the deal of the century,” he pointed out.
The Oslo Accords — consisting of Oslo I and Oslo II accords — were signed by the late chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, respectively in Washington DC, in 1993 and Egypt in 1995. The purported goal of the accords was to achieve peace based on the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and to realize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
The senior Palestinian official also lambasted some Arab and Muslim countries for supporting and acknowledging Trump’s proposal in the eye of the international community.
Nakhala then called upon all Palestinian resistance movements to join forces, and tirelessly protect Jerusalem al-Quds and the Palestinian cause from liquidation.
‘The US decision to declare al-Quds as the capital of Israel was not surprising, given that America is the sponsor of the Zionist project ever since its inception (back in 1948). It is a full partner to this project, and is in fact spearheading the Western project in our region,” he underscored.
On January 28, Trump unveiled his so-called deal of the century, negotiated with Israel but without the Palestinians.
Palestinian leaders, who severed all ties with Washington in late 2017 after Trump controversially recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of the Israeli regime, immediately rejected the plan, with President Mahmoud Abbas saying it “belongs to the dustbin of history.”
Palestinian leaders say the deal is a colonial plan to unilaterally control historic Palestine in its entirety and remove Palestinians from their homeland, adding that it heavily favors Israel and would deny them a viable independent state.
This weekend 75 years ago, the German city of Dresden was razed to the ground by British and American aerial bombardment. At least 25,000 mainly civilians were destroyed in raid after raid by over 1,200 heavy bombers, indiscriminately dropping high explosives and incendiaries. It took seven years just to clear the rubble.
The destruction of Dresden, a world-famous cultural center of Baroque majesty, has been long dogged by controversy. Official British and American military accounts claim it was necessary to hasten the collapse of the Third Reich; with a reasoning that resonates with US claims for dropping the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Critics say, however, that the mass bombing of Dresden was immaterial in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany. It was a wanton act of terror – a war crime – carried out by the British and Americans. Critics point out that most of the industrial and military targets on the outskirts of the beautiful city were largely left untouched by the bombing. British wartime leader Winston Churchill is even said to have expressed misgivings about the morality of this and other indiscriminate bombing of German civilian centers.
Ardent advocates of the terror-bombing campaign said it would exhaust German morale. A classic case of ends justifying means, no matter how vile the means.
There were also claims at the time that the damage to Nazi communication and transport lines would aid the advancing Soviet Red Army.
But there is good reason to believe that the rationale for the obliteration of Dresden was for an altogether more sinister reason. It wasn’t so much an act of terror aimed at Nazi Germany, but rather a show of maniacal power to the Soviet Union.
A British Royal Air Force memo on the Dresden operation noted that it would “show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.” (See caption 17 in this linked photo essay.)
By mid-February 1945, the front lines of the Western and Eastern allied forces were such that the American and British ground troops had not yet entered Germany territory, while the Soviet Red Army had crossed the Oder River and were a mere 70 kilometers from Berlin, the seat of the Third Reich. Such was the keen advance of the Soviets that the Western allies were concerned that the Red Army might take all of German territory.
Rather than aiding Soviet forces from the mass bombing of Dresden, Leipzig and other cities in the German east, it seems plausible that, as the above British RAF memo indicates, the Western allies were intent on demonstrating a shockingly brutal, raw power to Moscow. Not just military power, but a will power to use any means necessary to defeat enemies.
There is a direct analogy here with the subsequent atomic bombing of Japan. At the Potsdam conference in July 1945 following the defeat of Nazi Germany and the carve-up of Berlin, giving the Western allies shared control of the German capital way beyond their final front lines, the American president Harry Truman relished the ability to drop a sinister hint to Josef Stalin about a newly acquired secret weapon – the A-bomb.
As with the earlier British and American bombing of Dresden and other German cities, there was arguably little military justification for dropping the atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Like Dresden, the military significance of those cities was dubious. The death of 200,000 civilians from the atomic inferno was not a military necessity for defeating imperial Japan, as Truman’s top generals MacArthur and Eisenhower were advising him against.
So if the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki was unnecessary from a military point of view to end the Pacific War, why was it done?
As with Dresden, the point was a monstrous display of terror by Western powers to let the Soviet Union know that nothing would be off-limits in the postwar geopolitical stand-off that was anticipated and which became the Cold War.
When the A-bombs were dropped on Japan, Stalin was said to have been frozen by reports of the awesome new destructive power. The Soviet Union was not to develop its A-bomb until 1949.
The terror unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems to have had the intended effect of halting Soviet Red Army advances that were being made into the Korean Peninsula and onwards to Japan. The American troop lines were relatively remote by comparison with their Soviet counterparts, yet after the A-bombing the US was catapulted to take over both Asian-Pacific territories in the postwar period. Not unlike the precocious territorial gains that were acquired by the Western allies in defeated Nazi Germany.
Thus the moral controversies about the British and American bombing of German and Japanese cities goes way beyond arguments about the right or wrong of mass murder for the supposed purpose of ending wars. That moral hazard is difficult enough. But even more fiendish is a bigger picture; one in which the cold, calculated use of terror and genocide is not about ending war, but rather to simply exert geopolitical power against a perceived rival in the postwar era. Terror for terror sake, evil for evil sake.
A final note: it has become fashionable to falsify the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany by claiming that the Red Army became an occupying tyranny in eastern Europe after the war’s end. Suffice to say that if the Soviets committed even a fraction of the crimes that were actually carried out by the Americans and British from their aerial bombing of civilians in both Germany and Japan, one would never hear the end of deafening Western condemnations against Moscow to this day, and for decades to come.
Trump claims Iran’s military is routed just as IRGC launched missiles strike American bases
RT | June 10, 2026
The Iranian military has been “completely defeated,” US President Donald Trump has claimed, warning Tehran it will “pay the price” for delaying a deal with Washington.
The warnings came after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced missile and drone strikes on American military facilities in several Arab countries in retaliation for recent US attacks. US Central Command said the operations inside Iran were carried out after an AH-64 Apache helicopter was lost near the Strait of Hormuz, an incident it blamed on Tehran.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that Iran “is all talk and no action,” adding that “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” … Full article
HEAT exposure could drive a dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden across the USA over the next 25 years, with researchers warning that climate change and population ageing may combine to reverse decades of progress in heart health.
Heat Exposure Threatens Future Heart Health A new modelling study estimated that heat-attributable CVD burden could more than triple by 2050 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, disproportionately affecting older adults and economically disadvantaged communities. … Full article
… Climate change and land use conversion have the potential to increase the frequency of encounters between snakes and humans. This situation arises due to changes in temperature and rainfall, the loss of natural habitats, and shifts in food sources, which drive snakes to move into areas closer to human activity.
Prof Mirza Dikari Kusrini, a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism, Faculty of Forestry and Environment (Fahutan) at IPB University, explained that climate change affects snakes’ behavior, distribution, and movement patterns. … Full article
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Elephants from the get-go
Last week I went to the 
In my 2006 book, 
Aletho News 