West Bank, occupied Palestine – A video posted on October 12th by Shehab news agency described as an attack on a Palestinian girl from Haifa in her twenties for allegedly trying to assault a taxi driver in Tel Aviv after an argument between them. The video shows a woman pinned to the ground by a man as passers-by argue about whether or not to beat and kill her. One woman claims she saw the woman had a knife and screams “Why are you playing around. They are coming to kill our children!” and demands her execution. Another bystander asks the man “Did she come at you with a knife?” and he replies “She put her hand in her pocket.” Yet Another kicks her in the head.
While there undoubtedly are stabbings of Israelis taking place, there are also undoubtedly mistaken or false accusations and pressure from Israeli civilians to kill people they suspect of being terrorists. The latest example being the Eritrean asylum seeker Mulu Habtom Zerhom who was shot and beaten to death in the Beersheva central bus station after being mistaken for an Arab. Because Mulu was not Palestinian there will be an investigation committee looking into his murder.
Palestinians who are killed are assumed guilty by default. In the case of the Palestinian woman in the video taken in Tel Aviv, if some of the bystanders hadn’t intervened and the woman had been lynched it would have been reported as: “knife wielding terrorist neutralized”. This is how the Israeli media portrayed 23 year old Ahmed Sha’ban from Ras el-Amud in Occupied East Jerusalem. Al Quds Newspaper published a video showing an Israeli security guard shooting twice directly at Ahmed’s body after he is already on the ground. An Israeli eye witness is heard stating: “Central bus station in Jerusalem, just now, a terrorist was exterminated, bro, right in front of me! Right in front of me he shot him ten times! Ten bullets were shot at him now! It’s such a mess here! I don’t know, he didn’t touch anything… He didn’t have a knife in his hand. Everyone shouted ‘terrorist’. The security guard shot him. I am telling you the bullets are right in front of me. My head hurts.”
Israeli officials have been criticised by human rights organisations for calling on Israelis with licensed guns to carry them in public and to kill any suspect. They have made it clear that it is not necessary to determine if the suspect is holding a knife before shooting to kill. At a press conference on October 8th Israeli Minister of defence Moshe Yaalon stated “Right now it is required primarily to be vigilant, determined, to respond quickly to any local attack, to eliminate the terrorist stabber or the perpetrator, stone thrower and the like, immediately on the spot. This is the answer to this kind of terrorism.” Other Israeli officials rushed to echo the sentiment On the 11th of October MK Yair Lapid Head of the Yesh Atid party said on a televised interview,” whoever takes out a knife or a screwdriver or whatever it may be, needs to be shot to kill”, adding “don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct.”
There have been many cases of alleged knife wielders shot in the last months since the killing of Hadeel al-Hashlamoun in Hebron that Amnesty international categorized as an extrajudicial execution. They all deserve an investigative committee. Whether a suspect is falsely accused or did actually carry out an attack, shooting and/or killing people who do not constitute an immediate threat to anyone is war crime.
In a television interview Sunday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made his most categorical statements yet of his willingness to use military force in support of the foreign policy goals of American imperialism.
Speaking on the ABC program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the Vermont senator gave his backing to Obama’s decision this week to keep nearly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan through the end of 2016, and at least 5,000 troops indefinitely. He also refused to define any circumstances in which he would rule out the unilateral use of military force.
Reacting to the Taliban takeover of the key city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, a debacle for the troops of the US puppet regime in Kabul, Obama reversed his previous decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year.
In response to a direct question about whether he backed the decision to keep nearly 10,000 troops on the battlefield of a war that has gone on for more than 14 years, Sanders responded: “Well, yeah, I won’t give you the exact number. Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan Army needs.”
Stephanopoulos then asked about the candidate’s statements during last Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas on the use of US military force, when Sanders pointed to his vote to authorize the Afghanistan war in 2001 as proof that he was willing to use force. What were the circumstances in which “a President Sanders would authorize unilateral action to use force,” the ABC anchorman asked?
Sanders replied, “Well, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.” Then the following exchange took place:
SANDERS: I think sensible foreign policy and military policies suggest that it cannot be the United States of America alone which solves all of the world’s military…
STEPHANOPOULOS: In all circumstances?
SANDERS: Well, of course, you know, I’m not saying, you know, I don’t want to get into hypotheticals. I didn’t say in all circumstances.
In other words, pressed on his rhetorical commitment to form military-diplomatic coalitions to pursue US foreign policy goals, Sanders declined to set limits on what he as president might do unilaterally. The supposed advocate of “democratic socialism” and “political revolution” fell back on a standard talking point of would-be commanders-in-chief for US imperialism.
“I don’t want to get into hypotheticals” simply means, “I want a free hand to use force whenever the military-intelligence apparatus demands it.”
While Sanders was happy to denounce George W. Bush’s decision to go war in Iraq as one of the worst decisions ever made in US foreign policy, he made no reference to the devastation created by Barack Obama’s interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.
Sanders is in no sense an “antiwar” candidate. He uses demagogic condemnations of “millionaires and billionaires” and the growth of social inequality to appeal to working people and young people who are deeply opposed to American militarism, but only to divert their attention from the growing danger of the imperialist war. His support for the policy of the ruling class abroad exposes his pretense of opposing the policy of this same ruling class within the United States.
Even on the infrequent occasions when he has discussed the disastrous consequences of US policy in the Middle East, it is only from the standpoint of American nationalism, not genuine opposition to imperialist war. Once in a while, Sanders bemoans the casualties suffered by American troops or the waste of resources better used at home, but he has never indicated any sympathy for the people of the countries targeted for destruction by US military interventions.
His comments Sunday on Afghanistan were typical. Sanders made no mention of the latest atrocity there by US forces, the deliberate bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, which killed at least 22 people: three doctors, nine other staff of the aid agency, and ten patients.
His silence is only part of a much broader policy, observed by all the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, who despite their incessant mudslinging maintain a united front in covering up for the war crimes carried out by the US military.
In this they are joined by the corporate-controlled media, which has largely ignored the revelations—reported by the Associated Press and then dropped—that US special operations forces were well aware of the hospital’s existence and location, and deliberately targeted it for incineration by an AC-130 helicopter gunship.
Hitting back at claims from General John Campbell — the commander of NATO and US troops in Afghanistan — who said the hospital had been “mistakenly struck”, Christopher Stokes, the General Director of MSF, said evidence suggested the attack was planned.
“The hospital was repeatedly hit both at the front and the rear and extensively destroyed and damaged, even though we have provided all the coordinates and all the right information to all the parties in the conflict,” Stokes told Associated Press (AP).
“The extensive, quite precise destruction of this hospital… doesn’t indicate a mistake. The hospital was repeatedly hit.”
Clear Explanation Needed
Officials from the charity, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), have said that the bombing attack lasted over an hour, leading to suggestions that it was the legitimate target of the US airstrike.
Stokes also reiterated calls for an independent investigation into the incident to be carried out, saying that the charity wanted “… a clear explanation because all indications point to a grave breach of international humanitarian law, and therefore a war crime.”
The charity has raised concerns over the joint NATO-US-Afghan probe into the attack, saying that officials couldn’t be trusted to carry out a thorough and independent investigation into the incident.
The October 3 attack on the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan killed 22 people — 12 staff and 10 patients — with reports some victims were burning in their beds as a result of the bombing.
The US has taken responsibility for the attack, with President Barack Obama apologizing to MSF officials.
Despite the apology and claims that the hospital was “mistakenly” hit, there have been major question marks over how the site was bombed, with medical officials repeatedly maintaining that they had informed US and Afghan officials that the site was being used as a hospital.
MSF Dismisses Taliban Hideout Suggestions
MSF’s claims have been backed up by media reports suggesting US forces were aware the facility was a hospital and had been monitoring the site for days leading up to the attack.
According to a report by AP, a former intelligence official familiar with the details of the incident said that American analysts were scrutinizing the hospital before it was destroyed amid fears the site was being used a base for Taliban operatives.
US officials weren’t aware of the media reports, while MSF General Director Christopher Stokes denied any suggestions that armed Taliban forces were present on the hospital site.
“The compound was not entered by Taliban soldiers with weapons.
“What we have understood from our staff and guards is that there was very strong, very good control of what was happening in and around the compound and they reported no firing in the hours preceding the destruction of the hospital,” Stokes said.
The pressure is now building on United States officials, with accusations that the US is guilty of war crimes as a result of the incident.
Legal experts have said that if it can be proved that the US knew the site was being used as a hospital, then it could amount to war crimes.
MSF has already raised concerns around the current investigation into the attack, saying that there were fears the joint NATO-US-Afghan probe could have potentially destroyed vital evidence after entering the bombed hospital site last week.
The charity has launched an online petition calling on president Obama to allow the Swiss-based International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) to carry out an investigation into the attack. However, the US has failed to grant the commission access to the hospital.
A damning White House memo has revealed details of the so-called “deal in blood” forged by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush over the Iraq war.
The document, titled “Secret… Memorandum for the President”, was sent by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell to President Bush on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
The sensational memo revealed that Blair had agreed to support the war a year before the invasion even started, while publicly the British prime minister was working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
The document also disclosed that Blair agreed to act as a spin doctor for Bush and convince a skeptical public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which actually did not exist.
In response, Bush would flatter Blair and give the impression that London was not Washington’s poodle but an equal partner in the “special relationship.”
Powell told Bush that Blair “will be with us” on the Iraq war, and assured the president that “”the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East.”
Another sensational memo revealed how Bush used “spies” in the British Labour Party to help him to influence public opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of the Iraq war.
Both documents were obtained and published by The Mail on Sunday. They are part of a number of classified emails stored on the private server of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which courts have forced her to reveal.
Blair has always denied the claim that he and Bush signed a deal “in blood” at Crawford to launch a war against Iraq that began on March 20, 2003, that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The Powell memo, however, showed how Blair and Bush secretly prepared the Iraq war plot behind closed doors at Crawford.
Powell told Bush: “He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.”
The top US diplomatic official added that the UK premier has the presentational skills to “make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace.”
Powell wrote that Blair will “stick with us on the big issues” but he needs to show the British public that “Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship.”
In March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs. But no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has expressed support for President Barack Obama’s decision to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan.
On Thursday, Obama announced plans to keep 9,800 US troops in Afghanistan through 2016 and 5,500 in 2017, reneging on his promise to end the war there and bring home most American forces from the Asian country before he leaves office.
Clinton on Friday called Obama’s move an example of “a leader who has strong convictions about what he would like to see happen but also pays attention to what’s going on in the real world.”
Obama had originally planned to withdraw almost all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year. He just wanted to keep a small, embassy-based military presence in Kabul.
But the Pentagon has been arguing for months that Kabul needed additional US military presence in order to defeat a resurgent Taliban movement.
Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state during his first term, said Washington wants to bring American troops home and “we certainly don’t want them engaged in on-the-ground combat.”
“We want them to help support and train the Afghan army,” she added.
“So I can’t predict where things will be in January of 2017. But I support the president’s decision,” Clinton stated.
According to US officials, Washington would also maintain a large counterterrorism capability of terror drones and Special Operations forces to fight militants in Afghanistan.
The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but after more than 14 years, the foreign troops have still not been able to establish security in the country.
“We have invested a lot of blood and a lot of treasure in trying to help that country and we can’t afford for it to become an outpost of the Taliban and ISIS [Daesh/ISIL] one more time, threatening us, threatening the larger world,” Clinton declared.
Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terrorism.
— Barack Obama, February 15, 2013.
Even to those who do not watch closely it has to be apparent that Washington’s vast disinformation machine is finally out of control, seriously awry, or desperate.
The latest foray in apparent media manipulation was the claim by US “anonymous sources” that four Russian missiles targeting terrorist groups in Syria, landed in Iran.
US Administrations are serial repeaters of untruths. However, talking of stray missiles after bombing a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan under a week before – when coordinates of the buildings had been confirmed to US authorities again just prior to the attack – then changing the story as to how it happened four times in less days, is skating on wafer thin ice.
As Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of MSF and former French Foreign Minister wrote: “Targeting a red cross drawn on the roof of a hospital is … unacceptable … a line has again been crossed.” Demanding an independent investigation he stated: “It is a war crime.” (Guardian, October 9, 2015.)
Former US Senate candidate, Mark Dankof, speaking to Iran’s Press TV regarding US claims of stray missiles in Iran, believes a full-blown psychops operation towards Russia is underway. President Putin’s Ministers stating that all terrorists terrorizing the people of Syria are targets – thus including the US backed ones – might be the reason.
Dankof points out: “ … two anonymous US officials (are) a basis for this claim, who in turn are quoting unspecified, uncorroborated, and unverified ‘military and intelligence information.’”
Moreover:
This is laughable … and underscores the blizzard of lies spun by the American government, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, and Turkey, about what has been going on in Syria, and who is clearly responsible for the 250,000 Syrian deaths, one million wounded, and 9.5 million displaced citizens of that country”, he added.
The blame is clearly on the aforementioned states, who have financed, supported, and introduced the … extremists and terrorists into the sovereign state of Syria in an illegitimate attempt to overthrow the legitimate and recognized government … This is not simply evil, but illegal.
The lies being woven by Zionist corporate media in the West about Russia are an attempt to conceal the alliance of ISIL, al-Qaeda, and affiliates with American, Israeli, British, French, and Saudi intelligence, and to conceal the obvious fact that the Russian airstrikes are hurting these terrorist groups militarily, even as they take place legally because the sovereign government … of Syria has formally requested Russian assistance.
Dankov pointed out that on Thursday October 8, the “White Helmets” became CNN’s source for their reports on the stray missiles, the network citing them as “an independent medical team” in Syria. However:
The truth is that the White Helmets are an invention of state intelligence agencies and NGOs who seek the overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This organization has special links to the British government in particular, and (also) to the PR firm Purpose Inc., to lobby for military intervention against Assad.
They are closely linked to the Avaaz NGO which has the same agenda, and is linked to the Open Society Foundation of George Soros …
Australian born Jeremy Heimans, co-founder and CEO of Purpose Inc. (“We create new organizations and ventures to tackle issues where mass participation and collective action can unlock big change”; Purpose moves people to remake the world”) is also a co-founder of Avaaz.
However, back to “stray missiles”, a story speedily silent in the Western media. Russian General Musa Kamali told Sputnik News Agency on October 9, 2015: “We have no reports of any Russian missiles crashing in Iran … those media reports alleging that Russian missiles aiming at Syria hit Iran are blatant lies. If the people making those claims had any proof, they would have certainly presented it”, he said. Quite.
Of course, US expertise excels not alone in stray missiles, but in planned assaults on hospitals and other buildings protected under international laws. Hospitals are specifically protected under Article 20 of the Geneva Convention, amongst other binding international laws.
Intended indiscriminate destruction was demonstrated in 2003, when: “The scenes of downtown Baghdad in flames (made it) abundantly clear why US officials insisted on covering up a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ at the UN Security Council during Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.” Picasso’s painting commemorates a Basque town razed to the ground by a German aerial assault in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
At the onset of their illegal invasion US aircraft were making bombing runs on Baghdad at the rate of 1,000 a day with many parts of the city described as “an inferno.” Holocaustal war crimes of enormity. (Holocaust: “Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire.”)
Further, the US is also no stranger to stray missiles. As Time Magazinereported in April 2003, just two weeks into America’s bombardment:
… in the past week, three U.S. Tomahawks have gone missing in the rocky plains of southeastern Turkey en route to Iraq, several hundred miles from the war zone. Five more went astray in Saudi Arabia, and a handful of others have broken up in Iran and reportedly, Syria.
Bombing in Iraq, as everywhere “liberated” by America was criminally indiscriminate. Edward S. Herman cites Fallujah as a chilling example and of war crimes of enormity:
According to Dr. Hafidd al-Dulzanni, head of the Commission for the Compensation of Fallujah Citizens, the U.S. assault (of 2004) destroyed some 7,000 houses, 840 stores, workshops and clinics, 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries, 59 schools, 13 government buildings, two electricity stations, three water purification plants, along with several railroad stations and sewage purification plants, among other things. Hospitals were an explicit target and weapons like white phosphorus and uranium-loaded projectiles were used, all adding up to massive violations of the laws of war. (Emphasis mine.)
Fallujah’s illegal destruction both targeted and indiscriminate was a metaphor for all Iraq.
On the day the US military entered Baghdad (April 8, 2003) they declared war on journalists, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol 1 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
First US troops directed a missile at the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub and seriously wounding several others. It should be noted that: “The attacks came amid broadcasts showing some of the mounting slaughter being conducted by US troops throughout the Iraqi capital.”
The surviving Al Jazeera staff sought shelter in nearby Abu Dhabi TV which then also came under US attack. Abu Dhabi TV correspondent, Shaker Hamed, issued an on air call for help reporting: “Twenty-five journalists and technicians belonging to Abu Dhabi television and … Al-Jazeera are surrounded in the offices of Abu Dhabi TV in Baghdad.” Note the “surrounded”. These were seemingly no “stray” airborne missiles. The tanks were firing from near point blank range. “Kill the messenger” comes to mind.
Hamed called for relevant agencies “to intervene quickly to pull us out of this zone where missiles and shells are striking in an unbelievable way.”
In a now chillingly familiar story, also reminiscent of the MSF hospital in Kundiz: “Al-Jazeera had written to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 23 giving the precise location of its office so as to avoid being targeted.” Giving co-ordinates to the US military is, it appears, literally the kiss of death.
Al Jazeera was also attacked by the US troops in Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion, as Iraq, destroying their offices.
Having targeted Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, the US troops turned their attention to the Palestine Hotel, where two hundred journalists and world wide media were based. They killed Reuters correspondent Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso of Spanish Telecinco TV. Three other journalists were injured, and the hotel was extensively damaged. The US military had, of course, been informed that the Palestine was the media’s base.
The previous day in Basra, Al Jazeera offices were targeted by two US missiles which failed to explode and outside Baghdad on the highway both Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV cars, clearly marked as such on roof, sides and hood, were targeted. Miraculously no one was hurt.
ITV journalist Terry Lloyd was murdered near Basra by the US within four days of the invasion – also in a clearly marked car. Cameraman Fred Nerac and their Lebanese assistant Hussein Osman in an accompanying car were also killed. French cameraman, Daniel Demoustier, injured in the attack said the US were firing on media vehicles: “to wipe out troublesome witnesses.” Given the examples above and the continuing litany of such attacks by US troops (and British) during the occupation, he seems to have hit the nail on the head.
When it comes to war crimes the US is a serial offender. In the 1991 assault on Iraq all water purification plants were deliberately destroyed on the orders of US Central Command, as were clinics, schools, separate Education Ministry stores. Media centres and radio stations were obliterated across the country. Over fifty percent of all livestock was destroyed, farms and herds, chicken farms a special target. Iraq was the world’s largest exporter of dates – the US clearly regarded date palms as an enemy and bombarded great ancient, majestic groves too.
The women and children who nightly went to the great, reinforced Ameriyah Shelter on the outskirts of Baghdad were also incinerated – the US had satellites over the Shelter which recorded the women and children entering as dusk fell and leaving at first light.
The factory that made baby milk powder was reduced to rubble and described as a “chemical weapons factory.” The machinery was provided, installed and maintained by a company in Birmingham, England – and could only have been used to provide baby milk.
Also destroyed were plants which produced basic medical supplies as syringes, pain killers, antibiotics, a well worn path followed in other US bombings as a civilian pharmaceutical factory, Al-Shifa (“The Cure”) Sudan in August 1998 when missiles also rained down on Afghanistan. Two US embassies in East Africa had been attacked, so as ever, proof-free Judge, jury and executioner, the US randomly bombed.
Barely noticed have been the numerous US attacks on ancient Yemen (population just 24.41 million) before their ongoing proxy attack by current Chair of the UN Human Rights Council, Saudi Arabia.
Ninety eight US missile and drone attacks struck Yemen between 2002 and 2015; 41 in 2012, 26 in 2013 and 14 in 2014, with other attacks in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The cost in human life is hidden and shaming. In May 2010 alone an “errant” US drone killed five people. In December 2009 a US Cruise missile killed 41 souls.
In 1999 former Yugoslavia was decimated – with stray US missiles landing in Macedonia, hitting Belgrade’s media centre, the Chinese Embassy, markets, obliterating train passengers, all “liberated” from life the American way.
2011 brought involvement in Libya’s destruction – another metaphor for the monstrosity of lawless might presented as benevolent saviour.
Let us hear no more phony allegations of stray missiles before the hell of the real ones have been accounted for.
The medical group Doctors Without Borders, whose hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz was bombed in a U.S. airstrike, said Thursday that a U.S tank forced its way through the gates of the compound, raising questions on whether it was a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence in a possible war crime inquiry.
The group, also known as MSF, said they were only informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank carried investigators from a joint US-Nato-Afghan team looking into the Oct. 3 attack, the Guardian reported.
The incident further violated an agreement with the medical group that they “would be given notice before each step of the procedure involving the organization’s personnel and assets.”
“Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” the group said in a statement, adding that a Doctors’ Without Borders team had arrived at the hospital earlier in the day.
The group said Tuesday that it was dealing with the bombing of its hospital as a “war crime,” saying that statements made by U.S. and Afghan officials indicate the attack was not “accidental” as some U.S. officials had claimed.
MSF International’s president, Dr. Joanne Liu, echoed similar statements made by the organization over the weekend in a new statement Tuesday.
“This attack cannot be brushed aside as a mere mistake or an inevitable consequence of war,” she wrote. “Statements from the Afghanistan government have claimed that Taliban forces were using the hospital to fire on Coalition forces. These statements imply that Afghan and U.S. forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital, which amounts to an admission of a war crime.”
The United States military has contradicted earlier statements about the massacre that killed 22 civilians, including international MSF doctors and children, as staff pleaded with the U.S. military to stop.
Rabbis have declared the killing of Palestinian resistance fighters “a religious duty”, Israeli media reported.
Israeli news website Walla reported that right-wing rabbis replied to questions including: “Am I allowed to kick the insurgent, hit him or shoot him in order to kill him after he has been arrested or is this prohibited?”
Rabbi Rav Benzion Mutzafi replied: “It is not only desirable to do so, but it is a religious duty that you hold his head down to the ground and hit him until his last breath.”
Mutzafi expressed anger towards Rabbi David Staph’s response. Staph said it is prohibited for people to attack a Palestinian perpetrator of an operation after he has been injured or when he is posing no danger. Mutzafi responded: “Do not listen to Staph because those who have mercy on the cruel will end up being cruel toward the righteous.”
Chief Rabbi of the city of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu called on all Israeli police officers and soldiers who allow Palestinian resistance fighters to live after their arrest:
“It is prohibited to keep the vandal alive after the operation, because if he is left alive, there is a fear that he would be released and then he would kill others,” Eliyahu wrote on Facebook.
The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.
This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL.
And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy elites are not happy about it.
You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to serve as a bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation.
How do we know? Because important protagonists in the Israelo-American policy planning elite have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of clarity in documents and public statements issued over the last several decades.
The key here is learning to listen to what our cultural training has not prepared us to hear.
In 1982, as the Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation of the Revisionist Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the ”Iron Wall” that the only way to deal with “the Arabs” in and around Israel was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation) was consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his country needed to take in the coming years.
What follows are some excerpts from Israel Shahak’s English translation of that text:
“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon….”
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”
“If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan, or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt.
“There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority.”
Yinon’s vision reappeared in the now infamous “Clean Break” document from 1996, authored by a consortium of US and Israeli “strategic thinkers” that included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav Wurmser, which was meant to serve as a foreign policy blueprint for the first administration of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The text is nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously debilitate Syria’s ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence in the in the area .
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
“Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.”
And as Dan Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about the need to balkanize Israel’s northeastern neighbor in articles published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about “expediting the chaotic collapse“ of Baathist Syria.
Then there is Wesley Clark’s famous interview, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was “to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years”.
Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the “Clean Break” document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to “shape its strategic environment”.
On September 5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in New York and well-connected member of Tel Aviv’s conservative policy elite described the Syrian conflict in the following terms in theNew York Times :
“This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win – we’ll settle for a tie,….Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”
I don’t think it can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in Syria has never been about helping anyone in that country, but rather insuring its effective dismemberment so as to further the perceived “strategic interests” of the Jewish state.
As Tomás Alcoverro, the longtime Mideast correspondent of Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper wrote on 9 October 2015, in reference to the combined Russian and Syrian government attacks carried out during the previous week: “If this joint offensive is successful, the US plan for continuing the war of attrition until both sides are exhausted will lie in ruins”.
Yes, the US and Israelis, have been “faking it” in Syria for a good long time now. And Putin has come along and called their bluff.
And they are not happy about it. Which is why the ongoing campaign of demonization against the Russian leader is being ratcheted up – if that’s possible – to still higher levels of intelligence-insulting hyperbole.
The United States has approved selling Saudi Arabia nine UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters, valued at $495 million, the Pentagon says.
According to Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the deal is aimed at providing security to the country, engaged in daily bombardment of neighboring Yemen, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Tasked with overseeing foreign arms sales, the agency said the Saudis had requested nine helicopters, 21 T700-GE-701D engines built by General Electric Co, embedded GPS systems, machine guns, and missile warning systems.
It further claimed they were supposed to be used by the Royal Saudi Land Forces Aviation Command (RSLFAC) for search and rescue, disaster relief, humanitarian support, counterterrorism, and combat operations.
Earlier in the day, Saudi Arabian warplanes bombarded Sa’ada and Ta’izz provinces, respectively in the northwest and southwest of the impoverished Yemen, taking the lives of at least five people.
Yemen has been under military strikes on a daily basis since Saudi forces launched a military aggression on March 26, in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to fugitive former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
Around 7,000 people have reportedly lost their lives, including hundreds of Yemeni children.
In one of the most despicable incidents of the United States’ 14-year war in Afghanistan, U.S. troops bombed a hospital in Kunduz, killing 22 people, including patients, three children, and medical personnel from Doctors Without Borders, or MSF. Thirty-seven people were injured, including 19 staff members in the Oct. 3, 2015, attack.
U.S. forces knew they were targeting a hospital because MSF, as it does in all conflict contexts, had provided its exact GPS coordinates on multiple occasions over the past months, including most recently on Sept. 29. There was a nine-foot flag on the roof that identified the building as a hospital. After the first strike, MSF contacted U.S. officials and reported the hospital was being bombed and begged them to halt the attack. Nevertheless, the U.S. AC-130 gunship continued to pummel the hospital repeatedly for more than one hour.
“Our patients burned in their beds,” said MSF International President Joanne Liu. “Doctors, nurses and other staff were killed as they worked.” She added, “Our colleagues had to work on each other. One of our doctors died on an improvised operating table – an office desk – while his colleagues tried to save his life.”
In attempting to explain why they had bombed a hospital, U.S. military leaders changed their story four times. On Saturday, the day of the bombing, U.S. spokesman Col. Brian Tribus said the strike occurred “against individuals threatening the force. The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” On Sunday, Gen. John Campbell, U.S.-NATO commander in Afghanistan, claimed the strike occurred “against insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. service members … in the vicinity of a Doctors Without Borders medical facility.” On Monday, Campbell announced, “Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support” and “several civilians were accidentally struck.” By Tuesday, Campbell said, “the decision to provide aerial fire was a U.S. decision, made within the U.S. chain of command. A hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a medical facility.”
Since the Pentagon has access to video and audio recordings taken from the gunship, they must know what actually occurred. Daily Beast reported that the recordings contain conversations among the crew as they were firing on the hospital, including communications between the crew and U.S. soldiers on the ground. Moreover, AC-130 gunships fly low to the ground so the crew can assess what they are hitting.
But members of Congress who oversee the Pentagon have been denied access to the classified recordings.
Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states, “Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict.”
International law expert Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, said, “The critical question for determining if US forces committed a war crime was whether they had notified the hospital ahead of the strike if they understood the Taliban to be firing from the hospital.”
MSF has said they were never notified that the hospital would be bombed. “Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the U.S. airstrike on Saturday morning,” according to MSF General Director Christopher Stokes.
Parties to a military conflict have a duty to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and civilians and their facilities cannot be targeted. If the hospital were being used for military purposes, the strike must be proportionate to the military advantage sought, and the U.S. forces had a duty to warn the people inside the hospital that it would be struck. No one in the hospital said it was being used for military purposes, and even if it was, the U.S. forces never warned those in the hospital before striking it.
The U.S. strike was a precise attack on the hospital, because no other buildings in the MSF compound were hit. MSF executive director Jason Cone said, “I want to reiterate that the main hospital building where medical personnel were caring for patients was repeatedly and very precisely hit during each aerial raid while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched. So we see this as a targeted event.”
MSF is demanding an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC), established under Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. But the United States must consent to the investigation. The U.S. government says there are enough investigations – one by the Pentagon, one by a joint US-Afghan group, and one by NATO. But none of these is independent and impartial.
Historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter has written three articles about three different internal investigations the U.S. military used to cover-up operations that should have led to criminal prosecutions against U.S. officers. Why should we believe that this will be any different?
The Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court provides several bases for war crimes prosecution. They include willful killing; willfully causing great suffering or serious bodily injury; intentional attacks against civilian or civilian objects; intentional attacks with knowledge they will cause death or injury to civilians when clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage; and intentionally attacking medical facilities which are not military objectives. Although the United States is not a party to the Statute, there could be jurisdiction over U.S. leaders if the Security Council referred the matter to the Court. That will not happen because the United States would veto such a referral. If US leaders are found on the territory of a country that is a party to the Statute, that country could send them to The Hague, Netherlands for prosecution. But the Bush administration blackmailed 100 countries into signing “bilateral immunity agreements,” promising they would not send US nationals to The Hague on penalty of losing U.S. foreign aid.
Other countries can prosecute foreign nationals under the well-established doctrine of “universal jurisdiction.” But since Bush initiated his war on Iraq, no nation has been willing to incur the wrath of the United States by maintaining such an action against a U.S. leader.
Nick Turse and Bob Dreyfuss documented the killing of as many as 6,481 Afghan civilians by U.S. forces from October 2001 through 2012. The U.S. government has killed large numbers of civilians in its drone attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. But Obama rarely apologizes to or compensates the victims. It is only because a Western-based organization was hit and the attendant media coverage has been so overwhelming that led Obama to apologize to MSF.
MSF’s advance provision of the hospital’s coordinates to U.S. forces, its notifications during the bombing, its denial that any fire was coming from the hospital, and the Pentagon’s shifting rationales for the bombing constitute probable cause that a war crime was committed.
Obama should consent to a full, independent, impartial investigation of the hospital bombing by IHFFC. If that investigation shows that war crimes probably occurred, appropriate prosecutions of the U.S. chain of command should ensue.
Two U.S. psychologists contracted by the CIA are accused of human experimentation, torture and war crimes.
CIA psychologists behind the U.S. intelligence agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program are guilty of torture, non-consensual human experimentation, and war crimes, three former detainees alleged in a federal lawsuit Tuesday.
The civil case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of plaintiffs Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman, who were all held in CIA detention centers in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.
Not one of the three was ever charged with a crime.
Raham died in a CIA prison in 2002, while the other two were eventually released.
According to the lawsuit, Raham’s autopsy report showed he died from hypothermia caused “in part from being forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants,” with the contributing factors of “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining’.”
The case is being brought against psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, contractors who managed a company that was given a US$81 million paycheck from the CIA over a four-year period, and “helped convince the agency to adopt torture as official policy.”
The duo was also featured in last year’s CIA “torture report.”
The lawsuit sets out that the pair devised the torture program to intentionally inflict intense pain and suffering, on both a physical and mental level. The object was to psychologically destroy detainees through torture and abuse so that they would be unable to resist demands for information. The CIA adopted the methods in 2002, and contracted Mitchell and Jessen to train others in the arts of torture.
“(Plaintiffs) were subjected to solitary confinement; extreme darkness, cold, and noise; repeated beatings; starvation; excruciatingly painful stress positions; prolonged sleep deprivation; confinement in coffin-like boxes; and water torture,” according to the ACLU lawsuit. “Defendants are directly liable because they experimented on Plaintiffs by seeking to induce in them a state of ‘learned helplessness’ to break their will by means of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Intelligence agencies expert Steven Aftergood told the Guardian that the tortured men were being studied by medical professionals to note their responses to such treatments, which ACLU said amounted to a war crime.
“These psychologists devised and supervised an experiment to degrade human beings and break their bodies and minds,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “It was cruel and unethical, and it violated a prohibition against human experimentation that has been in place since World War II.”
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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