Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman based his 2006 warrant for the arrest of top Iranian officials in the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 on the claims of representatives of the armed Iranian opposition Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the full text of the document reveals.
The central piece of evidence cited in Nisman’s original 900-page arrest warrant against seven senior Iranian leaders is an alleged Aug. 14, 1993 meeting of top Iranian leaders, including both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then president Hashemi Rafsanjani, at which Nisman claims the official decision was made to go ahead with the planning of the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA).
But the document, recently available in English for the first time, shows that his only sources for the claim were representatives of the MEK or People’s Mujahideen of Iran. The MEK has an unsavoury history of terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Iran, as well as of serving as an Iraq-based mercenary army for Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq War.
The organisation was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups last year after a campaign by prominent former U.S. officials who had gotten large payments from pro-MEK groups and individuals to call for its “delisting”.
Nisman’s rambling and repetitious report cites statements by four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the political arm of the MEK, as the sources for the charge that Iran decided on the AMIA bombing in August 1993.
The primary source is Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the Security and Intelligence Committee of the NCRI. The report quotes Kouchaksaraee as testifying to an Argentine Oral Court in 2003, “The decision was made by the Supreme National Security Council at a meeting that was held on 14 August, 1993. This meeting lasted only two hours from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.”
Nisman also quotes Hadi Roshanravani, a member of the International Affairs Committee of the NCRI, who claimed to know the same exact starting time of the meeting – 4:30 pm – but gave the date as Aug. 12, 1993 rather than Aug. 14.
Roshanravani also claimed to know the precise agenda of the meeting. The NCRI official said that three subjects were discussed: “The progress and assessment of the Palestinian Council; the strategy of exporting fundamentalism throughout the world; and the future of Iraq.” Roshanravani said “the idea for an attack in Argentina” had been discussed “during the dialogue on the second point”.
The NCRI/MEK was claiming that the Rafsanjani government had decided on a terrorist bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina as part of a policy of “exporting fundamentalism throughout the world”.
But that MEK propaganda line about the Iranian regime was contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment at the time. In its National Intelligence Estimate 34-91 on Iranian foreign policy, completed on Oct. 17, 1991, U.S. intelligence concluded that Rafsanjani had been “gradually turning away from the revolutionary excesses of the past decade… toward more conventional behavior” since taking over as president in 1989.
Ali Reza Ahmadi and Hamid Reza Eshagi, identified as “defectors” who were affiliated with NCRI, offered further corroboration of the testimony by the leading NCRI officials. Ahmadi was said by Nisman to have worked as an Iranian foreign service officer from 1981 to 1985. Eshagi is not otherwise identified.
Nisman quotes Ahmadi and Eshagi, who made only joint statements, as saying, “It was during a meeting held at 4:30 pm in August 1993 that the Supreme National Security Council decided to carry out activities in Argentina.”
Nisman does not cite any non-MEK source as claiming such a meeting took place. He cites court testimony by Abolghassem Mesbahi, a “defector” who had not worked for the Iranian intelligence agency since 1985, according to his own account, but only to the effect that the Iranian government made the decision on AMIA sometime in 1993. Mesbahi offered no evidence to support the claim.
Nisman repeatedly cites the same four NCRI members to document the alleged participation of each of the seven senior Iranians for whom he requested arrest warrants. A review of the entire document shows that Kouchaksaraee is cited by Nisman 29 times, Roshanravani 16 times and Ahmadi and Eshagi 16 times, always together making the same statement for a total of 61 references to their testimony.
Nisman cited no evidence or reason to believe that any of the MEK members were in a position to have known about such a high-level Iranian meeting. Although MEK propaganda has long claimed access to secrets, their information has been at best from low-level functionaries in the regime.
In using the testimony of the most violent opponents of the Iranian regime to accuse the most senior Iranian officials of having decided on the AMIA terrorist bombing, Nisman sought to deny the obvious political aim of all MEK information output of building support in the United States and Europe for the overthrow of the Iranian regime.
“The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared.
In an effort to lend the group’s testimony credibility, Nisman described their statements as being made “with honesty and rigor in a manner that respects nuances and details while still maintaining a sense of the larger picture”.
The MEK witnesses, Nisman wrote, could be trusted as “completely truthful”.
The record of MEK officials over the years, however, has been one of putting out one communiqué after another that contained information about alleged covert Iranian work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, nearly all of which turned out to be false when they were investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The only significant exception to the MEK’s overall record of false information on the Iranian nuclear programme was its discovery of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility and its Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
But even in that case, the MEK official who announced the Natanz discovery, U.S. representative Alireza Jafarzadeh, incorrectly identified it as a “fuel fabrication facility” rather than as an enrichment facility. He also said it was near completion, although it was actually several months from having the equipment necessary to begin enrichment.
Contrary to the MEK claims that it got the information on Natanz from sources in the Iranian government, moreover, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported, a “senior IAEA official” told him in 2004 that Israeli intelligence had passed their satellite intelligence on Natanz to the MEK.
An adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the Shah, later told journalist Connie Bruck that the information about Natanz had come from “a friendly government”, which had provided it to both the Pahlavi organisation and the MEK.
Nisman has long been treated in pro-Israel, anti-Iran political circles as the authoritative source on the AMIA bombing case and the broader subject of Iran and terrorism. Last May, Nisman issued a new 500-page report accusing Iran of creating terrorist networks in the Western hemisphere that builds on his indictment of Iran for the 1994 bombing.
But Nisman’s readiness to base the crucial accusation against Iran in the AMIA case solely on MEK sources and his denial of their obvious unreliability highlights the fact that he has been playing a political role on behalf of certain powerful interests rather than uncovering the facts.
The general history of America’s internment of its own citizens during World War II has focused on the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them American-born, who were forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But few people know that Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt, which permitted the roundup of Japanese and their American-born children, also paved the way for the arrest of Germans and Italians who the FBI considered security risks and labeled as “enemy aliens.” Indeed the day before Roosevelt signed the order FBI agents had arrested 264 Italians, 1,296 Germans, and 2,209 on the East and West Coast. The hunt for perceived enemies was on.
Here are five surprising facts about the extent of FDR’s internment program:
Fact One: The arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national borders. Under provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the same act that allowed Presidents George W. Bush and President Obama to intern modern-day suspected terrorists, Roosevelt orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from thirteen Latin American countries — and locked them up around the United States, many in a secret government internment camp located in Crystal City, Texas, an isolated desert town located at the southern tip of Texas, only thirty miles from the Mexican border. His reason? Roosevelt feared security threats from Germans and Japanese in Latin America.
Fact Two: Incredibly, among those taken from Latin America included a small number of Jews who had fled persecution in Germany. In his book, Nazis and Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman documented 81 Jews in Latin America who were part of the roundup. One Jewish family — the Jacobis from Columbia – was interned in the camp in Crystal City.
Fact Three: The entire political and military establishment applied pressure on Roosevelt to pursue a vigorous internment policy. The only person close to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt who believed the case against immigrants was driven by wartime hysteria. “These people were not convicted of any crime but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental looking people,” she wrote of the evacuation order for the Japanese.
Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told Attorney General Francis Biddle to arrest Italians and Germans. “I don’t care so much about the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different: they may be dangerous.” In response, Biddle widened the net of suspicion.
Fact Four: One reason for the internment program was to create a pool of people of hostages to exchange for Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Pacific. FDR created a secret division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division, which negotiated numerous prisoner exchanges with Japan and Germany.
Fact Five: The Crystal City Internment Camp was at the center of those exchanges. Some former internees, who were children in the camp, refer to it as The Kidnap Camp. Thousands of internees in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for ostensibly more important Americans — diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries — behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
The first of four exchanges in Crystal City took place in June 1942 and the second on September 2, 1943. During those exchanges, more than 2000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were traded for Americans caught in Japan. In February 1944, 634 German immigrants and their children, were sent from Crystal City into Germany. On January 2, 1945, 428 more in Crystal City were traded into war.
The tableau of today’s headlines about government surveillance, internment and prisoner exchanges was written more than seventy years ago in Crystal City, Texas.
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Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City, is a former Nieman Fellow, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, and has written for the San Antonio Express-News, The New York Times, Slate, and other magazines. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr. For more information please visit http://www.janjarboerussell.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter
A colleague of mine in Cairo told me a story a few years ago about a massacre in the streets of Paris.
He was a news service reporter at the time of the violence in the French capital —Oct. 17, 1961—and saw tens of bodies of dead Algerians piled like cordwood in the center of the city in the wake of what would now be called a police riot.
But his superiors at the news agency stopped him from telling the full story then, and most of the world paid little attention to the thin news coverage that the massacre did receive. Even now, the events of that time are not widely known and many people, like myself, had never heard of them at all.
This year is an apt time to recall what happened, and not only because this is the 35th anniversary year of Algerian independence. The continuing civil war in Algeria and the growing violence and racism in France, as well as the appalling slaughters taking place elsewhere in the world, give it a disturbing currency.
Here’s what happened:
Unarmed Algerian Muslims demonstrating in central Paris against a discriminatory curfew were beaten, shot, garotted and even drowned by police and special troops. Thousands were rounded up and taken to detention centers around the city and the prefecture of police, where there were more beatings and killings.
How many died? No one seems to know for sure, even now. Probably around 200.
It seems astonishing today, from this perspective, that such a thing could happen in the middle of a major Western capital closely covered by the international media. This was not Kabul, Beijing, Hebron or some Bosnian backwater, after all, but the City of Light—Paris.
But the Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle was in trouble in October 1961. De Gaulle, who was primarily interested in establishing France’s pre-eminent position in Western Europe and the world, found himself presiding over domestic chaos. France was constantly disrupted by strikes and protests by farmers and workers, as well as by terrorism from opposing organizations: the Front de Libération Nationalè (FLN), representing the Algerian nationalist independence movement, and the Organisation Armée Secrete (OAS), a group of disaffected soldiers, politicians and others committed to keeping Algeria French. The OAS rightly perceived that de Gaulle was bound to free France from the burden of its last major colonial holding, so he could get on with the business of making France the economic and political power of his lofty ambition.
Eyewitness reports recounted stranglings by police.
But the vicious war in Algeria, marked by bloody atrocities committed on all sides, had been grinding on for nearly seven years. Terrorist attacks in Paris and other French cities had claimed dozens of lives of police, provoking what Interior Minister Roger Frey called la juste colère—the just anger—of the police. They vented that anger on the evening of Oct. 17. About 30,000 Muslims—from among some 200,000 Algerians, ostensibly French citizens, living in and around Paris—descended upon the boulevards of central Paris from three different directions. The demonstration of men, women and children was called by the FLN to protest an 8:30 p.m. curfew imposed only on Muslims.
The demonstrators were met by about 7,000 police and members of special Republican Security companies, armed with heavy truncheons or guns. They let loose on the demonstrators in, among other places, Saint Germain-des-Prés, the Opéra, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysée, around the Place de l’ètoile and, on the edges of the city, at the Rond Point de la Defense beyond Nèuilly.
My news agency friend counted at least 30 corpses of demonstrators in several piles outside his office near the city center, into which he had pulled some Algerians to get them away from rampaging police. Another correspondent reported seeing police backing unarmed Algerians into corners on side streets and clubbing them at will. Later eyewitness reports recounted stranglings by police and the drowning of Algerians in the Seine, from which bodies would be recovered downstream for weeks to come.
Thousands of Algerians were rounded up and brought to detention centers, where the violence against them continued. “Drowning by Bullets,” a British TV documentary aired about four years ago, alleges that scores of Algerians were murdered in full view of police brass in the courtyard of the central police headquarters. The prefect of police was Maurice Papon, who recently was still denying charges that he was responsible for deporting French Jews to Auschwitz during World War II while he was part of the Vichy government.
The Official Version
The full horror of this inglorious 1961 episode in French history was largely covered up at the time. Though harrowing personal accounts did eventually percolate to the surface in the French press, the newspapers—enfeebled by years of government censorship and control—for the most part stuck with official figures that only two and, later, five people had died in the demonstration. Government-owned French TV showed Algerians being shipped out of France after the demonstration, but showed none of the police violence.
Journalists had been warned away from coverage of the demonstration and were not allowed near the detention centers.
With few exceptions, the British and American press stuck to the official story, including suggestions that the Algerians had opened fire first. Even the newsman who saw the piles of Algerian corpses was not allowed to report the story; his bosses ordered that the bureau reports stick to the official figures.
Both French and foreign journalists in Paris seemed tacitly to agree that nothing should be done to further destabilize the French government or endanger de Gaulle, who was widely seen as the last, best hope for navigating France out of its troubles.
The story quickly died, drowned out by fresher alarums and excursions in Europe and elsewhere. And, of course, in the next year, Algeria would have its independence.
Jacques Vergès, the controversial French lawyer who represented the FLN during the war in Algeria, told me in an interview last summer that the police violence and government and press cover-up in 1961 were not surprising. The political circumstances were right for it, and the news media usually do what they’re told.
Just look at how easy it was to round up and intern American citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor, he observed.
If he’s right, then the problem for politicians is to make sure that the conditions for injustice and atrocity do not conjoin, that there is no probability created for massacres like the one in Paris in October 1961. And if the politicians fail, then the problem for journalists and others is how to resist becoming their accomplices.
Naeim Giladi (born 1929, Iraq, as Naeim Khalaschi) is an Anti-Zionist, and author of an autobiographical article and historical analysis entitled The Jews of Iraq. The article later formed the basis for his originally self-published book Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.
Giladi was born in 1929 to an Iraqi Jewish family and later lived in Israel and the United States. Giladi describes his family as, “a large and important” family named “Haroon” who had settled in Iraq after the Babylonian exile. According to Giladi his family had owned, 50,000 acres (200 km²) devoted to rice, dates and Arab horses. They were later involved in gold purchase and purification, and were therefore given the name, ‘Khalaschi’, meaning ‘Makers of Pure’ by the Turks who occupied Iraq at the time.
He states that he joined the underground Zionist movement at age 14 without his parent’s knowledge and was involved in underground activities. He was arrested and jailed by the Iraqi government at the age of 17 in 1947. During his two years in the prison of Abu Ghraib, he was expecting to be sentenced to death for smuggling Iraqi Jews out of the country to Iran, where they were then taken to Israel. He managed to escape from prison and travel to Israel, arriving in May 1950.
While living in Israel, his views of Zionism changed. He writes that, he “was disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism’s cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948″.
I organized a demonstration in Ashkelon against Ben Gurion’s racist policies and 10,000 people turned out.”
After serving in the Israeli Army between 1967-1970, Giladi was active in the Israeli Black Panthers movement.
Israeli politicians have one singular goal: to engineer a permanent demographic majority in Mandatory Palestine that will allow them to maintain their repression of Palestinians under the facade of democracy. This can be accomplished in two ways, killing or expelling Palestinians from Greater Israel and attracting new Jewish immigrants. Both are unofficial Israeli state policies. Thus it was no surprise that after the Paris massacres Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored the Jews of France and Europe: “Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home.” The idea that your home is determined by your ethnicity rather than your life experience is not a new one. It is common among racists who believe biology is more important than language and culture, famously embraced by opponents of equality for African Americans before the Civil War.
The Zionist political movement was founded by Theodor Herzl, a European atheist from a Jewish family. Many of the founding fathers of the Israeli state, such as David Ben-Gurion, were also atheists whose belief in the Bible only extended as far as it served their nationalist identification. As Shlomo Sand writes in The Invention of the Jewish People: “the Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for individuals of very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which they barely observed. [1]
The Zionist aspiration was to band together based on an imaginary shared ancestry to achieve political domination. At first, Ben-Gurion recognized – as all serious historians today do – that the Palestinians were descendants of the Judean peasants who inhabited the land at the time of the Arab conquest. “Historical reason indicates that the population that survived since the seventh century had originated from the Judean farming class that the Muslim conquerors had found when they reached the country,” wrote Ben-Gurion in a book coauthored with Itzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Israeli President, in 1918. [2]
Later, when Palestinians resisted Zionist machinations for a Jewish state on their land, it became apparent that it would be impossible for Zionists to integrate what they saw as an inferior culture into their political scheme. This caused Ben-Gurion and others to simply eschew their former historical understanding in order to strip the native population of any rights they enjoyed as the rightful owners of their land, and justify the dispossession required for Zionists to subvert them. Sand writes that after the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39, “the descendants of the Judean peasantry vanished from the Jewish national consciousness and were cast into oblivion.” [3]
Zionists understood race and ethnicity as the true determinant of one’s political association. But they proved they valued political domination above all, eagerly punishing people who identified with their neighbors and shared cultural values over ideas about biological origins. It is now understood that European Jews are descendants of the Khazars, who ruled an empire of converts to Judaism in present-day Russia. But even if the Biblical version of Judaism were true, the idea that a race of people share immutable similarities that should be the basis of a political association is a racist one.
For one thing, it perverts the idea of “home” as a product of biology rather than an individual perception. Writing about the “socially and psychologically .. delicate” impact of immigration, Orly Noy describes the process her family went through 36 years ago to immigrate to Israel from Iran. “According to Isareli parameters, we are seen as a successful aliyah story. However, not a day goes by in which I’m not painfully aware of how we were torn from our home, from our language, our most intimate cultural codes – and how those deep scars remain with my parents to this day.”
When Netanyahu and Israeli politicans cavalierly call for Jews across the world to “return” to their “home,” it demonstrates their desire to solidify their political power at the expense of the people they proclaim to care about. Instead of viewing Jews as individuals who speak many languages, have roots in countries all over the globe, and have attachments to the places where they have grown up and live their lives, they are seen as a vehicle for political power.
As Joseph Massad says, Israel demands a “right to be racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere.” These legal rights include the “Law of Return” that allows Jews from anywhere in the world to move to Israel and obtain citizenship, while Palestinian refugees are denied entry to Israel by the “Prevention of Infiltration Law.”
Opponents of Zionism have fought back against Israel’s colonization of another people based on a racist political philosophy that justifies oppression and subjugation.
The Israeli colonial project shares many similarities with the ideas of many Americans in the pre-Civil-War era United States who believed the abolition of slavery should be tied to a project to colonize African Americans, in Liberia, Central America or the Caribbean, or elsewhere.
The most famous proponent of the colonization idea was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had inherited the idea from his political idol Henry Clay, who helped to found the American Colonization Society in 1816.
Supporters of colonization of African Americans generally believed that as an inferior race, blacks did not belong in the United States and should therefore leave the country to prevent a threat to whites. As Zionists see Jews as sharing a common ancestral home, so did American colonization proponents see Africa as the home of blacks.
Lincoln himself evolved on the topic throughout his political career, but he was never an abolitionist who believed blacks deserved equal rights. He opposed slavery as an institution and supported the application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence to slaves, but he never believed in equality between blacks and whites.
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality … I … am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position,” Lincoln said in 1858. [4]
Even after the start of the Civil War, Lincoln made clear his support for the gradual emancipation to be coupled with colonization.
Both Zionism and white supremacy are guilty of propagating the myth of race as a biologically legitimate fact, when it is in fact nothing more than an artificial social construct. People who believe in the division of society by race and ethnicity propagate racist ideas that reduce people to classifications that have no legitimacy other than what people choose to believe.
Not surprisingly, African Americans almost unanimously opposed colonization. At a convention of blacks in Springfield, Illinois in 1858, the gathering declared: “We believe that the operations of the Colonization Society are calculated to excite prejudices against us, and they impel ignorant or ill disposed persons to take measures for our expulsion from the land of our nativity… We claim the right of citizenship in this, the country of our birth … We are not African.” [5]
The famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass was equally adamant about African Americans belonging to the country where they lived and were raised. He blasted those who sought colonization to expel blacks from the United States: “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here – have lived here – have a right to live here, and mean to live here,” Douglass wrote.
Despite Zionists purporting to act in the interest of global Jewry, they are essentially playing the same role as American white supremacists. While white supremacists sought to expel African Americans to ensure white rule over the United States, Zionists seek to import Jews to ensure Jewish rule over Mandatory Palestine.
The notion of ethnic supremacy is incompatible with a decolonized nation where all citizens enjoy equal rights regardless of what imaginary ethnic group you believe you belong to.
This year, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 85-years-old. Since he embraced peace, practiced nonviolent resistance, and sought a loving society, for years the media has cast him as a sincere, avuncular, dreamy leader. This hardly comports with his essence or his fiercely tenacious battles—against war, racism and poverty—found in his writings, speeches, marches, and jail time.
King died because he was a radical thinker and activist whose movement challenged the powerful and made dangerous enemies. In 1964 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called him “the most notorious liar in the country.” When he denounced the Vietnam War in 1967 the liberal New York Times and Washington Post roundly condemned him for questioning this part of America’s anti-communist crusade.
King’s views were far from popular. The year of his death public opinion polls showed 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of African Americans disapproved of his opposition to the war and his campaign to eradicate poverty.
The King to celebrate united as many people as he could behind his radical plan for a peaceful world . . . and fought like a tiger. At New York City’s Riverside Church a year before his death, King referred despairingly to the cost of American militarism and hopefully to revolutionary movements. He said Lyndon Johnson’s war in Asia had “eviscerated” the War on Poverty “like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”
“The madness of Vietnam is devastating the hopes of the poor at home” and will “totally poison America’s society,” said King. Urging withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, King added that “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” He called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and began to unite Americans across lines of race, class, nationalities, and religion for a Poor People’s March on Washington.
King’s bold stands increased the death threats while the FBI reduced his protection. While assisting striking Memphis garbage workers in April 1968 he was killed by a rifleman.
Soon after his death King was again targeted, this time by assassins in suits armed with laptops and enjoying media access. Their rewrite of the King story muted his strong voice and buried his radical proposals. And for the good reason—Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks to today’s injustices. In 1968 the U.S. had military bases all around the world, and now it has more. A government that invaded and bombed Southeast Asia, now has military footprints on Middle East soil.
Would King have greeted recent the U.S. interventions in the Middle East as steps toward peace? Would he have looked away from “enhanced” interrogations the world defined as torture, endorsed U.S. threats of air strikes against Iran, approved a “war on terror” that terrorizes civilian populations, and justified occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that never end? Would he have approved of U.S. drone strikes?
The King who told us the people of Vietnam “must see Americans as strange liberators,”—what would he tell us about U.S. foreign occupations today?
When he denounced war, poverty, and injustice. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke for “the shirtless and barefooted people of the land.” Poor Americans and distant people “who languish under our bombs and consider us . . . the real enemy.” Is this voice not worth listening to today?
Selma was distributed to a mainstream audience on January 9. The film has already been viewed by millions across the United States and the world.
During the Jan. 9-11 period of its opening, the Associated Press reported that “civil rights drama “Selma” moved from 22 to 2,179 theaters, arriving in second place at the weekend box office with $11.2 million. The film chronicles the historic 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and stars David Oyelowo as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” (Jan. 11)
The film has generated a tremendous degree of interest in both mainstream and social media. Interviews with the actors, director and the actual historical figures such as Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson and Andrew Young have generated broader publicity outside the official industry sources.
Directed by Ava DuVernay, with talk show host and network owner, Oprah Winfrey, serving as the producer as well as playing a supporting role depicting Annie Lee Cooper, this is the first feature film made for movie theaters that attempts to depict a key chapter in the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. A made-for-television mini-series was done in 1978 featuring Paul Winfield as Rev. Dr. King and Cecily Tyson as Coretta Scott King.
Despite the success during the opening days of the film showings, the Golden Globe held on Jan. 11, awarded the movie only one of the four categories nominated. Songwriter and producer John Legend along with spoken-word artist and actor Common were given the top prize for the Best Original Song, entitled Glory, the main selection of the soundtrack.
Nonetheless, DuVernay remained optimistic going into the Golden Globe Awards ceremonies. She wrote over twitter on Jan. 11 that “We’ve already won. We made a film we believe in, and now it’s out in theaters and moving in the world!”
John Legend said of his experience in working on the soundtrack for Selma, “I was brought on at the last minute but I’m so honored to be part of this amazing film that honors such amazing people that did great work and is so connected to what’s happening right now. We still are in solidarity with those who are out there fighting for justice right now. We’re so grateful to write this song, hopefully as an inspiration to them.”
Controversy Over Historical Accuracy
Some of the most widely publicized disagreements over the film’s accuracy surround the role of the-then President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former Senator from Texas and Vice-President under John F. Kennedy. The film suggests that Johnson, played by Tom Wilkinson, categorically opposed the Selma campaign and the introduction of Voting Rights legislation in 1965.
One of Johnson’s top advisers on domestic affairs, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., objected so strongly to the film’s portrayal of the president that he wrote an opinion piece that was published in the Washington Post on Dec. 26. Califano went as far as to suggest that the Selma Campaign was LBJ’s idea.
He asserted that “the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself. In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.”
What is striking about the Califano editorial is that it is full of historical inaccuracies itself. The piece gives wrong dates that contradict the facts of the period and the chronological order of events that have been well documented by participants and historians over the subsequent decades.
Andrew Young, a former aide to King and leading member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), said during several interviews that the actual situation was quite different but he was not offended by this aspect of the film. Young rejected outright the notion that the Selma Campaign that brought SCLC to Dallas County in Jan. 1965 was Johnson’s idea.
Young said that Johnson did not believe Voting Rights legislation could make it through the U.S. Congress only months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was signed into law by him in July of that year.
Young noted that he had traveled with King to Norway when the Civil Rights leader was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Dec. 1964. After the delegation returned to the U.S., they stopped over in New York City for a reception and celebration. (Interview with Roland Martin, Jan. 5)
Later the group went to Washington, D.C. for a meeting with the Justice Department and it was only then that Johnson invited them to the White House one evening. However, the crisis created through the arrests, beatings in Selma during Jan. and Feb., followed by the police shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in neighboring Marion, Alabama on the night of Feb. 18 prompted activists to organize a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery.
Of course the first attempt resulted in the Alabama state police and local law-enforcement vicious attacks using clubs, cattle prods and teargas on 600 demonstrators at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, known as “Bloody Sunday.” The beating of the demonstrators prompted a national mobilization in cities throughout the country, many of whom traveled to Selma two days later for yet another confrontation with authorities.
Amid legal challenges over an injunction not to march to Montgomery on March 9, King and SCLC decided to turn 2,000 demonstrators around heading back to Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the center of the Selma Campaign. This move caused confusion and debate within the movement, as some felt they should have refused to disperse again which could have sparked another beating by the police just two days later.
A favorable federal court ruling several days later saying that there was a constitutional right to march paved the way for Johnson to nationalize the Alabama National Guard which provided protection for demonstrators to initiate and complete the final march during March 21-25, 1965. Nevertheless, on March 9, Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, who traveled to support the Selma Campaign based on a national appeal, was severely beaten by white racists in Selma and died of his injuries the following day.
Later, on the day the Selma to Montgomery March concluded, Mrs. Viola Liuizzo, portrayed in the film by Tara Ochs, who was a volunteer activist from Detroit, was murdered in her vehicle while transporting demonstrators through Lowndes County. It was later revealed that she was killed due to a conspiracy by the Ku Klux Klan.
It was during this period that Johnson came out in favor of new legislation that worked its way through Congress over the next five months.
Although it has historical inaccuracies and other problems, many feel that the film can play a progressive role in light of the resurgence of the anti-racist struggle since July-Aug. that has manifested through rebellions and mass demonstrations in response to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in Staten Island and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.
The fact that these tremendous events unfolded five decades ago illustrates how far the struggle against national oppression has to go in this country. At the same time the developments over the last five months reveals the capacity of African Americans and their allies to create new methods of agitation aimed at the state and the corporate structures of the racist capitalist system.
In the beautiful, gilded, Staatstheater in Nuremberg, not far from the Palace of Justice where the historic Nuremberg trials were held, the last searing, soaring notes of the opera “Die Witwe des Schmetterlings (The Butterfly Widow)” ring out, seemingly suspended for an eternity. The audience rises to its feet and explodes in applause, giving a seemingly unending number of curtain calls. There are 31 curtain calls this opening night of February 23rd, 1968. The conductor comes out and bows repeatedly, but the composer does not join him.
He is shivering alone in a frigid cell in a prison in South Korea, where he has been imprisoned for over a year. He has been tortured—hung from a pole, beaten with sticks, electrocuted, waterboarded—within desperate inches of his life.
In 1967, a Korean student in Berlin “confesses” to having had contact with the North Korean government to the South Korean authorities. South Korea, was, at that time, one of the poorest countries in the world—its economy cobbled together from military prostitution, remittances from soldiers fighting for the US in Vietnam, and the export of human hair for wigs. The few South Koreans lucky enough to be studying abroad, for the most part, were heartbreakingly impoverished. North Korea, before the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and crippling sanctions, was richer, more prosperous, more robust than its counterpart, and its economic production and consumption was multiples that of the south. As an act of political largesse–a mix of propaganda, insular camaraderie, avuncular goodwill—the North Korean embassy, had treated these students well. They were allowed to crash parties at the embassy, as starving students will, for the food; they sometimes received color brochures (an inconceivable luxury in South Korea) touting the development of North Korea. Some were given small stipends or bursaries to help them study, and a few eventually travelled to the North to meet family or long lost friends. This contact with North Koreans and the embassy—an act of political infidelity with a wealthier, sexier, more attractive partner– were considered seditious by the South Korean government, and action was rapidly taken. A hit list was made of suspects, and in the tightly knit community, these quickly denounced and implicated others under torture, and soon a full-blown web of two hundred brainwashed “spies” was “uncovered” both in Europe and in Korea.
Never mind that the suspects were an unlikely mix of students, scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and musicians. Never mind that the composer, Isang Yun, was a musical prodigy who had invented a brilliant technique of musical composition, the “hauptton”, that organically combined East Asian idioms with twelve tone serialism, and Taoist and Buddhist spirituality. Never mind that Yun’s visit to study frescoes in North Korea was legitimate research for one of his musical compositions. Never mind that the allegations of brainwashing were absurd on their face. None of this seemed to matter to the Korean government, that these were unlikely backgrounds and qualifications for a brood of active spies in the pay of the North Korean government.
Isang Yun was kidnapped in Berlin, along with three dozen others, from under the nose of the German government, rendered back to Seoul, and tortured until he admitted to being a spy and subversive for North Korea. He was found guilty of planning to undermine and violently overthrow the government. He was sentenced to death.
This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment; his wife was sentenced to two years as an accomplice. He recanted first before the judge, claiming he had been tortured into confessing, to no avail; then in his own cell, proclaiming his innocence in blood onto the prison walls. At the end of his rope by then, he would attempt to take his own life.
Four decades later, in 2006, the entire East Berlin Spy incident was finally declared by the Korean Government a fabrication of the intelligence services.
Here is the dirty secret of torture, ticking time bomb fantasies notwithstanding: the only truth that it is capable of revealing is that human beings are fragile and frail creatures, that they suffer on the rack, and under that pain, they will bend truth to say whatever is demanded, will confess to absurdities, will denounce kith and kin, to arrest the horror, stop the torment, end the nightmare.
Here is the other secret of torture: it does not simply damn the tortured, but it damns the torturer and the system that produces it. A country that tortures loses not only its soul, but loses touch with reality, for the simple reason that torture bears the same relationship to truth that rape bears to intimacy. It assumes what it demands, and cynically, violently, as the Neocons so triumphally proclaimed, it creates its own reality—a tautological, hermetically sealed reality of stupidity, brutality, and paranoid terror.
Republic of Terror
That paranoid reality echoed and presaged other “seditious” events, each conforming to its own brutal internal logic.
The “discovery” of the East Berlin Incident in June 1967 by the South Korean Intelligence Services (the KCIA), coincided with the massive eruption of demonstrations against the Park Chung Hee government regarding allegations of vote-rigging in the national assembly elections on June 8th. The Park government, threadbare in accomplishment and naked in legitimacy, had been fighting for its political survival and for the continuation of its regime. The recent presidential and general elections had largely been considered fraudulent. The sudden eruption of the East Berlin incident, in which subversives were seen everywhere, shifted the political landscape, put progressives on the back foot, shut down dissent, and solidified the tenuous Park presidency.
In 1964, massive opposition erupted to the Japan-Korea Normalization Treaty, whereby President Park, a former Japanese military officer and colonial collaborator, sold out the country’s reparation rights–35 years of colonization, 1 Million conscripted into slave labor, hundreds of thousands of sex slaves– for a pottage: a few grants and loan guarantees. Individual reparations for those exploited, maimed, killed, during this period would be appropriated by the regime for “development”, scraps would be tossed to the legitimate claimants. Later that year, as protest reached critical mass, 41 students and reporters would be arrested, tortured, and admit to being members of the “People’s Revolutionary Party”, “an organization attempting to overthrow the Republic of Korea according to North Korean Programs”. Criticism of the treaty vanished.
In 1972, the Yushin Constitutional Reforms were enacted that transformed an authoritarian South Korea into a totalitarian dictatorship, and which rendered Park Chung Hee effectively dictator for life. Massive opposition started to mobilize, and as protest started to crescendo, on April 3rd, 1974, another “People’s Revolutionary Party”: “an anti-government communist group…. steeped in communist ideology” was uncovered. Over a thousand students were arrested and tortured, and their “leaders” were sentenced to death, after confessing to being members of a second People’s Revolutionary Party, under the direct control of North Korea, and plotting to overthrow the government. Their executions took place 18 hrs after their conviction.
In 1980, as General Chun, Park’s designated successor, took power in a coup, massive protest erupted across the country. In 1980, in the City of Kwangju, hundreds, if not thousands of citizens were raped, bludgeoned, bayoneted, burned, and shot to death for protesting the Chun Regime and demanding democratic reforms. They were tarred as a “colossal rebellion instigated by the North Korean Government”. The presidential candidate, Kim Dae Jung, later to win the Nobel Peace Prize, would be charged as the mastermind of “impure elements and fixed spies” that had instigated the uprising. Concurrently, some 37,000 citizens would also be rounded up and kidnapped off the streets all over the country, placed in “re-education” camps, where they were routinely starved, tortured, beaten, and worked to death. At least 5,000 were known to have died in these camps.
Even such small fry as book clubs were targeted: a year later, a group of 22 students and workers in a social science reading club were arrested for reading, among other books, E.H. Carr’s “What is History?”, a collection of lectures on historiography by a middle-of-the-road Cambridge Don. All of them were tortured for months—beaten, waterboarded, hung from poles, electrocuted; they confessed to being members of an anti-state organization. Drunken meetings in bars, New Year’s Eve parties, a business launching, all of these were classified as subversive gatherings plotting to overthrow the government.
Decades later, lives and livelihoods destroyed, various official investigatory committees and courts determined that the defendants were innocent of all charges in the above incidents. Evidentiary review shows that these cases were fabricated out of whole cloth by the South Korean intelligence agencies. In particular, in 2007 a court found the 1974 People’s Revolutionary Party defendants innocent, and ordered $63M of reparations to the aggrieved parties. Here is the pattern, as predictable as it is brutal: when dissent rises, “discover” an anti-state North Korean conspiracy. Apply torture, character assassination, and trial by state media until punishment ensues. Rinse off blood, and Repeat. These and countless other incidents, contrived by the Intelligence Services, using the draconian National Security Laws, were a dramatic, politically expedient theater of terror that was effective in tamping down rising tides of dissent. The proverb, “Kill a few chickens to scare the monkeys”, is applicable here; to this end, the country was turned into a noisy, busy, steaming slaughterhouse.
This is the ultimate utility of torture: it is the imprinting, broadcasting and branding of state terror into the sinew and marrow of human bodies and human relationships. In the nightfall of torture, as whispers seep out of the closed chambers, the miasma of fear suffuses the streets: voices grow hushed, eyes avert or grow dull, dissent vanishes. Fascists prowl, parade, preen, bombast, consume with aplomb. Only the ghosts of the dead keep speaking.
Confederation of Falsehoods
This pattern of history is important to keep in mind as we view the recent disbanding of the United Progressive Party (UPP) and the arrest of its lawmakers. It’s been established that the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), interfered in the 2012 Presidential elections, using its psychological/cyber warfare division to propagandize for the current incumbent, and to denounce the opposition. Documentation shows that thousands of carefully crafted messages were spread over key electronic message boards by teams of agents, then reproduced millions of times using automated software. When all was said and done, the electronic landscape had shifted to the right, and the daughter of the dictator Park Chung Hee was firmly ensconced in power, in what critics charged amounted to South Korea’s first electronic coup.
When the UPP, a progressive coalition of opposition parties, took up the mantle of challenging the legitimacy of the election and the cyber interference, organizing mass demonstrations and calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor, retribution was not long in coming.
The UPP law maker, Lee Seok-Ki, a former student radical and vocal critic, was suddenly arrested on charges of sedition. A transcript appeared suddenly from a paid informant who had been illegally surveilling the party for the NIS, alleging that Lee and others had plotted a rebellion to violently overthrow the government, through a clandestine group manipulated by North Korea, called the “Revolutionary Organization (RO)”.
Never mind that the UPP were for the most part ex-student radicals and democracy activists, with strong views beholden to no one, least of all North Korea.
Never mind that the rebellion was seemingly concocted single handedly from the testimony of the bribed informant–mostly unsupported supposition and confabulations; and that the evidentiary transcript was significantly doctored—words never spoken or heard were attributed and leaked to the media.
Never mind that the RO, allegedly a quisling organization of North Korea, seems to have been a figment of the imagination of the NIS, a lazy, hazy re-branding of the fabricated “People’s Revolutionary party” from 1964 & 1974.
Lee Seok Ki was tried and found guilty of sedition—first for “organizing” to overthrow the government; then later for “incitement” to revolution. The others were also found guilty.
With fresh blood in the water, the authorities then went after the party, arguing that the UPP presented a threat to society, was attempting to impose a North Korean socialist regime on South Korea, through stealth and organized violence.
The UPP’s platform for “peace and reunification”, “a people-centered world… for the working class”, where people can “live together with human dignity”, its resistance against austerity, neoliberal policies, and for labor rights were twisted into the charge that the UPP was “against the basic order of democracy”, “secretly trying to achieve North Korean style socialism”, and that the “progressive democracy they pursue is the same or very similar to the North’s revolutionary strategy”.
Following rapidly on the heels of Lee Seok-Ki’s arrest, the South Korean constitutional court ordered the disbanding of the UPP. Its assets have been seized, its members have been stripped of seats in the National assembly and local councils. Its 100,000 members are also at risk of prosecution for association with the UPP for violating national security laws. The ministry of justice has also stated its intention of also going after other “anti-state groups”: labor movements, anti-base movements, peace movements, environmental activists, and to prevent the creation of any political party with a progressive platform similar to the UPP.
The UPP defense lawyer stated, “Today is the day democracy is murdered. History will rule on this verdict”. UPP chairwoman, Lee Jung-Hee stated, “The door to totalitarianism has been opened. Independence, democracy, unification and peace, representation for the people has been banned. Dark times… lie ahead.”
* * *
The composer Isang Yun finally returned to Berlin, after 2 years of global mobilization. World-wide denunciation, boycotts, mass demonstrations, diplomatic expulsions and embargoes, and a celebrity letter-writing campaign, finally secured his release. He dove back into his work, but remained at heart, wounded, broken, shattered. Despite subsequent artistic success— awards, medals, professorships, acclaimed compositions, including the majestic “Exemplum in Memoriam Gwangju”–the libel of traitor stuck, and he lived out the rest of his life in pain, exile, and isolation: unable to travel to South Korea for fear of further arrest and torture; unable to connect with fellow Koreans for risk of “contaminating” them. “Success.. is.. a shadow, which passes by”, he said, towards the end of his life, “One day I’d like to go back to my Korea … [and] listen to the music in my mind, without writing it down, and find myself in the great silence. And there I would also want to be buried, in the warmth of my native earth.” In 1994, a quarter century after his exile, he petitioned the South Korean government for a short visit to his hometown, but was told he would have to submit a written confession of “repentance”. He refused and was buried in Berlin, a year later, with a handful of earth from his hometown his only consolation.
In the great forgetting that is known as corporate media, Isang Yun’s story has vanished to the margins of history, his kidnapping and torture footnotes for musicologists and historians. What endures of Yun Isang is a technical method of composition known as hauptton (“maintone”). It is a singular style of composition. It bases itself, not on a musical cell, motif, or theme, with melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic elaboration, but on a single note—a single assertion, if you will—that is ornamented until it returns and recovers the original tone and timbre. Scholars have compared it to calligraphy or brush painting, where the integrity of the single line and the energies of its motion—the dance of ink molecules on paper–give the image its visual appeal. It has also been compared—from Taoist and Buddhist influences– to the myriad worldly energies obscuring, then revealing, an original cosmic vibration; the dialectic of freedom and constancy in creation; or the unperturbed Buddha-nature that remains unsullied as it returns, ostinado, into its original clear being. And of course, in certain compositions, it’s clear that it bears a striking analogy to Yun’s own story—strings stressed, pulled, interrogated, tortured, like sinews of a human body, almost to the breaking point, before re-intoning a full-throated assertion of innocence. But we could also argue that it represents, as Yun’s life itself attests to, to the deepest, profoundest yearnings of the soul—the desire for solace, justice, peace; compassion and love for the downtrodden; the heart’s deepest desire for reconnection, reconciliation, reunification. Tormented, stressed, vexed, challenged through friction, slippage, distortion, distraction, the hauptton always returns to its original keening, its original, single-minded desire, its original yearning undefiled, unblemished, undiminished by suffering, pain, time, or distance. Even as the curtain falls for South Korean democracy, as it returns seemingly to the dark ages of paranoia, conspiracy, terror; it is this single, trembling, whimpering, searingly, pure note that will not be silenced or denied.
K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer and teacher. He can be reached at k.j.noh48@gmail.com
A former Guantanamo Bay prison guard and Marine has spoken to the press for the first time about what he claims were the CIA murders of three problematic detainees, covered up as a triple suicide.
Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman was on duty at the notorious prison camp when the three men died, and insists the official version of events is “impossible,” he told Vice News.
The three men were Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, 37, from Yemen, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, 30, from Saudi Arabia, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, 22, also from Saudi Arabia. None of them had been charged with any crime.
He explained in an incendiary interview with Vice News that the three men would have had to have committed suicide at exactly the same time in a cellblock where guards check on detainees every four minutes.
“They would have had to all three tie their hands and feet together, shove rags down their throats, put a mask over their face, made a noose, hung it from the ceiling on the side of the cellblock, jumped into the noose and hung themselves simultaneously,” he said.
Hickman added that an inspection of the detainees’ cells just a few hours before they supposedly killed themselves revealed nothing that they might have used to kill themselves – such as nooses, rags, or shoelaces.
The former Marine, who first joined up in 1985 and for a while was in a unit attached to the NSA, has been trying to put the nightmare of working at Camp Delta behind him. But when he saw on TV that another inmate had hung himself, he decided to face up to what he had witnessed. He has written a book, ‘Murder at Camp Delta,’ which he hopes will eventually lead to the truth.
Hickman was careful not to name any of the alleged murderers by name in the book, but he still hopes it may trigger a proper investigation into what really happened that night.
“I can’t name names. I keep it vague at the end for that reason. I say it was murder, this is the reason why,” he said.
On June 9, 2006, Hickman was on guard duty at Camp Delta when he saw a paddy wagon arrive at the high security Alpha Block three times – each time picking up a prisoner and taking them out of the camp.
He saw the police wagon turn left at checkpoint ACP Roosevelt onto a road which only leads to two places – the beach or a CIA holding center, which Hickman and his colleagues nicknamed ‘Camp No.’
After this, between 11:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., the paddy wagon came back to Camp Delta – but instead of going to Camp I, it went straight to the medical detainee clinic.
“About 10 minutes later, all the lights come on, like a stadium, and sirens are going off — it’s chaos,” he said.
All three detainees were dead.
Hickman believes he knows why the authorities at Guantanamo would have wanted to get rid of the three men.
The three men were regular hunger strikers who incited other detainees to do the same – and when prisoners were on hunger strike, camp policy said they couldn’t be interrogated.
“They had a policy that if a detainee is hunger-striking, he cannot be interrogated. In 2006, they were doing roughly 200 interrogations a week, so any massive hunger-strike would, what they consider, cripple the intelligence value. I believe the number-one mission in JTF-GTMO (Joint Task Force Guantanamo) at the time was, stop the hunger strikes at all costs,” said Hickman.
The ex-sergeant said that after the deaths, there were no hunger strikes for a long time.
Hickman first approached the US Department of Justice in 2009. His claims and those of others at the camp were reported in Harper’s magazine in 2010. The authorities issued a hasty denial, claiming that Hickman was stationed outside the perimeter and wouldn’t have been able to see the entrance to Alpha Block.
But Hickman says that half of his duties were inside the perimeter and half were outside, and that “both positions give me a pretty good view of what happened.”
Since then, the truth of what went on at Guantanamo has begun to trickle out. A recent Senate report – which the CIA tried to repress – found that the CIA regularly used torture, violence, and degrading treatment in its interrogation techniques. The report also claims those tactics rarely produced any decent intelligence.
But just after the supposed triple suicide, Rear Admiral Harry Harris attacked the three detainees for daring to take their own lives.
“They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Democracy Now quoted him as saying.
Hickman’s interview comes just days after Republican senators proposed that a moratorium should be placed on the release of all medium- and high-risk detainees, citing danger to the US and its allies, adding that any transfers to Yemen should be barred for two years.
It is said that there is nothing new under the sun.
Jewish leaders talking up the threat of “anti-Semitism” in order to induce Jews to immigrate to Israel is of course not new. Such talk emanating in the immediate aftermath of what appear to have been false flag attacks by Zionists against fellow Jews–this also is not new.
“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend in the wake of the attacks in Paris.
Netanyahu is certainly up on his Jewish history, but for those of the rest of us who may not be quite as well-versed, here is a little primer.
In the years 1950-51, the city of Baghdad was hit by a series of explosions targeting Iraqi Jews. The attacks caused property damage, injuries, and deaths, creating panic in the Jewish population. At the time the bombings were blamed upon Arab nationalists, raising fears of anti-Semitism and giving rise to a desire by Jews to immigrate to Israel–which of course, at precisely that same time, was in the process of displacing Palestinians and attempting to expand its Jewish population.
What follows is a timeline of events in Baghdad excerpted from a book written and published in the 1990s by an Iraqi Jew named Naeim Giladi. I’ll say a little bit more below about who Giladi was, but for right now just consider the timeline as he presents it:
Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.
The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad’s El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.
The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues.
On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.
On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from Iraq be increased.
On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.
On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.
Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.
The paragraphs above come from Giladi’s book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews, originally published in 1992. An except from the book can be found here, and includes details about the Baghdad bombings as well as a number of other interesting items, including Giladi’s own immigration to Palestine and what he witnessed there. You’ll note, in the timeline, his reference to leaflets being distributed on the same day of the April 8 bombing. That leaflet read in part, “Call to the Jews: To all the tribe of Zion living in Babylon.” It goes on to encourage an exodus out of Iraq:
“For the second time in the history of the diaspora, we have an opportunity to leave. We encourage you to hurry and leave. Today the Jews are in a new era of the history of the diaspora.”
Giladi was born in Iraq in 1929 and became a committed Zionist in his late teens. Later in life he disavowed Zionism, renounced his Israeli citizenship, and moved to the US. His change of heart began when, as a young Jewish immigrant, shortly after arriving in Israel, he encountered “institutionalized racism,” against both Palestinians as well as Arabic or Mizrahi Jews.
The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.
At the time in question, the early 1950s, Israel was ethnically cleansing the Ashkelon area and forcing Palestinians who lived there into the Gaza Strip. Farms were indeed taken over, and so, yes, there was a need for cheap labor, and Jews from Iraq provided a good source. And to make sure that the new arrivals were wholly dependent upon their earnings as laborers, Israel saw to it that they were forced, for the most part, to leave their property and possessions behind in Iraq. According to Giladi:
…the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said [Nouri el-Said, the Iraqi prime minister–ed.]saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn’t return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.
Giladi passed away in 2010, but his conclusions–that the Baghdad bombings were perpetrated by Zionist Jews–are shared by a number of modern historians and writers, including Uri Avnery, who wrote that, “After the disclosure of the Lavon Affair… the Baghdad affair became more plausible.” But perhaps most interesting was the assessment given by career CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland:
In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . .
Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.
An Iraqi court went on to find 20 people, all members of the Iraqi Zionist underground, guilty of carrying out the bombings. Two were sentenced to death, and the rest received lengthy prison terms. But by this time the Jewish population of Iraq had been greatly reduced. Giladi says that 125,000 Iraqi Jews ended up immigrating to Palestine, leaving just 6,000 remaining. It also resulted in a split in Giladi’s own family; while Giladi himself made the journey, his parents, he says, were not fooled by the false flag events and remained behind in Iraq.
***
While a good many analysts have concluded that the recent attacks in Paris were a false flag operation, carried out most likely by Israel, others have expressed dubiousness on the matter. Certainly Israeli false flag operations are well documented, but a line would surely be drawn at targeting Jews in such attacks–this seems to be the reasoning. The events in Baghdad 65 years ago, however, would apparently refute this notion. If something is “good for the Jews” collectively, as a whole, then it can apparently be justified even should it be brought about at the expense of individual Jews–that at least seems to be the thinking on the matter by some Jews or Jewish leaders at any rate. Maybe, though, this should come as no surprise, and here I’m reminded of the words of Caiaphas, the chief priest at the time of Jesus: “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
I highly recommend Giladi’s book excerpt in its entirety, if you have the time, for it makes for fascinating reading. You can also click here to see a video featuring an interview with the author that was conducted in 1994.
Meanwhile Israeli officials continue urging French Jews to make “aliyah” to Israel.
“Due to the impossible security situation [for French Jews], Israel has a responsibility to allocate all necessary resources to facilitate the aliyah and absorption of Jews from France,” said Knesset member Yoni Chetboun.
Other Israeli officials have also spoken out.
“Your place, Jews of France, is with us,” said Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, Religious Affairs minister, speaking at a Jewish Home party rally.
“We are all shocked at the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in France,” said Knesset member Motti Yogev. “To all our Jewish brothers in France we call: Come and make Aliyah to Israel! Here is your home – our home.”
Another Israeli politician, Yair Lapid, seemed to be going out of his way to push the alarm buttons.
“I don’t want to speak in terms of Holocaust, but…” he said, “European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the State of Israel.”
All of this is obviously having an effect. The leader of a Paris synagogue is predicting that between 14,000 and 15,000 French Jews will immigrate to Israel in 2015, and indeed hundreds are reported to have flocked to an “aliyah fair” held on Sunday.
French Jews attend an “aliyah fair” held in Paris on Sunday, Jan. 11, just two days after an attack on a kosher market. A series of such fairs are scheduled as part of an Israeli policy called “France First.”
Is not the holding of an “aliyah fair” just two days after an attack on a kosher market pretty much the equivalent or on a par with the aforementioned leaflets printed by the Zionist underground in Baghdad 65 years ago?
Is there anything new under the sun?
By the way, additional aliyah fairs are scheduled this week for Marseilles and Lyon, with more to come in February and March. The organizing of such events is said to be part of a new Israeli policy–overseen by the Ministry of Immigration Absorption–called “France First.” The implications of such a policy are somewhat alarming. If France is “first,” who’s next? Will attacks similar to the ones last week begin to occur in other countries with large Jewish populations?
No word on whether Netanyahu dropped by the fair in Paris on Sunday, although he was in the city participating in the giant anti-terrorism march–this of course despite the fact that he had been specifically requested by the French government not to come. One person who did pop into the fair, however, was Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, who had accompanied the prime minister to Paris from Israel.
In his remarks, Sharansky assured the potential immigrants that “the Jewish Agency embraces the French Jewish community at this difficult time and is extending its full support by helping provide for the physical security of Jewish communities across France, increasing our assistance to any individual who wishes to immigrate to Israel, and working to ease immigrants’ integration into the Israeli workforce and Israeli society.”
Translation: don’t worry. The United States will pay for it.
The calls for Jewish immigration today are, of course, motivated by different needs from those of 65 years ago. Recently the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released figures showing that the number of Palestinians throughout historical Palestine will exceed the Jewish population by the end of the year 2020. The figures have been challenged by Israeli academics, who insist the Palestinian statistics are flawed, although certainly the “demographic threat” has been an ongoing Zionist concern.
But prompting an upswing in Jewish immigration probably would not have been the only, and maybe not even the prime, consideration in carrying out the Paris attacks–that is assuming the attacks were a false flag. Other writers have suggested a number of other motivations including payback for France’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN. (One wonders: was Israel’s “France First” policy adopted before or after the UN vote?)
What is clear, of course, is that terrorist organizations and terrorist armies are being supported by some of the most powerful nations on earth, and that these forces are being used to advance certain geopolitical objectives. The likelihood that such elements will be mobilized in some way in future false flag attacks in Western cities has to be considered high.
Don’t kill white people. After all is said and done, the Charlie Hebdo outrage, the hashtags, and the million person marches amount to that simple but very powerful dictum. In the eyes of the governments that do most of the killing on the planet and the corporate media who act as their scribes, there is nothing worse than targeting even a handful of white people for death.
Charlie Hebdo is a supposedly satirical magazine published in Paris, France. It was little known to Americans until January 7, 2015 when two gunmen attacked its offices and killed twelve staff members. Charlie Hebdo was well known for intentionally violating the Islamic prohibition of depicting the prophet. According to survivors, the killers announced themselves as members of al-Qaeda and said they were avenging the prophet Muhammad. A policewoman and four more people were killed the following day when another gunman took hostages in a kosher supermarket.
One look at Charlie Hebdo cartoons shows that the word satire is being used very loosely. The depictions of cabinet minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey, and the kidnapped Nigerian school girls as pregnant welfare recipients make a mockery of the world satirical. Regardless of how many French politicians are skewered in its pages, it must be pointed out that Charlie Hebdo indulges in racist hate speech.
Their reputation for insult and offense was quickly forgotten and the call to unquestioningly identify with the victims was immediate. Within a few days, #Jesuischarlie was tweeted more than one million times. The propaganda onslaught created an awkward example of hypocrisy for world leaders who are always the worst killers of all.
Barack Obama trotted out tired denunciations, calling the attacks “cowardly” as he claimed to stand up for the rights of a free press. These were strange words coming from a man who on seven occasions has used the discredited Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to the media.
Americans were not alone in hypocritically condemning murder. The convenient selective amnesia of the French people is as stunning as their sense of feeling more aggrieved than anyone else in the world.
France was a party to every atrocity and genocide committed by Europeans in history. France played a major role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, kidnapping approximately 1,250,000 Africans and sending them to work under barbaric conditions in their American territories.
After being forced out of Haiti by the world’s most successful slave rebellion, France then held that nation hostage under threat of re-enslavement and demanded a payment of $60 million francs which were paid from 1838 to 1947. Haiti remains poverty stricken to this day as a result.
France was at the table during the 1884 Berlin Conference which chopped Africa up into European spheres of influence. France engaged in mass slaughter again and again as it attempted to prevent colonies such as Vietnam and Algeria from gaining independence.
After NATO murdered Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, French president Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Libya to personally gloat over the country he helped to destroy. He was joined by UK prime minister David Cameron, who was also among the killers-in-chief who arrived in Paris looking solemn. France and the UK are part of the NATO effort to destroy Syria and turn it into a chaotic ruin as they have done to Libya.
The corporate media determines who is and who isn’t a worthy victim and people with dark skin rarely make the cut. The thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza included members of the press. Seventeen journalists were killed in Gaza in 2014 alone, yet Israeli president Netanyahu was allowed to join the “unity march” in Paris as if he too were an innocent.
There is enough horror in the world to cause outrage but the level of outrage seems to depend on who is being treated horribly and who is carrying out the atrocity. The worst acts of terror are committed by heads of state who don’t kill seventeen people as these attackers did in Paris. They kill in the thousands yet are still treated with respect.
It doesn’t say much for the state of human advancement that killings committed by individuals still create so much more concern than those committed by governments. They get away with mass murder because the same corporate media which saturated coverage of Charlie Hebdo say little or nothing about Gaza or Libya or Somalia or Syria or Iraq or Haiti. Instead of pointing out that Barack Obama is a killer too, the pundits criticize him for not being among the sanctimonious liars who gathered in Paris. The group photo should have been a perp walk to the Hague instead of a photo opportunity for the seriously blood thirsty.
Murder is wrong when committed by individual gunmen with grudges and it is still wrong when it comes from a drone strike. A unity march should denounce human rights abuses, of which warfare is the worst. The next time 1 million gather to denounce terror, the anger should be directed at those people who carry it out the most.
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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