Riyadh has called on Iran not to interfere in the conflict in Yemen after Tehran repeatedly called for end to the Saudi-led airstrike campaign against embattled Yemen.
“How can Iran call for us to stop the fighting in Yemen? … We came to Yemen to help the legitimate authority, and Iran is not in charge of Yemen,” Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said Sunday at a joint press conference in Riyadh with his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius.
Faisal called on Iran to stop providing political and military support to the Houthi rebels, a Shiite rebel group, that has taken control of swathes of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, in recent months.
On Thursday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decried Saudi airstrikes as a “crime and genocide.” In a speech Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani urged Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to halt aggression in Yemen and commence peace negotiations.
“To the countries in the region, I say, let’s adopt the spirit of brotherhood. Let’s respect each other and other nations,” Rouhani said. “Do not kill innocent children. Let’s think about an end to the war, about a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to the suffering people of Yemen.”
Moscow is calling for a diplomatic solution to the conflict, emphasizing that foreign military intervention would only lead to more civilian deaths. Last Friday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met with the newly appointed Saudi ambassador, conveying the “necessity for a ceasefire” to create favorable conditions for a peaceful national dialogue.
The US has meanwhile accused Iran of aiding the Houthis.
“There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran.” US Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday. “There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in. We trace those flights, and we know this. We are well aware of the support that Iran has been giving to Yemen.”
For its part, Iran has denied backing the rebels. On Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Saudi charge d’affaires to lodge a complaint against allegations of Iran’s involvement in Yemen.
Saturday Yemeni militiamen in Aden said they captured two Iranian military officers advising Houthi fighters. The two officers are allegedly members of an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Tehran has denied these reports, according to Iranian state news agency IRNA. “Iran has no kind of military force in Yemen,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian was quoted as saying on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia and nine other Sunni majority states began an airstrike campaign against Houthi positions throughout the country at the end of last month. Ousted Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia as rebels advanced on Aden, where he had been staying since being forced out of Sanaa in February.
According to the International Federation of the Red Cross, up to 1,042 people have died in the conflict so far. Even getting aid to conflict-torn areas and retrieving the dead has proven dangerous and outright impossible at times.
“Our paramedics face being targeted while doing their job. There are dead and wounded left in the street whom we cannot reach,” Abdullah Radman, a doctor with the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Reuters.
In this excerpt from Bob Coen and Eric Nadler’s film “Shadow War of the Sahara”, broadcast on the Franco-German channel ARTE charts the rise of the U.S.military’s AFRICA COMAND (AFRICOM). This excerpt reveals why AFRICOM’s chief critic, Libya’s Mohammar Gaddafi, had to be removed from power for the project to succeed.
Chief Military Advocate General Danny Efroni said he refuses to probe the bombing of civilians in the Gaza Strip during last summer’s war, but will probe potential acts of looting and robbery committed by Israeli soldiers.
Efroni said: “You will never hear me say, ‘The IDF is the most moral army in the world’.”
Nearly 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the air, naval and ground strikes on Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians. A quarter of the victims were children.
In an interview with Haaretz newspaper, published yesterday, Efroni said: “We will not put soldiers on trial only in order to satisfy the media, which is disturbed by the large number of civilians killed in the war. I am not investigating in order to satisfy anyone. I will not file indictments in order to arrange the statistics of B’Tselem,” which criticised the small number of indictments in the past.
An indication of Efroni and the army’s general approach is the fact that despite the passing of over eight months since the end of the war, no decision has been made regarding whether or not a military probe into the incident in Rafah that has become known as “Black Friday” on 1 August, when the IDF implemented the Hannibal Directive after the abduction of Second Lt. Hadar Goldin.
This criminal and brutal operation involved the launching of very heavy artillery fire and intensive air, ground and naval strikes, resulting in the death of dozens of Palestinian civilians. Some estimates indicate that 150 Palestinians were killed in the attack, the vast majority of whom were civilians. The Israeli army has admitted that it did not warn the civilians in the Rafah area to leave their homes before they launched the intense strike.
Despite this, Efroni said that a Military Police probe is not an insurance policy for the IDF protecting them from being prosecuted at The Hague. “If the probe is a whitewash and not a true investigation, nothing will stop the ICC,” he added.
Israeli human rights organisations B’Tselem and Yesh Din claimed that the investigation system in the IDF is “a failure” and that Israel “is not interested and not capable of investigating violations of Palestinians’ human rights by the security forces.”
B’Tselem also claimed that the IDF investigations do not arrive at the truth, noting that of the 52 Military Police probes opened after Operation Cast Lead, carried out in late 2008 and early 2009, only three resulted in the filing of indictments – and the harshest punishment was for a soldier who stole a credit card.
The US State Department has approved the sale of 356 AGM-114K/R3 Hellfire II Missiles to Egypt, the Defence Security Cooperation Agency announced on 8 April. The sale of the missiles, which were requested by Egypt, is estimated to cost $57 million.
It is the first military sale by the US to Egypt since the Obama administration announced on 31 March that it would lift the hold on the delivery of military equipment including F-16 aircraft, Harpoon missiles, and M1A1 tanks. The ban had been in place since the overthrow of democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in October 2013.
The move comes as the Obama administration hopes to strengthen ties with the Egyptian regime and promote shared objectives in the region. In a White House statement, Obama spoke of “shared challenges to US and Egyptian interests in an unstable region”, quoted from a phone call with Al-Sisi on 31 March.
The approval for the Hellfire missiles also comes as Egypt began its first airstrikes against the Houthi targets in Yemen on 9 April, according to Al Jazeera.
The US has also expressed support to the Saudi-led coalition for carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has threatened Tehran with war, saying his country’s bunker-busting bombs are ready to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if necessary.
“We continue to improve it and upgrade over time so that there is this alternative,” Carter told CNN on Friday.
“My job as secretary of Defense is to, among other things, make sure that the so-called military option is on the table,” he added.
The bunker busting bomb or the Massive Ordinance Penetrator can explode 200 feet underground.
The threats come amid efforts by Iran and world powers to reach a final nuclear agreement following the framework deal reached in Switzerland last week.
The Pentagon chief also noted that the US military has the capability to “shut down, set back and destroy the Iranian nuclear program.”
Carter also said any nuclear deal with Iran must include inspection of Iran’s military sites.
“It depends on what you mean by military sites, but yes. Absolutely,” he said.
Deputy Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri has already hit back at Carter’s comments, saying Tehran would not allow any inspection of its military facilities as part of a possible nuclear deal.
“During the previous negotiations, the Iranian officials… have explicitly and unequivocally expressed the prohibition of any inspection of [Iran’s] military and defense centers and facilities,” Jazayeri said on Friday.
A landmark framework agreement was reached between Iran and the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – in Switzerland on April 2.
The two sides will work to draw up a final accord by the end of June.
In his essay entitled, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell says, “political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Orwell, whose writings are more prescient with each passing year, would wince at the words of Saudi Arabia’s Brigadier General Asiri, who, in a recent press conference, defended Saudi Arabia’s unprovoked war in Yemen by saying, “all we are trying to do is to make sure that there is security in Yemen.” Bombing an already desperately poor country’s infrastructure, destroying its armed forces (the same armed forces that were equipped and trained to fight al-Qaeda by the US), air dropping weapons (now being sold in Yemen’s arms markets), blockading Yemen’s ports (Yemen imports 90% of its food), and hobbling an already struggling economy are hardly ways of ensuring security.
Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel A. al-Jubeir, has sought to justify the Kingdom’s war in Yemen by arguing that Saudi Arabia—a country that is ruled by an autocratic king and a collection of princes—is fighting to protect the “elected and legitimate government of Yemen,” the government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi.
Hadi, who fled Yemen for Saudi Arabia on 25 March, was “elected” in an election in February 2012 in which his name was the only one on the ballot. There is also the fact that Hadi’s term as president expired in February 2014. According to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) brokered initiative, national elections, including the election of a new president, were to be held in 2014.
To sum it up: an autocracy with a deplorable human rights record (Saudi Arabia’s Sharia courts routinely behead criminals and flog victims of gang rape as well as recalcitrant bloggers) and its partners—which includes the US—are endeavoring to reinstall an ineffectual exiled government of questionable legitimacy and ensure security in Yemen by bombing and starving it into submission.
Hadi and his exiled government are supporting the bombardment of their own country and calling on the Saudis and their allies to intensify air strikes and launch what will likely be a disastrous ground invasion. Of course, these calls for more bombs, more weapons, and more war are being made by men who fled Yemen aboard private jets and are comfortably ensconced in villas in Riyadh. They do not have to worry about being incinerated in their homes, finding food or water, or burying their dead. It is worth citing another quote from Orwell who wrote in Homage to Catalonia, “all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
So what fruits is the Saudi led and US supported “Operation Decisive Storm” bearing? Security is not among them. An estimated 600 people, including at least 80 children, have been killed. According to UNICEF, a hundred thousand additional Yemenis have been displaced since the beginning of “Operation Decisive Storm.” Food, medical supplies, and petrol are in short supply across the country and as yet, flights and convoys bringing aid are being blocked. Conditions in parts of southern Yemen are so bad that some Yemenis are fleeing by boat to relatively secure and stable Somaliland and Puntland.
Across southern Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is on the offensive. AQAP has freed its members from various jails and has raised its flag over Mukalla, a city of nearly four hundred thousand and a major port with critical oil and gas handling facilities. However AQAP and other militant Islamist groups whose ideology differs little from the state sanctioned Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, are seemingly not targets for those directing “Operation Decisive Storm.” The primary targets of the aerial campaign, beyond critical infrastructure, food factories, and refugee camps, are the Houthis, a Zaidi Shi’a group that has had more success at fighting AQAP in the last six months than the US and its drones have had in the last decade.
AQAP was and, in some military circles, still is considered to be the most virulent of the al-Qaeda franchises. Mainstream US media has long trumpeted the idea that AQAP poses a clear and present danger to the US. Hundreds of millions of dollars of US tax payer money has been spent on the “war on terror” in Yemen. Yet rather than calling for a ceasefire and dialogue as the governments of China, Russia, and Iran have done, the US is supporting a war that will, beyond anything else, make sure that Yemen remains a failed state and fertile ground for AQAP and potentially the Islamic State.
It all makes sense in an Orwellian way.
Michael Horton is a writer and Middle East analyst.
MEMORANDUM FOR: Americans Malnourished on the Truth About Iraq
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: A New “Miller’s Tale” (with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer)
On April 3, former New York Times journalist Judith Miller published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths: Officials Didn’t Lie, and I Wasn’t Fed a Line.” If this sounds a bit defensive, Miller has tons to be defensive about.
In the article, Miller claims, “false narratives [about what she did as a New York Times reporter] deserve, at last, to be retired.” The article appears to be the initial salvo in a major attempt at self-rehabilitation and, coincidentally, comes just as her new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, is to be published today.
In reviewing Miller’s book, her “mainstream media” friends are not likely to mention the stunning conclusion reached recently by the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other respected groups that the Iraq War, for which she was lead drum majorette, killed one million people. One might think that, in such circumstances – and with bedlam reigning in Iraq and the wider neighborhood – a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, so to speak, might prompt Miller to keep her head down for a while more.
In all candor, after more than a dozen years, we are tired of exposing the lies spread by Judith Miller and had thought we were finished. We have not seen her new book, but we cannot in good conscience leave her WSJ article without comment from those of us who have closely followed U.S. policy and actions in Iraq.
Miller’s Revisionist History
Miller’s Tale in the WSJ begins with a vintage Miller-style reductio ad absurdum: “I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.” Since one of us, former UN inspector Scott Ritter, has historical experience and technical expertise that just won’t quit, we asked him to draft a few paragraphs keyed to Miller’s latest tale. He shared the following critique:
“Judith Miller did not take America to war in Iraq. Even a journalist with an ego the size of Ms. Miller’s cannot presume to usurp the war power authorities of the President of the United States, or even the now-dormant Constitutional prerogatives of Congress. What she is guilty of, however, is being a bad journalist.
“She can try to hide this fact by wrapping herself in a collective Pulitzer Prize, or citing past achievements like authoring best-selling books. But this is like former Secretary of State Colin Powell trying to remind people about his past as the National Security Advisor for President Reagan or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
“At the end of the day Mr. Powell will be judged not on his previous achievements, but rather on his biggest failure – his appearance before the United Nations Security Council touting an illusory Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction threat as being worthy of war. In this same vein, Judith Miller will be judged by her authoring stories for the ‘newspaper of record’ that were questionably sourced and very often misleading. One needs only to examine Ms. Miller’s role while embedded in U.S. Army Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, hunting for weapons of mass destruction during the 2003 invasion, for this point to be illustrated.
“Miller may not have singlehandedly taken America and the world to war, but she certainly played a pivotal role in building the public case for the attack on Iraq based upon shoddy reporting that even her editor at the New York Times has since discredited – including over reliance on a single-source of easy virtue and questionable credibility – Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. The fact that she chose to keep this ‘source’ anonymous underscores the journalistic malfeasance at play in her reporting.
“Chalabi had been discredited by the State Department and CIA as a reliable source of information on Iraq long before Judith Miller started using him to underpin her front-page ‘scoops’ for the New York Times. She knew this, and yet chose to use him nonetheless, knowing that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fully as eager to don the swindlers’ magic suit of clothes, as was the king in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. In Ms. Miller’s tale, the fairy-tale clothes came with a WMD label and no washing instructions.
“Ms. Miller’s self-described ‘newsworthy claims’ of pre-war weapons of mass destruction stories often were – as we now know (and many of us knew at the time) – handouts from the hawks in the Bush administration and fundamentally wrong.
“Like her early reporting on Iraq, Ms. Miller’s re-working of history to disguise her malfeasance/misfeasance as a reporter does not bear close scrutiny. Her errors of integrity are hers and hers alone, and will forever mar her reputation as a journalist, no matter how hard she tries to spin the facts and revise a history that is highly inconvenient to her. Of course, worst of all, her flaws were consequential – almost 4,500 U.S. troops and 1,000,000 Iraqis dead.”
Relying on the Mistakes of Others
In her WSJ article, Miller protests that “relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.” It is almost as though she is saying that if Ahmed Chalabi told her that, in Iraq, the sun rises in the west, and she duly reported it, that would not be “the same as lying.”
Miller appears to have worked out some kind of an accommodation with George W. Bush and others who planned and conducted what the post-World War II Nuremburg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime,” a war of aggression. She takes strong issue with what she calls “the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war.”
Does she not know, even now, that there is abundant proof that this is exactly what took place? Has she not read the Downing Street Memorandum based on what CIA Director George Tenet told the head of British Intelligence at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002; i. e., that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of making war for “regime change” in Iraq?
Does she not know, even at this late date, that the “intelligence” served up to “justify” attacking Iraq was NOT “mistaken,” but outright fraud, in which Bush had the full cooperation of Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin? Is she unaware that the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence at the time, Carl Ford, has said, on the record, that Tenet and McLaughlin were “not just wrong, they lied … they should have been shot” for their lies about WMD?
Blame Blix
Miller’s tale about Hans Blix in her WSJ article shows she has lost none of her edge for disingenuousness: “One could argue … that Hans Blix, the former chief of the international inspectors, bears some responsibility,” writes Miller. She cherry-picks what Blix said in January 2003 about “many proscribed weapons and items,” including 1,000 tons of chemical agent, were still “not accounted for.”
Yes, Blix said that on Jan. 27, 2003. But Blix also included this that same day in his written report to his UN superiors, something the New York Times, for some reason, did not include in its report:
“Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable.
“Our inspections have included universities, military bases, presidential sites and private residences. Inspections have also taken place on Fridays, the Muslim day of rest, on Christmas day and New Years day. These inspections have been conducted in the same manner as all other inspections.” [See “Steve M.” writing (appropriately) for Crooks and Liars as he corrected the record.]
Yes, there was some resistance by Iraq up to that point. Blix said so. However, on Jan. 30, 2003, Blix made it abundantly clear, in an interview published in The New York Times, that nothing he’d seen at the time justified war. (The byline was Judith Miller and Julia Preston.)
The Miller-Preston report said:
“Mr. Blix said he continued to endorse disarmament through peaceful means. ‘I think it would be terrible if this comes to an end by armed force, and I wish for this process of disarmament through the peaceful avenue of inspections,’ he said. …
“Mr. Blix took issue with what he said were Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s claims that the inspectors had found that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery. He said that the inspectors had reported no such incidents. …
“He further disputed the Bush administration’s allegations that his inspection agency might have been penetrated by Iraqi agents, and that sensitive information might have been leaked to Baghdad, compromising the inspections. Finally, he said, he had seen no persuasive indications of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush also mentioned in his speech. ‘There are other states where there appear to be stronger links,’ such as Afghanistan, Mr. Blix said, noting that he had no intelligence reports on this issue.”
Although she co-authored that New York Times report of Jan. 30, 2003, Judith Miller remembers what seems convenient to remember. Her acumen at cherry picking may be an occupational hazard occasioned by spending too much time with Chalabi, Rumsfeld and other professional Pentagon pickers.
Moreover, Blix’s February 2003 report showed that, for the most part, Iraq was cooperating and the process was working well:
“Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming. …
“The inspections have taken place throughout Iraq at industrial sites, ammunition depots, research centres, universities, presidential sites, mobile laboratories, private houses, missile production facilities, military camps and agricultural sites. …
“In my 27 January update to the Council, I said that it seemed from our experience that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, most importantly prompt access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure. This impression remains, and we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences. …
“The presentation of intelligence information by the US Secretary of State suggested that Iraq had prepared for inspections by cleaning up sites and removing evidence of proscribed weapons programmes.
“I would like to comment only on one case, which we are familiar with, namely, the trucks identified by analysts as being for chemical decontamination at a munitions depot. This was a declared site, and it was certainly one of the sites Iraq would have expected us to inspect.
“We have noted that the two satellite images of the site were taken several weeks apart. The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection.”
Blix made it clear that he needed more time, but the Bush administration had other plans. In other words, the war wasn’t Blix’s fault, as Judy Miller suggests. The fault lay elsewhere.
When Blix retired at the end of June 2004, he politely suggested to the “prestigious” Council on Foreign Relations in New York the possibility that Baghdad had actually destroyed its weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War in 1991 (as Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of the WMD and rocket programs assured his debriefers when he defected in 1995). Blix then allowed himself an undiplomatic jibe:
“It is sort of fascinating that you can have 100 per cent certainty about weapons of mass destruction and zero certainty of about where they are.”
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, former Technical Director, National Security Agency (ret.)
Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA
Daniel Ellsberg, former State and Defense Department official, associate VIPS
Frank Grevil, former Maj., Army Intelligence, Denmark, associate VIPS
Katharine Gun, former analyst, GCHQ (the NSA equivalent in the UK), associate VIPS
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan, associate VIPS
Brady Kiesling, former Political Counseler, U.S. Embassy, Athens, resigned in protest before the attack on Iraq, associate VIPS.
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003.
Annie Machon, former officer, MI5 (the CIA equivalent in the UK), associate VIPS
David MacMichael, former Capt., USMC & senior analyst, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former Capt., Army Infantry/Intelligence & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, Maj., former U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former Maj., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Greg Thielmann, former Office Director for Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Peter Van Buren, former diplomat, Department of State, associate VIPS
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.) & US diplomat (resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq)
The Israeli army uses Palestinians as targets for their training, Haaretz reported a former soldier as saying.
In an article entitled “From an Israeli combat soldier to conscientious objector”, Haaretz said that “after two years in the Israel Defence Forces, Yaron Kaplan, 21, of Lod, is declaring himself a conscientious objector and is refusing to continue his service because of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”
“From the moment I began my training I understood how violent this place is,” he said. “It was a totally traumatic experience. Every time we would do shooting practice, we would be ‘executing’ someone – ‘Now we shoot Mohammed; now we shoot at Ahmed’,” he said.
Kaplan said that he joined the army immediately after he graduated from the military college, but has now quit. He explained this is because of the “violent nature of the army”.
Ruling out any chance of a peaceful solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said: “I can’t expect or demand from a person that he be my partner, or that he should really see me as a partner for dialogue as long as I am imposing a military regime on him.”
Kalan said he would not return to his army service after Passover, he will present himself at his base and expect to be imprisoned.
“I am fully aware of the ramifications of this, what the path before me looks like – a lot of prison, including lengthy terms,” he said. “I have no doubt that this is the right thing to do. The emotional price and the price to my conscience that I would have to pay for the mental suffering of being in the army are too heavy from my perspective.”
A new report has revealed that Israel forces intentionally shelled a United Nations watchtower in southern Lebanon, which left a Spanish peacekeeper dead back in January.
The El Pais newspaper article published on Sunday cited extracts from a confidential Spanish military report on the incident, saying the Israeli forces corrected the trajectory of the artillery fire to hit the UN post. Thirty-six-year-old corporal Javier Soria Toledo was killed in the attack.
According to the report, Corporal Ivan Lopez Sanchez, a Spanish soldier stationed near the post, told investigators it was clear that the UN position was being targeted, noting, “Every time, they corrected the trajectory from Majidiye to the 4-28″ post, where the United Nations Interim Force Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers were stationed.
A second Spanish solider confirmed Sanchez’s report, saying the first salvo of shells landed some 500 meters north of the UN post and then Israel “corrected the trajectory towards the position.”
A third solider added that the fragmentation bombs used in the attack targeted the post’s main watchtower.
The newspaper also quoted a UN report as saying that around 20 artillery shells, 90 mortar grenades and five projectiles were fired at the UN post during the attack.
Spain and Israel have agreed to carry out a joint investigation into the incident.
The UNIFIL has some 10,000-troops, from 36 nations, which include some 600 Spanish soldiers.
Saudi Arabia plans to raze to the ground around one hundred villages in areas near the border with Yemen, amid airstrikes on the impoverished country.
According to the Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper on Sunday, out of 96 border villages targeted for demolition, as many as 10 have been destroyed since Riyadh started its airstrikes on Yemen.
The border guard chief in the area, Hassan Aqili, said the decision is to prevent the empty houses in the villages from turning into “a safe haven for traffickers and infiltrators,” the Saudi newspaper reported.
Saudi Arabia’s air campaign in Yemen started on March 26 in a bid to restore power to fugitive former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.
An exchange of fire between Saudi security forces and Yemen’s Ansarullah fighters on Friday claimed the lives of two Saudi soldiers on the kingdom’s border with Yemen as resistance against the Saudi aggression on the Arabian Peninsula country continues.
On Thursday, a Saudi soldier was killed and 10 others were wounded in a similar exchange of fire across the Yemeni border.
Hundreds of people have lost their lives since the Saudi airstrikes started more than a week ago, with the UN humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, saying she is “extremely concerned” about the fate of the civilians.
Hadi stepped down in January and refused to reconsider the decision despite calls by Houthi revolutionaries.
The Ansarullah movement later said Hadi had lost his legitimacy as president of Yemen after he escaped the capital to the southern port of Aden in February.
In late March, Hadi fled Aden, where he had sought to set up a rival power base, to Riyadh after Ansarullah revolutionaries advanced on the port city.
Ami Ayalon, the former chief of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, told Charlie Rose in a 2012 interview that Israel hoped to foster a ‘Sunni coalition’ led by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to assail Shia Muslims of the region led by Iran.
Ayalon told Rose that, “Iran is a huge threat. We cannot live with Iran having nuclear military power. We should not accept it.”
“How much time do we have and what do we do?” the Israeli spook asked.
“[We need to create] a kind of a Sunni coalition … with Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia… who understand that the major conflict is with Shia [Muslims] led by Iran.”
Interestingly, such a coalition has indeed formed in recent weeks with the Saudi-led bombing offensive in Yemen against the Iran-aligned Shia Houthi rebels who have seized power in the war-torn country.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and other Sunni-oriented dictatorships and Western-backed quisling regimes have formed a ‘coalition’ to stamp out the Shia rebellion in Yemen.
ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist groups currently fighting to topple the Shia/Alawite Assad regime in Syria may also be considered part of this ‘Sunni coalition’ that Ayalon speaks of. The Wahhabi militants who have besieged Syria and who previously attacked Libya were and continue to be subsidized and supported by Washington’s regional puppets (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Turkey).
In a 2014 interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the US should strive to weaken both Sunnis and Shias by letting them fight each other.
In a 2013 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, revealed that Israel’s main goal was to break down the Shia alliance of Damascus, Tehran and the Lebanese Hezbollah by siding with the Wahhabist radicals of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
“The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” Oren said.
Reports of Israel aiding and abetting anti-Assad militants, including those of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, are abundant and well-founded.
Oren went on to remark with glee that the Gulf sheikhdoms have in recent years come to embrace Israel’s designs vis-a-vis Syria, Iran and even the Palestinian issue, saying:
In the last 64 years there has probably never been a greater confluence of interest between us and several Gulf States. With these Gulf States we have agreements on Syria, on Egypt, on the Palestinian issue. We certainly have agreements on Iran. This is one of those opportunities presented by the Arab Spring.
Ayalon’s admission confirms what many suspect is an Israeli-led divide and conquer strategy where Israel and the West are using Sunni and Wahhabi zealots, useful idiots, and sell-outs to do the bidding of the Zionist regime.
The former Bush administration Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has said that he has no regrets about the genocidal war in Iraq which cost the lives of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers.
Responding to Iraq war veteran Ryan Henowitz who demanded an apology for Rove’s role in sending thousands of Americans to their deaths based on lies, the unrepentant war criminal said that “it was the right thing to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” Rove went on to say the US should be “proud” of “what we were able to do in Iraq” and that his only qualm was that the US military didn’t occupy the country longer.
Rove and company launched the Iraq war in 2003 based upon purposeful disinformation that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” which it did not. The Bush administration contrived a number of phony pretexts in order to convince the American public that the war was necessary for national security.
The logic of the war was comically incoherent, considering much of Saddam Hussein’s weapons stockpiles were provided to him by the US throughout the 70s and 80s when the Iraqi dictator was an ally of Washington.
Another false myth promoted by Washington to justify the war was that Hussein was supporting al-Qaeda militants – a claim which was not only patently false, but an example of imperial hubris and Orwellian projection seeing as the American CIA was responsible for creating and sponsoring thousands of Mujahideen militants, some of whom later formed al-Qaeda, as a proxy army against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
The hogwash used to justify the Iraq war was so laughable and so thoroughly discredited that it beggars belief how anyone can still defend it.
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