On Sunday afternoon, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, ending a three-day escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip. After two unarmed protesters were killed during the weekly Friday protest, two Israeli soldiers were killed in a firefight at the border. The Israeli military responded by bombing targets in Gaza resulting in two more Palestinian deaths. In response, Hamas and other minor political groupings such as Islamic Jihad, launched a barrage of projectiles into Israel.
According to a Hamas leader, the organization felt escalation was a necessary response to Israel shirking its obligations to ease the blockade — one of the terms of the ceasefire after Operation Protective Edge. To signal resistance against Israel, Hamas and other militant groups in the strip occasionally launch homemade projectiles into southern Israel. In reality these “rockets” are weak, especially compared to the high tech war machine that Israel possesses. In fact, only four Israelis were killed by the indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel’s urban areas. According to the Independent, this is the first time in five years that an Israeli has been killed by a projectile launched from Gaza.
As a side note: when the Jerusalem Post reported early on about injured Israelis, their numbers were inflated by 10 who were mildly injured while running to shelter and 45 who suffered from “anxiety”. Only three in this case were actually injured from Gaza rocket fire.
Why then, in the face of such a relatively insignificant threat, does Israel decide to erupt into a bombing frenzy in one of the poorest areas in the world? Israeli officials often say it is about something called “deterrence capacity”.
Israel bombs Gaza during the night [From @MuhammadSmiry]
Deterrence capacity is essentially a measure of how terrified people are of a violent response if they were to cross Israel. Throughout all of Israel’s statehood, deterrence capacity has been at the center of its military strategy. It is established when the Israeli forces “demonstrate real hooliganism” at the demand of the high Israeli officials. The more indiscriminate the violence and the more fear struck into the hearts of Palestinians, the less likely they are to resist Israel’s harsh treatment. The Israelis use the term “mowing the lawn” to describe these periodic outbursts of violence. It is a deliberate attempt to beat a desperate people into submission in order to accomplish political ends. In a word, it is the definition of state terrorism.
On Sunday, while the bombs were still falling, Hamas and Islamic Jihad signaled that they were ready to reach a ceasefire. Israel ignored this because, according to Israeli officials, they wanted to reestablish their deterrence capacity. Netanyahu promised “massive strikes” and even began mobilizing ground forces in preparation for an invasion. In other words, the military wanted the population of Gaza to suffer more so that they would fear Israel more. If they fear Israeli bombs enough, Israeli strategy assumes the people of Gaza would quietly accept the destruction of their society. The only reason Israel did not escalate was that it did not want to juggle the PR of bombing a defenseless population during the Eurovision song contest which is being held in Tel Aviv this year.
Seba Abu Arar, 14 months, killed in Israeli Strikes [From @MuhammadSmiry]
The decision to continue the bombardment came even after it was known that many civilians, including a pregnant woman and and an infant, were killed in the attacks. Israeli command evidently did not care about these casualties. This is just the latest example of Israel using security concerns to justify outright terrorism. To show just how spurious the security pretext is, ask simple question: What effect will the bombing have on Israeli security?
The bombings are never designed to destroy Hamas militarily. That would be impossible without completely obliterating the strip after a costly invasion and then entirely uprooting Gaza’s civil society. The attacks also do not weaken Hamas politically, but strengthen it. Hamas’s popularity comes in part from their reputation as an armed resistance against Israeli aggression. Armed resistance wouldn’t be as popular if Israel was not continuously antagonizing the population with a crippling blockade and perpetuating the humanitarian crisis.
When Israel attacks Gaza, they’re not expecting some sort of change to the status quo. Bombing the enclave only serves to exacerbate both feelings of hostility as well as the underlying conditions. All of this increases the likelihood of Palestinian violence. As long as Israel refuses to address the roots of the situation, daily life in Gaza will remain unchanged, along with the conditions that lead some to justify firing projectiles into Israel.
So, when Israel bombs one of the most densely populated areas on earth, remorselessly slaughters infants and bombs school shelters and personal residences all in the name of security, the serious reader must understand it as nothing less than a cover for the continuation of terrorism against the Palestinian people. Without willful ignorance, mental gymnastics or outright cognitive dissonance, there’s no other way of putting it.
May 11, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Early Thursday morning, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Daniel Everette Hale — a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and National Security Agency (NSA) and later a defense contractor working for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) — for providing a reporter with classified government information. The reporter in question, although unnamed in the indictment, is Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of and journalist for the online publication The Intercept.
The indictment against Hale makes him the third Intercept source to be charged with leaking classified information to the outlet in less than two years. Notably, both of the government whistleblowers that have already been prosecuted and convicted by the Trump administration – Reality Winner and Terry Albury – were Intercept sources who were outed as whistleblowers by reporters working for the online publication.
The publication, which has long been associated with the documents shared by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has yet to fire any of the reporters responsible for these breaches that have seen two whistleblowers already imprisoned and third, Daniel Hale, likely to be imprisoned.
Despite its increasingly dismal track record, the publication – largely funded by government-linked tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar – continues to invite and “welcome” whistleblowers from the public and private sector and implores them to “consider sharing your information securely with us.”
“An utter failure of source protection. Again”
According to the Department of Justice website and the official indictment, Hale has been charged with obtaining national defense information, retention and transmission of national defense information, causing the communication of national defense information, disclosure of classified communications intelligence information, and theft of government property. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, meaning that Hale faces 50 years behind bars.
The indictment, which can be read in full here, details that Hale and “the reporter” (Scahill) communicated rather insecurely on several occasions, appearing at public events together, talking by phone and sending unencrypted text messages by phone.
Other information in the indictment shows that Scahill is clearly “the reporter” in question, given that “the reporter” in the indictment attended the Oscars in 2014 and held book events at the Washington, D.C. venue Busboys and Poets on April 29, 2013 and on June 8, 2013. During the June 8 book event, the indictment states that Hale was seated next to “the reporter” at an event where said reporter was promoting his book. A video taken at an event at Busboys and Poets held on June 8, 2013 shows Hale seated next to Scahill.
The indictment does not specify what led federal investigators to Hale several years after the events in question took place. Indeed, the indictment deals exclusively with events that took place between 2013 and 2015, and Hale’s house had been raided in August 2014, from which some of the evidence cited in the indictment was likely acquired. However, the Obama administration never pressed charges and it is unclear why the Trump administration has waited until now to do so, or if investigators acquired new information on Hale’s whistleblowing activities relatively recently. Hale, who appeared in the 2016 documentary National Bird about drone whistleblowers, had stated in that film that he anticipated being indicted at some point in time.
While the indictment suggests that the lack of secure communication with Scahill was a likely factor, there are other possibilities, such as the “friend” of Hale, noted in the indictment, with whom he discussed his relationship with Scahill.
Another possibility is that someone else at the Intercept other than Scahill was made aware of Hale’s identity, a point raised years ago by CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and recently pointed out by independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone. After it was revealed that the Intercept had obtained information from a whistleblower on drone warfare, which turned out to be Daniel Hale, in 2015, Kiriakou tweeted: “New drone whistleblower at The Intercept. For God’s sake don’t let Matthew Cole learn his identity.”
Cole, as will be noted later on in this report, has been accused by Kiriakou for outing him as a journalistic source to the federal government and, two years after Kiriakou’s tweet, was believed to have helped lead federal investigators to Intercept source Reality Winner in 2017. Thus, it is possible that Cole or another employee of the online publication had learned of Hale’s identity from Scahill and then passed it along, either intentionally or inadvertently, to the government.
Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of the Intercept, said in a brief statement that the publication “does not comment on matters relating to the identity of anonymous sources.”
Jesselyn Radack — Hale’s lawyer, who has represented several past whistleblowers, such as Thomas Drake and Kiriakou — stated on Twitter that “unsophisticated whistleblowers” like Hale, now 31 years old but who was only 23 when he met Scahill, should not have borne the burden of keeping his identity safe. Rather, Radack wrote, such a burden fell to the journalist – particularly those working at an outlet like the Intercept that promotes its source protection capabilities (now very much in doubt).
In a separate tweet to journalist Tim Shorrock, Radack called Hale’s case “an utter failure of source protection. Again.” In other words, Hale’s lawyer – who is privy to information not contained in the publicly available indictment – asserts that a large part of the blame for Hale’s arrest was attributable to the Intercept’s, and presumably Scahill’s, behavior and failure to protect their source. The other guilty party, of course, is the Trump administration’s continuation — if not intensification — of the Obama-era crackdown on whistleblowers and journalistic sources.
The Intercept’s three-of-a-kind
For readers who may be puzzled by Radack’s use of “again” in her tweet to Shorrock, it is worth revisiting the case of the two currently imprisoned Intercept sources – Reality Winner and Terry Albury – both of whose whistleblowing activities were made known to the government as a result of poor decisions by Intercept staff.
MintPress reported on the acts by the online publication and noted that the Intercept made two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in March 2016 for documents that the publication had already received from Albury — so the requests were an effort to “launder” or obfuscate the fact that the classified documents had been obtained from a whistleblower. Yet, both FOIA requests contained specific information identifying the names of the documents that were not publicly available, an error that led the FBI to link references contained in the requests to Albury’s activity on FBI information systems. The FBI subsequently found that documents that Albury had accessed had been later published by the Intercept.
Albury, a father of two young children, is currently serving a four-year sentence for bringing important information about the FBI’s abuse of power in relation to its counter-terrorism activities and surveillance of journalists to the public. To date, no one at the Intercept was fired in connection with Albury’s prosecution, despite the role of the FOIA requests made by the Intercept in his arrest.
Nine months prior to Albury’s arrest, Reality Winner, a federal contractor, had been arrested for giving a classified document to the Intercept. While the Intercept has long maintained that it was unaware that Winner was the source of the document, FBI documents have shown that negligence helped lead federal investigators straight to Winner. The Intercept’s scanned images of the intelligence report that Winner leaked contained tracking dots – a type of watermark – that, according to Rob Graham of the Errata Security blog, showed “exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.” These dots make it easy to identify a printer’s serial number as well as the date and time a document was printed. As Graham noted, “Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.”
From left to right: Winner, Albury and Hale
Most concerning of all, the FBI warrant also notes that the reporter in question – who is unnamed in the document – contacted a government contractor with whom he had a prior relationship and revealed where the documents had been postmarked from – Winner’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia – along with Winner’s work location. He also sent unedited images of the documents that contained the tracking dot security markings that allowed the documents to be traced to Winner. Jesselyn Radack as well as whistleblower John Kiriakou, who served two and a half years in prison for exposing the CIA’s illegal torture program, have since asserted that Matthew Cole was the journalist mentioned in this warrant. Well prior to being hired by the Intercept, Cole’s behavior was known to have been a key factor that led to Kiriakou being outed as a confidential source, which led to his arrest. Upon learning of Hale’s arrest, Kiriakou openly speculated upon whether the outlet was incomptent or compromised.
Despite this track record, the Intercept hired Cole anyway. Cole continues to write for the Intercept and appears to have suffered no negative consequences for his alleged role in outing Winner. Intercept editor-in-chief Reed took responsibility for the acts on the part of the publication that led to Winner’s arrest and “for making sure that the internal newsroom issues that contributed to it are resolved.” Reed remains employed by the Intercept and continues to make a hefty six-figure salary. Winner is currently serving a five year and three month prison sentence for releasing a classified NSA document in relation to alleged Russian intrusion of a U.S. election software supplier.
Furthermore, journalist Barrett Brown — who served a lengthy 63-month prison sentence for linking to hacked material — has recently stated that Intercept journalist Sam Biddle played a role in his imprisonment, further worsening the optics of the publication’s track record. Brown originally faced a combined sentence of over 100 years in prison before negotiating a plea deal.
With Hale now the latest whistleblower to have been allegedly outed as a result of poor operational security by Intercept staff, the question turns to whether any of those responsible will be held accountable. Scahill, a celebrity reporter at the paper who makes over $40,000 per article, is just as unlikely as those involved in the outing of Albury and Winner to face any sort of negative consequences for failing to protect their sources, who risked (and have temporarily lost) their freedom to bring vital information to the public.
Will Omidyar’s pull keep Scahill out of hot water?
While only an indictment against Hale has been made public, Scahill may soon find himself in trouble with the Department of Justice based on information contained in that indictment.
As Moon of Alabama noted in an article detailing the charges against Hale:
The first contacts with Hale and the first leaks by Hale were in the first half of 2013, when Hale was still enlisted and worked at the NSA. In July Hale emailed a resume to Scahill which he wanted to use to find a job with a defense contractor who leases people with security clearances to other U.S. agencies. They seem to have discussed the resume by phone. Hale was later hired by such a contractor and worked at the NGIA. There he copied the secret and top secret documents and presentations that seem to be the objects of Scahill’s later reporting. That Scahill discussed Hale’s resume with him could be construed as active help to gain access to secrets that would then be leaked to The Intercept.”
Indeed, such a narrative is present within the indictment and Scahill may be pursued by the Trump Department of Justice, which has shown great zeal in prosecuting not only confidential government sources but also their publishers. Notably, the currently unsealed charges against WikiLeaks co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange put forth a similar, though less compelling, narrative that Assange actively goaded Chelsea Manning into accessing state secrets that were subsequently given to WikiLeaks. Based on this alone, it seems likely that Scahill’s behavior as detailed in the indictment is likely to see the journalist pursued by the DOJ in some capacity, given the charges now facing Assange.
If this comes to pass, it will bode dark days for the future of American journalism that are already heralded by the indictment awaiting Julian Assange and the current imprisonment of Chelsea Manning for refusing to testify against Assange or WikiLeaks.
Yet, if Scahill evades any legal predicament on his end, it will raise many questions, most notably one of a double standard between his treatment and Assange’s treatment by the Trump DOJ, especially considering that both Scahill’s and Assange’s journalistic work has largely been unfavorable to government interests. Unlike Assange, Scahill’s publication and work are funded by eBay billionaire and the owner of PayPal, Pierre Omidyar, who is very well-connected to the public and private sector as well as to the U.S. intelligence community. Omidyar’s past public statements show hostility towards whistleblowers, whom Omidyar had likened to “thieves” prior to the Intercept’s founding.
If Scahill goes uncharged, it would likely be due to the intervention of powerful, politically-connected forces in the United States that are friendly towards Scahill, something Julian Assange lacks. Omidyar, given his ownership of the Intercept, would be the most probable person who could intervene successfully.
What did Hale’s whistleblowing reveal?
Based on the indictment, Hale is named as the source of several documents that revealed grave government wrong-doing, much of which related to the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone war and other counterterrorism programs with little or no oversight that have resulted in untold numbers of civilian deaths abroad.
One document noted in the indictment — “Document M,” which was classified as “secret” — appears in an article published in the Intercept in August 2014. That article revealed that most of the people in the government’s secret terror suspect database had no affiliation with any terror group and that the system disproportionately targeted Arab-Americans.
In addition, Documents A-F in the indictment appear to have been used in the Intercept’s “Drone Papers” series. Those documents revealed many stark truths and shocking facts about the Obama administration’s drone warfare campaign — which Trump has since significantly expanded — including the fact that U.S. drones killed innocent people 90 percent of the time, victims who were subsequently labeled “enemy combatants” regardless of their actual status.
Hale’s motive for coming forward with this information is very compelling and shows him to have risked his personal freedom in order to change a corrupt system. Cited in a 2015 article by Scahill as “the source,” Scahill wrote that Hale “decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government.”
Hale had said anonymously at the time:
This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong…We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
To date, no one in the government has been held accountable for the killing of civilians in relation to the U.S. government’s covert drone assassination program.
The Intercept must be held accountable
Daniel Hale, just like Terry Albury and Reality Winner, is a hero. He exposed government programs that were out of control and killing innocent people around the world. Hale’s bravery helped hold the powerful to account and now Hale faces 50 years in prison, thanks to both the Trump administration’s troubling effort to double down on the persecution of whistleblowers and would-be whistleblowers as well as the actions of an employee, and potentially employees, of the Intercept.
If the Intercept will not hold itself accountable, as has thus far been the case, then it must be held accountable in the court of public opinion. Its employees must be held to account, including its celebrity journalists, for the paper’s refusal to deal with its indefensible track record of burning sources who have placed their trust in it. Concerned citizens on social media should ask Intercept journalists and the publication’s own accounts why nothing has been done and should demand that something tangible be done now that no less than three brave Americans who trusted the Intercept have found out the hard way that their trust was misplaced.
The lives of Winner, Albury and now Hale have been destroyed, in large part by the acts of a single publication that continues to market itself as “safe” for whistleblowers. While the Trump administration’s continued persecution of whistleblowers is the clear root of the problem, the fct remains that a site that advertises itself as “adversarial” to the State’s interests and as a haven for whistleblowers has aided the Trump administration in its persecution of whistleblowers, regardless of whether its operational security failures were intentional or inadvertent. If the Intercept as an organization were really so concerned with the Trump administration’s crackdown on press freedom, there would be accountability — not impunity — in such cases.
Sadly, by all appearances, the only confidential Intercept source from the public sector who was not outed by the publication and subsequently arrested was the source that prompted its formation: Edward Snowden, who “outed” himself. However, the Intercept closed its archive of the Snowden documents in late March, citing “cost” factors, despite the fact that the archive was less than 2 percent of its budget and its celebrity journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, make over $500,000 and $349,000, respectively, leaving aside that the Intercept’s owner, Omidyar, is worth $12.7 billion.
If the Intercept continues to remain unaccountable, its track record of poor operational security and lack of concern for the risks its sources have taken could lead to the destruction of other lives. It also aggravates the chilling effect that the government’s prosecution of journalistic sources has had on those in the public sector seeking to expose government wrong-doing by narrowing their options for coming forward. Indeed, if something had been done after Winner’s case, perhaps the whistleblowing activities of neither Albury or Hale would have been made known to the government.
The Intercept claims to “hold the powerful accountable,” but such an adage will ring forever hollow until it is applied internally to its own organization and to those in its ranks who put the Trump administration on the trail of these brave whistleblowers.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
May 10, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | United States |
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In its monthly report on Israeli violations against journalists, published today, WAFA said that 11 journalists were injured from rubber-coated metal bullets, live bullets and tear gas canisters, fired by Israeli soldiers, as well as from severe beatings. At the same time, one journalist was detained and another had his press papers seized.
On April 3, the Jerusalem District Court rejected an appeal filed by Mustafa Kharouf, a photographer with Turkish Anadolu news agency, to release him from prison so that he can be with his family in Jerusalem, and kept him incarcerated until May 5, the date he is to be expelled to Jordan. (Kharouf’s attorney got an injunction from the Israeli High Court on May 5, stopping his expulsion until it hears his plea.)
On April 5, Israeli forces shot Amad News Agency correspondent Safinaz al-Louh, with a teargas grenade, in her right foot, and Noor News photographer Mohammad Issa with a gas bomb, in his leg, while covering the March of Return protests, east of the Gaza Strip.
On April 10, Israeli forces raided the home of Ra’ed al-Sharif, in Hebron, holding his family in one room before embarking on a thorough search of the house and tampering with its contents.
On April 12, Israeli forces shot Filistin al-Hadath photographer and correspondent Ahmed al-Zurei, with a rubber-coated bullet, in the abdomen, while he was covering protests east of al-Bureij, in the central Gaza Strip.
On April 19, freelance photographer Abdel Rahim al-Khatib was hit with a rubber-coated bullet, in the left thigh, and Reuters photographer Bassam Massoud with a gas grenade, behind his left ear. A similar bomb injured Watan Radio reporter Mohammad al-Louh and freelance photographers Mahmoud Badr, in the left foot, and Ahmad Washah, in the head, while covering protests east of the Gaza Strip.
In the same day, Xinhua photographer Nidal Shtayeh and WAFA photographer Ayman Noubani were shot with rubber-coated metal bullets, in their thighs, while covering the Israeli army’s crackdown on the weekly protests in Kufr Qaddoum village, east of Qalqilia, in the north of the West Bank.
On April 26, Israeli forces targeted Shihab News Agency photographer Ramadan al-Sharif, with a live bullet that hit him in his right foot, while he covered protests east of Rafah, in southern Gaza.
The daily attacks on journalists in the West Bank are part of an ongoing Israeli policy against their activities and their role in covering the practices and violations committed by these forces, against Palestinian civilians and property.
May 9, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Kurdish-led militants from the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by helicopters from the US-led coalition, have reportedly stormed a town in Syria’s eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr, killing and injuring a number of locals.
Local sources, requesting not to be named, told Syria’s official news agency SANA that the US-sponsored militants laid siege to the al-Katef neighborhood of al-Shuhayl town for more than two hours on Thursday, before raiding the area and firing at people indiscriminately.
The sources added that six civilians lost their lives and four others sustained injuries as a result. SDF militants rounded up a number of local residents as well.
Back in late April, hundreds of people took to the streets in the northeastern Syrian towns of al-Busayrah, Masheikh, al-Tayyana as well as the villages of Tal al-Dhaman, al-Namliyah and Tayyeb Al Faall to protest the presence of SDF militants, rising cases of abduction and assassination in their areas and plunder of Syria’s oil wealth by the US-sponsored forces.
The protesters closed the main roads to their areas, burning tires and demanding the expulsion of SDF militants from their hometowns.
Local sources said the Kurdish-led militants fired indiscriminately at demonstrators in al-Tayyana to disperse the protest. There were no reports about possible casualties.
The development came only a day after dozens of people staged demonstrations in the towns of al-Shuhayl, al-Sur and al-Hissan as well as Mweileh village against the presence of SDF militants in their areas.
Local residents, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Kurdish-led forces opened fire on protesters in Hissan, injuring a number of them.
SDF militants illegally transport Dayr al-Zawr’s crude oil to neighboring Hasakah province in Syria’s northeast, a move that has angered local people.
The United States has long been providing the SDF, a Kurdish alliance, with arms and militants, calling them a key partner in the purported fight against the Daesh terrorist group.
Many observers, however, see the support in the context of Washington’s plans to carve out a foothold in the Arab country.
Such support has also angered Washington’s NATO ally, Turkey, which views militants of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the SDF, as a terrorist organization tied to the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group.
The PKK has been seeking an autonomous Kurdish region in Turkey since 1984.
May 9, 2019
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Middle East, Syria |
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The US has imposed sweeping new sanctions on anyone who trades with Iran in iron, steel, copper, aluminum and related products, escalating the economic blockade of Tehran as the nuclear deal continues to unravel.
An executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday says the property of anyone who owns or operates or engages in “significant” transactions with Iran’s metals sector will be seized by the US under sanctions laws. Likewise, anyone accused of materially assisting, sponsoring or supporting anyone who is sanctioned will have their property blocked as well.
The blocked property “may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in,” says the executive order. The sanctions apply to property inside the US, or in possession or control of any US person.
The Treasury Department announced it would allow a 90-day “wind-down” period for any transactions related to Iran’s metal sector.
The new sanctions are part of the continuing US policy to “deny Iran all paths to both a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and to counter the totality of Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East,” it said, adding that revenues from the metals trade could be used to “provide funding and support for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups and networks, campaigns of regional aggression, and military expansion.”
Metals are said to represent about 10 percent of Iran’s exports.
Trump’s latest move comes exactly a year after he unilaterally withdraw the US from the JCPOA nuclear agreement, negotiated by his predecessor in 2015 to limit Iran’s ability to develop atomic weapons. Tehran has consistently claimed its nuclear program was peaceful, but Israel has disagreed and actively campaigned against the deal.
Earlier on Wednesday, Iran announced it would no longer sell excess uranium and heavy water as provided under the JCPOA, citing last week’s decision by the US to end sanction waivers on these transactions. Tehran officially remains party to the JCPOA, but has grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of practical steps from Europe to offset US sanctions.
May 8, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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The Hamas leader Raafat Murra on Sunday decried the Israeli occupation army’s targeting of several media offices in the ongoing aggression on the Gaza Strip.
Murra condemned the Israeli attack on the Anadolu Agency office and described it as “terrorism” and “deliberate crime”.
He affirmed that Hamas fully supports all Palestinian, Arab, and international media platforms which cover the events in Gaza objectively and professionally.
Israeli warplanes on Saturday bombed the Anadolu Agency office and the Palestinian prisoners media office with several missiles during large-scale aerial attacks on Gaza.
May 8, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The irresponsible policies of the US have put the multilateral pact on Iran’s nuclear program at risk of failure, the Russian foreign minister said, adding that Washington should try diplomacy instead of threats for a change.
Sergey Lavrov criticized the US during a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, who personally brought a letter from his government informing Russia about Tehran’s latest decision on the nuclear agreement. Russia is one of the signatories of the 2015 document, also known as JCPOA, which offered Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for accepting restriction on its nuclear industry.
“As I understand, our main task here is to discuss the unacceptable situation, which has unfolded around the JCPOA as a result of irresponsible behavior by the United States,” the Russian diplomat said before negotiations with the Iranians.
The Iranian minister said Tehran’s actions came in response to the US withdrawal from the deal, and were not meant to destroy the agreement. “[They] can be reversed. There is a 60-day windows of opportunity for diplomacy,” he said.
Later in the day, Lavrov lamented the current US administration’s habit of coercing other nations with threats of sanctions or direct use of military force, be it in the Middle East or Venezuela.
“The day before yesterday, I met US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Finland and called on him to use instruments of diplomacy instead of threats when dealing with all issues of contention, and to stick to international law and UN principles, which require the peaceful resolution of conflicts,” he said. “One has to have a taste for diplomacy, which probably not everyone has today.”
Iran on Wednesday announced that it will no longer observe the limits on reserves of enriched uranium and heavy water established by the deal, calling it a response to the US withdrawal from the JCPOA exactly a year ago. Unless European signatories of the agreement deliver on their promise to protect the Iranian economy from unilateral sanctions reimposed by the US over the last 12 months, Iran would take further action, President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised address.
All signatories were formally notified about Tehran’s decision, with Zarif using his coinciding visit to Moscow to offer personal explanations about why it was taken.
Lavrov stressed that Russia appreciated Iran’s continued compliance with the JCPOA even after the US broke its side of the bargain.
May 8, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Russia, Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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As far as I know, no evidence has yet surfaced that definitively establishes direct CIA involvement in the U.S. regime-change operation in Venezuela. But it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is directly embroiled in the operation.
How do we know that? Because that’s what the CIA does. It’s what it has always done. Regime-change has always been one of the core missions of the CIA. If there is a U.S. regime-change operation, you can bet your bottom dollar that the CIA is at the center of it.
You can also be certain of something else: secrecy. The long-established modus of the CIA is to keep its role in regime-change operations secret, even if it has to lie or commit perjury to maintain that secrecy.
For example, think back to the Chilean coup in the 1970s.
When the Chilean people elected Salvador Allende president, the CIA immediately went into action. It began offering bribes to Chilean congressmen to get them to vote against Allende’s confirmation. (Allende had received only a plurality of the votes and, therefore, under the Chilean constitution the Chilean congress determined who was going to be president.)
It also orchestrated the kidnapping and assassination of Gen. Rene Schneider, who was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was standing in the way of a CIA-inspired military coup, which the CIA was secretly inciting within the Chilean national-security establishment.
In the months leading up to the coup, the CIA was doing its best to maximize the economic suffering of the Chilean people. GOP President Richard Nixon called it “making the economy scream” and it was intended to aggravate the economic crisis that had been brought on by Allende’s socialist policies. The CIA even tried to starve the Chilean people to death by bribing truckers who delivered food across the country to go on strike.
All of this CIA mayhem was kept top-secret. In fact, CIA and U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup was considered so secret that the CIA may well have played a role in the Chilean execution of American Charles Horman during the coup. He had inadvertently discovered strong circumstantial evidence of the U.S. role in the coup and, therefore, posed a grave threat to the secrecy of CIA involvement in the coup.
When CIA Director Richard Helms was summoned before Congress and asked about CIA involvement in the circumstances surrounding the coup, he committed perjury in order to keep the CIA’s role in the coup secret. When he was later convicted of lying to Congress, his CIA counterparts glorified him for having lied to Congress for the sake of “national security.”
It was no different with respect to the CIA’s regime-change operations against Cuba.
Although the CIA was planning and orchestrating the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs through the use of Cuban exiles, the CIA was doing everything it could to hide its own role in the invasion.
Later, the secrecy was expanded to include the CIA’s partnership with the Mafia to achieve regime-change in Cuba through the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
In 1954, the CIA successfully planned and orchestrated the regime-change operation against Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. Secrecy, once again, was the policy. It wasn’t until years later that the American people discovered the CIA’s role in the operation.
The year before, 1953, the CIA had done the same in Iran. In a coup in which the CIA’s role was kept secret at the time, the CIA successfully ousted the country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the Shah. The CIA then proceeded to train the Shah’s secret police force, the SAVAK, in the dark-side arts of torture, indefinite detention, and assassination in order to help him maintain his grip on power. Again, secrecy was the order of the day.
There is something else to keep in mind as the Venezuela regime-change operation continues to unfold — the short term vs. the long term.
In the short term, the CIA secretly celebrated its regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Medals were secretly passed out to CIA participants. The long-term results of those interventions, however, proved to be disastrous. Relations between Iran and the U.S. continue to suffer. Guatemala was ruled by a succession of brutal military dictatorships that threw the county into a 30-year-long civil war that killed more than a million people. Chile was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for more than 15 years, one that rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, or killed some 50,000 innocent people. Moreover, don’t forget the disastrous long-term results of the U.S. regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Of course, the solution to all this mayhem is not to require the CIA to provide real-time transparency in its regime-change operations. It wouldn’t comply with such a law anyway, based on concerns for “national security.” The only solution is to abolish the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex, restore America’s founding foreign-policy principle of non-interventionism, and restore a limited-government republic to our land.
May 7, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Iran, Latin America, United States, Venezuela |
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A UN rights expert has slammed unilateral US sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, saying the use of economic measures for political purposes violates human rights and international law.
In a statement released on Monday, Idriss Jazairy, UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures, warned that the US bans against the trio might precipitate man-made humanitarian catastrophes.
“Regime change through economic measures likely to lead to the denial of basic human rights and indeed possibly to starvation has never been an accepted practice of international relations,” he said.
“Real concerns and serious political differences between governments must never be resolved by precipitating economic and humanitarian disasters, making ordinary people pawns and hostages thereof,” he added.
Jazairy also voiced worries about Washington’s termination of sanctions waivers for major Iranian crude buyers, saying the move harms not only the Iranian nation, but also their trade partners.
“The extraterritorial application of unilateral sanctions is clearly contrary to international law,” he said.
“I am deeply concerned that one State can use its dominant position in international finance to harm not only the Iranian people, who have followed their obligations under the UN-approved nuclear deal to this day, but also everyone in the world who trades with them,” he noted, referring to the landmark 2015 agreement — officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Recently, the US ended six months of waivers which allowed Tehran’s eight largest customers to continue importing limited volumes. It also threatened the buyers of Iranian oil with sanctions if they fail to stop their purchases.
The anti-Iran American sanctions had been lifted under the JCPOA, but they returned in place last year when the US abandoned the multilateral accord.
Elsewhere in his statement, the UN rights expert denounced the economic hardship caused by the US sanctions in Cuba and questioned Washington’s claim that its sanctions against Venezuela were aimed at “helping” its people.
He further called on the international community to “challenge” Washington’s restrictive measures against sovereign countries which amount to “a threat to world peace and security.”
“I call on the international community to engage in constructive dialogue with Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and the United States to find a peaceful resolution in compliance with the spirit and letter of the Charter of the United Nations before the arbitrary use of economic starvation becomes the new ‘normal’,” Jazairy said.
May 7, 2019
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Cuba, Latin America, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Venezuela |
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There is a war on Gaza, as it has been once, twice, and more. Gaza and its people are in a state of permanent war. It has been under constant siege for 13 years, which is war imposed upon them every day. Today, the month of Ramadan has started for fasting, prayer, repentance and good deeds. Instead, we see death exploding in and around Gaza. Israel itself complains of the war. Yesterday, Sunday May 5th, the Israeli Defense Minister tweeted and cried out to the world to notice and see Israelis waking up for the second day in a row of rockets coming from Gaza and falling in Israel.
War is painful after two days in Israel. It is as painful and more painful in Gaza after 13 years of siege. War is an absolute evil both for the Israelis and for the Palestinians. Mr. Minister, the key to peace and the end of war is not in the hands of a world that we summon but simply in your hand and in the hands of Israel.
The issue is not only that of Gaza but the issue of all the Palestinian people. The issue is the injustice imposed on the Palestinian people for generations. Israel refuses to see Palestinians as human beings with same rights and equal to all human beings. Israel has tried the methods of war and violence repeatedly to solve the issue. Until today, it has not succeeded and now, on the near horizon, there is talk about a solution wrapped in darkness and non-recognition of Palestinian rights. It will not bring a just solution. It will be another failure.
The solution is simple if Israel wanted to SEE. If it wanted to see that the Palestinian people have the same rights as the Israeli people, all being equal in humanity. It is in Israel’s hands – Israel is the stronger – to realize this equality. Avoiding this equality until now has been useless. Israel itself today suffers from war launched on Gaza.
The solution is simple. Israeli human beings should not remain exposed to war, as is the Palestinian human being. Both are human and equal in humanity. We call upon Israel, the friends of Israel, those interested in the survival of Israel and the security of Israel to simply see that the Palestinian and Israeli peoples are equal in rights and duties and capable of making peace.
We say to the Israeli authorities: It is in your hands to keep us and keep yourselves in constant war and hostility, and in your hands to let us move together to an equal life with dignity, peace and security. Learn from the experience of already 70 years in war. They did not yield security and peace. The cause of the Palestinian people cannot be solved by violence or unjustly imposed solutions, but only by justice and equality. This is the key to war and peace in Israel and Palestine. The key to open the door of peace is in the hands of Israel.
Eileen Fleming, Senior Non-Arab Correspondent for USA’s The Arab Daily News, Author, Reporter: In Nov. 2006, Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza, informed the world:
“Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry… people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.
“Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles… Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.
“Gaza cannot sleep… the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!
May 7, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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With the recent surge in violence between Israel and Gaza, it is important to examine events of the past year and to learn the chronology and details of the recent deaths among both populations…
With news reports focusing on recent deaths in Israel and Gaza, it’s valuable to enlarge the time period being examined.
Israeli soldiers have been shooting Gazan men, women, and children every week for over the past year.
Israeli forces have killed approximately 290 Gazans and have injured over 29,000 since Gazans began their weekly Great March of Return on March 30th (see below about why they are marching.) A few additional Gazans died during this time period from wounds inflicted by Israeli forces earlier.
Among those killed and maimed have been numerous medics, women, children, and journalists. Approximately 126 Gazans have had legs and/or arms amputated, and others have been permanently paralyzed.
While Israeli governmental statements, often parroted by U.S. media, claim that Israel targets “terror,” the large majority of Gazans killed by Israeli forces have been civilians.
During the same time period, Gazan resistance fighters have killed 6 Israelis, one of them a Palestinian. (It is difficult to provide a number for Israelis wounded during this time since Israeli statistics for injured include those suffering from panic attacks.)
The names and details of both the Palestinians and the Israelis killed are listed on this timeline.
Deaths during the last 3 days:
On Friday, May 3, Israeli forces killed 4 Palestinians and injured 82. Among the injured were 34 children, two journalists and three paramedics.
On Saturday, May 4, Israeli forces killed 4 Palestinians (including an infant and her mother). Israeli forces also targeted and destroyed a news agency. Journalistic organizations around the world have condemned this attack. This attack was largely unreported by U.S. news media.
On Sunday, May 5, Palestinian resistance fighters killed 3 Israelis and 1 Palestinian Israeli, and Israeli military forces killed 19 Palestinians, including a 12-year-old boy and a 4-month-old girl named Maria. The Israeli shelling destroyed or damaged 600 Palestinian homes, businesses and livelihoods.
The Palestinian Israeli who died, Ziad Alhamamd, was a bedouin from the unrecognized Negev village of as-Sawaween who was working in an Israeli factory in Ashakalon when it was hit by a rocket from Gaza. Gaza’s rockets are mostly home-made and lack guidance systems.
Unrecognized villages are Palestinian villages that were in Palestine before Israel was created that are not formally recognized by the state of Israel. They have no access to Israeli services such as water, electricity, telephones, sewage systems, roads, and often schools and voting stations. Many of the villages are under Israeli demolition orders and never know when their homes will be destroyed. Alhamamd’s village of Sawaween had been denied a school for its 350 elementary school-aged children.
US media provide Israel-centric reports
U.S. news media have published a number of reports on the recent violence that emphasize the Israeli deaths, begin with Israeli victims, largely ignore the year-long killing of Gazans, and frame Israeli actions as defensive.
The New York Times lead paragraph that framed its report yesterday is an example:
“Fighting between Israel and Gaza escalated rapidly on Sunday in the worst combat since the last full-blown war in 2014, with Palestinian rocket and missile attacks killing four Israeli civilians and Israeli forces taking aim at individual Gaza militants.”
Fox News report on Sunday:
“The death toll continues to rise Sunday on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border in one of the most intense flare-ups of violence in the region in years, shattering a month-long lull in attacks.
“Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired more than 600 rockets into southern Israel in less than 24 hours, killing at least four Israelis and leaving several more in critical condition.”
Below is how the Washington Post introduced its report today:
“An uneasy cease-fire settled over the cities of southern Israel on Monday after a weekend that brought a rain of 600 rockets from the Gaza Strip, but not all residents thought the truce was a good thing.
“Near the explosion-scarred house of Moshe Agadi, 58, who became the first Israeli since 2014 to die in rocket fire from Gaza, mothers took their children to play in a park after 48 hours of sheltering indoors.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has abducted 11 Palestinians in the West Bank, uprooted 120 Palestinian olive trees, and an Israeli NGO published a report revealing that Israeli authorities forced almost 3,000 Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem between 2004 and 2019, deliberately leaving them homeless, including 1,574 of minors.
Total number of Israeli and Palestinian deaths including those outside Gaza
Altogether, 343 Palestinians have died from Israeli attacks, and 16 Israelis have died from Palestinian attacks since March 30, 2018 .
At least 9,908 Palestinians and 1,267 Israelis have been killed by someone from the other side since 2000.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
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TAKE ACTION: Contact Congress to condemn Israeli assault on Gazans
Once again, ‘NYT’ distorts the news, dishonestly making Gazans the aggressor and Israel the victim
May 6, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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This is where three years of failed Russiagate conspiracy theorizing and fixation leads you — into the arms of fanatical endless war proponent John Bolton: “John Bolton God bless you, good luck..” one can now hear on “resistance” network MSNBC prime time.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is now championing neocon national security adviser John Bolton’s “humanity” given he apparently went loose cannon this past week, vowing to confront Russia over Venezuela even as his boss President Trump downplayed Moscow’s role in the crisis after a Friday phone call with Putin.
“This is what John Bolton, human being, thought his job was this week,” Maddow said on her show Friday night. Both Pompeo and Bolton had clearly gone a bit rogue with their overly bellicose Venezuela comments, while Trump appeared to be more restrained — and for Maddow this was of course cause for championing the neocon interventionist line: “Hey, John Bolton, hey, Mike Pompeo, are you guys enjoying your jobs right now?” she questioned.
On Friday Trump had said following the phone call, Putin is “not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen in Venezuela, and I feel the same way.”
Maddow, who once prided herself on slamming and deconstructing Bush-era regime change wars, now finds Trump not jingoistic enough. She stridently questioned:
“How do you come to work anymore if you’re John Bolton? Right, regardless of what you thought about John Bolton before this, his whole career and his track record, I mean, just think of John Bolton as a human being. This is what John Bolton, human being, thought his job was this week.”
She further cut to a clip of Bolton criticizing Russia’s alleged military involvement in Venezuela to prop up Maduro, because apparently uber-hawk Bolton is now a “fearless truth-teller” in Maddow’s world.
“You thought that was your job,” Maddow said. “But it turns out not at all, not after Vladimir Putin gets done with President Trump today.”
It bears repeating that among the loudest right-leaning voices who joined the chorus of leading establishment Democrat Russiagaters included previously forgotten about neocons who were quickly rehabilitated by the “Resistance” — David Frum, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol among them.
And then there was the nauseating phenomenon of watching liberals lionizing Trump-skeptical Republican Congressional leaders like Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, and the late Sen. McCain.
Because it’s awful, just awful! – that Trump might actually prefer peace to waging war in multiple places…
Restraint vs. war in multiple places? Maddow apparently advances the humanity of those advocating the latter.
It amounted to, at times, a picture of a President at odds with the officials who this week have called vociferously for a change in power in Caracas and have consistently declined to rule out a US military intervention.
Trump has become frustrated this week as national security adviser John Bolton and others openly teased military options and has told friends that if Bolton had his way he’d already be at war in multiple places. — CNN
And now, months into 2019, we get to hear Maddow waxing eloquent about the innocent “human side” of none other than John Bolton.
Of course, Maddow should first consider whether Bolton or his neocon ilk ever once paused to consider whether those they advocate dropping bombs on — from Iraq to Syria to Libya to Yemen to Gaza to Venezuela — are themselves actually human beings who simply wish to live out their daily lives in peace.
May 6, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia, War Crimes | MSNBC, United States, Venezuela |
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