As the war in Yemen rages on, a new report says there is “strong evidence” that the Saudi-led coalition has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in areas of the country controlled by Houthi rebels.
The report, titled ‘Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Aerial Bombardment and Food War’, is a compilation of data from various sources on the impact of the coalition’s bombing campaign on the production and distribution of food in rural Yemen, and on fishing along the Red Sea coast.
“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanaa,” the report, published earlier this week by the World Peace Foundation, says.
It goes on to explain that the deliberate destruction of “family farming and artisanal fishing” is a war crime.
“Together, the data detail the overall levels of targeting civilian, military and unknown sites… the systematic targeting of agricultural areas including the character of the site, and the frequency and timeline of targeting.”
It goes on to document the killing of fishermen along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, and the destruction of boats and infrastructure required to support small-scale fishing which “otherwise could provide life-saving food for a civilian population on the brink of famine.”
The report cites data from the General Authority of Fishing in the Red Sea when it states that 146 fishermen have died as a result of coalition airstrikes from the beginning of the war until December 2017.
Yemen has seen major civilian loss and suffering since the country’s civil war broke out in 2015, with many on the brink of starvation. The country has also endured a major cholera outbreak and a severe lack of medical supplies which has led to many cancer patients having to forego treatment.
The coalition has denied allegations that it is targeting civilians. It did, however, express regret over the bus attack. Such an admission is rare for the coalition, particularly after it previously referred to the bus attack as being “legitimate.”
The Saudi-led coalition intervened in the conflict in Yemen in 2015, in an effort to restore the internationally recognized government after it was driven out by Houthi rebels.
There were two simultaneous Brett Kavanaugh stories. Together, as part of the confirmation process regarding his nomination as Supreme Court Justice, they revealed how political discourse in the United States has reached a new low, with debate over the man’s possible predilection to make judgments based on his own preferences rather than the US Constitution being ignored in favor of the politically motivated kabuki theater that was deliberately arranged to avoid that issue and instead go after his character.
Consider first of all, his flaws as a candidate. He was regularly framed as a “conservative,” but what did that mean in the context of his career? Some of the critics are referring to his time spent as a government lawyer, specifically for the George W. Bush Administration, where he was a supporter of wide executive authority in the context of the war against terror while others point to his decisions and writings during his time as a US Circuit judge from 2006 until the present. That meant essentially that Kavanaugh then supported and apparently continues to support what is now referred to as the John Yoo doctrine, named after the Department of Justice lawyer who penned the memo that made the case for the president to act unilaterally to do whatever is required in national security cases even if there be no direct or immediate threat. Yoo specifically argued that the president, by virtue of his office, is not bound by the War Crimes Act. This theory of government, also more broadly dubbed the unitary executive, was popularized by Yoo, fellow government lawyer Jay Bybee and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
For those who find Kavanaugh unacceptable in terms of his judicial philosophy, this repudiation of the constitutional principle of three branches of government that check each other was enough to disqualify him from a position on the Supreme Court, principally as it impacts on both the first and second articles of the constitution by granting to the president the authority to both begin and continue a war on his own recognizance. It also means that the president on his own authority can suspend first and fourth amendment rights to freedom of speech and association as well as freedom from illegal search. He supported, for example, the government’s “right” to conduct mass searches of private data such as was conducted by the NSA. Kavanaugh supports government authority to legitimize incarceration without trial and to order assassinations and torture. Kavanaugh is also on record as favoring limiting the public’s right to use the courts to redress government overreach.
But curiously enough, or perhaps not so curiously, Kavanaugh was treated with kid gloves on those critical issues, basically because both major parties are now supportive of the unitary executive concept even if they would not admit that to be the case. Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan on his own authority and involved the US in a war in the Balkans. George W. Bush did the same in approving torture and expanding the war on terror to Iraq and also globally, while Barack Obama attacked both the Syrian and Libyan governments and assassinated US citizens abroad, all acts of war or war crimes carried out without a congressional declaration of war or without any real pushback by the judiciary.
The failure of Congress to carry out its duty to review Kavanaugh’s ability or lack thereof to interpret the constitution impartially was the more important story line in the confirmation process but it was ignored by the media. The other narrative that ran simultaneously, the purely political attempt made by the Democrats and some Republicans to destroy Kavanaugh as a person through the exploitation of random claims of sexual assault dating from more than thirty-five years ago, was an attempt to discredit the candidate that everyone knew right from the beginning could not be substantiated.
This all means that the important issue of Kavanaugh’s likely comportment as a judge was subjected to too little inquiry while his character as evidenced by tales from his past life received far too much attention. Ironically, the media, which has been frantically searching for an explanation for the breakdown of democracy in the United States, has been pillorying the Russians and more recently the Chinese for outside interference in the process, while ignoring the intense public dissatisfaction with the government it has been allowed to have by the Establishment, which is exemplified by the dystopic reality demonstrated by Kavanaugh. Some Americans would have rejected him based on his merits as a judge, but the case was not clearly made. Many instead came to view him as a victim of a vicious personal campaign and that was apparently enough to win confirmation, at least as reckoned by the calculus of those in Congress who cast the actual votes. In either case, the system failed to produce a good result and we only have our polarized and dysfunctional government to blame for that failure.
Jens Stoltenberg’s claim that NATO “protected” Yugoslavia from the government of Slobodan Milosevic is nothing but propaganda, Christopher C. Black, a Toronto-based international criminal lawyer told Sputnik, stressing that NATO had no legal reason to attack Yugoslavia and de facto committed a war crime against the sovereign nation.
“The NATO attack on Yugoslavia has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting anyone since the claims made by NATO against the government of Yugoslavia were false and were just a pretext for their aggression,” says Christopher C. Black, a Toronto-based international criminal lawyer with 20 years of experience in war crimes and international relations.
Black’s comment comes in response to a statement made by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg who told Serbia’s RTS: “We are aware in NATO that many people in Serbia still have bad memories about the bombing, the airstrikes in 1999. I stress that we did this to protect civilians and stop the Milosevic regime,” the NATO chief said.
“NATO countries had no legal right to bomb anyone for any reason as that is a violation of international law, the UN Charter, Nuremberg Principles etc.,” the scholar underscored. “Their attack was aggression and therefore a war crime and they committed war crimes during the attack.”
The NATO military campaign against sovereign Yugoslavia codenamed Operation Allied Force kicked off amid the Kosovo war (February, 1998 — June, 1999) between the country’s government forces and Albanian separatists. The alliance’s 78-day air raids resulted in 5,700 civilian deaths, infrastructural damages and contamination of the part of the region with depleted uranium.
Rambouillet Diktat: The Trigger for War
“The real reason NATO attacked is set out in the Rambouillet diktat presented by [then Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright to [then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan] Milosevic in early 1999 that Yugoslavia must surrender its sovereignty and allow its total occupation by NATO forces and give up its socialist system for a free enterprise one,” Black said. “If Yugoslavia refused NATO promised to attack. The Yugoslav government had to refuse such a diktat and so NATO attacked.”
Rambouillet Accords envisaged the creation of a de facto independent entity in Kosovo which violated Yugoslavia’s independence and sovereignty.While the refusal to accept the unacceptable accord was used by the alliance as a trigger for the attack, there were several reasons behind NATO’s invasion, the lawyer explained.
“NATO wanted to establish a base in the Balkans against Russia, to take over mineral resources at the Trepca Mine complex in Kosovo and to destroy the last socialist state in Europe,” the legal practitioner said. “To justify their aggression they concocted the same types of lies against the government as they are now doing against Russia.”
Almost two decades after the NATO bombing, the Trepca mining and metallurgical complex in Kosovo still remains a bone of contention between Pristina and Belgrade. The complex is split between ethnic lines, however, in October 2016 the parliament of the self-proclaimed state of Kosovo voted to take control over the complex despite Serbia’s protests.
When commemorating the enterprise’s 90th anniversary in December 2017 — Europe’s largest lead-zinc and silver ore mine — Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic stressed that Belgrade would continue to fight for it, dubbing the complex “a part of family and national heritage, a part of tradition,” as quoted by Serbian news outlet RTV B92.
NATO’s Expansion in the Balkans
Besides claiming that NATO bombed Yugoslavia to “protect it,” Stoltenberg drew attention to the “close partnership” between NATO and Serbia. Although he noted that the alliance respected Belgrade’s neutrality, the question arises whether that the North Atlantic military bloc is seeking to absorb Serbia in the long run, after admitting Montenegro and signaling readiness to let Macedonia join.
Commenting on the issue, the lawyer recalled that “the Yugoslav and Serbian government was overthrown in 2000 in a putsch organized by NATO forces and their fascist agents in the group called OTPOR and the DOS organizations which were NATO assets.”
He said that “the president [was] arrested on false charges and the government [was] taken over by the Quislings of the DOS group.” According to Black, these groups are still powerful in Serbia. They do not represent aspirations of the Serbian people, he stressed.
Manipulating the Judgments
Black, who has long criticized the imprisonment of Slobodan Milosevic at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, stressed that the tribunal “manipulated the judgments to put out different stories as it suits them.”
“As I said above the NATO claims were pure propaganda. It was NATO that used force and massive force to destroy a nation that resisted its diktats,” the lawyer highlighted, calling the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) “a NATO tribunal under UN guise.”
“The point is that the charges against Milosevic were bogus, he proved it in his trial,” Black said.
The former Yugoslav president died in his prison cell on March 11, 2006 while on trial for war crimes at the ICTY. Although it was officially stated that Milosevic died from a heart attack the lawyer does not rule out that the ex-Yugoslav leader could have been killed, since “they did not want to release him and could not convict him.”
France will be facing the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity over a series of nuclear tests it had been conducting in the South Pacific for some three decades.
A French Polynesian opposition leader said a complaint has already been filed to “hold all the living French presidents accountable for the nuclear tests against,” conducted against Polynesia – French oversees territory in the South Pacific.
“It’s with a great sense of duty and determination that we filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court on October 2 for crimes against humanity,” Oscar Temaru said at the United Nations.
“We owe it to all the people who died from the consequences of nuclear colonialism,” he added.
France carried out 193 out of 210 nuclear tests from 1960 to 1996 in Polynesia. For decades, it had claimed that the explosions were controlled and clean and denied its responsibility for the health and environmental impacts of the testing.
Back in 2013, declassified documents of the defense ministry however revealed that extent of plutonium fall-out from the tests was kept hidden.
According to the documents, plutonium fallout hit the whole of French Polynesia, a much broader area than France had previously admitted.
French daily Le Parisien wrote at the time that the documents “lifted the lid on one of the biggest secrets of the French army.”
French Polynesia with a population of about 290,000 people is best known nowadays for its tourist island of Tahiti, which was exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation.
“We see French nuclear tests as no less than the direct result of colonization,” Temaru said, adding the testing was imposed upon the islanders “with the direct threat of imposing military rule if we refused.”
Temaru said France has “ignored and shown contempt” for repeated offers since 2013 to come to the table under supervision of the United Nations.
Earlier this year, French Polynesia’s nuclear test veterans organization, Moruroa e tatou, said only if France increases its compensation efforts 100 times, it will become credible that it takes the problem seriously.
Marking the 52nd anniversary of the first of the weapons tests, the organization said in July that despite confessions from France it was working on compensation for victims of the weapons test, the process was not functioning as it should.
It said France has been considering only four cases this year, while 100 times more cases would have to be dealt with.
Sales of US military equipment to foreign governments have increased by 33 percent compared to the previous year’s total, a US administration official says.
Lieutenant General Charles Hooper, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, told Reuters on Tuesday that the US foreign military sales hit 55.6 billion dollars in the fiscal year ending September 30.
According to Reuters, the increase in foreign military sales came in part because the Trump administration rolled out a new “Buy American” plan in April that relaxed restrictions on sales while encouraging US officials to take a bigger role in increasing business overseas for the US weapons industry.
Hooper said the $55.6 billion figure represented signed letters of agreement for foreign military sales between the United States and allies.
The United States sold over $40 billion worth of weapons last year, maintaining its position as the world’s dominant arms supplier.
A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) revealed in March that the US has increased its arms sales by 25 percent over the past five years.
It also said some half of US arms exports during that period have gone to the Middle East, and that Saudi Arabia registered a 225-percent rise in military purchases – almost all from the US and Europe.
Saudi Arabia was the first country US President Donald Trump visited after taking office last year. It was announced during his visit to Riyadh that Washington could sell $110 billion in military equipment to Saudi Arabia in a period of 10 years. The State Department said at the time that the deal could grow to $350 billion over a decade.
The massive arms sales come despite repeated international calls on the US to stop supporting the Saudis with modern weaponry, which the kingdom has, according to many reports, used in its devastating war on Yemen.
The White House has also been criticized by both human rights groups and US lawmakers in Congress from both political parties for allowing its Saudi ally to bomb Yemen.
Some 15,000 Yemenis have been killed and thousands more injured since the onset of the Saudi-led aggression in March 2015.
Washington has denied it is directly supplying the Saudis with weapons in the war but numerous reports have suggested that US arms have played a part in massive civilian casualties.
MOSCOW – The bomb squad of the Russian Armed Forces’ International Mine Action Center will depart for Laos to help the country clear out remaining unexploded US bombs from the Vietnam War later on Wednesday, local media reported.
The squad consists of 36 people, according to the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. The mission will last until March 2019, and will focus on clearing myriads of hard-to-find US bombs that pose a threat to local residents from the Laotian jungle, as chief of the engineer troops of the Russian Armed Forces Lt. Gen. Yury Stavitsky said last week.
The United States dropped some 260 million bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973, according to experts. The Vietnam war, which began in 1964 and ended in 1975, killed about 3 million Vietnamese and over 58,000 US nationals, as well as many people in adjacent countries, including Cambodia and Laos.
US Army investigators secretly confirmed over 300 war crimes committed by the US military, including murder, torture, rape, corpse mutilation and indiscriminate fire in civilian areas, according to the Crimes of War Education Project.
NATO’s Secretary General has boldly defended the alliance’s 1999 bombing of former Yugoslavia as an act of humanitarianism, despite the dubious motives and devastating aftermath. RT took a more thorough look at the conflict.
Jens Stoltenberg told a group of students from Belgrade University that NATO bombed their country to “protect civilians and to stop the Milosevic regime,” adding that many Serbs have an incomplete picture of the bombing campaign.
But the truth may be a bit more complicated – and less flattering.
To mark the 15th anniversary of the bombing campaign, in 2014 two RT journalists – Anissa Naouai and Jelena Milincic – travelled across the former Yugoslavia and met with people who survived the 3-month bombing. In the process, they revealed the very different ways in which the war was portrayed – and perceived – in Serbia and abroad.
In contrast to Stoltenberg’s rosy description of the bombing campaign, Naouai and Milincic’s resulting documentary about their journey, ЗАШТО? (Why?), presents the unsettling truths about a 78-day bombardment that left hundreds of civilians dead.
In 1969, US President Richard Nixon ended all offensive aspects of the US bio-weapons program — the first category of weapons prohibited by an international treaty. In 1975, the US ratified both the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) — the international treaties outlawing biological warfare. But many reports from different sources offer reason to believe that the US military is developing a new generation of weapons in violation of the international treaties Washington is a party to.
An opinion paper published on Oct. 4 in the journal Science, written by an international group of researchers led by Richard Guy Reeves from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, claims the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is potentially developing insects as a means of delivering a “new class of biological weapon.”
The official goal of Insect Allies, an ongoing research program, is to disperse infectious, genetically modified viruses that have been engineered to edit crop chromosomes directly in the field. But there is a reason to believe that the program is actually an effort to develop biological agents and a means of delivery intended for hostile purposes. If true, this would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
The researchers warn the project could be used to create drought-resistant crops as an “agricultural bio-weapon.” The Washington Post cited Silja Voeneky, the co-author of the Science article and a professor of international law at the University of Freiburg, who stated, “We argue that there is the risk that the program is seen as not justified by peaceful purposes.” According to her, “To use insects as a vector to spread diseases is a classical bio-weapon.”
DARPA’s program manager for Insect Allies, Blake Bextine, acknowledged that the project involves new technologies that potentially could be deployed for “dual use,” in theory, for either defensive or offensive purposes. But that’s true for almost any advanced technology, he added.
The simple fact alone that Insect Allies is a military program naturally raises questions. The US Defense Department says its research agency has been tasked with this problem because food security is a component of national security. The State Department has explained that the project is for peaceful purposes and does not violate the BWC. This does not sound very convincing!
Just a few hours before the scathing report published by Science hit the press, Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the commander of the Russian Armed Forces’ Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Troops, accused the US military of carrying out large-scale, covert, biological warfare research using labs located in Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. The Russian military is concerned about the outbreaks of African swine fever that first began in Georgia in 2007 and then spread into Russia, Europe, and China. “The infection strain in the samples collected from animals killed by the disease in those nations was identical to the Georgia-2007 strain,” Igor Kirillov emphasized.
The documents released by former Georgian State Security Minister Igor Giorgadze have confirmed that the US-funded Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi, Georgia, was used as a cover for secret military biological research. The Russian military believes the spread of viral diseases in southern Russia could have been linked to the activities of the Lugar Center. Identical information has also been obtained from other sources. US investigative journalist Jeffrey Silverman, who has lived in Georgia for over 25 years, tells the same story about the US military’s biological research effort in that country.
In October 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement claiming that someone was collecting“biological material” from various ethnic groups and regions of Russia.
Last summer, the US Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command sought samples of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and synovial fluid from Russian subjects who “must be Caucasian.” It was looking for at least 12 RNA samples from Russians of European ancestry, as well as 27 samples of synovial fluid. Only Russian specimens. It wanted no tissue samples from Ukraine.
In January 2018 Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a well-known Bulgarian investigative journalist, published an extensive report confirming the fact that the US military has never stopped its bio-weapons research that it conducts in many countries. According to her, it regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria, and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of biological weapons, and that hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically being exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases.
No, the reports about the US violations of the BWC cannot be dismissed as mere Russian propaganda. Neither the journal Science nor the authors of the sensational article that has drawn so much public attention have any ties to Russia. Too many sources, based in a variety of geographic locations and publishing reports by a wide range of people, all tell the same story. The programs in question are always under the control of the military, not other, civilian agencies. The issue of US non-compliance with the BWC has not been in the spotlight and has been overlooked in comparison to the problems related to other weapons of mass destruction. But if the United States so flagrantly violates the BWC, can it be trusted with other international arms-control treaties? Russia appears to be trying to draw public attention to this issue. Other nations should join this effort. The time is right to ask the US to stop dodging awkward questions and provide some clear answers to them.
This week Russian officials declared that the delivery of S-300s for Syria was completed and that this first batch included 49 pieces of “military equipment”, including radars, control vehicles and four launchers. Russian officials added that, if needed, this figure could be increased to 8-12 launchers. Defense Minister Shoigu added that “the measures we will take will be devoted to ensure 100 percent safety and security of our men in Syria, and we will do this”. This leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
First, it is still unclear which version of the S-300 was delivered to Syria. Some sources say that this might be the S-300PMU2, others mention the S-300VM while, yet other sources speculate that this might be an S-300V4 or its export version the Antey-2500. I will spare you the technical details (those interested can look at the pretty detailed Wikipedia entry here), but it should be noted that until the specific version of the S-300 becomes known it will be very hard to assess the potential impact of this delivery. The original S-300s are by now maybe not obsolete, but most definitely not the bleeding edge of air defense technologies. (The first S-300s entered service with the Soviet military in the late seventies!). But the newest version of the S-300s are very close in capabilities to the S-400 system and thus rank among the most capable air defense systems ever built. For example, a lot has been made from the fact that the Israelis have had many years to study the S-300s delivered to Greece, but what is often overlooked is that the version delivered to Cyprus and which was later re-deployed to Greece was the (relatively outdated) S-300PMU-1. The probability that the Russians would deliver this version to the Syrians is close to zero. However, when I think of Israeli Defense Minister (and bona fide nutcase) Lieberman declaring that “one thing needs to be clear: If someone shoots at our planes, we will destroy them. It doesn’t matter if it’s an S-300 or an S-700” he probably was told by the Israeli military analysts that the S-300 is not that formidable a weapon and missed the fact that they were referring to the older version and not the kind of kit the Russians would be using nowadays.
What is sure is that just four launchers are not very many, but are enough to protect any one specific part of Syria. They will also increase the overall number of Russian/Syrian air defense missiles thus helping to achieve the officially stated goal of ensuring “the 100 percent safety” of the Russian forces in Syria. However, this is certainly not enough to create a complete no-fly zone over the entire country, at least not against a large scale attack.
Still, the Russians already have S-300s (and even S-400) in Syria and 4 more launchers do provide them with some additional firepower, but not any new capabilities. I think the most likely explanation is that the S-300s delivered to the Syrians will protect a few important strategic Syrian targets (Damascus?) while, at the same time, adding firepower to the (rather small) Russian task force in Syria. As for the statement that an additional 4-8 launchers could be delivered, that is both a sign that the Russians want to keep their options open while, at the same time, creating a deliberate ambiguity about how much firepower they actually possess at any one given moment in time.
Second, I will repeat what I said before: S-300s are not what the Syrians need most. In terms of anti-air missiles, what they need most are higher numbers of Pantsirs-S1/2 mobile medium to short range air defense systems. Not only are the Pantsirs ideal to protect against cruise missile strikes, they can also protect the S-300s, which will become a critical issue if the Israelis decide to try to destroy them (which they threatened to do in the past).
What S-300s primarily add to the Syrian capabilities is not so much the ability to intercept more missiles, but the ability to track and engage AWACS and other battle management and reconnaissance aircraft at very long ranges. In theory, an S-300V4 could make it impossible for the Israelis to put up an AWACS at any useful range. The AWACS would either have to remain too far to be of use, or take the huge risk of being shot down by a high speed and very maneuverable missile (S-300V4 missiles have a flight envelope of 400 km at Mach 7.5 or of 350 km at Mach 9!). If the Israelis conclude that the Syrians now have S-300V4′s, they will have to dramatically decrease their air operations in Syria and will switch to tactical (ground to ground) ballistic missiles and long range artillery systems. More S-300s also improve the overall radar coverage and will close some gaps created by the Syrian mountain ranges.
Third, it remains equally unclear, perhaps deliberately, which electronic warfare systems Russia has deployed (or will deploy) in Syria and in what numbers. Possible candidates include the Zhitel R-330Zh electronic intelligence and jamming system, the Borisoglebsk-2 RB-301B electronic warfare weapon system and the Krasukha-4 jamming system. As for the automated command and control system which might be deployed to Syria, my guess is that the Polyana D4M1 would be a prime candidate. Whatever the actual mix will be in the end, I would argue that this presents a more formidable capability than additional S-300 launchers. Sure, this is apples and oranges, but we have to keep in mind that these electronic warfare systems are extremely powerful force-multipliers which can dramatically increase both the Russian and the Syrian defensive capabilities by jamming GPS signals, datalinks, cellphone signals (used for targeting and intelligence), radars, by creating false targets and even by destroying electronics. Electronic warfare is one field in which the Israelis have always enjoyed a huge superiority over their Arab victims and the fact that this has now changed is an extremely distressing development for them, even if they will never admit it.
As predicted, the Israelis have declared themselves both superior and invulnerable so they will continue their policy of (completely illegal) aggression against Syria. They have several options here: the Israelis might decide to stick to basically symbolic attacks against unprotected targets and declare each time that they have destroyed a huge depot of Hezbollah missiles or a Syrian chemical weapons plant. That would greatly help to bolster Netanyahu’s “patriotic” credentials while keeping the real action at a purely symbolic level. The second option would be to use ballistic missiles and long range artillery and strike some real targets. Finally, the Israelis could try to launch a complex and large air attack on the Syrian air defense systems in an attempt to show that S-300s are no big deal for them. The option of using ballistic missiles is probably the most likely one (and if the Syrians don’t keep their S-300s fairly close to each other (so they can protect each other), the Israelis might also be able to destroy them). That is a rather risky plan since, if successful, it would just result in more air defense system deliveries from Russia. This is something the USA might strenuously object to since every time the Russians deliver military hardware to the Syrians to protect them against the Israelis, they also improve the Syrian capability to defend their country against US/NATO/CENTCOM attacks (the delivery of S-300s to the Syrians is just as much a disaster for the USA as it is for Israel so I imagine that the US commanders are rather angry with the Israelis for creating this situation).
It is important to keep in mind that while the S-300s are certainly formidable air defense systems, they are not a Wunderwaffe which could, by itself, prevent the Israelis from attacking Syria. The latest delivery of military hardware from Russia will definitely mark a sharp increase in the Syrian (and Russian) defense capabilities, but if the Israelis are determined to continue striking Syria, the Russians will have to deliver even more systems.
Speaking of the Israelis, their big delegation which traveled to Moscow apparently only succeeded in further irritating the Russians. I had speculated that they might present some kind of exculpatory evidence but I was wrong: apparently, they had nothing to say besides “Iran is bad” and “Syria is responsible”. This is what caused the Russians to show a record of the radar data of the Russian S-400 in Syria to prove that every words of the Israelis were lies, lies and more lies.
I see that as yet another proof of the absolutely amazing combination of gross incompetence and breathtaking arrogance of the Israelis. The way they conducted their entire attack is already a testimony of their gross lack of professionalism, and they only added insult to injury when they showed up in Moscow and looked the Russians straight in the eyes and lied about everything (even though they must have known that Russians had it all recorded second by second). When Putin spoke of a “chain of tragic circumstances” he was very politely trying to give them an out as long as they apologized and compensated the Russians, but to the Israeli Herrenvolk that would have been totally unacceptable. They did what they always do: they doubled down and accused all their critics of antisemitism. What else is new?
In conclusion I will say that, while I might very well be wrong, I still don’t believe that the Israelis had some sophisticated plan to achieve some still to be determined goal. During the past year the Israelis informed the Russians about their planned airstrikes in Syria via their deconfliction line only in 10% of the cases. For the remaining 90% they did not even bother, in spite of having promised to do so in their agreement with Russia. In sharp contrast, the Russians always informed the Israelis of their operations, as did the Americans towards the Russians. But the Israelis simply think that they don’t have to abide by any kind of norms of behavior. That kind of contempt for agreements (and for non-Jews in general) is typical of the Israeli mindset and it will eventually bring the downfall of the last openly racist regime on the planet.
The vast regime of torture created by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks continues to haunt America. The political class and most of the media have never dealt honestly with the profound constitutional corruption that such practices inflicted. Instead, torture enablers are permitted to pirouette as heroic figures on the flimsiest evidence.
Former FBI chief James Comey is the latest beneficiary of the media’s “no fault” scoring on the torture scandal. In his media interviews for his new memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, Comey is portraying himself as a Boy Scout who sought only to do good things. But his record is far more damning than most Americans realize.
Comey continues to use memos from his earlier government gigs to whitewash all of the abuses he sanctified. “Here I stand; I can do no other,” Comey told George W. Bush in 2004 when Bush pressured Comey, who was then Deputy Attorney General, to approve an unlawful anti-terrorist policy. Comey was quoting a line supposedly uttered by Martin Luther in 1521, when he told Emperor Charles V and an assembly of Church officials that he would not recant his sweeping criticisms of the Catholic Church.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations did excellent reports prior to Comey’s becoming FBI chief that laid out his role in the torture scandal. Such hard facts, however, have long since vanished from the media radar screen. MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently declared, “James Comey made his bones by standing up against torture. He was a made man before Trump came along.” Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, in a column declaring that Americans should be “deeply grateful” to lawyers such as Comey, declared, “The Bush administration wanted to claim that its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were lawful. Comey believed they were not…. So Comey pushed back as much as he could.”
Martin Luther risked death to fight against what he considered the scandalous religious practices of his time. Comey, a top Bush administration policymaker, found a safer way to oppose the worldwide secret U.S. torture regime widely considered a heresy against American values: he approved brutal practices and then wrote some memos and emails fretting about the optics.
Losing sleep
Comey became deputy attorney general in late 2003 and “had oversight of the legal justification used to authorize” key Bush programs in the war on terror, as a Bloomberg News analysis noted. At that time, the Bush White House was pushing the Justice Department to again sign off on an array of extreme practices that had begun shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A 2002 Justice Department memo had leaked out that declared that the federal Anti-Torture Act “would be unconstitutional if it impermissibly encroached on the President’s constitutional power to conduct a military campaign.” The same Justice Department policy spurred a secret 2003 Pentagon document on interrogation policies that openly encouraged contempt for the law: “Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law.”
Photos had also leaked from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq showing the stacking of naked prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution from a wire connected to a man’s penis, guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers celebrating the sordid degradation. Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published extracts in the New Yorker from a March 2004 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba that catalogued other U.S. interrogation abuses: “Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape … sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”
The Bush administration responded to the revelations with a torrent of falsehoods, complemented by attacks on the character of critics. Bush declared, “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush had the audacity to run for reelection as the anti-torture candidate, boasting that “for decades, Saddam tormented and tortured the people of Iraq. Because we acted, Iraq is free and a sovereign nation.” He was hammering this theme despite a confidential CIA Inspector General report warning that post–9/11 CIA interrogation methods might violate the international Convention Against Torture.
James Comey had the opportunity to condemn the outrageous practices and pledge that the Justice Department would cease providing the color of law to medieval-era abuses. Instead, Comey merely repudiated the controversial 2002 memo. Speaking to the media in a not-for-attribution session on June 22, 2004, he declared that the 2002 memo was “overbroad,” “abstract academic theory,” and “legally unnecessary.” He helped oversee crafting a new memo with different legal footing to justify the same interrogation methods.
Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboarding, which sought to break detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S. government since the Spanish-American War. A practice that was notorious when inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition was adopted by the CIA with the Justice Department’s blessing. (When Barack Obama nominated Comey to be FBI chief in 2013, he testified that he had belatedly recognized that waterboarding was actually torture.)
Comey wrote in his memoir that he was losing sleep over concern about Bush-administration torture polices. But losing sleep was not an option for detainees, because Comey approved sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique. Detainees could be forcibly kept awake for 180 hours until they confessed their crimes. How did that work? At Abu Ghraib, one FBI agent reported seeing a detainee “handcuffed to a railing with a nylon sack on his head and a shower curtain draped around him, being slapped by a soldier to keep him awake.” Numerous FBI agents protested the extreme interrogation methods they saw at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but their warnings were ignored.
Comey also approved “wall slamming” — which, as law professor David Cole wrote, meant that detainees could be thrown against a wall up to 30 times. Comey also signed off on the CIA’s using “interrogation” methods such as facial slaps, locking detainees in small boxes for 18 hours, and forced nudity. When the secret Comey memo approving those methods finally became public in 2009, many Americans were aghast — and relieved that the Obama administration had repudiated Bush policies.
When it came to opposing torture, Comey’s version of “Here I stand” had more loopholes than a reverse-mortgage contract. Though Comey in 2005 approved each of 13 controversial extreme interrogation methods, he objected to combining multiple methods on one detainee.
The torture guy
In his memoir, Comey relates that his wife told him, “Don’t be the torture guy!” Comey apparently feels that he satisfied her dictate by writing memos that opposed combining multiple extreme interrogation methods. And since the vast majority of the American media agree with him, he must be right.
Comey’s cheerleaders seem uninterested in the damning evidence that has surfaced since his time as a torture enabler in the Bush administration. In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a massive report on the CIA torture regime — including death resulting from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and dozens of cases where innocent people were pointlessly brutalized. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. From the start, the program was protected by phalanxes of lying federal officials.
When he first campaigned for president, Barack Obama pledged to vigorously investigate the Bush torture regime for criminal violations. Instead, the Obama administration proffered one excuse after another to suppress the vast majority of the evidence, pardon all U.S. government torturers, and throttle all torture-related lawsuits. The only CIA official to go to prison for the torture scandal was courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou. Kiriakou’s fate illustrates that telling the truth is treated as the most unforgivable atrocity in Washington.
If Comey had resigned in 2004 or 2005 to protest the torture techniques he now claims to abhor, he would deserve some of the praise he is now receiving. Instead, he remained in the Bush administration but wrote an email summarizing his objections, declaring that “it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. [Attorney General] and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong.” A 2009 New York Times analysis noted that Comey and two colleagues “have largely escaped criticism [for approving torture] because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.” In Washington, writing emails is “close enough for government work” to confer sainthood.
When Comey finally exited the Justice Department in August 2005 to become a lavishly paid senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, he proclaimed in a farewell speech that protecting the Justice Department’s “reservoir” of “trust and credibility” requires “vigilance” and “an unerring commitment to truth.” But he had perpetuated policies that shattered the moral credibility of both the Justice Department and the U.S. government. He failed to heed Martin Luther’s admonition, “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”
Comey is likely to go to his grave without paying any price for his role in perpetuating appalling U.S. government abuses. It is far more important to recognize the profound danger that torture and the exoneration of torturers pose to the United States. “No free government can survive that is not based on the supremacy of the law,” is one of the mottoes chiseled into the façade of Justice Department headquarters. Unfortunately, politicians nowadays can choose which laws they obey and which laws they trample. And Americans are supposed to presume that we still have the rule of law as long as politicians and bureaucrats deny their crimes.
Israeli settlers have occupied two Palestinian buildings near Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.
In the early hours of this morning, Israeli settlers stormed a building in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. According to Wafa, the “settlers moved into the building owned by the Joudeh family, which was used as a clinic” in the Aqbat Darwish area, near Al-Aqsa Mosque.
This was the second building in Jerusalem to be taken over in the past two days. Yesterday settlers occupied a building in the Wadi Hilweh area of Silwan, situated just outside the walls of the Old City and below Al-Aqsa Mosque.
This is not the first time these areas have been targeted by illegal Israeli settlers, with Silwan in particular repeatedly facing attempts to drive Palestinian inhabitants from their homes. The “City of David” national park – a tourist site and archaeological dig run by right-wing settler group City of David Foundation (also known as Elad) – is situated in Batan Al-Hawa in Silwan and is frequently used as justification for such illegal activity.
In July, the Israeli Knesset advanced a new law that would allow residential construction in the “City of David” national park. According to a report by Haaretz, “the minutes of the [Elad] committee’s previous meeting in January made it clear that Elad and its leader, David Beeri, are behind the bill, which is designed to promote construction at the site.”
In August a “heritage centre” was opened in the park, with the inauguration attended by senior Israeli and US figures. A Palestinian resident of Silwan, Yakoub Al-Rajabi, explained that: “We know that this was a well-orchestrated plan to force us to leave […] And if we stay, it will paralyse us and isolate us in our homes”.
Since 2002, 700 Palestinians have been facing eviction from their land in Batan Al-Hawa. Their land was transferred to the Benvenisti Trust when Israel’s Justice Ministry issued title deeds to the organisation for the land in question. The trust is controlled by Ateret Cohanim, a right-wing organisation that encourages Jewish Israelis to settle illegally in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.
In June, Israel admitted that its decision to evict the Palestinians of Batan Al-Hawa was “flawed” and that it had not properly investigated the nature of the trust, or the Ottoman-era law that applies to the case. Despite the admission, a number of families have already been evicted from Batan Al-Hawa or are embroiled in court battles to save their homes.
Other areas of Jerusalem are also targeted for illegal Israeli settlement. According to statistics from the Jerusalem Institute, as of 2015 there were some 211,000 Jewish Israelis living in occupied East Jerusalem, amounting to 40 per cent of all inhabitants in these neighbourhoods. The statistics also demonstrate that the number of Israelis living in illegal Jerusalem settlements has grown consistently since the city was occupied in 1967.
Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev yesterday called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to take care of her country’s interests and not to mention the demolition of the Palestinian village of Khan Al-Ahmar during her official visit to Israel, news site Arutz Sheva reported.
Regev’s comments came after reports circulated that Merkel threatened to cancel her trip to Israel if the West Bank village of Khan Al-Ahmar was demolished.
“I think that her statement is out of place, and we certainly do not interfere with the decisions of the courts in other countries, and I expect that they will not interfere with the decisions of the Israeli court,” Regev said.
“I propose to the German chancellor that she deal with the internal problems of her own country or deal with the very good cooperation system between Germany and Israel,” the Israeli minister from the Likud said.
She added: “We respect the chancellor and her government, but I expect every leader to take care of the internal affairs of his country only.”
In response to the claims, Israeli MK Bezalel Smotrich also tweeted: “If I was prime minister I would evict the village while Merkel’s aircraft is in the air. So that she will then turn around and go back.”
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Israeli settlers have occupied two Palestinian buildings near Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.
Aletho News
Aletho News 