Qalqiliya, 29 August 2007
Posted on 2007-09-23
Palestinians: Three civilians killed in IDF raid in Gaza Strip
Posted on 2007-09-20
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Neocons and Israelis Condemn Iran for Vowing Self Defense
Posted on 2007-09-20
Neocons and Israelis Condemn Iran for Vowing Self Defense
Another Day In The Empire -- http://adereview.com/blog/?p=51
Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:29:00
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"Iran draws up plans to bomb Israel.... The deputy commander of Iran's air force said Wednesday that plans have been drawn up to bomb Israel if the Jewish state attacks Iran, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.... The announcement came amid rising tensions in the region, with the United States calling for a new round of U.N. sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program and Israeli planes having recently overflown, and perhaps even attacked, Iranian ally Syria."
Imagine the shoe on the other foot: Syria bombs Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev, its German-built Dolphin-class submarines equipped with American-made Harpoon missiles modified to carry small nuclear warheads, and the Israel Institute for Biological Research at Ness Ziona, where Israel allegedly manufactures Sarin nerve gas, a weapon of mass destruction.
Now imagine the blood red 72 point headlines in the New York Times calling for turning Syria into a glass parking lot.
"On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the international community should prepare for the possibility of war in the event that Iran obtains atomic weapons, although he later appeared to soften that statement."
Let's turn this one on its head: "On Sunday, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara said the international community should prepare for the possibility of war due to fact Israel has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them under the dictates of its Samson Option. In 2002, before Bush invaded Iraq, Ariel Sharon threatened to ‘a retaliatory strike ... if Iraq launched a pre-emptive strike against the Jewish State before an American military campaign had got underway,' according to the Scotsman.
In addition, according to strategic planners and analysts, Israel would certainly use its ‘weapons of mass destruction' against Iraq in the event of an attack in response to the U.S. invasion of the country. Louis Rene Beres, Professor Department of Political Science, Purdue University, in a spring, 2001 open letter to Sharon reviewed by Israeli Insider wrote that Israel ‘must rely upon complementary nuclear and conventional forces, and upon the continuing and associated availability of critical preemption options.' Beres suggests that Israeli nuclear deterrence has been significantly eroded and offers little protection against the irrational calculations of Islamic fanatics who see the destruction of the Zionist entity as a religious commandment. He argues that the cost of an Israeli first strike on sources of the nuclear, chemical and biological threats may be lower than waiting, hopefully, for the elimination of these threats by other means or the possibility that political agreements will reduce the likelihood of their use."
News geared for clueless Yahoos continues:
"We have drawn up a plan to strike back at Israel with our bombers if this regime (Israel) makes a silly mistake," Gen. Mohammad Alavi was quoted as telling Fars in an interview.
Fars confirmed the quotes when contacted by The Associated Press, but would not provide a tape of the interview. The Iranian air force had no immediate comment.
Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammed Najjar told the official IRNA news agency Wednesday that "we keep various options open to respond to threats. ... We will make use of them if required."
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards released a statement that the nation was ready for a military confrontation.
"Iran, having passed through crises ... has prepared its people for a possible confrontation against any aggression," IRNA quoted the statement as saying.
White House press secretary Dana Perino called Alavi's comment "unhelpful."
"It is not constructive and it almost seems provocative," she said. "Israel doesn't seek a war with its neighbors. And we all are seeking, under the U.N. Security Council resolutions, for Iran to comply with its obligations."
In other words, if Iran defends itself, this would be considered "unhelpful" for the long planned effort to slaughter untold numbers of Iranian grandmothers and grade school kids. In fact, Israel has consistently agitated for war with its neighbors, as an unbiased reading of history reveals. "The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning," writes the Israeli journalist Livia Rokach (Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents, Assn of Arab-Amer Univ Graduates; 3rd edition, August 1985).
"The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.... In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used... Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations, who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression... Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes' destabilization from inside their military structures... Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability."
On May 26 of this year, Gordon Prather, a former physicist with the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army, wrote: "Contrary to what you've been told by the same folks-minus Judith Miller-who sold you on Bush's war of aggression against Iraq, ElBaradei reports that Iran continues to be in complete compliance with its NPT Safeguards Agreement."
In other words, neocon mouthpiece Dana Perino is lying. Imagine my surprise.
The IAEA adds: "Pursuant to its NPT Safeguards Agreement, Iran has been providing the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities," thus "the Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States is committed to diplomacy. But she said "it can't be business as usual" with a country whose president has spoken of wiping Israel off the map.
For diplomacy to work, Rice said during a visit to Jerusalem, "it has to have both a way for Iran to pursue a peaceful resolution of this issue and it has to have teeth, and the U.N. Security Council and other measures are providing teeth."
Like Hitler's "Big Lie," so outrageous no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously," Rice is repeating the facile and repeatedly debunked lie that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map. "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to ‘wipe Israel off the map' because no such idiom exists in Persian," notes academic blogger Juan Cole, who provided the correct translation: "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." Of course, neocons, such as Canada's former PM, Paul Martin, irresponsibly interpreted Ahmadinejad's speech as a call for genocide and said "Iran's obvious nuclear ambitions is a matter that the world cannot ignore," in other words, the "world," i.e., the neocons, need to kill scads of Iranian grandmothers and toddlers. Rice, as well, is calling for such mass murder, calling it part of "measures" with "teeth."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said his government took Iran's "threat very seriously and so does the international community."
"Unfortunately we are all too accustomed to this kind of bellicose, extremist and hateful language coming from Iran," he said.
Translation: it is "bellicose, extremist and hateful language" when a threatened state declares it will defend its sovereignty and people.
Israeli warplanes in 1981 destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor being built by Saddam Hussein's regime, and many in the region fear Israel or the U.S. could mount airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities if Tehran doesn't bow to Western demands to cease uranium enrichment.
Iran, which says it isn't trying to produce material for atomic bombs but rather fuel for reactors that would generate electricity, has said in the past that Israel would be the first retaliatory target for any attack. But Alavi's comments were the first to mention specific contingency plans.
David Ochmanek, an international policy analyst with the U.S.-based RAND Corporation, said Iran has the capability to attack Israel with a limited number of ballistic missiles, but Israel could potentially inflict greater damage on Iran.
"If Israelis attacked Iran it would be with high precision weapons that could destroy military targets," he said. "They could destroy Iran's nuclear reactor and do damage to the enrichment."
"The Iranian response would be quite different," Ochmanek said. "It would be small numbers of highly inaccurate missiles and the intention would be to do this for psychological purposes rather than to destroy discrete targets. It's an asymmetrical relationship."
Again, uranium enrichment completely legal under the terms of the NPT, not that this matters, same as it did not matter than the French sold the Osirak reactor to the Iraqis, constructed the facility, provided technical assistance, and sold around 28 lb (12.5 kg) of 93% highly enriched uranium fuel, the usual fuel world-wide for research-type reactors at that time. It also does not matter no shortage of Europeans and Americans sold Saddam Hussein all the material he desired to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. According to former Reagan official and National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort [against Iran] by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." In 2002, I wrote (Bush Senior: Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons):
In 1982, Reagan "legalized" direct military assistance to Iraq. This resulted in more than a billion dollars in military related exports. According to Kenneth R. Timmerman (author of The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq) the US government under Reagan and Bush sold Iraq 60 Hughes MD 500 "Defender" helicopters, eight Bell Textron AB 212 military helicopters equipped for anti-submarine warfare, 48 Bell Textron 214 ST utility helicopters (sold for "recreational" purposes), and US military infra-red sensors and thermal imaging scanners (sold illegally to Iraq through a Dutch company). After the Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency found the following US equipment in Iraq: spectrometers, oscilloscopes, neutron initiators, high-speed switches for nuclear detonation, and other tools used to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons.
"One entire facility, a tungsten-carbide manufacturing plant that was part of the Al Atheer complex," Timmerman told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, "was blown up by the IAEA in April 1992 because it lay at the heart of the Iraqi clandestine nuclear weapons program, PC-3. Equipment for this plant appears to have been supplied by the Latrobe, Pennsylvania manufacturer, Kennametal, and by a large number of other American companies, with financing provided by the Atlanta branch of the BNL bank."
[...]
The US Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. The French newspaper Le Figaro, in an article published in 1998, said researchers at the Rockville, Maryland lab of the American Type Culture Collection confirmed sending anthrax samples via mail order to Iraq. After the Gulf War, Iraq made several declarations to UN weapons inspectors about how they had weaponized the anthrax sent to them by the American corporation. In 1985, the US Centers of Disease Control sent samples of an Israeli strain of West Nile virus to a microbiologist at the Basra University in Iraq. In addition, Iraq received other "various toxins and bacteria," including botulins and E. coli.
And then-not that it matters to amnesiac Americans-the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran during the so-called Iran-Contra scandal, with Israel acting as a middle man and facilitator, a blatant violation of the Arms Export Control Act. Interestingly, the fanatical neocon Iran hater, Michael Ledeen, who now calls for mass murdering Iranian school children, played an instrumental role in these illegal transactions. Instead of spending his golden years in federal prison, Ledeen works for the American Enterprise Institute, where he calls for killing Iranians in broken record fashion.
But never mind.
Tensions have been raised by a mysterious Israeli air incursion over Syria on Sept. 6. Israel has placed a tight news blackout on the reported incident, while Syria has said little. U.S. officials said it involved an airstrike on a target.
One U.S. official said the attack hit weapons heading for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, an ally of Syria and Iran, but there also has been speculation the Israelis hit a nascent nuclear facility or were studying routes for a possible future strike on Iran.
Former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday he was involved "from the beginning" in the alleged airstrike, the first public mention by an Israeli leader about the incident. Netanyahu, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, did not give further details.
Hardly surprising, as Bibi Netanyahu is a world class war criminal and Arab-hating Jabotinskyite of the most fanatical order. It should be noted that few if any members of the corporate media, so eager to suck up to Bibi when he comes to town-basking in his mass murder aura-called the attack against Syria for what it was: an in-your-face violation of national sovereignty.
Edward Djerejian, founding director of Rice University's Baker Institute, said the accusation that Israel had violated Syrian airspace, and possibly launched an attack on Syrian territory, was putting new concerns on an already tense situation.
"The region is very nervous," said Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Syria.
No, you think? But then this nervousness is precisely what the neocons want. "As we undertake these efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, occasionally by force of arms but generally not, generally by influence, by standing up for brave students in the streets of Tehran, we will hear people say, from President Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt or from the Saudi royal family, that we are making them very nervous," declared James "World War IV" Woolsey, a sickeningly arrogant and despicable neocon and former CIA director. "And our response should be, ‘Good. We want you nervous. We want you to change, but realize that now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, the democracies are on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear: your own people.'"
Actually, the people of Iran probably fear suffering a mirror image of Iraq-civilian infrastructure in ruins, child mortality and disease rates rocketing skyward, precious little electricity or clean water, millions of people dying from leukemia and other cancers, thanks to depleted uranium and other lethal side effects of "democracy," neocon style.
With Iran adding to the talk of military options, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns called Wednesday for U.N. Security Council members and U.S. allies to help push for a third round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
But Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Moscow opposes new sanctions, adding they could hurt a recent agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency aimed at resolving questions about the Iranian program.
Two U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade the country to suspend uranium enrichment.
Burns said he would host a Friday meeting of the Security Council's permanent members-the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France. Talks on a new resolution are also expected next week in New York, when world leaders attend the annual ministerial session of the U.N. General Assembly.
Call it a rerun, so pathetically reminiscent of the transparent neocon one act plays conducted on the United Nations stage, primarily to lend a gleam of legitimacy to a series of war crimes. In fact, the neocons do not want sanctions against Iran-they want to flatten the country and kill as many Iranians as possible-and this time around they will not take their manufactured lies to the United Nations, as they ordered Colin Powell to present his ludicrous dog and pony show, complete with charts and test tubes.
In the waning hours of the Bush administration, they will simply attack Iran and leave the mess for Hillary to clean up.
If an article has been reprinted in full, The Intelligence Daily has either obtained permission to publish it and/or the original news source has allowed other websites to publish its material under fair use.
Syria: Israeli nuclear weapons are sparking Mideast arms race
Posted on 2007-09-20
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Arabs push through U.N. watchdog vote against Israel
Posted on 2007-09-20
Arabs push through U.N. watchdog vote against Israel
Thu Sep 20, 2007 7:52pm EDT Email | Print | Digg | Reprints | Single Page | Recommend (-) [-] Text [+]Related News
Arabs slam Israel at U.N. rights forum over GazaFeatured Broker sponsored link
By Mark Heinrich
VIENNA (Reuters) - Arab and other Islamic nations, targeting Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal, pushed through a U.N. atomic watchdog resolution on Thursday calling on all Middle East nations to renounce atomic weapons.
The unusual vote was 53-2 but with 47 abstentions by Western and developing states, highlighting reservations that the move politicized the International Atomic Energy Agency's work.
The decision was non-binding but symbolized tensions over Israel's presumed nuclear might and shunning of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and it frayed the traditional consensus culture of the Vienna-based IAEA.
Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, though it has never confirmed or denied it.
A similar resolution urging all Middle East nations to adopt IAEA safeguards on nuclear work passed overwhelmingly at last year's IAEA general assembly, with only Israel and top ally the United States opposed, as they were again on Thursday.
Egypt reintroduced the resolution this year seeking full consensus but attached two new clauses that prompted Israel to demand a vote and European, other Western and non-aligned developing nations to abstain.
One clause urged all nations in the Middle East, pending creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) there, not to make or test nuclear arms or let them be deployed on their soil. The other urged big nuclear arms powers not to foil such a step.
"The new language threatened to bring new political issues into the IAEA that would ultimately detract from the technical role the IAEA plays in safeguarding nuclear material," said a Western diplomat whose delegation abstained. Continued...
'Israeli warplanes raid' Lebanon
Posted on 2007-09-20
| 'Israeli warplanes raid' Lebanon | ||
The fighter jets allegedly caused sonic booms as they flew over the cities of Sidon and Tyre, as well as the towns of Bint Jbeil and Marjayoun. Israel has so far made no comment on the Lebanese claims. Israel has been criticised by the UN for making a number of overflights in Lebanon in recent weeks. Israel says they are necessary to monitor activities by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militants. 'Hezbollah stronghold' Lebanese police said six Israeli aircraft violated Lebanon's airspace at 0700 GMT, according to the AFP news agency. Police said the jets swooped low over the port cities of Sidon and Tyre as well as the Bint Jbeil region, a Hezbollah stronghold. Last August's UN ceasefire followed a resolution by the world body that ended a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. | ||
It is unjust and absurd to apply economics to this hell
Posted on 2007-09-20
It is unjust and absurd to apply economics to this hell
The government must acknowledge the present catastrophe in Palestine is a direct consequence of Israeli intransigence
Karma Nabulsi
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Guardian
No people, territory or issue on earth have had more international attention devoted to them than Palestine and its people. Yet no conflict looks further from resolution, and no people further from achieving the freedom promised them. More Palestinians lack more basic freedoms today than they did 60 years ago. While an expensive and extensive peace process was in full swing, Israel managed to illegally expropriate most of the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, install hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers, kill more Palestinian families, arrest more young men, destroy more crops, homes and businesses, build a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice, and set forth, unchecked, a policy of aggressive expansionism in Palestine that continues until this moment.
Citizens of this country may wish to ask why this is so, and what on earth their government has been doing all this time with their money. Yesterday the government attempted to answer this question with the launch of a report on the Economic Aspects of the Peace Process. What the report doesn't explain is the direct link between throwing economics at this conflict and the repeated failures to solve it.
The symbiotic relationship between the illegal "facts on the ground" created by Israel in occupied Palestine; the simultaneous loss of nerve by almost all international leaders and institutions to reverse those facts; the subsequent flurry of international activities designed to avoid challenging illegal Israeli actions - this triangle of desolation has been masterfully described in a remarkable publication by Chatham House, entitled Aid, Diplomacy, and Facts on the Ground: the Case of Palestine. Its authors - World Bank representatives, UN officials, humanitarian agencies - detail the economic, political and diplomatic strategies by which international donors have (by deafault or by design) encouraged illegal Israeli practices that have made peace impossible. Without polemics or partisanship, these expert contributors coolly demonstrate the calamity of this approach, and suggest practical solutions to redirect attention towards doing good.
Two of the most treacherous mechanisms of avoidance need highlighting: diplomacy through international negotiations, and the type of economic assistance given to an increasingly impoverished Palestinian people. Since the Oslo agreement in 1993, every subject Israeli governments refused to discuss was removed from the negotiating table. Unfortunately this required excluding the people and issues essential to resolving the conflict: the Palestinians and their right to their land.
First it was the refugees, the majority of the Palestinian people; absurdly, the main victims of the conflict were denied respect, involvement, and participation in peace. Next came the elimination of an entire sector of Palestinian representation under occupation: some assassinated, others now languishing in Israeli jails in their thousands, most of whom want peace - just not one entirely on Israel's terms. And finally an international boycott of any elected party whose political views unsurprisingly run counter to its enemy's. An inevitable outcome of these exclusions is that all civic-minded, active and representative Palestinians have quit, in revulsion, the corrupted public space and secret backrooms of such negotiations.
As well as entire sectors of people, political issues Israelis deemed unacceptable have also been pushed off the agenda. This is the ugly shape of the international conference President Bush is seeking to convene in November. Its purpose is to legitimise the intolerable status quo, especially Israel's recent military conquests. Worse, it will endeavour to demonstrate, through a PR campaign by paid-up pro-Israel lobbyists, that the deal is authentic and supported by ordinary people uniting for peace. Everyone who disagrees will face being smeared as marginal, anti-peace, or dangerously extremist.
The "problem" of Palestine is now restricted to a discussion in purely economic terms. It is not the military occupation, the enforced exile and statelessness of millions of Palestinians, or the daylight robbery of Palestinian land that needs confronting, but the lack of economic stability in occupied Palestine for jobs and development.
The latest initiative from the government suggests improvements driven by private investment. The absurdity of proposing to stimulate investment in this hell - where because of Israeli closures and checkpoints Palestinians cannot trade between their own towns much less with the outside world - or the fact that the present economic catastrophe is a direct consequence of the military occupation, gets no acknowledgement here. By avoiding the real issue of Israeli intransigence, and with no plan on tackling it, neither jobs nor justice are on offer to Palestinians. They expect international support to help them win their freedom - or at least not assistance in their oppression. As Mary Anderson, a contributor to the Chatham House book, explains: if you can do no good in Palestine, at least do no harm.
· Karma Nabulsi is a fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University karmanabulsi@hotmail.com
Bush’s Fake Sheik Whacked:
Posted on 2007-09-20
Bush's Fake Sheik Whacked:
The Surge and the Al Qaeda Bunny
A special investigative report from inside Iraq
By Greg Palast
09/17/07 "ICH" -- -- Monday, September 17, 2007- Did you see George all choked up? In his surreal TV talk on Thursday, he got all emotional over the killing by Al Qaeda of Sheik Abu Risha, the leader of the new Sunni alliance with the US against the insurgents in Anbar Province, Iraq.
Bush shook Abu Risha's hand two weeks ago for the cameras. Bush can shake his hand again, but not the rest of him: Abu Risha was blown away just hours before Bush was to go on the air to praise his new friend.
Here's what you need to know that NPR won't tell you.
1. Sheik Abu Risha wasn't a sheik.
2. He wasn't killed by Al Qaeda.
3. The new alliance with former insurgents in Anbar is as fake as the sheik - and a murderous deceit.
How do I know this? You can see the film - of "Sheik" Abu Risha, of the guys who likely whacked him and of their other victims.
Just in case you think I've lost my mind and put my butt in insane danger to get this footage, don't worry. I was safe and dry in Budapest. It was my brilliant new cameraman, Rick Rowley, who went to Iraq to get the story on his own.
Rick's "the future of TV news," says BBC. He's also completely out of control. Despite our pleas, Rick and his partner Dave Enders went to Anbar and filmed where no cameraman had dared tread.
Why was "sheik" Abu Risha so important? As the New York Times put it this morning, "Abu Risha had become a charismatic symbol of the security gains in Sunni areas that have become a cornerstone of American plans to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq though much of next year."
In other words, Abu Risha was the PR hook used to sell the "success" of the surge.
The sheik wasn't a sheik. He was a fake. While proclaiming to Rick that he was "the leader of all the Iraqi tribes," Abu lead no one. But for a reported sum in the millions in cash for so-called, "reconstruction contracts," Abu Risha was willing to say he was Napoleon and Julius Caesar and do the hand-shakie thing with Bush on camera.
Notably, Rowley and his camera caught up with Abu Risha on his way to a "business trip" to Dubai, money laundering capital of the Middle East.
There are some real sheiks in Anbar, like Ali Hathem of the dominant Dulaimi tribe, who told Rick Abu Risha was a con man. Where was his tribe, this tribal leader? "The Americans like to create characters like Disney cartoon heros." Then Ali Hathem added, "Abu Risha is no longer welcome" in Anbar.
"Not welcome" from a sheik in Anbar is roughly the same as a kiss on both cheeks from the capo di capi. Within days, when Abu Risha returned from Dubai to Dulaimi turf in Ramadi, Bush's hand-sheik was whacked.
On Thursday, Bush said Abu Risha was killed, "fighting Al Qaeda" - and the White House issued a statement that the sheik was "killed by al Qaeda."
Bullshit.
There ain't no Easter Bunny and "Al Qaeda" ain't in Iraq, Mr. Bush. It was very cute, on the week of the September 11 memorials, to tie the death of your Anbar toy-boy to bin Laden's Saudi hijackers. But it's a lie. Yes, there is a group of berserkers who call themselves "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." But they have as much to do with the real Qaeda of bin Laden as a Rolling Stones "tribute" band has to do with Mick Jagger.
Who got Abu Risha? Nothing - NOTHING - moves in Ramadi without the approval of the REAL tribal sheiks. They were none-too-happy, as Hathem noted, about the millions the US handed to Risha. The sheiks either ordered the hit - or simply gave the bomber free passage to do the deed.
So who are these guys, the sheiks who lead the Sunni tribes of Anbar - the potentates of the Tamimi, Fallaji, Obeidi, Zobal and Jumaili tribes? Think of them as the Sopranos of Arabia. They are also members of the so-called "Awakening Council" - getting their slice of the millions handed out - which they had no interest in sharing with Risha.
But creepy and deadly or not, these capi of the desert were effective in eliminating "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." Indeed, as US military so proudly pointed out to Rick, the moment the sheiks declared their opposition to Al Qaeda - i.e. got the payments from the US taxpayers - Al Qaeda instantly diappeared.
This miraculous military change, where the enemy just evaporates, has one explanation: the sheiks ARE al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Just like the Sopranos extract "protection" payments from New Jersey businesses, the mobsters of Anbar joined our side when we laid down the loot.
What's wrong with that? After all, I'd rather send a check than send our kids from Columbus to fight them.
But there's something deeply, horribly wrong with dealing with these killers. They still kill. With new US protection, weapons and cash, they have turned on the Shia of Anbar. Fifteen thousand Shia families from a single district were forced at gunpoint to leave Anbar. Those moving too slowly were shot. Kids and moms too.
Do the Americans know about the ethnic cleansing of Anbar by our erstwhile "allies"? Rick's film shows US commanders placing their headquarters in the homes abandoned by terrorized Shia.
Rick's craziest move was to go and find these Shia refugees from Anbar. They were dumped, over a hundred thousand of them, in a cinder block slum with no running water in Baghdad. They are under the "protection" of the Mahdi Army, another group of cutthroats. But at least these are Shia cutthroats.
So the great "success" of the surge is our arming and providing cover for ethnic cleansing in Anbar. Nice, Mr. Bush. And with the US press "embedded," we won't get the real story. Even Democrats are buying into the Anbar "awakening" fairy tale.
An Iraqi government official frets that giving guns and cover to the Anbar gang is like adopting a baby crocodile. "A crocodile is not a pet," he told Rick. It will soon grow to devour you. But what could the puppet do but complain about his strings?
This Iraqi got it right: the surge is a crock.
Greg Palast is the author of "Armed Madhouse: from Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild." See Palast's reports for BBC Television's Newsnight, now filmed by Rick Rowley and partners, at http://mailings.gregpalast.com//lt/t_go.php?i=45&e=NTcxMDg=&l=-http--www.GregPalast.com
On his departure from Iraq, Al Jazeera's English language network agreed to broadcast the Rowley/Enders film. I urge you to see it: click here. Palast will update the report today on Air America's Randi Rhodes show.
Palestine: democracy not Zionism By John V. Whitbeck
Posted on 2007-09-16
Palestine: democracy not Zionism
By John V. Whitbeck Fri Sep 14, 4:00 AM ET
Jeddah, saudi arabia - With some sort of "meeting" or "conference" to kick start the peace process now being touted by the Bush administration, there is at least the appearance of an understanding in Washington of the importance for the region and the world of solving the "Palestinian problem."
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However, if this problem is ever to be solved, it must be redefined. Those who truly seek justice and peace in the Middle East must dare to speak openly and honestly of the "Zionism problem" - and then to draw the moral, ethical, and practical conclusions that follow.
When South Africa was under a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime, the world recognized that the problem was the ideology and political system of the state. Anyone outside the country who referred to the "black problem" or the "native problem" (or, for that matter, to the "white problem") would instantly have been branded a racist.
The world also recognized that the solution to that problem could not be found either in "separation" (apartheid in Afrikaans) and scattered native reservations (called "independent states" by the South African regime and Bantustans by the rest of the world) or in driving the settler-colonial group in power into the sea. Rather, the solution had to be found - and to almost universal satisfaction was found - in democracy, in white South Africans growing out of their racial-supremacist ideology and political system and accepting that their interests and their children's futures would be best served in a democratic, non-racist state with equal rights for all who live there.
The solution for the land which, until it was literally wiped off the map in 1948, was called Palestine is the same. It can only be democracy.
The ever-receding "political horizon" for a decent two-state solution, which, on the ground, becomes less practical with each passing year of expanding settlements, bypass roads, and walls, is weighed down by a multitude of excruciatingly difficult "final status" issues. Israeli governments have consistently refused to discuss these final-status issues seriously, preferring to postpone them to the end of a road which is never reached - and which, almost certainly, is intended never to be reached.
Just as marriage is vastly less complicated than divorce, democracy is vastly less complicated than partition. A democratic post-Zionist solution would not require any borders to be agreed, any division of Jerusalem, anyone to move from his current home, or any assets to be evaluated and apportioned. Full rights of citizenship would simply be extended to all the surviving natives still living in the country, as happened in the United States in the early 20th century and in South Africa in the late 20th century.
The obstacle to such a simple - and morally unimpeachable - solution is, of course, intellectual and psychological. Traumatized by the Holocaust and perceived insecurity as a Jewish island in an Arab sea, Israelis have immense psychological problems in coming to grips with the practical impossibility of sustaining forever what most of mankind views as a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime founded upon the ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population.
Indeed, Israelis have placed themselves in a virtually impossible situation. To taste its bitter essence, Americans might try to imagine what life in their country would be like if the European settlers had not virtually exterminated the indigenous population and if almost half of today's American population were Indians, without basic human rights, impoverished, smoldering with resentment, and visible every day as the inescapable living evidence of the injustice inflicted on their ancestors.
This would not be a pleasant society in which to live. Both colonizers and colonized would be progressively degraded and dehumanized. The colonizers could, rationally, conclude that they could never be forgiven by those they had dispossessed and that no "solution" was imaginable. So it has been, and continues to be, in the lands under Israeli rule.
Perhaps the coming "meeting" or "conference" will be the last gasp of the fruitless pursuit of a separation-based solution. Perhaps those who care about justice and peace and believe in democracy can then find ways to stimulate Israelis to move beyond Zionist ideology toward a more humane, hopeful, and democratic view of present realities and future possibilities.
No one would suggest that the moral, ethical, and intellectual transformation necessary to achieve a decent one-state solution will be easy. However, more and more people now recognize that a decent two-state solution has become impossible.
It is surely time for concerned people everywhere - and particularly for Americans - to imagine a better way, to encourage Israelis to imagine a better way, and to help both Israelis and Palestinians to achieve it. It is surely time to seriously consider democracy and to give it a chance.
- John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck."
Living off scraps: The West Bank's bitter harvest
Posted on 2007-09-16
Living off scraps: The West Bank's bitter harvest
To Israeli settlers on the West Bank, it's just the dump where their rubbish ends up. To many Palestinians, it's the key to their families' survival. Donald Macintyre reports from Ad Deirat
Published: 14 September 2007
The stench from the refuse dumped by the trucks arriving every four or five minutes is pervasive, yet the men and boys sifting methodically through the rubbish hardly even notice the acrid smell any more. They are too busy looking through the discarded water bottles, bags soggy with food remains and near-empty family-sized hummus cartons. For along with discarded clothing it's the tin, steel and aluminium - cans mostly, but also, when their luck is in, the odd rusting car axle or broken toy bicycle - that earns the dozens of scavengers from the southern West Bank town of Yatta what little living can be made here by finding scrap saleable to dealers: often no more than 15 shekels (or just under £2) but on the best days up to 30.
They work in this isolated place from early morning, arriving seven or eight to a car that has used the dirt roads to avoid the police because it is so grossly overloaded and has no licence plates; or walking the seven kilometres from the town; or by donkey. Once, says Ali Lamoor, 19, he was so tired at the end of the day that he lay down instead of going home and slept till morning, undisturbed by the howling of the hyenas that, he says, prowl these arid and rocky hills at night.
There is a system here. The municipality bulldozer drivers wait to allow the men to do their work before removing the mountains of rubbish to make way for the next load and mixing them with earth.
Once dumped here, the refuse is indiscriminately cross-community. The trucks with Arabic markings are Palestinian from West Bank cities as far away as Beit Jala, those with Hebrew ones are Israeli, from the Jewish settlements of the southern West Bank, and those with UN insignia from the refugee camps. Ali, who has been coming here since he was 12 and sports a filthy suede coat and flamboyant red and white keffiyeh, says the settlement rubbish affords the richest pickings - "it's seven stars garbage" - but warns that by the time it gets here it may have already been scavenged at least once. Claiming that both Arabs and Jews visit the settlement rubbish tips, he says: "A guy will go to the settlement to look for shoes. If he sees some good shoes he'll take them; if they're no good, he puts them back and that's what we get here."
The dump, providing the sole income for most who work at it, is far from unique. From the Philippines to Latin America, the urban poor have long foraged at similar tips. But it has become a potent symbol of West Bank poverty and unemployment - over 30 percent for adults - in a Palestinian economy close to collapse. Not least because Yatta, where the scavengers come from, is only a few kilometres from the border with Israel whose thriving first-world economy - despite its own pockets of real poverty - affords the highest per capita income in the Middle East.
The work can be dangerous as well as unhealthy. Ali says they often find used syringes as they pick through the rubbish; and many of the men here have cuts from stumbling into sharp metal or broken glass. Three weeks ago, the men say, Hijazi Rabai, a 27-year-old married man with four children, was scavenging here when his ancient tractor turned over and killed him. Nor does it make for respect among your neighbours. Even though all the men are scrupulous about cleaning up and changing their clothes after a day at the dump, "people smell us and it is not good," says Ali. "Sometimes they don't want to drink coffee with me." He even threatens to break our photographer's camera when we arrive - before quickly calming down. But he remains resolute - even when back home at Yatta - in refusing to have his picture taken. "People will laugh at me and say I work in garbage," he explains. In a culture where solvency is a precondition for marriage, he muses on what he would ask his family to say he did for a living to the parents of a potential bride. He hits on a formulation which is literally accurate without being humiliating. "I would tell her to say I'm a garbage collector," he says with a smile. But Ali, who confesses to having done badly at school but dreams of one day becoming a journalist, says at another point: "I haven't got a future. I will never get married."
Ali says that in the summer, when the students are on holiday, as many as 300 to 350 people come to the dump. Now they are back at university the numbers are down to between 70 and 100, mainly from three or four large Yatta clans, though he insists that "anyone can come. This is not our property".
But some students still work here even in term-time. Ali's cousin Taher and his twin brother Fadi are both at Al Quds Open University, studying education and English, respectively, and doing three days at the dump and three days earning degree credits for each course towards which they pay £35. Taher is trying to save some of the £2.50 a day he reckons he makes here. "I haven't paid my university fees for three months," he explains.
Ali's father left his wife, four sons and three daughters six years ago to move in with another woman in Qalqilya, adding to the burden on the sons to provide for the family. But many of those who work at Ad Deirat are married men with children of their own - almost all of whom used to work in Israel legally before the intifada began in 2000, and even afterwards, illegally, by sneaking across the border until heavier police enforcement against those without permits made it impossible. "We have no honour," says Ibrahim Daoud, 30, a father of two who was caught while trying to get to a construction job at the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh. "We have three choices, to become a thief, a collaborator or to pick up garbage."
Mousa Rabai, 28, married with a five-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son, is another who made the third choice; he has a long red gash down his right shin from walking into a piece of sharp metal while foraging in the hills of refuse. He worked as a bricklayer in Beit Shemesh; he has been caught twice on the Israeli side of the border, fined 1000 shekels (£120) the first time and sent to prison for two weeks the second time. He built his own house in Yatta, but it is barely furnished; the floors - and the ramp up to the second floor - are rough concrete because he can't afford tiles or a staircase. A television and an old refrigerator are their only luxuries. Mousa says the family has given up red meat altogether and they eat chicken perhaps once every 10 days. Fruit is largely a luxury for the religious holidays.
The quietly spoken M r Rabai blames Ariel Sharon for his plight. Like many Palestinians he sees Mr Sharon's famous walk on Jerusalem's Temple Mount - or Haram al Sharif as Muslims know it - as the trigger for the uprising that began in September 2000. Whoever is to blame, however, the intifada has been an economic disaster for the town. Because so many of Yatta's men like Mr Rabai, worked in Israel in the 1990s, the town is among the worst hit by the security closures Israel subsequently imposed on its borders. His situation is typical; he owes £1,200 in debts incurred for payments ranging from groceries to medicine for his anaemic daughter. (According to the town's mayor, Khalil Younis, anaemia, often associated with poor diet, is 13 per cent higher here the West Bank average.)
Of his four brothers, all unmarried, three also work the dump, and a third is a municipality driver. But while the lifting of the international economic embargo of the Palestinian Authority - for the West Bank - after the installation by Mahmoud Abbas of a new, Hamas-free, emergency government three months ago means that PA employees are now being paid, that has made little difference to the shrunken revenue base of the municipality. In a town as poor as Yatta, where only a minority pay local taxes, Mr Rabai says his brother, the family's only actual wage-earner, has been getting around £215 every three or four months. Mr Rabi says he would gladly take a construction job in Yatta though the going rate is only around 50 shekels (£6) a day compared with six times as much in Jerusalem - where, thanks to the checkpoints and closures, he has no chance of going.
He is not the self-pitying type but he says he called his daughter Amal (hope) "because five years ago I had a hope that things would get better. He jokes: "If I had a daughter now I would call her 'frustration' or 'despair'."
While Mr Rabai left school at 15, his 26-year-old wife is a graduate in history and geography from Hebron University. "She tried to get a job teaching in a school," says Mr Rabai. "But she couldn't because we didn't have the connections. We are not Fatah and we are not Hamas." He says the couple were advised to bribe an official to get a job, but even supposing he had the funds, he says simply: "It is forbidden in Islam to pay money for a benefit like this."
Some of the problems of Yatta are localised; with average families of more than seven - partly because of what Mayor Younis labels as ignorance - population growth is even faster than in the rest of the West Bank. So is the lack of rain for farming in this semi-desert climate. But others are common throughout the occupied territory. According to the mayor, traditional agriculture has been badly hit by the loss of 1,250 acres of farmland to the surrounding Jewish settlements in the past 25 years. And the mayor says that valuable grazing land is among the 6,500 acres closed by the Israeli military.
There is however something stoical about the men who come to the dump. Mahmoud Lamoor, 42, father of Taher and Fadi, who after years as a housepainter in Israel, first went to scavenge at Ad Deirat after the West Bank closures at the time of the 1991 Gulf War puns cheerfully that "our future is in the garbage" but adds that "God is putting the poor to the test". Like Mr Rabai he is dismissive of both the main political factions, which he says "are busy with clashes among themselves." He adds: "The poor people are buried. There is no support from the government. We read that millions are being paid to the Palestinian people but it doesn't come here. We only depend on God. But even if we work in garbage, I live in dignity. I won't allow anyone to mock me." Certainly, if there are economic benefits to accrue from the new rapprochement between the emergency Palestinian government in Ramallah and Israel, they may take a long time to turn around the deep depression in Yatta. Nevertheless, "I hope this will happen," says Mr Rabai. "Then everyone can have a clean job."
Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay
Posted on 2007-09-16
Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 13 September 2007
An al-Jazeera journalist captured in Afghanistan six years ago and sent to Guantanamo Bay is close to becoming the fifth detainee at the US naval base to take his own life, according to a medical report written by a team of British and American psychiatrists
Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese national, is 250 days into a hunger strike which he began in protest over his detention without charge or trial in January 2002. But British and American doctors, who have been given exclusive access to his interview notes, say there is very strong evidence that he has given up his fight for life, experiencing what doctors recognise as "passive suicide", a condition suffered by female victims of Darfur.
Dr Dan Creson, a US psychiatrist who has worked with the United Nations in Darfur, said Mr Haj was suffering from severe depression and may be deteriorating to the point of imminent death.
He said the detainee's condition was similar to that of Darfuri women in Sudan whose mind suddenly experiences an irreversible decline after enduring months of starvation and abuse. He said: "In the midst of rape, slow starvation, and abject humiliation, they did whatever they could to survive and save their children; then, suddenly, something happened in their psyche, and, without warning, they would just sit down with their small children beneath the first small area of available shade and with no apparent emotion wait for death."
In June this year a Saudi man became the fourth prisoner to take his own life at Guantanamo Bay. Guards found him dead in his cell. Two Saudis and a Yemeni prisoner were found hanged in an apparent suicide at Guantanamo in June last year. A senior US officer caused outrage at the time by describing the suicides of three men as an act of asymmetric warfare and a good PR move on the part of terrorist suspects.
Mr Haj, 38, was sent on assignment by al-Jazeera television station to cover the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. The following month, after the fall of Kabul, Mr Haj left Afghanistan for Pakistan with the rest of his crew.
In early December, the crew were given visas to return to Afghanistan. But when Mr Haj tried to re-enter Afghanistan with his colleagues, he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities - apparently at the request of the US military.
He was imprisoned, handed over to the US authorities in January 2002, taken to the US military compound in Bagram, Afghanisatan, then Kandahar, and finally to Guantanamo in June 2002.
His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, of the human rights charity Reprieve, said his client had endured months of brutal force-feeding and lost nearly a fifth of his body weight during the hunger strike.
Mr Stafford Smith said: "The US military is rightly afraid of a fifth prisoner dying in their custody. But they wrongly respond by treating prisoners worse. Blankets and clothes are removed in case they are used to commit suicide. The harshest methods of forced feeding are deployed - Sami has suffered the feeding tube being forced down into his lungs by mistake several times."
The warning about the condition of Mr Haj coincided with the release of Guantanamo transcripts which describe the hostility between guards and their prisoners. The transcripts includes details of guards interrupting detainees at prayer, detainees flinging body waste at guards and interrogators withholding medicine.
Dr Hugh Rickards, a British psychiatrist, warned in his report that the level of Mr Haj's mental suffering "appears so acute that it is my duty as a medical practitioner to put this in writing to ensure appropriate assessment and treatment".
Dr Mamoun Mobayed, a British psychiatrist based in Northern Ireland, and a third member of the team who has also been given access to written notes of recent interviews with the prisoner, said there was also concern about the mental health of Mr Haj's wife and seven-year-old son, who was just one when his father went on assignment to Afghanistan.
Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Posted on 2007-09-16
Sabra and Chatila Massacres
After 19 years, The Truth at Last?
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her just over 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon--who was then Israel's defence minister--she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, 'Give us the men, give us the men.' We thought, 'Thank God, they will save us.'" It was to prove a cruelly false hope.
Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband Hassan, 30, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. "We were told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to the Cite Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11am. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men."
Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4pm, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you all waiting for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again."
Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to decide if Prime Minister Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. (Belgian laws allow courts to try foreigners for war crimes committed on foreign soil.) In working on this case, the prosecution believes that it has discovered shocking new evidence of Israel's involvement.
The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium-- the "Cite Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport, the damaged stadium was a natural holding centre for prisoners. It had been an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18 September 1982--about the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium--I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, probably well over 1,000, sitting in its gloomy, dark interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret service) agents and men who I suspected were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles--for further "interrogation".
Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed--given our Western appearance--that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads bowed. But Israel's Phalangist militiamen--still raging at the murder of their leader and president elect Bashir Gemayel--had been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in charge. So what did these men have to fear?
Looking back--and listening to Sana Sersawi today--I shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently written into a book about Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the PLO, contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one of the prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad [Christian militia] men. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return them." Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the prisoners talk to me, I asked? "They can talk if they want," he replied. "But they have nothing to say."
All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep with the words "Military Police" painted on it--if so exotic an institution could be associated with this gang of murderers--drove by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cite Sportif. He also filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya" for the release of her husband. (The colonel has now been positively identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.)
Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside the camps. One of the members of the tank crews, Lt Avi Grabovsky--he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission--had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous day and had been told not to "interfere".
And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague rumours of "disappeared" people.
I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's 'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut". But I had not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cite Sportif. I had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's coup d'etat, a stadium from which many prisoners never returned?
Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, 17 September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still (unknown to her) underway inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces [Phalangists] on the road. The men were separated from the women." This separation--with its awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war--were a common feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the Cite Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cite Sportif, as the Israelis told us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again."
The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cite Sportif and the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some militiamen--watched by the Israelis--loaded him into a car, blindfolded, she claims. "That's how he disappeared," she says in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again since."
It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as "missing". We assumed--how easy assumptions are in war--that they had been killed in the three days between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their corpses had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young people had been murdered outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.
Why did we not think of this at the time? The following year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a one-line hint--unexplained-- that several hundred people may have "disappeared" at about the same time. The commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of the 18th. A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise now that I had even met the woman who ordered the boy's execution.
Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cite Sportif where, in one of the underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her gratitude for an Israeli soldier--inside the Chatila camp, against all the evidence given by the Israelis--who prevented the murder of her daughters by the Phalange.
Long after the war, the ruins of the Cite Sportif were torn down and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie beneath its foundations--and its frightful implications--might give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment
More than 100,000 Iraqis in jail
Posted on 2007-09-16
More than 100,000 Iraqis in jail
By Nidhal Laithi
Azzaman, September 13, 2007
With the advent of the holy month of Ramadan, many hoped U.S. and Iraqi authorities would settle the issue of tens of thousand of Iraqi prisoners.
U.S. troops hold 23,600 Iraqis almost all of them without trial. The U.S. has promised to release 50 of them every day throughout Ramadan.
But the U.S. is not the only authority with the right to jail Iraqis. Iraqi armed forces and police can also imprison Iraqis without trail and informed sources say there are more than 82,000 Iraqis in government jails.
Prisoners have become one of the thorniest issues blocking the path to reconciliation with government opponents, particularly the Sunnis demanding the immediate release of all those who have not been convicted of a crime.
But neither the U.S. nor the government is willing to heed the Sunni demand.
The government has only agreed to release 200 on the occasion of the holy month and the U.S. has accepted to free about 1,500.
Most of these prisoners are snatched from their families or haphazardly arrested during military campaigns or on checkpoints.
But Maliki has ordered the immediate release of morel than 300 Iranians jailed in Iraq. The sources said the freeing of the Iranians was in response to a pledge Maliki had made to a visiting Iranian official.
Iraqi Kurds have their own jails too where opponents, particularly from the cities bordering their enclave are held.
But the sources said the Kurdish authorities have freed several thousand prisoners, belonging to the northern city of Mosul and its outlying districts.
Mosul is not part of the Kurdish enclave but their militias operate in the city and towns and villages nearby.
The Justice Ministry is increasing the pressure on the Iraqi government, U.S. troops and Kurdish authorities to let a high judicial commission examine the files of all prisoners.
The ministry would like the commission to have the prerogative to set all the prisoners who have not been convicted free and expedite the trial of those accused of committing a crime.
Pigs of War
Posted on 2007-09-16
Pigs of War By Cindy Sheehan
09/12/07" --"ICH" --- - Pigs of War come in both political colors of red and blue. We are all unfortunately very familiar with the red pigs. The pigs of war who manipulated, cherry-picked, stove-piped and manufactured intelligence to suggest to the world that Saddam had mushroom cloud producing WMD and something to do with the tragic events of 9-11 that occurred six years ago now. Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and The Camp Casey Peace Institute. |
Lebanon and the Planned US Airbase at Kleiaat
Posted on 2007-09-16
Lebanon and the Planned US Airbase at Kleiaat
Dr. Franklin Lamb
Global Research
09/12/2007
As residents of Bibnin Akkar, less than two miles from the site of the proposed US base and the Lebanese daily newspaper Aldiyar speculate, construction of a US airbase on the grounds of the largely abandoned airbase at Klieaat in northern Lebanon may begin late this year. To make the project more palpable, it is being promoted as a 'US/NATO' base that will serve as the headquarters of a NATO rapid deployment force, helicopter squadrons, and Special Forces units.
The base will provide training for the Lebanese army and security forces fighting Salafi, Islamist fundamentalists and other needs.
The Pentagon and NATO HQ in Belgium have given the project which, will sit along the Lebanese-Syrian border, using this vast area "as a base for fast intervention troops", a name. It is to be called The Lebanese Army and Security training centre".
Kleiaat, a nearly now abandoned small airport, was used by Middle East Airlines for a period for commuter flights between Beirut and Tripoli. Residents of the area report than during the Civil War (1975-1990) a commuter Helicopter service was also operated due to road closures.
The proposed base was measured by this observer to be roughly two and one-half miles down the beach from Nahr al-Bared Palestinian Camp. Both share pristine Mediterranean beachfront. Kleiaat is an expanse of gently undulating sandy dunes covered with long prairie grass and brush.
Despite opposition from Lebanon's anemic environmental movement, that argues that the pristine area should be left to its many varieties of birds and wildlife, the local community is watching closely.
Not much activity is going on as of May 29, 2007. About 20 Quonset huts, some recently driven stakes, no evidence of heavy equipment or building material. The three man army outpost fellows appeared bored and did not even ask for ID as I toured the whole area on the back of a fine new BMW 2200cc motorcycle courtesy of one of the local militia sniper guys who until two days ago was firing into Nahr al-Bared until the Lebanese army stopped him after the PLO leadership complained.
Lebanese entrepreneurs at Bibnin Akkar, a Sunni community loyal to the Hariri's, and who will be the chief financial winners from the project, see opportunities with thousands of new construction and related jobs coming. One kind fellow who hooked me up last night to intermittent internet via a jerry rigged dial up arrangement on one of his shop's two computers envisages running a fine new internet café with at least 50 wireless computers. Hotels, restaurants and businesses of various sorts are planning expansions to meet the demand of the expected workforce.
Who will not benefit from the building boom will be the 40,000+ Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared which is literally next door to the anticipated project These refugees, who were driven from their homes a in Palestine in 1948 and 1967, from Telezatter by the Phalanges in 1975, and others who came as a result of Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, and 2006, will gain no work from Kleiaat. The reason is that the 70 top trades and professions in Lebanon are denied to the Palestinians under Lebanese law.
Even if the 20,000 Palestinians displaced by the current conflict with Fatah al-Islam are allowed to return, which I expect will be the case, and even if Palestinian fears that the Camps will be demolished are unrealized, as I believe, they will remain destitute, according to UNWRA who considers 10,000 of them 'special hardship cases".
As reported by the NATO headquarters in Brussels, as well as by residents in Bibnin Akkar on May 28, 2007, an American-German-Turkish military delegation toured and surveyed Akkar region. US Embassy 'staff' have reportedly visited Kleiaat airport earlier this year to look over the site. David Welch also had a quick look at the site during his recent visit.
A Lebanese journalist who opposes the base commented on May 28, 2007, "The Bush administration has been warning Lebanon about the presence of Al Qaeda teams in northern Lebanon. And the base is needed to deal with this threat. Low and behold, a new "terrorist group" called Fatah al-Islam appears near Kleiaat at al-Bared camp".
The Pentagon argues that the military base will contribute to the development and the economic recovery in the region, advising the Lebanese government to focus on the financial aspect and positive reflection on the population (95% Sunni) of the region.
Contenders for the billion dollar project, according to the Pentagon procurement office could be Bechtel and Halliburton and other Contractors currently doing projects in Iraq.
Former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri saw potential for the Kleiaat airport as well. Hariri, which the green grocer who sells fruits and vegetables to the Lebanese army patrolling the Tripoli-Syria four lane road in front of Nahr al-Bared, commented, " Rafik Hariri, may he rest in peace, loved Lebanon. But he never saw a piece of real estate he didn't want to develop!" Hariri envisaged a billion dollar Free Commercial Zone and a port, despite Syrian opposition, and had investors lined up before he was murdered. Damascus was opposed to the Hariri dream because the new Port and Free Zone would drain the revenues from the nearby Syrian Port at Lathikiya.
According to Washington observers watching developments, the base has been pushed by elements in the office of the US Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the urging of Israeli operative Elliot Abrams. AIPAC can be expected to do the necessary work in Congress and with House Foreign Affairs, Appropriations, Intelligence, and Armed Service committees hermetically sealed by stalwarts of the Israel Lobby, it can be expected that it will be added as a rider to an unsuspecting House bill coming along.
"We need to get this base built as quickly as possible as a forward thrust point against Al Qaeda and other (read Hezbollah) terrorists", according to AIPAC staffer Rachael Cohen. Asked if Israel will offer training and advisors to the Lebanese army, Ms. Cohen replied, "we will see what we will see, Lebanon, smezzanon its not about them, its about stopping the terrorists stupid!"
"The question for Lebanon is whether the Lebanese people will allow the base to be built. Few in North Lebanon doubt that Israel will have access to the base " according to Oathman Bader, a community leader who lives in Bahr al-Bared but has fled to Badawi.
Franklin Lamb's just released book, The Price We Pay: A Quarter Century of Israel's Use of American Weapons in Lebanon is available at Amazon.com.uk