Monthly Archives: January 2009
Raids into Pakistan: What U.S. authority?
|
The strangest thing just happened, while I was attempting to access this article by googling it, every reference to it was blocked with “may harm computer” warning. After I managed to access the article through the “Hidden Access” site, the block and the warning were removed by someone. Google? Military? CIA?
|
||
|
Raids into Pakistan: What U.S.
authority?
Bush’s orders to send special forces after Taliban militants have roots in previous presidencies.
By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the September 15, 2008 edition
Page 1 of 2
WASHINGTON – Orders President Bush signed in July authorizing raids by special operations forces in the areas of Pakistan controlled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda and undertaking those raids without official Pakistani consent, have roots stretching back to the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In an address to a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush said, “From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
But even before that declaration, two key steps had been taken: One, Congress had authorized the use of US military force against terrorist organizations and the countries that harbor or support them. Two, Bush administration officials had warned Pakistan’s leaders of the dire consequences their country would face if they did not unequivocally enlist in the fight against radical Islamist terrorism.
What Mr. Bush’s July orders signify is that, after seven years of encouraging Pakistan to take on extremists harbored in remote areas along its border with Afghanistan and subsidizing the Pakistani military handsomely to do it, the US has become convinced that Pakistan is neither able nor willing to fight the entrenched Taliban and Al Qaeda elements. Indeed, recent events appear to have convinced at least some in the administration that parts of Pakistan’s military and powerful intelligence service are actually aiding the extremists.
“We’ve moved beyond the message stage here. I think the US has had it with messages that don’t get any action, and that is why the president authorized this,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Stratfor, an intelligence consulting firm in Washington. “This says loud and clear, ‘We’re fed up.’ “
Even before the July order, the US had undertaken covert operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Moreover, the CIA over the past year has stepped up missile attacks by the unmanned Predator drones it operates to hit targets in the region. That increase has coincided with a deterioration of the war in Afghanistan, where the Afghan Army and NATO forces have come under increasing attack from militants crossing over the rugged and lawless border from Pakistan.
But Bush’s orders, first reported in The New York Times Thursday, mean that operations against insurgent sanctuaries will become overt and probably more frequent. A Sept. 3 ground assault involving US commandos dropped from helicopters targeted a suspected terrorist compound. Missile attacks by the CIA’s unmanned drones, including one Friday reported by Pakistani officials to have killed at last 12 people, are also on the rise.
Precedence for the orders authorizing the attacks on terrorist havens can be found in President Bill Clinton’s authorization of retaliatory attacks in 1993 (against Iraqi intelligence facilities) and in 1998 (against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan), and in President Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Libya, legal scholars say.
The administration has debated the use of commando raids in Pakistan for years, but the tipping point came in July, as relations with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders deteriorated, intelligence sources say. The “kicker,” according to one source who requested anonymity over the sensitivity of the issue, was two July events: the bombing of India’s embassy in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, an act that US intelligence officials concluded was aided by Pakistani intelligence operatives; and a July 13 attack on a US military outpost in eastern Afghanistan that killed nine US soldiers. The outpost attack was carried out by Taliban militants who had crossed over the nearby border from Pakistan.
Page 2 of 2
The evolution of operations in Pakistan from covert to overt actions is reminiscent of a trajectory followed in some aspects by the Vietnam War, some analysts note.
Patrick Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the evolution in Pakistan is similar to what occurred in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, when US operations against Vietcong sanctuaries there were initially covered up.
“We initially crossed into Cambodia as covert forces, but that changed,” says Mr. Lang, who was part of special forces that carried out the Cambodia operations. By 1970, cross-border operations against enemy sanctuaries were being carried out in the open. Looking at the evolution in operations in Pakistan, the national security analyst says, “We are letting [Pakistanis] know this could evolve into bigger things.”
Adds the intelligence source who requested anonymity, “The message is to the new civilian leadership and the military, ‘We have bought all these toys for you – if you don’t use them and do things in these areas that are causing us problems, we’ll do them for you.’ “
The new orders reflect flagging confidence in Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership to address the problem of the Taliban and terrorist havens, which are thought to harbor Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. For seven years the Bush administration focused its Pakistan policy on President Pervez Musharraf and his assurances that he was battling the militant sanctuaries. But Mr. Musharraf was forced to resign last month after suffering a crushing electoral defeat earlier in the year, and the US appears to have little confidence in the new civilian and military leaders.
“Musharraf was a one-stop shopping center for US relations with Pakistan, but that no longer exists,” says Stratfor’s Mr. Bokhari. Senior State Department officials have met with Pakistan’s new civilian leaders, he notes, while top Pentagon officials have met with the military leadership including Army chief of staff Gen. Ashraf Parvez Kayani, the top military commander.
“The sense I get is they were given the runaround, and they came away from all these meetings convinced the leadership structure has become much more complex at a time when the Taliban are becoming stronger and the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” Bokhari says. “The feeling was the US couldn’t sit by and see how the leadership sorts itself out.”
Bush’s orders authorizing cross-border incursions into Pakistan mean in a sense that the rules governing US special operations have shifted from yellow to green. The military will no longer need a presidential “finding” for each operation – and that, military analysts say, means the handling of forays into Pakistan will fall increasingly into military rather than CIA hands.
That has some intelligence officials worried that the consequences of stepped-up US operations in Pakistan – in terms of Pakistani public opinion and the stability of the government – will get short shrift. According to intelligence sources, officials from the National Intelligence Council recently briefed the Bush administration’s national security team on the potentially dire consequences of US actions that could destabilize the government of a country with nuclear weapons.
1 | Page 2
July 12, 2008, The Day America Turned Against Its Most Faithful Ally
US told not to back terrorism against Pakistan 
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
By Kamran Khan
KARACHI: Pakistan has complained to the United States military leadership and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Washington’s policy towards terrorism in Pakistan was inconsistent with America’s declared commitment to the war against terror.
Impeccable official sources have said that strong evidence and circumstantial evidence of American acquiescence to terrorism inside Pakistan was outlined by President Pervez Musharraf, Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and Director General Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj in their separate meetings with US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen and CIA Deputy Director Stephen R Kappes on July 12 in Rawalpindi.
The visit by the senior US military official along with the CIA deputy director — carrying what were seen as India-influenced intelligence inputs — hardened the resolve of Pakistanís security establishment to keep supreme Pakistan’s national security interest even if it meant straining ties with the US and Nato.
A senior official with direct knowledge of these meetings said that Pakistan’s military leadership and the president asked the American visitors “not to distinguish between a terrorist for the United States and Afghanistan and a terrorist for Pakistan”.
For reasons best known to Langley, the CIA headquarters, as well as the Pentagon, Pakistani officials say the Americans were not interested in disrupting the Kabul-based fountainhead of terrorism in Balochistan nor do they want to allocate the marvellous predator resource to neutralise the kingpin of suicide bombings against the Pakistani military establishment now hiding near the Pak-Afghan border.
In the strongest evidence-based confrontation with the American security establishment since the two countries established their post-9/11 strategic alliance, Pakistani officials proved Brahamdagh Bugti’s presence in Afghan intelligence safe houses in Kabul, his photographed visits to New Delhi and his orders for terrorism in Balochistan.
The top US military commander and the CIA official were also asked why the CIA-run predator and the US military did not swing into action when they were provided the exact location of Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy number one and the mastermind of almost every suicide operation against the Pakistan Army and the ISI since June 2006.
One such precise piece of information was made available to the CIA on May 24 when Baitullah Mehsud drove to a remote South Waziristan mountain post in his Toyota Land Cruiser to address the press and returned back to his safe abode. The United States military has the capacity to direct a missile to a precise location at very short notice as it has done close to 20 times in the last few years to hit al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan.
Pakistani official have long been intrigued by the presence of highly encrypted communications gear with Baitullah Mehsud. This communication gear enables him to collect real-time information on Pakistani troop movement from an unidentified foreign source without being intercepted by Pakistani intelligence.
Admiral Mullen and the CIA official were in Pakistan on an unannounced visit on July 12 to show what the US media claimed was evidence of the ISI’s ties to†Taliban commander Maulana Sirajuddin Haqqani and the alleged involvement of Pakistani agents in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
Pakistani military leaders rubbished the American information and evidence on the Kabul bombing but provided some rationale for keeping a window open with Haqqani, just as the British government had decided to open talks with some Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan last year.
Before opening new channels of communication with the Taliban in Helmand province in March this year, the British and Nato forces were talking to leading Taliban leaders through†Michael Semple, the acting head of the European Union mission to Afghanistan, and Mervyn Patterson, a senior UN official, before their unprecedented expulsion from Afghanistan by the Karzai government†in January this year.
The American visitors were also told that the government of Pakistan had to seek the help of Taliban commanders such as Sirajuddin Haqqani for the release of its kidnapped ambassador Tariquddin Aziz, after the US-backed Karzai administration failed to secure Aziz’s release from his captors in Afghanistan.
Admiral Mullen and Kappes were both provided information about the activities of the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad and were asked how the CIA does not know that both Indian consulates are manned by Indian Intelligence who plot against Pakistan round the clock.
“ We wanted to know when our American friends would get interested in tracking down the terrorists responsible for hundreds of suicide bombings in Pakistan and those playing havoc with our natural resources in Balochistan while sitting in Kabul and Delhi,”, an official described the Pakistani mood during the July 12 meetings.
Throughout their meetings, the Americans were told that Pakistan would like to continue as an active partner in the war against terror and at no cost would it allow its land to be used by our people to plot terror against Afghanistan or India . However, Pakistan would naturally want the United States, India and Afghanistan to refrain from supporting Pakistani terrorists.
Pakistani officials have said that the current “trust deficit” between the Pakistani and US security establishment is not serious enough to lead to a collapse , but the element of suspicion is very high, more so because of† the CIA’s decision to publicise the confidential exchange of information with Pakistan and to use its leverage with the new government to try to arm-twist the Army and the ISI.
The Pakistani security establishment, officials said, want a fresh round of strategic dialogue with their counterparts in the US, essentially to prioritise the objectives and terrorist targets in the war against terror, keeping in mind the serious national security interests of the allies.
Pakistan envoy suggests India faked Mumbai transcripts
Pakistan envoy suggests India faked Mumbai transcripts
“They categorically informed me that [the] UK was not involved. Pak [Pakistan] was not involved. Its territories were not used for planning this operation,” he said.
“We are not doing any whitewashing business. We believe in going about facts. Our findings will be acceptable to the world.”
His remarks are bound to anger India, which blames the attacks on Pakistani militants who it says must have had support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
India this month presented Pakistan with a dossier of evidence, including details from the interrogation of the sole surviving gunman and information gleaned from satellite phones used by the attackers.
Asked about that evidence, Mr Hasan said: “Well, it could be fabricated. You took 45 days to give that sort of evidence although you started blaming Pakistan from day one.”
Pakistan has denied any state involvement in the attacks and promised on January 17 that the Pakistani commission investigating the attacks would publish their findings within 10 days.
That did not happen, however, and Yousaf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, said on Wednesday that Pakistan would release details of its investigation into the attack “very soon”.
There was no immediate response from the Indian foreign ministry.
Indian officials say that they are considering suspending all business, transport and tourists ties with Pakistan if it continues to drag its feet on the investigation and its pledge to crack down on Pakistani militant groups.
* Nine Pakistanis accused over a series of attacks that killed dozens of people and damaged the Danish embassy were remanded in custody by an anti-terror court. The suspects were arrested in the garrison city of Rawalpindi this week and confessed to involvement in bombings at the embassy in Islamabad, an Italian restaurant and against Pakistani security forces. (AFP)
Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce
Employees in deployable-designated positions will be trained, equipped and prepared to serve overseas in support of humanitarian, reconstruction and, if absolutely necessary, combat-support missions.
Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2009 – The Defense Department is forming a civilian expeditionary workforce that will be trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of military missions worldwide, according to department officials.
The intent of the program “is to maximize the use of the civilian workforce to allow military personnel to be fully utilized for operational requirements,” according to a Defense Department statement.
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed Defense Department Directive 1404.10, which outlines and provides guidance about the program, on Jan. 23.
Certain duty positions may be designated by the various Defense Department components to participate in the program. If a position is designated, the employee will be asked to sign an agreement that they will deploy if called upon to do so. If the employee does not wish to deploy, every effort will be made to reassign the employee to a nondeploying position.
The directive emphasizes, however, that volunteers be sought first for any expeditionary requirements, before requiring anyone to serve involuntarily or on short notice. Overseas duty tours shall not exceed two years.
Employees in deployable-designated positions will be trained, equipped and prepared to serve overseas in support of humanitarian, reconstruction and, if absolutely necessary, combat-support missions.
The program also is open to former and retired civilian employees who agree to return to federal service on a time-limited status to serve overseas or to fill in for people deployed overseas.
Program participants are eligible for military medical support while serving in their overseas duty station.
All participants will undergo pre- and post-deployment medical testing, including physical and psychological exams.
Defense civilians reassigned from their normal duty to serve overseas will be granted the right to return to the positions they held prior to their deployment or to a position of similar grade, level and responsibility within the same organization, regardless of the deployment length .
Families of deployed Defense Department civilian employees shall be supported and provided with information on benefits and entitlements and issues likely to be faced by the employee during and upon return from a deployment.
Defense civilian employees who participate in the expeditionary program shall be treated with high regard as an indication of the department’s respect for those who serve expeditionary requirements.
Expeditionary program participants’ service and experience shall be valued, respected and recognized as career-enhancing.
Participants who meet program requirements would be eligible to receive the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism.
Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets
Arcellor Mittal workers demonstrate during a protest march in Marseille. Photograph: Jean-paul Pelissier/Reuters
France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.
It’s a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.
Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.
Europe’s time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
Athens
Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old middle-class boy going to a party in a rough neighbourhood on a December Saturday, was the first fatality of Europe’s season of strife. Shot dead by a policeman, the boy’s killing lit a bonfire of unrest in the city unmatched since the 1970s.
There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilised to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.
This week it was the farmers’ turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.
Riga
The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.
After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.
The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections. It added that the economy of Estonia would shrink by 7% and of Lithuania by 4.5%.
The Latvian central bank’s governor went on national television this week to pronounce the economy “clinically dead. We have only three or four minutes to resuscitate it”.
Paris
Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows, and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.
Sarkozy has spent most of his time in office trying to fix the world’s problems, with less attention devoted to the home front. From Gaza to Georgia, Russia to Washington, Sarkozy has been a man in a hurry to mediate in trouble spots and grab the credit for peacemaking.
France, meanwhile, is moving into recession and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.
Budapest
A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency – the forint – sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.
So far the streets have been relatively quiet. The Hungarian misery highlights a key difference between eastern and western Europe. While the UK, Germany, France and others plough hundreds of billions into public spending, tax cuts, bank bailouts and guarantees to industry, the east Europeans (plus Iceland and Ireland) are broke, ordering budget cuts, tax rises, and pleading for international help to shore up their economies.
The austerity and the soaring costs of repaying bank loans and mortgages taken out in hard foreign currencies (euro, yen and dollar) are fuelling the misery.
Kiev
The east European upheavals of 1989 hit Ukraine late, maturing into the Orange Revolution on the streets of Kiev only five years ago. The fresh start promised by President Viktor Yushchenko has, though, dissolved into messy, corrupt, and brutal political infighting, with the economy, growing strongly a few years ago, going into freefall.
Three weeks of gas wars with Russia this month ended in defeat and will cost Ukraine dearly. The national currency, at less than half the value of six months ago, is akin to the fate of Iceland’s wrecked krona. Ukrainians have been buying dollars by the billion. In November the IMF waded in with the first payments in a $16bn rescue package.
The vicious power struggles between Yushchenko and the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, are consuming the ruling elite’s energy, paralysing government and leaving the economy dysfunctional. Russia is doing its best to keep things that way.
Reykjavik
Proud of its status as one of the world’s most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.
Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world’s oldest parliament. The yoghurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.
An openly gay prime minister takes over today as head of a caretaker government. The neocon right has been ditched. The hard left Greens are, at least for the moment, the most popular party in the small Arctic state with a population the size of Bradford.
The IMF’s bailout teams have moved in with $11bn. The national currency, the krona, appears to be finished. Iceland is a test case of how one of the most successful societies on the globe suddenly failed.
Changing the CIA
Changing the CIA
I am still skeptical that our new president will — or can — fulfill all his sweeping promises, but he has made an essential start by bringing the CIA back into our rule of law by appointing Leon Panetta as director of the CIA. It is significant that next to The New York Times Jan. 5 front-page story on his appointment was an account of a six-year imprisonment, with torture, of a Pakistani first “rendered” (kidnapped) by the CIA and now released without ever having been charged with any crime.
Critics of President-elect Barack Obama’s choice charge that Panetta has had no direct experience with the CIA or other intelligence work. Actually, as Fred Kaplan reveals in Slate (Jan. 6), while Panetta was Bill Clinton’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, “he was one of a very few people who knew about all of the covert and special-access programs” — and he knows where to find the buried line-item budget items concerning the CIA.
As for Panetta’s patriotic and moral qualifications for his new office, he wrote last year in Washington Monthly: “Those who support torture (the CIA’s involvement in torture has been extensively documented) may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. We either believe in…the rule of law…or we don’t. There is no middle ground.”
Panetta added: “The Constitution was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that.”
Bush and Cheney have deeply shaken the world’s — including our allies’ — belief that we are, indeed, different.
The president-elect made another equally vital appointment that introduces the CIA to our Constitution. Beginning in 2002, it was at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which advises the president, the attorney general and others in the executive branch on constitutional matters — that torture became U.S. policy and other violations of international treaties, and our own laws against cruel and inhumane punishments were also legitimized.
In the Obama administration, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel will be Dawn Johnsen, University of Indiana constitutional law professor, who previously served there under Clinton. She is convinced, like Panetta, that we can and will overcome terrorists by refusing to resemble them in any way.
Before I continue in the next column to indicate the possible impact of these two appointments in markedly improving our intelligence services, here is a partial list of the specific war crimes in international law and our own statues that have been committed during the past eight years, and before, by highly EXPERIENCED CIA officials and their agents in the field.
Neither Panetta nor Johnsen has committed any war crimes.
In Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, which the United States signed and has made part of our law, any person detained by our forces is guaranteed the right to freedom from “cruel treatment and torture; outrages on personal dignity (and) humiliating and degrading treatment.”
These rights must be in effect whether the detainee is a prisoner of war, unprivileged belligerent or noncombatant and — as I often tried to remind Dick Cheney in my columns — the guarantees apply “in all circumstances” and “at any time and in any place whatsoever.”
Moreover, the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a criminal offense for military personnel to commit the war crimes I have cited from the Geneva Conventions. That law was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress.
Also, and this should interest the new Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the indispensable 1,249-page thoroughly documented “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib” (Cambridge University Press) adds that our State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices “have expressly characterized as ‘torture’ or ‘other abuse’ tying detainees in painful positions; incommunicado detention; depriving detainees of sleep … long periods of imprisonment in darkened rooms … and instilling detainees with the false belief that they are about to be killed.”
That’s waterboarding, Mr. Departing Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
These are also precisely the common practices of torture and other abuses during the Bush-Cheney administration in our own detention centers. We do not yet know the interrogation techniques that have been used in the CIA’s secret prisons. In view of Panetta’s and Johnsen’s statements about the fundamental need to re-establish our rule of law for the CIA, I expect that they will insist on finding out — and telling us — what has been taking place in those “black sites.”
US envoy warns against Russian base in Abkhazia
US envoy warns against Russian base in Abkhazia
BRUSSELS, Jan 31 (Reuters) – Russia must refrain from opening a naval base in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia and should agree to extend the mandate of U.N. monitors in the region, said a senior U.S. envoy.
The NATO alliance has already expressed concern at a recent report Moscow plans a naval base in Abkhazia.
A separatist official told Reuters this week that Abkhazia expects to sign a deal over an airbase and naval base within a few months, but there has been no official confirmation from Moscow.
“The possible deployment of a naval base in Abkhazia, an airbase in Abkhazia and a military base in South Ossetia seems to be moving in the wrong direction,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza told Reuters in an interview.
Georgia’s pro-Western leaders accuse Russia of effectively annexing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a second breakaway region that was the focus of Russia’s war with Georgia last August.
“Russia pledged to reduce its troops to the levels and locations of before the Russia-Georgia war,” said Bryza, an envoy to the region. “Russia is already in violation of those commitments… Deploying a naval base would be another violation.”
MONITORS
He said Russia should not prevent the extension of a mandate for United Nations observers in the region, which needs extending by Feb. 15.
“We’ve put compromises forward and Russia has rejected them so far,” he said. “We hope Russia won’t reject the compromise for the United Nations.”
Russia’s crushing of Georgian forces in the five-day war raised concerns in the West about a new Russian assertiveness in its traditional sphere of influence and stirred fears for the safety of energy supplies that run through Georgia.
This winter’s gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, which cut off supplies to Europe, stoked those fears further and highlighted the need for renewed investment in Ukraine, said Bryza.
The United States is considering putting its weight behind an $800 million pipeline that would de-bottleneck gas flows from Ukraine into Slovakia.
“From a U.S. perspective it makes it all the more urgent,” he said.
“With this less than a billion dollar investment it is possible to increase the transit of gas by almost 15 billion cubic metres, so about half of the South Stream pipeline for a very small investment,” he added, referring to Russia’s preferred gas project for bypassing Ukraine.
But Ukraine will have to work hard to reassure private investors, who might view the project as too risky.
“It’s time for both sides to rebuild their respective reputations…maybe this proposal to expand gas transit through Ukraine is a way to bring it all back together.”
Groups review Gaza conflict for war crimes
Groups review Gaza conflict for war crimes
PATRICK MARTIN
Now that Israeli forces have left the Gaza Strip and fighting has largely ended, human-rights organizations are combing the detritus of war, surveying the extensive destruction, interviewing shell-shocked victims and building cases of war crimes against both combatant parties.
While Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and, therefore, is not subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, nearly all European courts have claimed authority to investigate and prosecute war crimes of other countries. It was a Spanish magistrate who prosecuted the case of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and, just Friday, another Spanish court announced it was investigating several Israeli officials for their alleged role in a 2002 military assault on Gaza.
The main danger to Israelis is expected to come from lawsuits brought by individuals and organizations, rather than governmental attempts to undertake official investigations. “We are preparing for a wave of international lawsuits,” Israeli Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz said.
Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s principal researcher in Israel and the Palestinian territories, warned: “Those [Israelis] giving the orders, and even those pulling the trigger, should not plan on taking any overseas holidays.”
Related Articles
The allegations against Israeli forces operating in Gaza between Dec. 27 and Jan. 18 fall into five categories:
Unlawful killings
This is the broadest category, in which it is alleged that Israeli air, sea and ground forces carried out indiscriminate bombing and shelling of military targets without proper regard for the safety of innocent civilians in the area.
It is further alleged that the scale of Israeli attacks was often out of proportion to the value of some military targets, or to the threat the targets posed to Israel, leading to unwarranted collateral casualties.
The massive aerial bombing carried out without warning on the first day, the targeting of a police graduation ceremony, the shelling of an area near a UN school, the bombing of two other UN schools and shelling of the UN headquarters, all are cases being investigated.
“Those who embark on this course of action must be held responsible,” Ms. Rovera said. She said there were numerous cases of Israeli artillery being used against targets in built-up residential areas.
“It doesn’t matter if their indiscriminate attacks result in one unlawful death or a large number,” she said. “It’s the scale here [in Gaza] that’s new.”
The use of anti-personnel weapons such as flechettes when shelling a physical or a narrow target is another example of unlawful killing, Ms. Rovera argued. Thousands of these five-centimetre-long metal arrows can be packed into tank shells, and evidence of their use has been found in at least two areas of Gaza, she said.
“X-rays showed flechettes embedded in people’s brains,” Ms. Rovera said.
Use of such weapons is not banned, but their use in civilian-populated areas runs afoul of humanitarian law, experts say.
White phosphorous shells is another example of a legal munition that may have been used illegally in Gaza. Intended to illuminate an area or to provide a smoke screen, the phosphorous ignites when exposed to air and cannot be doused with water. It ignites most material with which it comes into contact and burns human flesh to the bone.
Its use in heavily populated areas is a violation of humanitarian law, most agree.
Israel acknowledges using white phosphorous, but insists it did so only in open areas and in complete compliance with international law.
Wanton destruction of property
The neighbourhood of east Jabalya in the northern part of the Gaza Strip was an expansive industrial area containing factories and warehouses. Cement making, stone cutting, agricultural processing and small manufacturing all were carried out here, but an inspection of the district this week showed almost every single factory, warehouse and barn destroyed. Cement trucks all were overturned; buildings that weren’t shelled were bulldozed; a complete field of cattle lay dead on the ground.
Such destruction, experts say, may constitute an international crime. “They have destroyed the livelihood of thousands of people,” said Martha Myers, country director for Care International.
Israel has justified the destruction as an effort to remove possible rocket-launching sites – the area is not far from the Israeli border – and to destroy stockpiles of rockets and rocket-making factories.
On a smaller scale, an inspection of several sites this week found examples of how Israeli troops, occupying houses during their ground invasion, left homes unnecessarily trashed, desecrated and with hateful graffiti on the walls.
And in what appears to be a disregard for religious symbols in favour of sport, Israeli tanks shot the top off a great number of minarets in areas that Israeli forces occupied.
“Israelis say they only destroyed things that had potential military use,” Ms. Rovera said, “but the destruction was indiscriminate.”
Hindering medical relief
Numerous examples are cited of Israeli military action preventing neutral medical personnel from reaching civilian victims. The most infamous case is that of the Samouni family, whose house in the Gaza suburb of Zeitoun was destroyed by Israeli shelling. Ambulances were reportedly unable to reach the site for three days. When they did, they apparently found three crying toddlers lying by their dead mothers.
Israel denies it blocked any relief efforts and says the logistics of battle may have made the way unsafe in some situations.
Use of human shields
“We’ve heard a lot about Hamas using human shields,” Amnesty’s Ms. Rovera said. “But Israel used them, too.”
Israeli troops would go into a house, she explained, put the family on the bottom floor and take over the upper floor to use for sniping at the enemy.
“This constitutes using the family as a human shield,” Ms. Rovera pointed out.
Mistreatment of prisoners
Seven Israeli human-rights groups complained to Israel’s judge advocate-general Wednesday that prisoners taken in the Gaza operation were held in conditions so poor that their lives were often endangered.
They presented testimony that many were held in hastily dug pits exposed to cold for days; that many were held “near tanks and in clear combat areas,” and that several were victims of “serious and degrading violence.”
Such “disregard of ethical and legal obligations” makes Israel guilty of violations of international law, the groups argue.
More Zionist Than Israel?
More Zionist Than Israel?
German Policy and Media on Gaza
by Ali Fathollah-Nejad
The Gaza massacre, at least for the moment, is over — ended just before Barack Obama’s inauguration, so as not to cast an unwelcome cloud over his first hours as U.S. President. The initial Palestinian death toll is 1,300 . . . and expected to rise. (Four times that number were injured, and more wounded may be discovered). The number of the Israeli dead — 13 Israelis, ten of whom were soldiers, lost their lives — was one hundredth of the Palestinian dead. Such are the revealing casualty statistics of this so-called war — onslaught or even slaughter would be a more accurate term to describe the world’s fifth largest army using the high-tech weaponry of the world’s No. 1 military power against the civilian population as well as a scant number of armed combatants.
Only two and a half years after the last Israeli onslaught in which a comparable number of people were killed — with the difference that the Lebanese, unlike the imprisoned Gazans, had a better chance of fleeing from the murderous bombs dropped on them — much of the world found themselves in a state of shock again as they witnessed the reemergence of barbarity at its worst. Israel did not allow any Western journalists to cover the bloodbath of its “Operation Cast Lead,” though the non-Western world, watching Al Jazeera, Press TV, or TeleSur, could witness the carnage inflicted upon Gaza.
Needless to say, the “pictures” shown by the West’s “enlightened” media were antipodal to those shown by the non-Western alternatives mentioned above, which the same Western media promptly denounced as “propaganda.” Let’s take Germany for example, Europe’s economically as well as demographically strongest country, whose Constitution (Basic Law), as a lesson of the terrible experiences of the Nazi period, commits the German people, “[c]onscious of their responsibility before God and man, . . . to promote world peace” (Preamble), emphasizing that “The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world” (Art. 1, para. 2).1 One might expect the German people’s political representatives to feel obliged to respect those principles. Nothing of the sort!
“Unlimited Solidarity” Reloaded
In a telephone conversation on the second day of Israel’s attacks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “agreed that the responsibility for the development of the situation in the region clearly and exclusively lies with Hamas.” Berlin’s spokesperson further declared: “Hamas unilaterally broke the agreement for a ceasefire, there has been a continuous firing of . . . rockets at Israeli settlements and Israeli territory, and without question — and this was stressed by the chancellor — Israel has the legitimate right to defend its own people and territory.”2 Merkel’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier embarked on a “peace mission” — the German media’s description — where he observed from a safe distance in Rafah the “self-defending” Israeli bombs being dropped upon “self-responsible” Palestinians. Steinmeier, who as Schröder’s chief of staff played an inglorious role in keeping Germany-born innocents in the Guantánamo camp,3 is running as the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) candidate for the chancellery. Impressive seamlessness!
Like the United States during the immediate post-9/11 days, today Israel is the unmerited beneficiary of Germany’s “unlimited solidarity” aiding and abetting crimes.
Now, what about the German media, which in turn are bound by the German Press Code stating that “[t]he freedom of the Press enshrined in the Basic Law includes the independence and freedom of information, the right of expression and criticism” (Preamble) and that “[r]espect for the truth, preservation of human dignity and accurate informing of the public are the overriding principles of the Press” (Section 1)? Their story of “civilizational” war — comfortably embedded within the good-versus-evil scheme — was not surprising at all, though hardly compatible with the above principles.
The media overwhelmingly and across the political spectrum represented the interpretation given by the Israeli leadership, i.e. that the “Jewish State” was fighting a “defensive war” against rocket-throwing “Hamas terrorists,” pursuing the noble cause of defending “Western democracies,” such as Israel, in the “war on terror” against Islamism. Despite this narrative’s non-sense in moral, political, and legal terms, it was echoed in papers of every political couleur. The only newspaper consistently and extensively covering the “systematic nature of the destruction” (UN humanitarian chief Sir John Holmes)4 has been the left-wing junge Welt — which, alas, has only a small readership. This sole anti-imperialist German paper has been severely demonized by the ideologues of the mainstream but has received much praise from such respected personalities as Hans von Sponeck, a former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, who resigned in protest of the UN Security Council-mandated genocide of Iraqis in the 1990s.
Embedded Narratives
The country’s most prominent televised political discussion “Anne Will” announced that it would run a show on Gaza on 11 January, but in an unprecedented step canceled the topic only three days before the scheduled date, replacing it by a program on “suicide” — as if suicide were more important than mass killings. Seeing the freedom of press and democracy in peril, a protest initiative was launched, signed by over 700 worldwide.5
When not outright erased as in the case of the canceled “Anne Will” program, the Gaza coverage à l’Allemande was fundamentally composed of (1) prescribed discriminatory terminology, with “radical Islamist Hamas” used as a journalistic mantra to describe Israel’s opponent while such loaded terms as “radical Zionist” were never attributed to Israel; (2) the tale of “double hostage-taking” of both Israelis and Gazans by Hamas; and (3) the repetition of Israeli government positions even by journalists working for the most prestigious public broadcasters. German correspondents joining from Tel Aviv were practically embedded with Israel’s army.
What was scrupulously omitted in the media’s narrative was the history of the conflict, particularly the fact that we had, on one side, an illegal occupying power flouting world opinion as enunciated by numerous UN resolutions and international legal opinions and, on the other, the brutally occupied who were being practically starved to death. At best, this was only considered a marginal detail diverting one’s attention from the “continuous rocket attacks” by Hamas which rendered normal Israeli life impossible. No mention of course was made about the worthiness of Palestinian life.
What Lessons from the Judeocide?
Still under the long shadow cast by the monumental — and in its industrial fervor unique — genocide of the European Jews, the country’s media did not provide space for any discussion worth its name about the great ordeal that Gazans suffered while the “international community” acted in complicit silence. And when debated, as was done in “Anne Will”‘s competitor political talk show “Hart Aber Fair” (“Hard But Fair”), it was carefully made sure that the talk was not “switched” to a “discussion of facts.” Instead, in a highly obvious manner, a frantic effort was made to connect anti-Semitism and criticisms of Israel. While anti-Semitism certainly exists among some Germans, the more prevalent form of racism in today’s Germany is Islamophobia, which went un-discussed, despite it being relevant as a factor that explains official ideology and public opinion. Hardly a fair practice.
What was even more scandalous was the fact that Jewish voices against Israel’s operation were widely ignored. To be heard in the mainstream mass media, Jewish critics of Israel were forced to take out an ad. In the SüddeutscheZeitung, under the header “German Jews say NO to the murder by the Israeli army,” European Jews for a Just Peace (EJPJ) Germany said: “We are appalled by this inhumanity. . . . Do German politicians really believe that it is a compensation for the murder of our Jewish families and relatives that Israel can now . . . do whatever crosses her mind? . . . Hamas is using terrorist methods, but this is also what the elected officials of Israel do, in fact a hundred times more effectively.”6
It is deeply disturbing, and particularly sad for someone who has grown up in Germany, to raise the question “What have Germans learned from the Holocaust?” and to hear either embarrassed silence or “We must not criticize Israel.” I thought the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust was the duty to resist any kind of racism, oppression, and wars of aggression and to refrain from demonization which effectively paves the way for tacit acceptance of violence and war. That is the lesson codified in the Basic Law, too, albeit held in contempt by the German media and politicians. Despite the narratives promoted by them, however, polls suggest that a significant number of Germans are increasingly becoming aware of the moral hollowness of such “unlimited solidarity” and beginning to recognize that barbarity must be called barbarity, no matter who the perpetrators are.
A Rogue State: “If the Cap Fits. . . .”
Jewish Oxford international relations professor Avi Shlaim concluded his article on Gaza: “. . . Israel’s record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with ‘an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders’. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism — the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it.”7 As the leading scholar on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Norman Finkelstein corroborates Shlaim: “The record is quite clear.” Well, it is.
This is why it makes sense to launch a campaign against Israel in the same way it was done against Apartheid South Africa, which was a Western colonial state with entrenched racism, backed by “Western democracies” and engaged in apartheid and oppression . . . much like Israel.
I agree with the historian Ilan Pappé: it is now high time to expose the links between the Zionist ideological factor and the crimes committed by the “self-righteous ideological state” of Israel.8 This might conceivably awaken those Germans who remain asleep in a highly disturbing state of moral apathy.
In the end, one awaited in vain a major German, or any other European, newspaper headlining an article — as Le Monde did after 9/11 with “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans)9 — with “Nous sommes tous Palestiniens,” Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Instead, it’s as if the same headline blared, on the front pages of virtually all papers: “We are all Zionists.”
1 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Promulgated by the Parliamentary Council on 23 May 1949, as amended up to June 2008, Berlin: German Bundestag, 2008.
2 Agence France-Presse (AFP), “Germany’s Merkel Blames Hamas for Gaza Violence,” 29 December 2008.
3 Cf. Navid Kermani, “Wir sind Murat Kurnaz” [We are Murat Kurnaz], die tageszeitung (taz), 23 March 2007.
4 “UN ‘Shocked’ by Gaza destruction,” BBC News, 23 January 2009.
5 See my report “German Media Censorship on Gaza?”, Global Research, Montreal: Centre for Research on Globalization, 22 January 2009.
6 “Deutsche Juden und Jüdinnen sagen NEIN zum Morden der israelischen Armee,” advert in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 January 2009, p. 10.
7 Avi Shlaim, “How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe,” The Guardian, 7 January 2009.
8 Ilan Pappe, “Israel’s Righteous Fury and Its Victims in Gaza,” The Electronic Intifada, 2 January 2009; cf. also Ilan Pappe, “Dummy or Real,” London Review of Books (online), 14 January 2009.
9 Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous sommes tous Américans,” editorial, Le Monde, 13 September 2001.
Ali Fathollah-Nejad is a German–Iranian political scientist focusing on the international relations of the Middle East. For the open letter protesting the cancelation of the TV debate on Gaza
Islamic militancy is a foreign policy tool of the US and Pakistani establishments
THE MOST HONEST ASSESSMENT OF THE SITUATION IN PAKISTAN THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN.
Islamic militancy is a foreign policy tool of the US
and Pakistani establishments
By Yousuf Nazar
Admiral Mike Mullen (first from left), the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Pervez Kayani (third from the left) and next to him, the ISI Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha (then Major. Gen. and Director General Military Operations) aboard the US naval carrier Abraham Lincoln in Indian Ocean; in a secret meeting on August 26, 2008. Pasha was promoted to the rank of Lt. Gen. and appointed as the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence on Sept. 29, 2008. -_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Who stands to gain the most from the Mumbai attacks?
The Pakistani media was quick to dismiss Indian allegations about the complicity of elements from Pakistan in Mumbai attacks. Some channels even carried stories that there was no Aslam Amir in Faridkot, only to contradict themselves later. We need to reflect upon the whole paradigm of ‘terrorism’. For this purpose, it is essential to to take a holistic view including examination of some important and critical events since 9/11, US’s strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia, the relationship between the US and Pakistan authorities, and the murky nature of CIA’s involvement with the so-called Islamic militants.
In Pakistan, there are two extreme viewpoints. One view sees things through a conspiracy paradigm where India-US-Israel nexus is out to destroy Pakistan and Pakistani establishment is an innocent bystander. The other view sees fundamentalism as purely a home grown issue that has gone out of control. There are elements of truth in both the views. But the reality, as always, is far more complex.
It has been made more complex due to the fact there is big money involved on both the sides. The Americans have poured money into so-called Pakistani think-tanks and media groups. Some of these think-tanks have clear and identifiable linkages to those run by neocons or are indirectly funded by the US. Their views are given platforms by large and respected groups such as DAWN and GEO TV without bothering to make disclosures about conflict of interest; a standard practice.
Some of the so-called funadamentalists enjoy cosy relationship with the Arab kingdoms and the Pakistani intelligence agencies. These agencies are very close to the CIA and the Pentagon.
Hence, the exponential increase in militancy and terrorist attacks in Pakistan since 2004 cannot be analysed in isolation from the role of the establishment, the US policies, and the biggest ever [ongoing] covert operations of the CIA since the end of the Afghan war in 1989.
Tickled To Death!
CIA HAS BEEN TICKLING PEOPLE TO DEATH FOR YEARSBy: Peter ChamberlinMichael Hayden said the clandestine agency is using Predator missile attacks to tickle enemy groups, to provoke a reaction.We use military operations to excite the enemy, prompting him to respond.The agency director was jokingly referring to the policy of committing multiple mass-murders of innocent citizens of Pakistan, as a tactic for provoking retaliation by their relatives.http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress…Category: Science & Technology
more about “Tickled To Death!“, posted with vodpod
Mike Vickers Author of Anti-Soviet Strategy Now Plots the “Take-Over-the-World Plan”
NO KIDDING, THAT IS WHAT THEY CALLED VICKERS’ WAR PLAN!
Sorry, Charlie. This Is Michael Vickers’s War.
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2007; A19
Defense officials once jokingly described Michael Vickers as being in charge of the “take-over-the-world plan.”
In the Pentagon’s newly expanded Special Operations office, a suite of sterile gray cubicles on the “C” ring of the third floor, Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael G. Vickers is working to implement the U.S. military’s highest-priority plan: a global campaign against terrorism that reaches far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
The wide-ranging plan details the targeting of al-Qaeda-affiliated networks around the world and explores how the United States should retaliate in case of another major terrorist attack. The most critical aspect of the plan, Vickers said in a recent interview, involves U.S. Special Operations forces working through foreign partners to uproot and fight terrorist groups.Vickers’s job also spans the modernization of nuclear forces for deterrence and retaliation, and the retooling of conventional forces to combat terrorism — a portfolio so expansive that he and some Pentagon officials once jokingly referred to his efforts as the “take-over-the-world plan,” one official said.
Vickers, a former Green Beret and CIA operative, was the principal strategist for the biggest covert program in CIA history: the paramilitary operation that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” released last weekend, portrays Vickers in that role, in which he directed an insurgent force of 150,000 Afghan fighters and controlled an annual budget of more than $2 billion in current dollars.Today, as the top Pentagon adviser on counterterrorism strategy, Vickers exudes the same assurance about defeating terrorist groups as he did as a 31-year-old CIA paramilitary officer assigned to Afghanistan, where he convinced superiors that with the right strategy and weapons, the ragtag Afghan insurgents could win. “I am just as confident or more confident we can prevail in the war on terror,” Vickers, 54, said in a recent interview, looking cerebral behind thick glasses but with an energy and build reminiscent of the high school quarterback he once was. “Not a lot of people thought we could drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”
Vickers joined the Pentagon in July to oversee the 54,000-strong Special Operations Command (Socom), based in Tampa, which is growing faster than any other part of the U.S. military. Socom’s budget has doubled in recent years, to $6 billion for 2008, and the command is to add 13,000 troops to its ranks by 2011.
Senior Pentagon and military officials regard Vickers as a rarity — a skilled strategist who is both creative and pragmatic. “He tends to think like a gangster,” said Jim Thomas, a former senior defense planner who worked with Vickers. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.”
Vickers’s outlook was shaped in the CIA and Special Forces, which he joined off the street through a “direct enlistment” program in 1973. In the 10th Special Forces Group, he trained year-round for a guerrilla war against the Soviet Union. One scenario he prepared for: to parachute into enemy territory with a small nuclear weapon strapped to his leg, and then position it to halt the Red Army.
Vickers recalled that the nuclear devices did not seem that small, “particularly when you are in an aircraft with one of them or it is attached to your body.” Was it a suicide mission? “I certainly hoped not,” Vickers said.
An expert in martial arts, parachuting and weapons, and second in his class at Officer Candidate School, Vickers was also fluent in Czech and Spanish, which made him overqualified when he joined the CIA’s paramilitary unit in 1983. Soon after, he received a citation for combat in Grenada.
But Vickers’s greatest influence was in the clinically precise way he reassessed the potential of Afghan guerrilla forces and prescribed the right mix of weaponry to attack Soviet weaknesses. This brash plan to create a force of “techno-guerrillas” able to fight year-round called for exponentially more money, which through sheer force of logic Vickers was able to obtain.
Today Vickers’s plan to build a global counterterrorist network is no less ambitious. The plan is focused on a list of 20 “high-priority” countries, with Pakistan posing a central preoccupation for Vickers, who said al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the country’s western tribal areas are a serious threat to the United States. The list also includes Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia and Iran, and Vickers hints that some European countries could be on it. Beyond that, the plan covers another 29 “priority” countries, as well as “other countries” that Vickers does not name.
“It’s not just the Middle East. It’s not just the developing world. It’s not just nondemocratic countries — it’s a global problem,” he said. “Threats can emanate from Denmark, the United Kingdom, you name it.”
The plan deploys a variety of elite troops around the world, including about 80 to 90 12-man teams of Army Special Forces soldiers who are skilled in foreign languages and at working with indigenous forces. Today, those forces are heavily concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as their numbers grow, they will increase their presence in other countries.
“The war on terror is fundamentally an indirect war. . . . It’s a war of partners . . . but it also is a bit of the war in the shadows, either because of political sensitivity or the problem of finding terrorists,” Vickers said. “That’s why the Central Intelligence Agency is so important . . . and our Special Operations forces play a large role.”
Vickers is pressing Congress to double “train and equip” funding from levels approved in recent years for the military. The funds, which total $325 million for fiscal 2007, allow the U.S. military and Special Operations forces to pay indigenous fighters and paramilitaries who work with them in gathering intelligence, hunting terrorists, fomenting guerrilla warfare or putting down an insurgency.
The funds are “very important . . . so we can move rather rapidly to train and equip foreign security forces” and more will be needed, Vickers told senators at his confirmation hearing in July. “If you don’t have close cooperation, you can’t fight the war,” he said later.
But while local forces can be far more effective in countering terrorism in their regions, creating the forces must be done carefully, said Thomas, the former defense planner. “The last thing we want to do is create a bunch of right-wing goon squads that go out and shoot jihadists with very little legitimacy.”
Vickers is also arguing for billions of dollars in new technology: specialized stealthy aircraft able to fly over countries undetected, unmanned aerial vehicles and other equipment for distant and close-up surveillance, and technology to “tag” and “track” individuals and cars for long distances over time.
Finally, Vickers seeks authority for more flexible and rapid “detailing” that would allow Special Operations forces, in larger numbers, to be seconded to the CIA and allowed to work under agency rules.
“It’s striking to see how quickly he moves through large amounts of information” and then gives guidance how to get things done, said Kalev Sepp, deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations, who works under Vickers. “He knows the key players on Capitol Hill. . . . He understands what level of general officer has to be contacted to make decisions,” Sepp said.
But with just over one year left in the Bush administration, Vickers is impatient with bureaucratic infighting within the military and between the Pentagon and other agencies, current and former officials said. One official noted that it took Socom about three years to write the counterterrorism plan, and two years for the administration to approve a classified “execute order” against al-Qaeda.
Vickers, who has advised President Bush on Iraq strategy, is convinced that more U.S. troops are not enough to solve the conflict in Iraq and that working with local forces is the best long-term strategy for both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Its imperative that the Iraqis provide . . . security, so transitioning to an indirect approach is critical,” he said. “The surge has been phenomenally effective . . . but not sufficient,” he said, adding that he thinks that without political change the effects of the troop buildup “will dissipate.”
Working with proxy forces will also enable the United States to extend and sustain its influence, something it failed to do in Afghanistan, he said. “After this great victory and after a million Afghans died, we basically exited that region and Afghanistan just spun into chaos,” he said.
“It’s imperative that we not do that again,” he said.
Counterterrorism Mastermind Vickers Addresses Israeli-American Lobby On Terror War
Building the Global Counterterrorism Network
November 4, 2008
On October 24, 2008, Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers addressed a Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute as part of the Institute’s 2007-2008 counterterrorism lecture series. The U.S. Senate confirmed Mr. Vickers as assistant secretary of defense (special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities) on July 23, 2007. The following is a rapporteur’s summary of his remarks.
Although much work still remains on the counterterrorism front, the past seven years have seen notable achievements. The Philippines and the area of Southeast Asia referred to as the “terrorist transit triangle” have seen considerable success against Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah. In the Middle East, the tide turned against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula in 2003, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is now only “a whisper of what it used to be.” Moreover, although there have been many plots, no attacks have occurred on the U.S. homeland since September 11, 2001.
The threat, however, remains significant. Al-Qaeda has demonstrated an ability to regenerate, and its ambitions remain high. The group aims to catalyze an Islamist insurgency, break up and prevent the formation of international coalitions arrayed against it, exhaust and expel the West from Muslim lands, overthrow “illegitimate states,” establish a caliphate, and transform the international balance of power in favor of this new Islamic polity.
In Iraq, the situation has improved, but General Petraeus and others have pointed out that the durability of the past year’s dramatic change is difficult to measure, though the signs are pointing in the right direction. In Afghanistan, the insurgency has intensified over the past two years, and the international community faces a growing challenge to prevent the country from becoming a safe haven for terrorists and a source of instability.
The tribal areas of western Pakistan remain the most significant strategic threat, and the problem has escalated over the past decade. In late 2001 al-Qaeda’s senior leaders fled Afghanistan after the successful U.S. operation there and managed to align themselves with local Pakistani groups in this unsettled region. These groups have become more militant as a result and now present an internal threat to Pakistan’s government; in the past year, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have declared open war on the country. Not only is this threat serious for Pakistan, it poses an immense challenge to international strategy and stability in the region and beyond.
Furthermore, the United States faces challenges in the Horn of Africa, Somalia, Yemen, the Levant, and the Maghreb — all areas that al-Qaeda targets strategically. The threat remains global, emanating not just from traditional Muslim lands but also from the United Kingdom and other parts of Western Europe. In fact, we have seen just as many or more threats emerging from Europe over the past decade as we have seen emanating from the greater Middle East.
The long-term strategic challenge of the war on terror is dealing with a threat that has spread across the globe to some sixty countries. We can take either a direct approach, applying power ourselves as primary actors, or an indirect approach, working through others whom we advise, train, and enable. A clandestine component is also imperative, as this is primarily an intelligence war, or a “war in the shadows.” Our intelligence disciplines are therefore essential — particularly covert action, which was the decisive instrument of the Cold War and remains critical to the war on terror today.
Above all, the critical operational instrument of this war is what we describe as a global counterterrorism network. This network’s purpose is to create a persistent, ubiquitous presence in many countries that prevents adversaries from gaining traction and gradually smothers them over time. Ultimately, it takes a network to defeat a network. It is not enough to have a strong partner in one or more countries; we must be stronger than our adversaries everywhere. The principal operational element of this network is the intelligence community, which gives us our global reach and allows us to move at the speed of war.
In particular, the national clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces and the security apparatuses of our partners around the world, is central in this battle. Special Operations Forces have grown tremendously in the Department of Defense in recent years. By the end of the decade, the forces will be twice as large (reaching upwards of 64,000 in terms of total manpower) than they were at its outset, with more than double the original budget. In addition, more senior leaders will have special-operations backgrounds.
The core of U.S. Special Forces consists of approximately 15,000 ground operators, ranging from Army Special Forces and Green Berets to Rangers, Seals, Marine Corps Special Operations, and other classified units. Each of these elements has increased its capacity by a third since 2001, constituting the largest growth in Special Operations history. These forces are present in sixty countries around the globe, with more than 80 percent concentrated in the greater Middle East, the U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, we are expanding our force significantly to achieve broader global coverage.
These forces have invented a new way to fight the war on terror, waging it from an operational perspective and taking a proactive and sustained approach to counterterrorism. We now have intelligence-driven operations, with new tactics, techniques, and procedures — the cumulative effect of which will enable us to take down a network over time.
Gaps, however, still exist in the areas of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. We need to increase capacity in civil affairs and psychological operations, and we are also taking steps to acquire foreign-language expertise, in part by recruiting foreign-born operators. Additional organizational reform may also be in order, such as greater integration and consolidation, as exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security. We are looking at alternative command arrangements within the Department of Defense as well as mainstreaming Special Operations officers into senior leadership positions. We have the necessary institutions, but we must now focus on getting the right people and ensure that that they receive the necessary resources and authority.
Some of our current capabilities, capacities, and relationships predate the September 11 attacks, some have been significantly expanded since then, and others will reach the projected end state by the end of the next administration. There will likely be a need for more integration as we go forward, and we must operate simultaneously in countries with whom we are not at war. Thus, partner development and partner alignment remain critical issues, making diplomacy essential to achieving our goals. The pieces are gradually coming into place as we gain more experience and enhance our ability to build and develop a far more capable network. We are well on our way to building a global counterterrorism network — the critical instrument for keeping America safe through the next decade and beyond.
This rapporteur’s summary was prepared by Sana Mahmood.
American Secret Force based in Afghanistan includes Naval Units: Army Times USA
American Secret Force based in Afghanistan includes Naval Units: Army Times USA
Critics: Afghanistan plan takes SF from usual training mission
By Sean D. Naylor – Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Dec 23, 2008 13:30:19 EST
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ announcement of a plan to deploy an additional three brigades of combat troops to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over the National Security Council’s proposed near-term “surge” of special operations forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.
The NSC proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force- Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.
There are two major special operations task forces in Afghanistan: CJSOTF-A, which is the “white,” or unclassified, task force and is organized around a Special Forces group headquarters with two SF battalions and Marine special operations and Navy SEAL elements; and a “black” special operations task force with a headquarters element drawn from the secretive Joint Special Operations Command overseeing elements of Navy Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team 6, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, whose official title is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan policy and implementation, but who is often referred to as the “war czar.” The rationale behind deploying more special ops forces to Afghanistan was that any decision to deploy more conventional brigades to Afghanistan would take several months at a minimum to implement, whereas special ops units could be sent much more quickly, the field-grade Special Forces officer said.
The deployment of additional Special Forces A-teams, the 12-man units also known as operational detachments-alpha, or ODAs, “became the sine qua non” that the Bush administration was taking immediate action to reverse negative trends in the Afghan war, the Pentagon military official said.
“During this NSC review, my understanding was the most contentious issue was whether to arm the tribes,” a Defense Department civilian official said. “Lute had been pushing this idea of a lot more white SOF working specifically with the tribes.”
However, the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies.
“Four or five weeks ago, this was fairly contentious,” the Pentagon military official said. But the combination of Gates’ announcement of the plan to send an additional 20,000 troops to Afghanistan — which will include a significant special ops contingent — and the impending presidential transition has rendered the debate “stillborn,” the military official said.
Most major special operations commands were opposed to the proposal, special operations sources said. The sources identified U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities Michael Vickers as all resisting the initiative.
Lute declined to be interviewed through a representative, and spokesmen for SOCOM and Vickers’ office adopted a similar stance.
“It would be inappropriate for USSOCOM to comment on what may or may not be an ongoing policy discussion,” SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw said. “It’s pre-decisional, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about it until it’s officially released,” Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Bob Mehal, who handles media queries for Vickers, said with regard to the NSC review.
Special operations sources said that those opposing the “SOF surge” were generally against the idea on two grounds: that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has not requested them, and that the CJSOTF-A does not have enough “enablers” — such as helicopters and intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance assets — to support the forces it has in country now, let alone another battalion’s worth.
“This is being driven out of Washington, D.C., not requested by General McKiernan or by [U.S. Central Command],” a senior special operations staff officer said. “People in Washington, General Lute and those guys … want to micromanage the employment of individual ODAs. Is that really the right thing to do? Who are the guys in Washington to order the deployment of more forces if the theater commander has not asked for them and has no strategy to employ them? The next thing, those same guys in D.C. are going to be picking [high-value targets] for these guys to go after.”
A spokesman for McKiernan did not return a call seeking comment. An administration official denied that Lute was trying to interfere with the theater commander’s prerogatives.
“The requirements for forces are generated from the field, not generated from Washington,” the administration official said, adding that the NSC considered “all sorts of options” in putting together its strategic review for Afghanistan.
But the field-grade Special Forces officer said that the requests for forces generated by commanders in Afghanistan do not seem to comport to any overall plan for the theater. “Commanders are asking for what they think they can get, rather than what they need,” he said.
However, the field-grade SF officer acknowledged that the NSC proposal had run up against stiff opposition among the special ops brass. “SOCOM, USASOC, [USASOC commander Lt. Gen. John] Mulholland, ASD SO/LIC [i.e., Vickers’ office] are saying, ‘We’re not going to put more [forces] in until you give us dedicated enablers,’” he said. In addition to more helicopters and ISR assets, such as Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, the enablers sought by the special operations headquarters include “more dedicated forward operating bases, more money for [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], the whole package,” he added.
The short supply of helicopters in Afghanistan has been a constant problem for conventional forces and CJSOTF-A. Unlike the Joint Special Operations Command task force, which is directly supported by elements of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, “white” Special Forces groups do not have their own dedicated aviation units and have to compete for helicopter support with the rest of the U.S. and allied force in Afghanistan. But CJSOTF-A is commanded by a colonel, whereas the other organizations are all commanded by flag officers. “They’re left begging black SOF — the 160th — or begging conventional [forces] — the 101st Airborne — and who’s going to lose in that fight?” the field-grade Special Forces officer said.
However, a special ops surge would still benefit Afghanistan, said the field-grade SF officer, a proponent of the surge initiative. “The bottom line is even ODAs or [Marine Special Operations Command units] or Navy SEALs that are less enabled will make parts of Afghanistan better off if they’re doing full-spectrum counterinsurgency than those parts of Afghanistan that have nothing at all,” he said.
The Pentagon military official said that the planned deployment of an additional 20,000 U.S. troops, including three brigade combat teams, to Afghanistan would also include a lot of “enablers” that the special operations forces could use. “When you start building in BCTs … you get a lot of stuff that the SOF guys can fall in on,” the military official said. The Pentagon plan includes more helicopters being sent to Afghanistan, as well as the possibility of a one-star special operations flag officer to command “white” SOF forces in country, which would obviate the need to have “O-6s arm wrestling with O-7s and O-9s,” he said, referring to the paygrades for colonels, brigadier generals and lieutenant generals, respectively.
A field-grade officer in Washington who has been tracking the debate said that the “white” SOF leaders’ argument that their forces need more ISR assets and helicopters is a reflection of how Special Forces has veered away from its traditional mission of “foreign internal defense” — training host nation forces to conduct counterinsurgency — in favor of the more glamorous direct-action missions.
“Lute would say that’s a symptom of the problem,” the field-grade officer in Washington said regarding the insistence by some SF officers that the task force needs more ISR assets and helicopters before it can accommodate more troops. “You don’t need ISR and rotary-wing aviation if you’re training indigenous forces. You only need those things if you’re doing direct action.”
Lute thinks that special operations forces, particularly Special Forces, “are the right force” to send to Afghanistan because of their skills at teaching foreign internal defense, the field-grade officer in Washington said. “He seems to remember that once upon a time, SOF did something like that. Last we checked, their principal mission is raising and training indigenous forces.”
This might explain the special operations hierarchy’s opposition to Lute’s surge proposal, the field grade officer in Washington said. “This is an implict criticism of what SOF has done for the last five years,” he said. “They haven’t been training indigenous forces. That may be what SOCOM is objecting to, is it’s implicitly a critique of SOF’s over-fascination with direct action.”
He noted that Special Forces A-teams in Afghanistan are partnered with Afghan commando units, not regular Afghan National Army battalions. “The CJSOTF may think that ODAs are too good to work with conventional forces, [so] they only work with SOF-like forces,” he said.
The senior special operations staff officer acknowledged that SF A-teams in Afghanistan do not routinely partner with conventional Afghan units, but said some of the blame lies with the way the coalition mission in Afghanistan is structured. “The real question is, are all Special Forces in Afghanistan sufficiently postured with Afghan forces? And the answer is no,” he said. “The problem is that the advisory mission is separate from the SF mission. That’s the fundamental problem with Afghanistan.” As a result, he said, “Our ODAs are not being effectively employed.”
Under the Defense Department plan for Afghanistan, Army brigade combat teams and Marine regimental combat teams would be responsible for “mentoring” Afghan National Army units, but “white” special operations forces would also have a role, according to the Pentagon military official. “White SOF can come in and focus on the much harder nuts … the tougher missions,” he said, adding that he was not referring necessarily to “kinetic” operations, but to training missions at more remote locations.
“The framework is going to look a lot more like the framework did in Iraq over the last couple of years,” the Pentagon military official said.
Part of the debate over the feasibility of a special operations surge revolves around the perception by some surge proponents that special operations leaders are not making as many of their forces available as they might. “Lute, for a long time, has been talking about his deeply held belief from his time as the J-3 [director of operations on the Joint Staff] that the SOF are withholding a lot of their assets in order to preserve their op tempo and their retention numbers,” said the field-grade officer in Washington who has been following the debate.
Special Forces’ deployment ratio was 1 to 0.8, he said, meaning that for every day the average SF soldier spent deployed, he spent 0.8 of a day at home. “That’s not even 1 to 1,” the senior special operations staff officer said. “The guys are deployed more than they are home.”
This claim was flatly rejected by the senior special operations staff officer.
Of 288 A-teams in the five active-duty Special Forces groups — there are also two National Guard groups — about 36 are assigned to CJSOTF-A and 44 to CJSOTF-Arabian Peninsula, the “white” special operations task force in Iraq, for a total of 80 committed to the two wars at any one time. “However,” he said, “that number is really 160 ODAs committed to the CJSOTFs as they are on a seven months in, five months out rotation. In addition, he said, there is “an almost permanent presence” of two company headquarters (“B teams” in SF terminology) and about 10 A-teams in Colombia and Central America, about eight to 10 A-teams in the Philippines, “a handful” in the Horn of Africa and a similar number dedicated to the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership that includes countries across north and west Africa. When other A-teams conducting training in Pakistan and classified missions elsewhere are included, that makes for a total of about 32 A-teams committed outside of the two CJSOTFs, “which translates into a commitment of 64 ODAs with rotations,” the senior special operations staff officer said.
There is also a Special Forces presence at more than 40 U.S. embassies, while SF is supporting six “named” operations and more than 50 requests for forces around the world, he said. “There’s no ODAs sitting around doing nothing,” he added, noting that any deployment of additional Special Forces to Afghanistan “is going to be a question of priorities.”
The field-grade Special Forces officer acknowledged that pulling ODAs from other groups that do not habitually deploy to Afghanistan, such as 1st Group, which focuses mostly on east Asia, would incur a cost for regional combatant commanders in those parts of the world, who would have to curtail the number of joint/combined exchange training programs that Special Forces teams conduct with host nation forces. “There’s a huge list of JCETs and other missions that are going to go unfulfilled” in the event of a special operations surge into Afghanistan, he said.
However, it’s not clear that a SOF surge, whether the near-term one sought by the NSC or the longer-term one envisioned by the Pentagon plan, would be made of entirely or mostly of Special Forces units. CJSOTF-A already includes a Marine Special Operations Command element in western Afghanistan, which is likely to grow, the field grade Special Forces officer said. “The term that’s being bandied about is ‘ODA equivalents,’” he said.
The senior special operations staff officer scoffed at such talk. “There’s only SF,” he said. “There’s no SF equivalents. That’s idiocy. SEALs are not SF. MARSOC are not SF and SF are not SEALs. They’re not interchangeable. … Those people who are throwing that [term] around certainly don’t understand what they’re talking about.”
Organized Jewry Opposes Free Speech
-
Organized Jewry
Opposes Free SpeechBy Prof Kevin MacDonald
1-29-9 -
- It is something of an axiom of Jewish life that “Is it good for the Jews?” remains the litmus test of Jewish communal activity – in other words, interest over principles. A good example is free speech. There can be little doubt that the organized Jewish community sees free speech as a problem because it may be used to criticize the behavior of Jewish organizations and especially Israel.
- In Canada the response of the organized Jewish community to recent demonstrations against Israel was to attempt to invoke Canada’s restrictions on free speech in order to silence their critics. The Canadian Jewish Congress complained that protests against Israel’s incursion into Gaza contained images that were “uncivil, un-Canadian, that demonize Jews and Israelis.” They are asking the police to investigate the matter, for referral to the Canadian Human Rights Commission which is in charge of enforcing laws that infringe on free speech. Although the organized Jewish community in Canada has strongly supported the thought crime legislation (see below), Bernie Farber, the head of the CJC, stated “we are firm supporters and believers in the need to be able to demonstrate passionately in free and democratic societies.”
- Because of the First Amendment, we are still a ways from situation in Canada here in the US. Nevertheless, the ADL has been in the forefront of promoting hate-crime legislation in America, and there can be little doubt that they see the First Amendment as a barrier to their interests in suppressing thoughts and speech critical of Israel and other Jewish interests.
- An example of the efforts of the organized Jewish community in the direction of thought control is the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004. This law created an office of “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” within the State Department, headed by Gregg J. Rickman. The act not only requires the State Department to document acts of anti-Semitism, but also to “combat acts of anti-Semitism globally.”
- The act does not say what the U.S. must do to combat anti-Semitism around the world. I assume combating anti-Semitism wouldn’t require any more in the way of lives and money than, say, the war in Iraq – another project spearheaded by Jewish activism on behalf of Israel. But that may be wishful thinking as the same activists are avidly promoting a war with Iran which would likely be even more disastrous.
- In any case, the office issued its most recent Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism Report (GASR) in March of last year. The document is an excellent example of Jewish activism that would be unremarkable except that it is now officially ensconced at the highest reaches of the U.S. government. As we shall see, it goes beyond criticism anti-Jewish actions to anti-Jewish attitudes, such as statements about Jewish influence.
- The report performs the by now familiar casuistry on Israel as a cause of anti-Semitism. The reader is led to believe that the allegations of Israeli atrocities are overblown propaganda – when the real question is just how Palestinians manage to survive at all in the occupied territories. The recent horrifying incursion into Gaza is only the most recent example. Not only did Israel carry out a starvation-inducing blockade during a ceasefire and an assault that finally provoked Palestinian retaliation, there seems little doubt that Israel committed war crimes – particularly the use of white phosphorus bombs in densely populated civilian areas.
- The report complains that Israel’s bad behavior is singled out while nobody cares when other governments behave inhumanely. The problem here is that because Israel’s bad behavior is in important ingredient in enflaming the entire region, it should interest everyone. And because of the role of the Israel Lobby in shaping American policy, Israel’s bad behavior is even more properly the concern of all Americans. American taxpayers are not being asked to massively subsidize other badly behaved governments, nor are they asked to fight and die in wars designed to advance the interests of those governments.
- The report graciously states that “responsible criticism” of Israel’s policies is acceptable. (Thanks!) But there’s a catch: “Those criticiz-ing Israel have a responsibility to consider the effect their actions may have in prompting hatred of Jews.”
- This, of course, has the effect of proscribing criticism of Israel for fear of being called an anti-Semite. Presumably responsible criticism of Israel does not include books like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s The Israel Lobby, despite its academic tone and masterful marshalling of evidence. Jewish activists have routinely accused the authors of resurrecting the Protocols and other vicious acts of anti-Semitism.
- As the report notes, Israel is without doubt the source of most anti-Jewish words and deeds in the contemporary world. But the report also points to traditional Jewish stereotypes as a continuing concern: Jews as more loyal to Israel and Jewish interests than the interests of their country of residence; and Jews as having inordinate influence and control over media, the economy or government. For example, according to ADL surveys, substantial percentages of Europeans believe that Jews have too much power in business and in international financial markets. (The percentages range from around 20% in Germany to 60% in Hungary.)
- Similarly, ADL surveys indicate that beliefs that Jews are disloyal are common among Europeans, ranging from 39% in France to 60% in Spain. The report notes that “those who believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country tend to believe that Jew-ish lobbying groups and individual Jews in influential positions in national governments seek to bend policy toward Israel’s interests.”
- In other words, these anti-Semites are living under the illusion that organizations like AIPAC actually have some influence. And they may even believe that highly placed Jews like Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle may have steered U.S. policy in a way that benefited Israel to the detriment of the United States.
- As I noted in my review of Mearsheimer and Walt, Pro-Israel activists such as Perle typically phrase their policy recommendations as aimed at benefiting the United States. Perle does this despite evidence that he has a strong Jewish identity and despite the fact that he has typical Jewish concerns, such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the welfare of Israel. Perle poses as an American patriot despite credible charges of spying for Israel, writing reports for Israeli think tanks and op-eds for the Jerusalem Post, and maintaining close personal relation-ships with Israeli leaders.
- Needless to say, the GASR is not a good place to find nuanced or fair treatments of these issues.
- The GASR also has a section deploring ethnic nationalist movements of non-Jews, mainly in Eastern Europe, complaining that these movements are commonly anti-Jewish. Typically the anti-Jewish sentiments of such movements stem from the perception that Jews are an elite with considerable power and that this elite opposes the ethno-nationalism of non-Jews-a view that certainly has some basis in reality. (Jewish opposition to ethno-nationalism is restricted to non-Jews in areas where Jews form a Diaspora; it does not, of course, apply to Israel.)
- For example, the GASR singles out Roman Catholic institutions as “encouraging anti-Semitism and ethnic and religious chauvinism.” Chief among the offenders is a conservative Catholic radio station in Poland, Radio Maryja, cited for claiming that “Jews were pushing the Polish government to pay exorbitant private property restitution claims [for Holocaust reparations], and that Poland’s President was `in the pocket of the Jewish lobby.’”
- This seems odd, since it would hardly be surprising if indeed Jews and Jewish organizations were pressuring the Polish government on this issue. Indeed, Norman Finkelstein points out:
- In negotiations with Eastern Europe, Jewish organizations and Israel have demanded the full restitution of or monetary compensation for the pre-war communal and private assets of the Jewish community. Consider Poland. The pre-war Jewish population of Poland stood at 3.5 million; the current population is several thousand. Yet, the World Jewish Restitution Organization demands title over the 6,000 pre-war communal Jewish properties, including those currently being used as hospitals and schools. It is also laying claim to hundreds of thousands of parcels of Polish land valued in the many tens of billions of dollars. Once again the entire US political and legal establishment has been mobilized to achieve these ends. Indeed, New York City Council members unanimously supported a resolution calling on Poland ‘to pass comprehensive legislation providing for the complete restitution of Holocaust assets’, while 57 members of Congress (led by Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York) dispatched a letter to the Polish parliament demanding ‘comprehensive legislation that would return 100% of all property and assets seized during the Holocaust’.
- No sign of Jewish involvement there. Clearly, Radio Marija is way out of line.
- Incidentally, Finkelstein has paid dearly for offending the Israel Lobby: blacklisted from employment in the academic world, deported and barred from Israel, and living in a rent-stabilized apartment near his boyhood home in Brooklyn. The Lobby clearly believes in free speech so long as it’s in done in one’s closet and assuming the neighbors can’t hear it. (More on this below.)
- Also related to Poland, the GASR notes that Maciej Giertych, European Parlia-ment Deputy and former head of the Political Party League of Polish Families, wrote a booklet “suggesting that Jews were unethical and a `tragic community’ because they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah.” The report also deplored the ADL’s finding that 39% of Polish respondents agreed that “Jews are responsible for the death of Christ.”
- This is truly amazing. Here we have an official U.S. government report condemning a Polish politician and a large percentage of the Polish people for expressing religious ideas that date from the origins of the Church in antiquity. It’s very reminiscent of the situation in Canada where the Christian Heritage Party has been charged with promoting hatred because they published material opposing homosexuality for religious reasons stemming from their reading of the Bible.
- Incidentally, the GASR complains that Giertych also claimed that “Jews `create their own ghettos’ because they like to separate themselves from others.” Residential segregation, of course, was standard Jewish behavior in the Diaspora beginning in the ancient world, and it certainly occurred in Poland well into modern times. Indeed, it continues in many areas of the Diaspora today. But, as with thought crimes generally, truth is no defense.
- The GASR coyly states that “While the report describes many measures that foreign governments have adopted to combat anti-Sem-itism, it does not endorse any such measures that prohibit conduct that would be protected under the U.S. Constitution.”
- Nevertheless, the act requires the compilation of material that would presumably be protected by the US Constitution, in particular “instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that attempt to justify or promote racial hatred against Jewish people.” When one considers that a great many of the attitudes mentioned in the GASR are either substantially factual or reflect common religious beliefs, they would certainly seem to fall within the protections of the First Amendment.
- And it’s pretty clear where its heart lies. Indeed, as Ezra Levant has recently described, Jewish organizations and activists have been a major source of support for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, intervening in dozens of cases in favor of plaintiffs.
- Levant describes the Simon Weisenthal Center as “one of the most vicious interveners in Canadian Human Rights Commission censorship trials.” And Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress stated recently that “our anti-hate laws are probably the most underused.” Levant comments: “That sounds like Ian Fine, senior counsel for the CHRC, who declared that `there can’t be enough laws against hate.’ So while the rest of the country is realizing that our government censorship has gone too far, Farber says it goes nowhere far enough; it’s underused. He wants more censorship, more government intervention into thoughts and ideas – and the emotion called `hate’.”
- Clearly, the office of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism is nothing if not a Jewish activist organization. And it doubtless would love to institute the same kinds of thought control in the U.S. that have made Canada into a police state. Indeed, it would be entirely within the letter of the law that created this monster if the United States were to declare war on Poland as a means of combating anti-Semitism. At least it won’t be necessary to invade Canada.
- Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State UniversityLong Beach.
Mubarak Thinks Kissing Israel’s Ass More Important Than Food For Gaza
Cairo against Iran aid delivery to Gaza
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:33:40 GMT
Egypt has officially refused to give an Iranian aid ship permission to dock at Al-Areesh port.
|
Cairo has officially refused to give an Iranian relief ship permission to unload Gaza-bound humanitarian aid at an Egyptian seaport.
After weeks of stalling the Iranian aid ship Shahed some 25 km (15 miles) off the coast of Gaza, the Egyptian government expressed opposition to the emergency delivery through the Al-Areesh port, an informed source said Wednesday.
The move dealt a blow to efforts by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) aimed at channeling desperately-needed aid to Gazans, added the source who requested anonymity.
“The Immoral opposition of Egypt to aid transits is clearly a sign of cooperation with Israel and its policy of choking off humanitarian deliveries to Gazans,” he added.
Following the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, the Islamic Republic loaded a ship with 2,000 tons of medical and food supplies to help allay the humanitarian crisis brought about by the intense fighting.
The vessel, however, was intercepted by Israeli naval forces on January 14 and consequently opted to deliver the cargo through Egypt, the only state that shares a border with the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian authorities issued permits for the aid’s dispatch via the Al-Areesh port – some 50km (30 miles) off the coastal strip – but later backtracked on their promises.
In an exclusive interview with Press TV on Tuesday, the chief of operations of the Iranian Red Crescent, Morteza Shadbakht, said that the Iranian relief society was working hard to secure the delivery.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the head of the Egyptian interests section in Tehran, Amre al- Zayat, on Tuesday to expound on why the ship has not been permitted to dock.
The United Nations, concerned about the deepening humanitarian impact of the war, says there is an urgent need for emergency shipment as Tel Aviv’s repeated interception of Gaza-bound stockpiles of food, fuel and medicine has strangled humanitarian efforts for the besieged Palestinians.
Hamas officials have started paying compensation to the Gazan families who have lost their home in Israel’s three-week-long incursion into the Palestinian territory.
“We try to keep thing even between all people therefore we deliver to every family that lost their home 5000 dollars and every family that has a house which is not inhabitable 2500,” said Hamas welfare minister Ahmed al-Kurd.
An estimated 60,800 people are left homeless and more than 100,000 people remain displaced in the coastal sliver. Running water and electricity are reportedly available less than 12 hours a day. “Entire neighborhoods have disappeared,” the BBC reported.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has reported that more than 4,100 homes have been reduced to rubble and 17,000 others damaged.
Netanyahu Gleefully Predicts Al-CIAda Will Attack Holy Sepulchre
Bibi: Qaeda to blow up holiest Christian site
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:34:01 GMT
 |
Benjamin Netanyahu, the favorite to win the upcoming Israeli election, says al Qaeda terrorists will destroy Jesus Christ’s burial site.
Netanyahu, who claims he had predicted an Islamic extremists attack on the World Trade Center six years before the actual attack, said terrorists will target Church of the Holy Sepulchre also known as the Church of the Resurrection – Christianity’s holiest site.
The church located in Jerusalem (al-Quds) — which Christians believe is the site of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus — attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims every year and is considered a spiritual focal point.
“Radical Islam is willing and will want to attack the symbolic heart of the Christian religion,” said the former Israeli prime minister.
“This will incur a chain reaction we can’t even envision. We will witness an escalation of religious conflict above and beyond the regional conflict we have now,” Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.
The Right-wing Likud leader said he had warned in a 1995 book — six years before the September 11 attacks — that “Islamist terrorists” would detonate a nuclear device in the World Trade Centre in New York.
Life after the apocalypse
Life after the apocalypse
Tanya Gold
What if the doomsayers are right … what if society, as we know it, really is about to collapse? Do you have what it takes to make it in a world without electricity and running water? Tanya Gold offers an essential survival guide
I am standing in a wood with a tall man and a dead pheasant. There is blood everywhere: on my shoes, my hands, my face. Why am I here? Because the man – his name is Leon Durbin – is preparing me for the apocalypse, now.
What would happen if you awoke one morning and everyone was dead? Or if, less melodramatically, the world as we know it – and our teetering financial systems – ceased to function? What if you awoke to find your bubble-wrapped, gilded life was over, and for good? Could you survive? Could I?
I am an urban girl. I have no skills except whingeing and bingeing. I can barely open a packet of Hobnobs without an explosive device. But, unlike you, doomed and dying reader, I have decided to prepare for The End, and I am prepared to share the life-saving knowledge I will accrue. This is your cut-out-and-keep guide to the apocalypse. Put it in a drawer. One day you may need it.
So you wake up; everyone is dead. For the purpose of this exercise, imagine it’s like Survivors, the cheap BBC rendition of the apocalypse, where a plague wipes out humanity and then everyone is mildly annoyed that the trains are delayed. We could imagine total financial or ecological collapse leading to the failure of social structures, but let’s say it’s a plague. So, how long can you stay in your house?
The answer is: not long. According to the people at the National Grid, the electricity will stop. So will the water. These systems have buttons. Buttons need fingers. Fingers need people who are alive. You have a day, maybe two, of electricity. Then you will be in darkness, with no way of washing your face.
What should you do? You can steal food from supermarkets but the rotting corpses on the floor of Sainsbury’s will be fetid fonts of infection. And if you try to sit out the plague in your home, you could burn or drown. After a lightning strike, fires will begin and they will not stop. And if you live in London, the Thames barrier will fail without electricity and the low-lying areas of the city will flood.
So you have to leave. But where do you go? The apocalyptic norm – see 28 Days Later and Survivors – is for survivors to sit in desirable country mansions, eat tinned tomatoes, develop post-traumatic psychosis and shoot each other. Never in any apocalyptic scenario in any movie I have seen – and I have seen them all – does anyone try to live off the land. They prefer to feed on the crumbs of the lost civilisation. It never works. How can you rebuild civilisation with tinned tomatoes? You need to grow your own food.
But where? I choose Devon. It is warm and wet and fertile, and I have been happy there. There are cows. This is where I would live off the land, but I need to learn how. This thinking has led me to Durbin and the dead bird.
Durbin is tall and tweedy. He is the sort of man who keeps firewood kindling in his pocket, just in case. He owns Wildwood Bushcraft, a company that explains how to survive if you are dropped into the wilderness with no supplies, no warning and no clue.
Durbin leads me through the spindly, sleeping trees, pointing out different kinds of branch and bush, and their uses. According to him, the wood is a shop that will give you everything you need. “Willow bark can be boiled to relieve a headache,” he says. “Yew is for making long bows. Oak is for shelters. Ash is for tool handles. Have you ever had a beech-leaf sandwich?” I don’t bother replying.
To be competent in bushcraft, you have to be well equipped: before you leave the city, stop for a saw, chisel, spade, axe and hunting knife. Durbin has them all. They poke out of his rucksack in a manly fashion.
We arrive at a clearing and Durbin demonstrates how to light a fire. He places a small block of wood on the ground and puts a wooden stake on it, point down. He takes a bow, made of wood and string, places it round the stake and, when he moves the bow in a sideways motion, the stake rotates very fast. Its friction with the block of wood magically creates a pile of super-hot matter. It can ignite dry hay or bark. This creates a conflagration that can light a fire.
How will I get water? Durbin runs bushcraft weekends for angry executives here, so he knows where it is. “Water,” I cry, lunging at a small stream. “Careful,” says Durbin. “We have to filter the water with a sock full of sand. Then we have to bring it to a rolling boil.” Why a sock? He ignores me.
Food is harder. It is winter and the countryside is closed for repairs. My two main vegetarian foods, Durbin explains, will be burdock root and hazelnut. Both are high-energy. You can make chips out of burdock and you can boil, mash and dry hazelnut to produce a repulsive kind of biscuit. Durbin picks up a spade and starts digging for burdock. He finds some, but it’s rotten. “Winter,” he sighs. “Hmmm.”
So, with a fiendish flourish, I produce a dead pheasant from my handbag. I had spent the day before negotiating with the Guardian as to the legal and moral implications of murdering a rabbit for the purposes of this article. Finally we had compromised, and I had gone to a posh butcher’s in Mayfair and bought this beautiful pheasant for £3.50. Durbin looks impressed. “You have to pull off its head,” he says. “Just twist it.”
I close my eyes and twist. The head comes off easily; it feels like wringing out a slightly damp scarf. Then Durbin makes a hole in the pheasant’s bottom and I stick my hand up and clutch everything inside. Out comes a squelchy mass of once-living flesh. Durbin grabs the heart and cuts it open. “Very nutritious,” he says. I am slightly sick in my mouth. I pluck, and soon I have a pile of bloodstained feathers – and a nude bird. Durbin sticks it on a spit over the fire. When it is cooked, we eat it. It tastes slightly of excrement but I still feel strangely empowered. It was much easier than I thought it would be, to rip this bird apart.
I now have bloodlust. I ask Durbin how to trap animals. I could theoretically shoot them, but trapping is more suitable for the lazy or incompetent survivor. He looks slightly nervous. “It’s illegal,” he says slowly. But I prod and he tells me about different types of trap. I could try the pit trap, he says, where you dig a hole in the forest floor, line it with sharpened stakes and camouflage it. It is for large animals – deer, wild boar, parents, other journalists. There is also the deadfall trap, which is for small animals. They saunter over a trigger mechanism, and a lump of wood falls on their head. Bon appetit and ha ha.
But what would I eat if I couldn’t trap? “Bugs,” says Durbin happily. “Worms.” There are 40 calories in a worm, apparently; this is the equivalent of two Maltesers. “Or snails,” he adds. “But quarantine the snail for three days before you eat it. It may have eaten poisonous plants, and you will have to wait until it expels them.”
Now you need shelter. If I had the choice, I would probably look for a small stone cottage – hardy and easy to maintain – but if I am foraging, I have to go to where the food is. So Durbin shows me how to make a survival shelter. He hurls logs up against a tree trunk, and covers them with a foot of leaves and bracken and mud. “It is waterproof,” he says. I climb in and lie down. It is a hole that only a troll could love. But there they are, the four pillars of survival: food, water, fire and shelter.
The next day, I go to Pullabrook Wood in Devon to practise my skills. It was easy to survive yesterday, with Durbin standing by. Can I cope alone? Pullabrook is a lovely wood, administered by the Woodland Trust. It is full of happy Tories and happy Labradors. But now I have my own mini-apocalypse. I fail at bow drilling. I find a stream, but a happy Tory says the water is poisonous, even if filtered by sock. Why? “Because sheep droppings have contaminated it,” he says. Death by Sheep is only slightly behind Death by Snail in the encyclopaedia of embarrassing ways to die.
The first shelter I build is too small for me to enter. My second shelter collapses. I decide to abandon bushcraft. I will try my hand at farming. Woman cannot live on worm alone.
So, a few days later, I am standing inside an Iron Age roundhouse at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire. Butser is a project that re-enacts Iron Age life. The roundhouse is huge and round and dim. I feel a bit as if I am standing inside a giant breast. Steve Dyer is the archaeological director. He is tall and red-faced, with a frizzy white beard.
“Roundhouses are easy to make,” he says, waving his arms. He points out two animal skulls, tied to the entrance posts. Is that a cow’s skull? Dyer grimaces politely. “It’s a horse,” he says, before proceeding to tell me how to make a roundhouse.
The ingredients are: 27 large oak trees, 60 small oak trees, 100 hazel trees, 100 ash trees, wheat straw for thatching, and animal hair, clay, manure, soil and water for the walls.
You will also need animals. Dyer escorts me to his pigpen to meet two nameless pigs. To domesticate animals, he says, you just have to enclose them in smaller and smaller areas. Provide them with what they need – food, water and attention – and they will obey you. You can then eat them, and peel them, and tan their hides for soft furnishings. But beware of sheep, he says, waving a bright red finger. “I know this guy called Si,” he says. “He approached a frisky ram. It jumped up and broke his nose.” I am back at Death by Sheep.
I telephone the psychologist Cecelia De Felice. I want to know if I will go insane in my new one-woman world, especially when faced with tasks such as chopping down 27 large oaks. “You will be in a state of trauma,” she agrees. “You will quickly become lonely and paranoid. It is possible you will have a breakdown.” And if I meet other survivors? Be cautious, she advises. “They too will be lonely and paranoid. Of course you are stronger in a group. But you do not know whether they will help you or just steal your resources. Trust no one.”
I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. “It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames,” he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? “I would probably go to Canada,” he says. “There aren’t many nuclear power stations in Canada.”
So, it comes to this. No matter how hard you try, Britain will probably become a nuclear wasteland. The snails that are your lunch will either die, or look very weird. So, again, what to do? My considered advice is this. You, Guardian reader, need to begin building a boat – a sailing ship, actually – to take you to – yes, Canada. Before you leave the city you should pause at a library and steal the entire boat-making and maintenance shelf. Canada may be your only hope of salvation. And that is as fitting an obituary for our civilisation as I can type. In The End, it turns out you don’t just have to be the heroine of Survivors. You need to bloody well be Noah too.
Happy apocalypse.
It’s not all bad: Fun things you could do after the apocalypse
• Pop into the National Gallery and take Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man off the wall. (If you have no taste, take a Renoir.) The Van Eyck is hanging in the Sainsbury Wing. If you want to preserve it properly, Thomas Almeroth-Williams of the National Gallery suggests you store it in a slate mine, where the temperature and humidity levels are perfect for its conservation.
• Go to the British Library and help yourself to one of its two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. One is in a box in a strong room under the library floor; the other is in a glass case in the Treasure Room. If you want to preserve it properly, Helen Shenton of the British Library suggests you store it in a cool, dark place, and watch it carefully for infestations by animals or fungi. Dust regularly.
• Steal the crown jewels. If you can. “There are contingency plans in place in event of a power failure,” says a Royal Palaces spokesperson, “so the crown jewels should remain safe.” Really? To preserve them properly, do nothing. A diamond is for ever.
• Invade the News of the World – it’s in Wapping – and read all its secret files. Then break into M15. It’s on Millbank. Read all its secret files too. Oh, no! She was murdered! I knew it!
• Go and stand on the stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Skip over the bodies of the dead actors. Re-enact the whole of Oliver!
The vital skills you will need
How to make bread
I type this in full because I want bread at The End, and I want you to have it too (should you survive). So, clear the land, turn the soil over to create furrows, take seed from any wheat growing wild, sow it 20cm apart and kick the soil over. Make sure that the birds don’t eat the seed.
Stop browsing animals by hedging the field off and root out weeds. When the corn is ripe, thresh it by hitting it with a stick and mill it by rubbing it between large stones. Add the flour to water to make dough. Stick it in a pan on the fire. Result? Wholemeal flatbread!
How to make sanitary products and toilet paper
Find some sphagnum moss and use that. It is very spongy and it contains iodine, so it is slightly antiseptic.
How to eat snails
Always, always quarantine snails before eating them. Take the snail and put it where there is nothing for it to eat. Ignore its cries of hunger, leave for three days and then consume.
How to purify water
Collect the water from the purest source available, ideally a spring, minimising sediment and avoiding chemical contamination. Filter it through a sock full of sand. Sterilise the water by bringing it to a rolling boil for a few seconds.
How to clay bake a fish
Wrap the fish in large leaves, tying up the parcel with nettle stalk. Dig for clay in the earth. After combining the clay with water, cover the fish with a centimetre of clay, leaving no cracks. Scrape a shallow pit in the centre of the fire and lay the fish in it. Cover the fish with embers. After an hour, remove the fish and crack the outer shell open. The fish should be perfectly cooked.
How to remove the skin from a cow
You can kill a cow by strangulation apparently, although I have never met anyone who has done it. Or you can cut its throat, or spear it through the heart. Split the cow along its belly from the groin to the throat. Remove the internal organs. Hang the cow up by its hooves for several days to let the blood run out. Cows are heavy, so do not attempt to do this alone. To take the skin off, slide a blade or a sharp stone between the skin and the flesh. Once you have inserted the tool a little way, you can just peel the skin off.
How to shoot a deer with a bow and arrow
Deer are sensitive to human noise and smell. If you stomp through the wood with a bow and arrow you will never find one. Find out where the deer are going to be – they often walk the same way to the same place. Camouflage your scent, be quiet and do not move. When you see a deer, shoot it from 20m away. You ideally need a kill shot, eg in a lung. You don’t want to hit it in the bottom, because it will run off and you won’t get your dinner. TG
• Sources: Leon Durbin (Wildwood Bushcraft), Steve Dyer (Butser Ancient Farm) and Ben Jones (Merlin Archery Centre).
Israeli War Criminals in Jenin & Lebanon
Israeli War Criminals in Jenin & Lebanon
Jan 29th, 2009 by kawther.salam
The right place for the war criminals is jail. Leaving war criminals free is a big threat against the security of the international society, and they are a grave danger to their own societies. The International 
Criminal Court was established to deal with exactly these criminals. Let us work together to bring these criminals to justice. Let us work together to push the International Criminal Court to fulfill it’s duties and to play an active roll in ridding the planet of this grave kind of criminality.
Here are some more names of Israeli soldiers who participated in war crimes during “Operation Defensive Shield” from April 3 to 21 of 2002 in Jenin. The former OC Central Command, Maj-Gen. Yitzhak Eitan gave awards to these criminals for their war crimes and crimes against humanity in Jenin, which left large sectors of the Palestinian population of that city homeless, and where about 500 were massacred by the IOF. These Israeli war criminals received an appreciation medal from their regional commander for the crimes which they committed.
Colonel Fuad Halhal, the IOF officer in Jenin during during “Operation Defensive Shield”, a former Military officer in Hebron, a druze.
Maj. (res.) Baram Segev.
Senior Warrant Officer Richard Awizrat.
Capt. Tomer Tsiter
Sgt. Shenior Alfassi
Sgt. Ron Margalit
Maj. Nimrod Aloni
Capt. Alon Madanes
Capt. Ron Vardi
Capt. Kfir Cohen
Capt. Ofir Levy
Anyone having additional information about these individuals, please email me.
Here are some names of Israeli war criminals who participated in the 
so-called “second war” against Lebanon in 2006. These criminals were awarded for their crimes by the IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, and Maj.-Gen. Yishai Beer, the former President of the Court of Appeals of the Israeli Forces and now a lecturer at Hebrew University in the occupied Jerusalem.
Col. Miki Edelstein Nahal Brigade Commander.
Yehuda David from Nahal Brigade’s Battalion 931, he also participated in “Operation Defensive Shield” in Nablus in 2002.
Lt. Erez Ramati, Nahal Battalion 931. Ramati, 31, from Kochav Yair, is still the doctor of Battalion 931.
Staff Sgt. Michael Hibner, Nahal Battalion 931, death squad unit.
Staff Sgt. Amichai Avraham, a combat soldier from the elite Egoz unit
Staff Sgt. Steven Friedland, born in Houston, Texas, made aliyah to Jerusalem 
with his family in 1995. He participated in the second war against Lebanon in 2006 and he received an award “citation of valor” as a recognition for his service in the Second Lebanon War crimes.
Friedland completed his military service in the IOF in October 2007 serving as a commander and teacher for the Intelligence unit. Currently, he is in Melbourne, Australia working for the Masorti (conservative) movement.
Maj. Ro’i Klein.
Sgt. Avichai Yaakov.
Capt. Hanoch Daube.
Lt. Anton Syomin.
Sergeant Yoni Binyamin Asraf, served as a gunner in the reconnaissance battalion of the Paratroop Brigade during the war in Lebanon.
Sergeant (res.) Rotmensch, 23, is from Beit Aryeh.
Sergeant (res.) Eliran Iluz, 24, is a resident of Even Yehuda.
The Israeli Death Squad war criminals
Nitai Okshi, a company commander who murdered several Palestinians at the Israeli concentration camp checkpoints surrounding Gaza
Major General David Ben-Ba’shat, Israeli Navy Head of Public Relations, department of the IDF Spokesman
Lieutenant Colonel Ofer Vinter (or Winter), is the commander of the 
reconnaissance battalion of the Givati infantry brigade, which has been at the forefront of the IOF offensive activity in the Gaza Strip in the past few years. Winter is a war criminal who operated in Gaza in 2004. He headed the worst of Operation Orange Iron in the Al Namsawi neighborhood in Khan Youniss were a quarter of a million citizens suffered from electricity and water shortages. Four bulldozers razed houses and shelters in the camp, forcing several families to gather near the hospital. In December 18, 2004, the forces of Lieutenant Colonel Ofer Vinter and tanks supported by helicopter gunships rolled into Khan Yunis refugee camp and 
killed six Palestinians. Lieutenant Colonel Ofer Vinter and his troops also participated in operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The war criminal commander Ofer Vinter also participated in dozens of infiltration operations to murder civilians on Palestinian territory. Winter is a illegal colonist who studied at the academy which was established in the illegal colony of Eli in the northern West Bank at the end of the 1980s. Winter is suspected to be a German citizen.
If you have any more information about these individuals, or about others involved in any way in perpetrating grave crimes against Palestinians, please Email me.
The Illustrated Manual for Police Brutality
The Illustrated Manual for Police Brutality
The New York Times is not usually a favorite of those of us who are, well, addicted to the news.
But there is always something to be thankful for, everyday. Like this picture which the paper used today:
It was taken by Sebastain Scheiner of the AP and is used here in an illustrative purpose.
It displays “Lesson #53″ in the (fictitious) Police Manual for Methods of Applying Brutality.
Lesson #53 reads: “while your colleague(s) subdue a protestor, raise your right arm to his/her head level, take a step forward with your left foot, pretend to accidentally stumble, thus causing you to take a brisk and firm step forward with your right foot, thus causing your upraised right elbow to effectively smash into the protestors face. With any luck, you can even break his/her nose or at the very least, his/her glasses”.
Other lessons:
#42 – When gently leading a protestor away, hold his/her hand in both of your and firmly press the his/her fingers together. With luck, you may crush a digit.
Like this:
and Lesson #77 – When carrying a demonstrator away, especially female, have two officers grab one leg each and then slowly separate as walking away.
Like this:
I found another legs version here:
And Maneuver #28, Twist Arm While Pressing Out Elbow here:-
Welcome to the Israeli Police, those guardians of civil rights and liberties.
You Thought Olmert Was a Maniac, Netanyahu Says Saving Israel More Important Than Saving World
Bibi: Iran threat trumps economic crisis
Keeping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons ranks above the economy in the challenges facing leaders in the 21st century, Likud head Binyamin Netanyahu told the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.
Photo: AP
Netanyahu said the global financial meltdown was reversible but the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a “fanatic radical regime” was not. “We have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in the hands of such a fanatical regime,” he added.
Pro-Israel media: Bloggers join media war
Pro-Israel media: Bloggers join media war
Some 1,000 new immigrants and foreign-language-speaking Jews volunteer to army of bloggers set up by Absorption Ministry and Foreign Ministry with the stated objective of flooding blogs with pro-Israel opinions
Itamar Eichner
Arye Sharuz-Shalicar, 31, whose parents emigrated from Iran to Germany, is a one-man PR show. He speaks Persian, German, English, French, and Spanish and can also get by in Russian, Turkish, Arabic, and Italian.
Sharuz-Shalicar is one of the front-line soldiers in the Ministry of Absorption’s new “army of bloggers” that was recently established in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry’s public relations department following Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.
The Absorption Ministry is recruiting new immigrants and Jews living abroad who have access to a computer and who speak a second language to a volunteer effort to improve public relations for Israel on the internet. The campaign was launched last week.
In the cross hairs are problematic blogs, talkbacks, online social networks, online polls, Youtube videos, and more.
The ministry was amazed by the massive response to the effort. More than 1,000 interested applicants contacted them, of which 350 are Russian speakers, 250 English speakers, 150 Spanish speakers, 100 French speakers, and 50 German speakers.
A range of other European languages are also represented among the volunteers: Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Danish. Persian-, Turkish-, and Arabic-speaking Jews also offered their services. The ministry even got an application from a Chinese speaker.
Some 60% of the applicants are immigrants, old and new. The rest are Jews living in the Diaspora, Israelis living abroad, and even non-Jews who support Israel and want to help out.
The Absorption Ministry forwarded the volunteers’ details to the Foreign Ministry, which briefed them via email and provided up-to-date material on the situation, including video clips that could help them in the field.
While the Absorption Ministry is tasked with recruitment, the Foreign Ministry will be responsible for directing the volunteers online. Each time the ministry identifies an anti-Israel trend on a foreign-language blog, news site, or other website, it will immediately put out a message to the volunteers to flood the site with pro-Israel opinions.
Absorption Ministry Director-General Erez Halfon commented, “This provides an important opportunity for new immigrants, who have always been a strong Zionist nucleus, to feel like they are contributing to improving Israel’s image in the world. The foreign-language-speaking immigrants are a real asset, and it is important to take advantage of this. From our perspective, it was like an emergency call up, and I am thrilled that the response was so great.”
Noam Katz, director of the Foreign Ministry’s PR department, said, “We are in the process of thinking how to utilize these volunteers not only during conflict, but also during regular times as well.”
Miriam Schatzberger, 25, a new immigrant from Germany, joined the ranks of the ministry’s volunteers.
Schatzberger said, “I surf the German websites, and I was shocked by the anti-Israel reports. It is really smart to go on these blogs, to introduce myself as an Israeli and just to talk to them in order to try and balance out the picture.”
Doctors Spooked by Israel’s Mystery Weapon
A Palestinian woman with severe facial injuries from a Dime bomb
Doctors Spooked by Israel’s Mystery Weapon
By David Hambling
Critics continue to press the case that Israel committed “war crimes” in its war with Hamas, because of the civilian casualties in Gaza. Ironically, many of these wounds may have been caused by a weapon designed to reduce collateral damage. Not that the Israelis admit they have the thing.
We first reported on Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions in 2006. The weapons originated as an offshoot of a bunker-busting program, when it was found that adding tungsten powder to explosives seemed to increase the blast effect over a small area. The powder was acting as micro-shrapnel which only carries for a few feet (compared to hundreds of feet for larger fragments), so the result was dubbed the “focused lethality munition” (FLM) which does massive damage in a small area and nothing outside.
There are a large number of reports from Gaza that suggest this type of weapon has been used, and, unfortunately, caused civilian deaths. There are reports and pictures of victims peppered with small particles, and descriptions which are consistent with very localized blast.
During Noah’s trip to Israel, he saw drone footage of an extremely small weapon hitting a car. When it struck — on a road, cutting through a Gaza cemetery — the car didn’t go up in a ball of flames. Its roof caved in, with a puff of smoke. The back doors were blown out; the front doors stayed shut.
Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza says that the weapon “causes the tissue to be torn from the flesh. It looks very different [from a shrapnel injury]. I have seen and treated a lot of different injuries for the last 30 years in different war zones, and this looks completely different.”
According to Fosse and his colleague Mads Gilbert, the weapon typically amputates or tears apart lower limbs and patients often do not survive. It’s no more illegal than normal blast-and-shrapnel weapons, but it is a mystery.
The only known focused-lethality munition is a version of the GBU-40 Small Diameter Bomb. The weapon has been sold to Israel; Danger Room reported last month that the Israeli Defense Forces were using it in Gaza. But there are two problems. First, the Israelis seem to have bought the original version, not the FLM. And secondly, as Ares reported, Boeing has stated that it has not made any deliveries of the weapon to Tel Aviv, yet.
Ares speculated that the IDF is using weapons supplied by the U.S. Air Force; a spokesman told the site that “we cannot release sensitive information on foreign military sales.”
However, Fosse told Britain’s Independent newspaper, “all the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones. The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded.”
It’s just possible that Israel is dropping Small Diameter Bombs from drones, but far more likely that this is a small missile with a DIME warhead. Channel 4 News recently aired footage of Human Rights Watch’s Marc Garlasco investigating the site of a number of DIME strikes in Gaza. The damage was very localized — confined to one room in one case — suggesting a much smaller weapon.
It is highly likely that Israel has developed its own version of DIME. In the United States, DIME is also being used for active defense systems to shoot down rocket-propelled grenades and other incoming threats. Because it does not throw shrapnel to any distance, it’s much safer than traditional warheads. The Israeli “Iron Fist” interceptor unveiled in 2006 is a similar concept, with small radar-guided projectiles. “Iron Fist uses only the blast effect to defeat the threat, crushing the soft components of a shaped charge or deflecting and destabilizing the missile or kinetic rod in their flight,” according to Defense Update. This suggests DIME technology.
One of the often-quoted concerns about DIME — which I mentioned two years back — is the potential for tungsten particles to cause cancer. But it’s quite possible that the Israeli version is not based on tungsten, and we will not know until there is chemical analysis. (Just a guess, but something called Iron Fist might well use iron or steel particles).
But why is such a precise weapon, intended to avoid the risk of collateral damage, causing civilian casualties at all? It takes tactics and procedures, as well as technology. I can only quote Marc Garlasco’s original comment to me in 2006:
“It is unfortunate that these weapons are being developed specifically for use in densely populated areas which may negate the intended effect.”
Blockade thwarts any postwar building boom in Gaza
Blockade thwarts any postwar building boom in Gaza
By Alastair Macdonald
GAZA, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Whole streets lie in ruins, many thousands of Palestinians are homeless after weeks of Israeli bombing and foreign aid cash is piling up. As a builder in the Gaza Strip, this should be Anwar al-Sahabani’s big moment.
Instead, though, he sits at home, angry and sad, not just at the wounds he suffered on the first day of bombardment, but with frustration at being denied the basic supplies he needs to start rebuilding. Israel will not let in cement, steel pipes and other materials it says its Hamas enemies might use to make war.
“The fighting stopped over a week ago but people are still sleeping in the open air,” said Sahabani, whose firm employs up to 100 craftsmen and labourers when working at full capacity.
“We should have started reconstruction the day the war ended. But we have no supplies.” His men, like him, sit idle, he said: “I am sad and angry and I feel a pain beyond words.”
Along the 45 km (30-mile) strip of Mediterranean coastline, half-finished construction sites stand silent, and, amid the ruins left by this month’s violence, families are building makeshift wood-and-plastic shelters to escape the cold.
“For two years now, we have not been able to build,” Sahabani said of an Israeli embargo going back to 2007. “God knows what will happen now to the people who lost their homes.”
Across town, Nabeel al-Zaeem, understands. His Palestinian Commercial Services Co. is Gaza’s top importer of cement.
Only these days, he has no cement.
“We need cement to rebuild the Gaza Strip, because of the Israeli offensive and the comprehensive destruction,” he said on a quiet morning this week at his office overlooking Gaza’s blockade-hit fishing port. “But we have no raw materials.”
He was able to import only a fraction of what he needed since June 2007, when Hamas, victors in a 2006 parliamentary election, seized full control in the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
NO SUPPLIES FOR HAMAS
Peter Lerner, a Defence Ministry official dealing with trade for Gaza, said Israel was helping international aid agencies in their efforts to move in the food and other vital supplies for the 1.5 million Gazans, most of whom are refugees, from families that fled or were driven from what is now Israel in 1948.
But until Israel was satisfied that cement would not be used by Hamas for fortifications and that steel pipes would be used only for plumbing and not to build improvised rockets for firing at Israeli towns, the embargo on construction material remained:
“We are working together with the international community to assist those needs that are beyond the humanitarian issues, such as building and reconstruction,” Lerner said.
But he added: “We are not interested today in rebuilding Hamas, their bunkers. We are not interested in supplying them with pipes that will be used for rockets.”
Amid the shaky ceasefire that has followed an offensive intended to deter Hamas rocket fire, Israeli ministers have also said this week that supplies will not re-start until Hamas frees an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was taken captive in 2006.
But John Ging, who runs the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency operations supplying much of Gaza’s population with basic rations, schooling and other essentials, said getting building materials into the enclave must be a priority: “This is the number one issue,” he said. “We have to get the crossing points open now to get everything that is needed to rebuild Gaza.”
Cement importer Zaeem said that even if the blockade were lifted it would take years to bring in all that was needed: “We need now 8,000 tonnes a month,” he said. “And even at that rate we would need three years to repair the damage.”
In all last year, he said, about 20,000 tonnes came in, all from Israeli quarries — Gaza has no cement industry. A crossing from Egypt is also largely closed, in coordination with Israel, and smuggling tunnels that provide many of the goods in Gaza’s stores cannot supply large quantities of building materials.
BUILDING BOOM OVERDUE
The World Bank says projects worth $240 million were frozen due to the blockade after Hamas took over and 42,000 workers had been laid off: “All the construction projects …. have been halted (due) to the absence of construction materials,” it said.
Yet even before losing some 5,000 homes this month and sustaining damage worth up to $2 billion by international estimates, Gaza was in dire need of a construction boom. At its present growth rate, the population is doubling with every generation, creating an acute shortage of schools and housing.
“It is just not acceptable in the 21st century that 1.5 million people are imprisoned like this,” said Zaeem, dismissing Israel’s security concerns about uses of cement as a “pretext”.
U.N. officials have described Israel’s blockade as illegal “collective punishment” of civilians and some Israelis also criticise the policy for fueling Palestinian resentment against the Jewish state while failing to stop Hamas attacks.
“They must open the passages,” Zaeem added. “We hope to live as everybody all over the world.”
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Israel’s infrastructure minister, made clear this week, however, that the government, which faces an election battle against the right-wing opposition on Feb. 10, has no intention of opening up the crossings in a hurry.
“Let nobody delude themselves that we are going to open the crossings for anything but humanitarian essentials,” he said.
“They can say what they want … We don’t intend to open the crossings before Gilad Shalit comes home.”
In Gaza, construction contractor Sahabani retorts: “Israel is inventing pretexts. For now the pretext is Hamas. Before it was Yasser Arafat … It doesn’t seem to matter.”
Lamenting one particular project, for 200 apartments, which his firm has had to mothball for lack of supplies, Sahabani said: “We hope there can be a truce, so that we can live like other people … We can appeal only to God.”
Asked if he thought Hamas and Israel might be able to come to terms and break the political deadlock from which he and other Gazans are suffering, he confessed to little optimism: “We have had so many disappointments that we have almost lost hope.” (Editing by Ralph Boulton)
Blockade thwarts any postwar building boom in Gaza
Blockade thwarts any postwar building boom in Gaza
By Alastair Macdonald
GAZA, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Whole streets lie in ruins, many thousands of Palestinians are homeless after weeks of Israeli bombing and foreign aid cash is piling up. As a builder in the Gaza Strip, this should be Anwar al-Sahabani’s big moment.
Instead, though, he sits at home, angry and sad, not just at the wounds he suffered on the first day of bombardment, but with frustration at being denied the basic supplies he needs to start rebuilding. Israel will not let in cement, steel pipes and other materials it says its Hamas enemies might use to make war.
“The fighting stopped over a week ago but people are still sleeping in the open air,” said Sahabani, whose firm employs up to 100 craftsmen and labourers when working at full capacity.
“We should have started reconstruction the day the war ended. But we have no supplies.” His men, like him, sit idle, he said: “I am sad and angry and I feel a pain beyond words.”
Along the 45 km (30-mile) strip of Mediterranean coastline, half-finished construction sites stand silent, and, amid the ruins left by this month’s violence, families are building makeshift wood-and-plastic shelters to escape the cold.
“For two years now, we have not been able to build,” Sahabani said of an Israeli embargo going back to 2007. “God knows what will happen now to the people who lost their homes.”
Across town, Nabeel al-Zaeem, understands. His Palestinian Commercial Services Co. is Gaza’s top importer of cement.
Only these days, he has no cement.
“We need cement to rebuild the Gaza Strip, because of the Israeli offensive and the comprehensive destruction,” he said on a quiet morning this week at his office overlooking Gaza’s blockade-hit fishing port. “But we have no raw materials.”
He was able to import only a fraction of what he needed since June 2007, when Hamas, victors in a 2006 parliamentary election, seized full control in the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
NO SUPPLIES FOR HAMAS
Peter Lerner, a Defence Ministry official dealing with trade for Gaza, said Israel was helping international aid agencies in their efforts to move in the food and other vital supplies for the 1.5 million Gazans, most of whom are refugees, from families that fled or were driven from what is now Israel in 1948.
But until Israel was satisfied that cement would not be used by Hamas for fortifications and that steel pipes would be used only for plumbing and not to build improvised rockets for firing at Israeli towns, the embargo on construction material remained:
“We are working together with the international community to assist those needs that are beyond the humanitarian issues, such as building and reconstruction,” Lerner said.
But he added: “We are not interested today in rebuilding Hamas, their bunkers. We are not interested in supplying them with pipes that will be used for rockets.”
Amid the shaky ceasefire that has followed an offensive intended to deter Hamas rocket fire, Israeli ministers have also said this week that supplies will not re-start until Hamas frees an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was taken captive in 2006.
But John Ging, who runs the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency operations supplying much of Gaza’s population with basic rations, schooling and other essentials, said getting building materials into the enclave must be a priority: “This is the number one issue,” he said. “We have to get the crossing points open now to get everything that is needed to rebuild Gaza.”
Cement importer Zaeem said that even if the blockade were lifted it would take years to bring in all that was needed: “We need now 8,000 tonnes a month,” he said. “And even at that rate we would need three years to repair the damage.”
In all last year, he said, about 20,000 tonnes came in, all from Israeli quarries — Gaza has no cement industry. A crossing from Egypt is also largely closed, in coordination with Israel, and smuggling tunnels that provide many of the goods in Gaza’s stores cannot supply large quantities of building materials.
BUILDING BOOM OVERDUE
The World Bank says projects worth $240 million were frozen due to the blockade after Hamas took over and 42,000 workers had been laid off: “All the construction projects …. have been halted (due) to the absence of construction materials,” it said.
Yet even before losing some 5,000 homes this month and sustaining damage worth up to $2 billion by international estimates, Gaza was in dire need of a construction boom. At its present growth rate, the population is doubling with every generation, creating an acute shortage of schools and housing.
“It is just not acceptable in the 21st century that 1.5 million people are imprisoned like this,” said Zaeem, dismissing Israel’s security concerns about uses of cement as a “pretext”.
U.N. officials have described Israel’s blockade as illegal “collective punishment” of civilians and some Israelis also criticise the policy for fueling Palestinian resentment against the Jewish state while failing to stop Hamas attacks.
“They must open the passages,” Zaeem added. “We hope to live as everybody all over the world.”
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Israel’s infrastructure minister, made clear this week, however, that the government, which faces an election battle against the right-wing opposition on Feb. 10, has no intention of opening up the crossings in a hurry.
“Let nobody delude themselves that we are going to open the crossings for anything but humanitarian essentials,” he said.
“They can say what they want … We don’t intend to open the crossings before Gilad Shalit comes home.”
In Gaza, construction contractor Sahabani retorts: “Israel is inventing pretexts. For now the pretext is Hamas. Before it was Yasser Arafat … It doesn’t seem to matter.”
Lamenting one particular project, for 200 apartments, which his firm has had to mothball for lack of supplies, Sahabani said: “We hope there can be a truce, so that we can live like other people … We can appeal only to God.”
Asked if he thought Hamas and Israel might be able to come to terms and break the political deadlock from which he and other Gazans are suffering, he confessed to little optimism: “We have had so many disappointments that we have almost lost hope.” (Editing by Ralph Boulton)
Spanish court to probe Israeli officials for alleged ‘crimes against humanity’
Spanish court to probe Israeli officials for alleged ‘crimes against humanity’
Madrid Court grants motion by Palestinian group to probe several senior defense officials for their involvement in 2002 hit on Hamas operative Salah Shehade; which left 14 dead, 100 wounded. Defense minister calls announcement ‘delusional’, says he will do all in his power to have charges dropped
Roni Sofer and AFP
| Latest Update: | 01.29.09, 18:18 / Israel News |
| National Infrastructure Minister and former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and former IAF and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz may face criminal charges in Spain for killing Palestinian civilians seven years ago.
A Spanish court granted a petition by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights on Thursday, asking the two be investigated for alleged “crimes against humanity” for their involvement in the 2002 assassination of Hamas operative Salah Shehade. Fourteen civilians were killed in the incident and about 100 more were injured. Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter, former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, former GOC Southern Command Doron Almog, former National Security Council Head Giora Eiland and Brigadier-General (Res.) Mike Herzog have also been named as persons on interest in the case. “Those who call the killing of terrorists ‘a crime against humanity’ are living in an upside-down world,” said Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He called the Spanish announcement “delusional”. “This decision is all the more outrageous when you consider Hamas’ true colors, being revealed once again these days to us and the world,” Barak added. He said he would do everything in his power to get the charges dropped. “All senior officials belonging to the defense establishment, past and present, acted properly and in the name of the State of Israel, out of their commitment to protect the citizens of Israel,” he said. According to a legal source in Madrid, Justice Fernando Andeo decided to grant the Palestinian petition “in the name of universal justice.” Scene of Shehade assassination in 2002 (Photo: Reuters) Andeo, a Audiencia Nacional de España (National Court of Spain) judge, is expected to inform both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities of his decision. Shehade was the founder of Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – the organization’s military wing. He was arrested by Israel in the 1980s and later turned over to the Palestinian Authority’s custody. The latter set him free in early 2000. Shehade was considered to be the mastermind behind hundreds of deadly terror attacks on Israel. He was targeted by the IAF on July 22, 2002. Dan Haluzt, who was still the Israeli Air Force chief at the time, was later quoted as telling his pilots that they carried out the mission “perfectly.” Shehade’s assassination also gave birth to one of his most infamous quotes, noted when he was asked about the collateral damage of the hit: “If you want to know how I feel when I release a bomb (off a fighter jet) – I feel nothing but a little thump on the side of the plane. It only lasts a second. ”
|
‘Jewish money’ controls U.S.: African diplomat
‘Jewish money’ controls U.S.: African diplomat
Johannesburg – South Africa’s deputy foreign minister has been taken before the national human rights body for allegedly saying that “Jewish money” controls the United States, officials said Thursday.
Fatima Hajaig allegedly told a political rally two weeks ago in Johannesburg that Jews “control America, no matter which government comes into power, whether Republican or Democratic, whether Barack Obama or George Bush.”
“Their control of America, just like the control of most western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money,” she allegedly said.
Outraged by the remarks, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies — a civil rights group — said it filed a complaint Wednesday against Hajaig at the human rights commission.
“We submitted yesterday our formal complaint on the minister’s outrageous statement to the South African Human Rights Commission,” the head of the group, Zev Krengel, told AFP.
“That minister’s statement is incorrect, inflammatory and outrageous. We feel in our young democracy and in the 21st century, we should learn to respect each other and refrain from such anti-Semitic statements,” Krengel said.
The rights commission’s spokesman Vincent Moaga confirmed that the body had received the complaint, but could not give a timeline for processing it.
Foreign affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa declined to give details on the case, but told AFP that the South African government “has committed itself to fighting against all forms of racism, in all their ramifications, including anti-Semitism.”
Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row
more about “BBC NEWS | Business | Davos 2009 | Tu…“, posted with vodpod
Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row
Turkey‘s prime minister has stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos after a heated debate on Gaza with Israel’s president.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan clashed with Shimon Peres, whose voice had risen as he made an impassioned defence of Israel’s actions, jabbing his finger.
Mr Erdogan said Mr Peres had spoken so loudly to conceal his “guilt”.
He accused the moderator of not allowing him to speak and said he did not think he would return to Davos.
The Turkish PM stressed later that he had left the debate not because of his disagreements with Mr Peres but because he had been given much less time to speak than the Israeli leader.
Turkey is one of the few Muslim countries to have dealings with Israel, but relations have been under strain since the Islamist-rooted AK Party was elected to power in 2002.
Late on Thursday, a WEF official said that Mr Peres and Mr Erdogan had spoken by mobile telephone, and both men now considered the matter closed.
Dinner time
In the debate, Mr Erdogan was cut off as he attempted to reply to Mr Peres.
|
Many of the casualties in Gaza have been children, doctors say |
Earlier the Turkish Prime Minister had made an address himself, describing Gaza as an “open-air prison”.
When the audience applauded Mr Peres, he said: “I find it very sad that people applaud what you said. You killed people. And I think that it is very wrong.”
The moderator, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, had given him a minute to reply, then asked him to finish, saying that people needed to go to dinner.
“I do not think I will be coming back to Davos after this because you do not let me speak,” Mr Erdogan shouted before marching off the stage in front of Mr Peres, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and an elite audience of ministers and international officials.
Mr Peres had told the audience Israel was forced on to the offensive against Hamas by thousands of rockets and mortars fired into Israel.
“The tragedy of Gaza is not Israel, it is Hamas,” the Israeli leader said.
“Why did they fire rockets? There was no siege against Gaza. Why did they fight us, what did they want? There was never a day of starvation in Gaza.”
He argued that Mr Erdogan would have reacted in the same way if rockets had hit Istanbul.
More than 1,300 Palestinians and 14 Israelis were killed during the three-week conflict which began on 27 December.
At news conference later on Thursday, Mr Erdogan complained that he had been allowed to speak for just 12 minutes compared with 25 for Mr Peres.
“I did not target at all in any way the Israeli people, President Peres or the Jewish people,” he said.
“I am a prime minister, a leader who has specifically expressly stated that anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity.”
Israel Ramping-Up Rhetoric on Hezbollah, As Well As Iran
Azerbaijan Thwarts Hizbullah Plot to Blow up Israeli Embassy
Israel Thwarted ‘Major Terror Attack’ In Europe
Nasrallah vows revenge for Mughniyeh
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran of “subversive activity” in Latin America
