Monthly Archives: May 2010

Israel’s red line: real democracy

Jonathan Cook writes:

The recent arrest of two respected public figures from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority in night-time raids on their homes by the Shin Bet secret police – brought to light this week when a gag order was partially lifted – has sent shock waves through the community.

The arrests are not the first of their kind. The Shin Bet has been hounding and imprisoning politicians and intellectuals from the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, since the birth of the Jewish state more than six decades ago. Currently, two MPs from Arab political parties, as well as the leader of the popular Islamic Movement, are facing trials.

But the detention of Amir Makhoul and Omar Sayid is seen differently — as the gathering storm clouds in a political climate already fiercely hostile to its Palestinian citizens.

Mohammed Zeidan, the head of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, said: “We are used to our political leaders being persecuted but now the Shin Bet is turning its sights on the leaders of Palestinian civil society in Israel, and that’s a dangerous development.”

Mr Makhoul and Mr Sayid are not accused of the usual public order offenses, nor have they simply violated chauvinistic legislation that criminalizes Palestinian citizens’ visits to neighboring Arab states. Both are facing the much more serious charge of espionage, on behalf of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Mr Makhoul, who appears to be the chief object of the Shin Bet’s interest, is the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization coordinating the activities of Palestinian human rights groups in Israel. More specifically, he has become the leading voice inside Israel backing the growing international campaign for boycott, sanctions, and divestment against Israel.

On Wednesday, the courts approved an extension of Mr Makhoul’s remand. He was not allowed to be present and was denied the right to a lawyer until at least next Monday, 12 days since his arrest. He is reportedly being interrogated around the clock.

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The attacks on Goldstone

In Haaretz, Hagai El-Ad writes:

What will they come up with next? The campaign to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone, his fact-finding commission and the report that now bears his name seems to reach new heights every week. The latest installment in this high-drama farce has been the revelations about Goldstone’s record during apartheid-era South Africa, and the implication that his report can therefore be disregarded. The mind reels at the intensity of attempts by Israeli officials and others to do everything to dodge the real questions of accountability, policy and justice that have been lingering inconveniently since Operation Cast Lead. But inconvenient questions do tend to linger, and the attempts to deploy an ever-thicker smokescreen usually only draw more attention to what may be hidden behind it.

And yet, the recent attacks on Goldstone have been helpful in re-introducing into public discourse what is perhaps the most important question of all: moral responsibility. How must individuals behave when faced with injustice? What do we expect from our judges, public servants and elected officials? And what do we expect from ourselves? The focus on Goldstone’s past, far from enabling us to escape the lingering questions of Cast Lead – and other questions that must trouble anyone seeking justice – actually serves to throw them into sharp relief.

So here are some complementary questions about justice and those involved in its disservice. And mind you, these questions were not drawn from a far-away past, but from the here-and-now. It is the present that will determine our future – and to what extent justice will be a part of it.

Consider this: What is the reader’s moral judgment of a law that allows some people to reclaim past ownership rights but denies the same rights to others? This is the question today in Sheikh Jarrah.

How just do we deem the conduct of legal advisers who approve the evacuation of longtime indigenous residents from the center of a thriving city, enforcing almost complete separation between the hundreds who have moved in and the thousands who were displaced? This is the question today in Hebron.

What do we think of military commanders who collectively punish more than a million human beings, systematically answering their nutritional needs with provisions that keep them just above a state-secret “red line”? This is the question today in Gaza.

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Obama wants US taxpayers to pay for an Israeli defense ‘scam’

Israel’s newly developed “Iron Dome” missile defense shield will supposedly provide vital protection from rocket attacks from Gaza or Lebanon.

The system’s manufacturer, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, says:

The Iron dome is a cost effective system that can handle multiple threats simultaneously and efficiently [and] has been selected by the Israeli Defense Ministry as the best system offering the most comprehensive defense solution against a wide range of threats in a relatively short development cycle and at low cost.

Israel receives $3 billion annually in military aid from US taxpayers, so you’d imagine that the Israeli government would allocate some of that generous aid to pay for Iron Dome. No, instead President Obama just agreed that we should chip in an extra $205 million because Iron Dome “addresses an immediately existing threat to each Israeli citizen,” a senior administration official said.

But while Israel isn’t willing to cover the cost of deploying this system, it is already looking at opportunities to sell it to NATO.

As for the “low cost” the manufacturers tout, perhaps what they mean is that it will be a low cost for Israelis so long as its paid for by Americans. Whether the system would have any real value — that’s a completely different question.

Some of the harshest criticism of the system comes from inside Israel where Tel Aviv University professor and noted military analyst Reuven Pedatzur charged that despite the well-known ineffectiveness of Iron Dome and other missile defense systems, “for the aeronautics and defense industries, it’s a matter of money; and for politicians, supporting such projects allows them to tell the public that they’re doing something, they’re trying to find answers to the threats we face.”

“The Iron Dome is all a scam,” he said. “The flight-time of a Kassam rocket to Sderot is 14 seconds, while the time the Iron Dome needs to identify a target and fire is something like 15 seconds. This means it can’t defend against anything fired from fewer than five kilometers; but it probably couldn’t defend against anything fired from 15 km., either.”

Added Pedatzur: “Considering the fact that each Iron Dome missile costs about $100,000 and each Kassam $5, all the Palestinians would need to do is build and launch a ton of rockets and hit our pocketbook.

The David’s Sling is even worse, he said. “Each one of its missiles costs $1 million, and Hizbullah has well over 40,000 rockets. This issue has no logic to it whatsoever.”

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Obama’s torture loophole

What’s the difference between a US-military-run detention facility and an intelligence gathering facility? For one thing, Red Cross officials are being prevented from seeing how prisoners are treated when held at Bagram’s intelligence gathering facility. Is that so that they can be tortured in secret?

Two days after taking office, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning torture. The era of secret detention facilities and CIA-administered waterboarding were over. Or so we thought.

Earlier this week, the BBC reported:

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

“The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

“This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as “black jail”.

Prisoners say they have been kept in isolation in cold cells and subjected to sleep deprivation, but it turns out the CIA’s hands are clean — this time it’s the Defense Intelligence Agency at work. And as for the fact that the Red Cross has been barred from entering this facility, that’s because it isn’t being called a detention facility.

Marc Ambinder reports:

Defense officials said that the White House is kept appraised of the methods used by interrogators at the site. The reason why the Red Cross hasn’t been invited to tour it, officials said, was because the U.S. does not believe it to be a detention facility, classifying it instead as an intelligence gathering facility.

A Defense official said that the agency’s inspector general had launched an internal investigation into reports in the Washington Post that several teenagers were beaten by the interrogators, but [Pentagon spokesman, Bryan] Whitman disputes this.

When the Obama Administration took over, it forbade the DIA from keeping prisoners in the facility longer than 30 days, although it is not clear how that dictum is enforced. It is also not clear how much Congress knows about the DIA’s interrogation procedures, which have largely escaped public scrutiny.

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Israel’s unlawful destruction of property during Operation Cast Lead

In a press release, Human Rights Watch said today:

Israel should investigate the unlawful destruction of civilian property during the 2009 Gaza hostilities and lift the blockade that hinders residents from rebuilding their homes, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 116-page report, “‘I Lost Everything’: Israel’s Unlawful Destruction of Property in the Gaza Conflict” documents 12 separate cases during Operation Cast Lead in which Israeli forces extensively destroyed civilian property, including homes, factories, farms, and greenhouses, in areas under their control, without any lawful military purpose. Human Rights Watch’s investigations, which relied upon physical evidence, satellite imagery, and multiple witness accounts at each site, found no indication of nearby fighting when the destruction occurred.

Israel has claimed that its forces destroyed civilian property only when Palestinian armed groups were fighting from it, or were using it to store weapons, hide tunnels, or advance other military purposes. Israel also claims that many Gazan homes were destroyed by Hamas booby-traps. The evidence in the incidents that Human Rights Watch investigated does not support such claims.

“Almost 16 months after the war, Israel has not held accountable troops who unlawfully destroyed swaths of civilian property in areas under their control,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Israel’s blockade continues to keep Gazans from rebuilding their homes, meaning that Israel is still punishing Gaza’s civilians long after the fighting is over.”

Human Rights Watch found evidence in the 12 cases indicating that Israeli forces carried out the destruction for either punitive or other unlawful reasons, violating the prohibition under international humanitarian law – the laws of war – against deliberately destroying civilian property except when necessary for lawful military reasons. In seven of the cases, satellite imagery corroborated eyewitness accounts that Israeli forces destroyed many structures after establishing control over an area and shortly before Israel announced a ceasefire and withdrew its forces from Gaza on January 18, 2009.

Israel’s comprehensive blockade of the Gaza Strip, a form of collective punishment against civilians imposed in response to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in June 2007, has prevented significant reconstruction, including in areas where Human Rights Watch has documented destruction. Israel has allowed imports of cement for several repair projects, but United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in late March that these were “a drop in a bucket” compared to housing needs.

Israeli officials insist that the blockade – which had already degraded humanitarian conditions in Gaza before Operation Cast Lead – will remain in place until Hamas releases Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured in 2006, rejects violence, and fulfills other political conditions. Hamas’s prolonged incommunicado detention of Shalit violates the prohibition of cruel and inhuman treatment and may amount to torture.

Many goods are being smuggled into Gaza through tunnels beneath the southern border with Egypt, and many damaged buildings have been repaired at least partially with bricks made from smuggled cement and recycled concrete rubble. However, these improvised building materials are reportedly of poor quality and cannot be used for large reconstruction projects. In the areas of Gaza where Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces had destroyed homes in areas under their control, there has been virtually no reconstruction of destroyed buildings, indicating that the inadequate supply of reconstruction materials still leaves these materials prohibitively expensive for most of Gaza’s residents, more than three-quarters of whom are impoverished.

Egypt shares responsibility for the collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population due to its own closure of Gaza’s southern border. Except in limited circumstances, Egypt refuses to allow the passage of goods or people through the border crossing it controls at Rafah.

The laws of war prohibit attacks on civilian objects, including residential homes and civilian factories, unless they become a legitimate military objective, meaning that they are providing enemy forces a definite military advantage in the circumstances prevailing at the time. The report examines incidents of destruction that suggest violation of the laws-of-war prohibition of wanton destruction – the term used to describe extensive destruction of civilian property not lawfully justified by military necessity. Such destruction would be a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949, which is applicable in Gaza. Individuals responsible for committing or ordering such destruction should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Human Rights Watch did not include in its report cases in which the destruction was not extensive, or the evidence suggested any possibility that Israel’s destruction of the property in question could have been militarily justified or based on mistaken information.

Human Rights Watch documented the complete destruction of 189 buildings, including 11 factories, 8 warehouses and 170 residential buildings – roughly 5 percent of the total property destroyed in Gaza – leaving at least 971 people homeless. In the cases investigated in the neighborhoods of Izbt Abd Rabbo, Zeitoun, and Khoza’a, Israeli forces had destroyed virtually every home, factory, and orchard within certain areas, indicating an apparent plan of systematic destruction in these locations. The destroyed industrial establishments include juice and biscuit plants, a flour mill, and seven concrete factories. Human Rights Watch did not determine whether these incidents represent a broader pattern, but Israel should thoroughly investigate these cases – including the lawfulness of any relevant policy decisions – and appropriately punish persons found to have acted unlawfully.

“The evidence shows that, in these cases, Israeli forces gratuitously destroyed people’s homes and livelihoods,” said Whitson. “If the Israeli government doesn’t investigate and punish those responsible, it would be effectively endorsing the suffering that these civilians have endured.”

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) lawyers told Human Rights Watch that the IDF is probing many of the cases of property destruction documented in this report. However, these are not criminal investigations by military police, but so-called operational debriefings that do not involve contacting Palestinian witnesses. Of the 150 investigations opened to date into Operation Cast Lead, 36 are criminal investigations and the rest are operational debriefings. Two of these criminal cases include allegations of damage to individual buildings.

The only reported penalty imposed for unlawful property destruction during Operation Cast Lead was an unspecified disciplinary measure taken immediately by the commander in the field against one soldier for an incident involving “uprooting vegetation” in Gaza. The IDF has provided no further details regarding the incident or the disciplinary measure. Overall, to date Israel has criminally sentenced only one soldier and has disciplined four other soldiers and commanders for violations during the Gaza operation.

Notably, Israel has not conducted thorough and impartial investigations into whether policy decisions taken by senior political and military decision-makers, including pre-operation decisions, led to violations of the laws of war, such as the unlawful destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Israel has published the results of a military probe into one case documented in this report, which found an attack on a flour mill to be lawful. The probe’s conclusions, however, are contradicted by available video and other evidence. (In late March 2010, Israel announced that it had approved cement imports to repair the flour mill.) The IDF has not provided explanations for the other 11 incidents that Human Rights Watch documented and previously raised with the IDF.

Hamas authorities are not known to have taken any meaningful steps to investigate or hold accountable members of Hamas or other Palestinian armed groups responsible for serious laws-of-war violations either before, during, or since Operation Case Lead, primarily rocket attacks at populated areas in Israel. However, under the laws of war, unlawfulness by one party to a conflict does not justify unlawful acts by another.

Under the laws of war, not all destruction of civilian property is unlawful. At times, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups used civilian structures to engage Israeli forces and to store arms; they also booby-trapped civilian structures and dug tunnels underneath them.

In addition, Human Rights Watch criticized Hamas and other Palestinian groups for firing rockets from populated areas. In such cases, property damage caused by Israeli counter-strikes against armed groups may have been lawful “collateral damage.” Palestinian armed groups also may have been responsible for damage to civilian property in cases in which IDF attacks triggered secondary explosions of weapons or explosives stored by armed groups, which damaged nearby structures. The destruction of civilian property during immediate fighting or in order to permit the movement of Israeli forces because adjoining roads were mined and impassable may be lawful as well, depending on the circumstances.

Human Rights Watch’s investigations considered these possibilities and focused on 12 cases where the evidence indicates that there was no lawful justification for the destruction of civilian property. In these incidents, the IDF was not engaging Palestinian forces at the time they destroyed the property – in all cases fighting in the area had stopped – and in most cases the property destruction occurred after Israeli forces had eliminated or dispersed Palestinian fighters in the area and consolidated their control, such as by occupying houses, stationing tanks in streets or on nearby hills, and undertaking continuous surveillance from manned and unmanned aircraft.

The mere possibility of future military use by armed groups of some civilian structures in these areas – such as to set booby-traps, store weapons, or build tunnels – cannot under the laws of war justify the wide-scale and at times systematic destruction of whole neighborhoods, as well as of factories and greenhouses that provided food and other items intended for the civilian population.

Public statements by some Israeli political leaders suggest a willingness to destroy civilian infrastructure in Gaza to deter rocket attacks by armed groups against Israel. Human Rights Watch documented numerous cases in which Palestinian armed groups in Gaza launched rocket attacks against Israeli population centers during and before Operation Cast Lead in violation of the laws of war. During the fighting, approximately 800,000 Israelis were within range of hundreds of rocket attacks, which killed three Israeli civilians and seriously injured several dozen others. Individuals who willfully conducted or ordered deliberate or indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians are responsible for war crimes. However, as noted, laws of war violations by one party to a conflict do not justify violations by another party.

Israel controls the Gaza Strip’s land, air, and sea access with the exception of a 15-kilometer border with Egypt. Since the end of the conflict, Israel has approved limited shipments of food, fuel, and material into Gaza, but these fall far short of the humanitarian needs of the population. It has allowed construction materials designated for specific projects, but continues to deny entry to cement, iron bars, and other basic construction materials. While there are valid Israeli security concerns that Hamas could use cement to build or strengthen military bunkers and tunnels, humanitarian aid organizations report that Israel has refused to consider a mechanism to ensure the independent monitoring of the end-use of construction materials. Israel should urgently seek to create such a mechanism.

“The United States, the European Union, and other states should urgently call upon Israel and Egypt to open Gaza’s borders to reconstruction materials and other supplies essential for the civilian population,” Whitson said.

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Russia’s Middle East moves

While Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan are like lead weights that limit the flexibility of the United States in the Middle East, other powers are now taking advantage of Washington’s inability to function as an agent of change.

After Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Turkey this week, commentator Semih Idiz wrote:

[I]f U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey was the highlight of 2009, Medvedev’s visit to Turkey is the highlight of 2010. In fact, one can even go further and suggest that the latter visit has produced much more in terms of concrete results than the former.

There is no doubt, for example, that Washington is looking on with a certain chagrin as Turkey awards a $20 billion nuclear power plant contract to Russia and signs documents that propose a $100 billion volume of trade as well as billions of dollars worth of investments, all suggesting a rapidly growing strategic partnership.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Russia has rejected criticism from Israel after Medvedev met the leader of Hamas in Damascus.

Israel’s foreign ministry said it was “deeply disappointed” that Medvedev had met Khaled Meshaal, the group’s exiled leader, during a visit to Syria this week.

“Hamas is not an artificial structure,” Andrei Nesterenko, the Russian foreign ministry spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday.

“It is a movement that draws on the trust and sympathy of a large number of Palestinians. We have regular contacts with this movement.

“It is known that all other participants of the Middle East quartet are also in some sort of contact with Hamas leadership, although for some unknown reason they are shy to publicly admit it,” Nesterenko said.

Joshua Landis says:

Russia will fish in the troubled waters of the Middle East. American isolation can only redound to its advantage. The Arabs and Iran will look to Russia for arms. Russia can also be gratified by the deterioration of Turkey’s relations with both Israel and the United Stats. It will continue to look for ways to frustrate U.S. efforts to add teeth to its sanctions regime against Iran.

So long as America’s No. 1 foreign-policy goal in the region is to hurt Iran and help Israel, Russia will be drawn back into the region and a new Cold War will take shape. Washington’s failure to realign relations with Iran and Syria dooms it to repeat its past. But this time Israel will be more of a millstone around its neck as it thumbs it’s nose at international law and human rights.

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The end of an era?

A few hours before Gordon Brown resigned as Britain’s prime minister, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications director said: “I think the reason why I’ve got involved in the election campaign is because I really think it would be terrible for Britain if David Cameron was prime minister and there was a Tory government, but if that is what happens we’ll just have to accept that. I hope that can be prevented.”

Anyone who lived in Britain through the Thatcher era has good reason to view the return of a Tory government as potentially terrible, but there is one prospect that would be even worse: the continued influence of people like Alastair Campbell.

The final effort of the master of spin to thwart the return to power of the Conservatives was to conjure the prospect of a “progressive alliance” — even when the numbers didn’t quite add up — but as soon as it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, Campbell rushed to announce the imminent publication of his tell-all diaries. His loss of political influence does no doubt open up fertile new commercial opportunities.

But as for the arrival of a much-dreaded Tory government, the fact that it will instead be a “Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition” — it was the new Conservative prime minister David Cameron who put his partners first — should not, as Jonathan Freedland points out, be seen as a construction of mere political expedience.

Since taking over in 2005, the Tory leader has tried to recast his party as one with which liberal Britons could feel comfortable – modern, tolerant, environmentally aware. That has been an uphill struggle, as the failure to “seal the deal” in last week’s election confirms. Yet at a stroke, Cameron has rammed his point home. How, runs the logic, could anyone dispute the liberal credentials of the new prime minister now? His government is packed full of Liberals. Cameron had always tried to rebrand himself as a liberal Conservative. Today he could speak of his “liberal Conservative government” – and the phrase was no longer empty.

Indeed, Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War opens up a possibility that should be watched with keen attention by observers who might otherwise have no particular interest in British politics. The era where image-makers such as Campbell turned policymaking into an utterly unprincipled message-shaping process, may finally be drawing to a close as the communications apparatus of a single party will no longer hold sway. David Cameron will not have the luxury of merely needing to sell his message to a friendly media but will have to persuade Liberal-Democrat partners much less willing to swallow the Conservative spin.

The political mechanics of consensus and compromise will be hard enough to manage without the additional strain of attempting to balance the competing demands of two communications teams. For that reason, there is a chance that the spin doctors will be sidelined or their influence at least diminished if they further complicate an already complex process.

Beyond Britain’s slavish allegiance to Washington during the Blair years, nothing represented the Labour government’s abandonment of principle more clearly over the last decade than the relentless erosion of civil liberties in the name of security. There is now the prospect that this trend will be reversed.

Yesterday, Andy Worthington wrote:

Those of us who are concerned about the erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government, and the assault on human rights as part of the “War on Terror,” will be watching the government closely. On ID cards, both parties pledged to scrap Labour’s much-criticized scheme, and wasted no time in announcing today that the scheme would indeed be scrapped. To follow, apparently, are plans to scrap the next generation of biometric passports, to review the libel laws in England and Wales “to protect freedom of speech,” and to regulate the use of CCTV cameras, in particular as used by local authorities. As Channel 4 News’ Home correspondent Andy Davies explained today, “There will almost certainly be a reduction in the capacity for the DNA database to store samples taken from people arrested but not convicted. The national child database in England (‘Contactpoint’) is likely to be abandoned.”

As Andy Davies also explained, civil liberties is “one area where the coalition parties have a struck a similar tone in recent years … In their manifestos, the Lib Dems complain[ed] that the UK has become a ‘surveillance state,’ the Tories bemoan[ed] a ‘database state.’ Both have made significant pledges to roll back what they describe as intrusive, authoritarian executive powers introduced under Labour.”

How this seemingly happy cooperation will translate to questions of terrorism and human rights remains to be seen. Andy Davies noted that “the controversial control order regime could be one of the first Labour counter-terror initiatives to disappear under the new National Security Council.” He added that “the Tories call the orders ‘inherently objectionable’ and want a review” and “the Lib Dems have said they’ll cancel the whole project.”

And if anyone is in any doubt about just how badly eroded civil liberties in Britain have become, watch David Hoffman, a photojournalist who lives in east London, describe how he got handcuffed by police officers who forced their way into his own home on election day after he displayed a mildly offensive political poster in his living room window.

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Is Obama moving to escalate the war in Pakistan?

The United States is at war in Pakistan. It will be up to historians to decide when this war began.

“Drone Strikes Pound West Pakistan” says the headline above a brief report in the New York Times. After the CIA fired 18 missiles resulting in at least 14 deaths on Tuesday, the operation was described merely as “a continuation of the air campaign to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban fighters now working together in North Waziristan” (my emphasis).

“Continuation” is another name for escalation when developments that should prompt alarm have already been inoculated with the name “necessity.”

A course of action that if it initiated by George Bush might have been seen as an expression of his intemperate nature, when pursued by no-drama Obama is instead billed as a judicious expansion in the use of force.

But the danger of escalation — now as always — is that the seemingly carefully calibrated expansion of a war has unintended and far-reaching consequences. Only after it’s too late do we learn that the calibration rested on nothing more than wishful thinking.

The logic behind the apparent necessity of expanding the war into Pakistan has been evident ever since the war in Afghanistan began. For Bush, the dangers implicit in crossing the Durand Line seemed to provoke fear, but his successor seems intent on showing he lacks such trepidation. North Waziristan is where Obama gets to prove that he has the steel that Bush lacked — or so the script says.

In this context the Times Square attempted bombing has acquired particular significance. If the lack of a credible endgame in Afghanistan would make it even more difficult to justify expanding the war, then a scare in New York could be useful in prompting a renewed sense of urgency.

In Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper today, Rafia Zakaria writes:

Security experts in Washington have since begun to call Shahzad’s bombing attempt a “game changer” in the war against terror and have been signalling the possibility of an incursion of US forces into Pakistani territory. Several factors point to the fact that such an option is indeed being considered by the Obama administration and Pentagon officials. First, conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill have long been sounding alarm bells asking for a wider presence in Pakistan to accomplish the goals of the war on terror. Recent hearings held on Capitol Hill have focused on groups such as Jaish-i-Muhammad and Lashkar-i-Taiba that do not operate in the areas currently being targeted by aerial drone attacks.

In a hearing held in March, several US congressmen noted that the Lashkar “had put the world on notice that they intend to escalate the carnage and take it worldwide”. Other analysts have repeatedly pointed to the necessity of expanding drone strikes into Quetta to target the Quetta shura which supposedly runs the Taliban operations. While Shahzad’s connections are not currently traced to groups other than the Taliban, the fact that he spent time in Pakistan bolsters the position of those who insist that a wider military presence in Pakistan is crucial to eliminating the threat to the American homeland.

Second, the problems faced by the highly publicised US/Nato initiatives in Marja and Kandahar in Afghanistan have created a political demand for a more decisive endgame in the region. In the footsteps of the Marja offensive in early April, The New York Times reported that many of the gains made in the area by the US Marines’ costly offensive had largely been reversed and many Taliban had moved back into the area. The Kandahar offensive due to start soon has also been the subject of lowered expectations, with experts saying that the easy absorption of Taliban fighters into the local population and the lack of visible centres of Taliban control make it difficult to win a decisive victory in the area.

The reason why the failure of both offensives — one yet to begin — is relevant to the Pakistan equation is simple: with the beginning of a US withdrawal already announced for 2011, there is immense political pressure on the Obama administration to produce some semblance of victory. The expansion of the Afghanistan war into Pakistani territory would not only be a culmination of the Obama campaign’s slogans of Pakistan being the real problem, it would also provide a visible endgame to the vexing and increasingly intractable issue of whether the war in Afghanistan has really eliminated global terrorism.

If Obama is now a victim of his own campaign logic — the repetition of half-baked slogans must surely be as harmful to those who utter them as it is to those who hear them — this logic is nevertheless looking less persuasive outside the administration.

Noah Shachtman notes that the skepticism once only voiced by counter-insurgency wonks like David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum has now percolated right into the mainstream media.

“If you go into Pakistan and talk to college kids, which is what we did, these drone attacks are feeding this narrative: this is what we [Americans] are aiming to do. We’re aiming to kill Muslims,” Leslie Stahl said today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“Let’s say China was launching drone attacks on Idaho, we would be pretty angry too. We are launching attacking against a people were not at war with, officially,” Joe Scarborough responded. “I would rather us go after the terrorists — individual terrorists — drag ‘em out, interrogate ‘em, get information — instead of dropping bombs that kill four year-old little girls. That dismember grandmoms that happen to be in the family compound. That seems immoral.”

The decision to dramatically escalate the drone war was done behind closed doors, with no public debate about whether the strikes were the best way to smash the jihadist networks based in Pakistan’s tribal wildlands. Perhaps now, we’ll have that discussion.

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Israel’s dark past arming apartheid South Africa

A new attack on Judge Richard Goldstone is the latest effort in a campaign to direct attention away from his allegations that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. In this instance though, questions about Goldstone’s record as a judge in apartheid South Africa are overshadowed by the Jewish state’s own role in helping support the racist policies of one of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century.

Israel’s dark past as a secret ally of the cruel apartheid regime in South Africa is revealed in an article by Sasha Polakow-Suransky (the author of a new book on the same subject).

The Israel-South Africa alliance began in earnest in April 1975 when then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres signed a secret security pact with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha. Within months, the two countries were doing a brisk trade, closing arms deals totaling almost $200 million; Peres even offered to sell Pretoria nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. By 1979, South Africa had become the Israeli defense industry’s single largest customer, accounting for 35 percent of military exports and dwarfing other clients such as Argentina, Chile, Singapore, and Zaire.

High-level exchanges of military personnel soon followed. South Africans joined the Israeli chief of staff in March 1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces.

There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoria’s nuclear missile program at South Africa’s secret Overberg testing range. By this time, South Africa’s alternative sources for arms had largely dried up because the United States and European countries had begun abiding by the U.N. arms embargo; Israel unapologetically continued to violate it.

As for Goldstone’s record as “a hanging judge”, this is what he told the Jewish Chronicle:

“During the nine years I was a trial judge from 1980 to 1989, I sentenced two people to death for murder without extenuating circumstances.

“They were murders committed gratuitously during armed robberies. In the absence of extenuating circumstances the imposition of the death sentence was mandatory. My two assessors and I could find no extenuating circumstances in those two cases.

“While I was a judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal from 1990 to 1994, all executions were put on hold. However, automatic appeals still continued to come before the Supreme Court of appeal. We sat in panels of three and again, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, some of those appeals failed.”

He added: “It was a difficult moral decision taking an appointment during the Apartheid era. With regard to my role in those years I would refer you to the joint public statement issues in January by former Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson, the first Chief Justice appointed by President Mandela, and George Bizos, Nelson Mandela’s lawyer and close friend for over 50 years.

In their statement, Chaskalson and Bizos wrote:

Not every judge appointed during the apartheid era was a supporter of apartheid. There were a number among them, including Goldstone, who accepted appointment to the Bench in the 1970s and 1980s in the belief that they could keep principles of the law alive. They included Michael Corbett, Simon Kuper, Gerald Friedman, HC Nicholas, George Colman, Solly Miller, John Milne, Andrew Wilson, John Didcott, Laurie Ackermann, Johann Kriegler and others.

There is a considerable body of evidence that they discharged their functions with courage and integrity. This is recognised in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which observed that “there were always a few lawyers (including judges, teachers and students) who were prepared to break with the norm”. Commenting on such judges, it says “they exercised their discretion in favour of justice and liberty wherever proper and possible . . . and [the judges, lawyers, teachers and students referred to] were influential enough to be part of the reason why the ideal of a constitutional democracy as the favoured form of government for a future South Africa continued to burn brightly throughout the darkness of the apartheid era”.

Goldstone was one of those judges. For instance, his decision in the case of S v Govender in 1986 that no ejectment order should be made against persons disqualified by the Group Areas Act from occupying premises reserved for the white group, without enquiring into whether alternative accommodation for such persons was available, was a blow to the apartheid regime and contributed substantially to that legislation becoming unenforceable in parts of the country.

As a judge of the Constitutional Court he concurred in the finding that the first draft of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa passed by the newly elected Constituent Assembly did not comply in certain respects with the 34 constitutional principles agreed to by the negotiating parties at Codesa.

He was the founding chairperson of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro), which looks after prisoners who have been released; he exercised his power as a judge (not often used by other judges) to visit prisoners in jail; he insisted on seeing political prisoners indefinitely detained to hear their complaints; and he intervened so as to allow doctors to see them and where possible to make representations that their release be considered.

After the release of Nelson Mandela he played an important role in persuading his colleagues on the Bench to accept the inevitable changes that were likely to take place in the political and judicial structures.

Former president FW de Klerk, with the concurrence of the then-president of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, appointed Goldstone as the chairperson of the commission to investigate what became known as hit-squads or third-force organisations within the army and the police.

His reports exposed high-ranking officers, who were obliged by De Klerk to resign, and other ­members of the security forces, and he made findings that police had unlawfully shot at unarmed protesters and recommended that they be charged with murder.

Threats to his life were made, and his name was on the hit list produced in court as part of the state case against the killers of Chris Hani in 1993.

Meanwhile, yesterday was a good day for Israel as it was invited to join the mostly white, Eurocentric, rich nations’ club, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Nothing better expresses the apartheid mentality at the heart of Zionism than Israel’s preference to belong to international organizations that are defined by exclusion rather than inclusion.

As Aluf Benn writes today in Haaretz:

Israel has always sought to become a member of international organizations where the Western bloc of nations enjoys a clear advantage. In the vast majority of UN institutions, for example, Israel is isolated and does not belong to any geographic group. So it can’t elect or be elected. But there are no Arab countries in the OECD and the only Muslim member is Turkey, which yesterday voted in support of the unanimous acceptance of Israel into the group.

Joining the OECD bolsters the approach of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who consider Israel “a villa in the jungle” – a small island of Western values and development in an Arab and Muslim sea. Now we’re in the club and the Palestinians, Egyptians and even the Saudis aren’t. They’re not even on the waiting list. In the OECD they can’t bother Israel with decisions condemning the occupation.

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America’s latest nemesis

Among the many problems the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration, none may be more troublesome than the fact that the man once granted the status most dangerous man in the world still remains the most elusive man in the world.

But if Osama bin Laden can’t be tracked down, maybe the alternative is to elevate an easier target to the same status in the hope of being able to claim an equal victory. It appears that the American-born and now fugitive imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, is being groomed for such a role.

This is how the New York Times is feeding the narrative:

One day in August 2001, Mr. Awlaki knocked at the door of Mr. Higgie, his neighbor [in San Diego], to say goodbye. He had moved the previous year to Virginia, becoming imam at the far bigger Dar al-Hijrah mosque, and he had returned to pick up a few things he had left behind.

As Mr. Higgie tells it, he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area — and got a strange response. “He said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why,’” Mr. Higgie said.

The next month, when Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, Mr. Higgie remembered the exchange and was shaken, convinced that his friendly neighbor had some advance warning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In fact, the F.B.I. had first taken an interest in Mr. Awlaki in 1999, concerned about brushes with militants that to this day remain difficult to interpret. In 1998 and 1999, he was a vice president of a small Islamic charity that an F.B.I. agent later testified was “a front organization to funnel money to terrorists.” He had been visited by Ziyad Khaleel, a Qaeda operative who purchased a battery for Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone, as well as by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, who was serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up New York landmarks.

Still more disturbing was Mr. Awlaki’s links to two future Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. They prayed at his San Diego mosque and were seen in long conferences with the cleric. Mr. Alhazmi would follow the imam to his new mosque in Virginia, and 9/11 investigators would call Mr. Awlaki Mr. Alhazmi’s “spiritual adviser.”

The F.B.I., whose agents interviewed Mr. Awlaki four times in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, concluded that his contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random, the inevitable consequence of living in the small world of Islam in America. But records of the 9/11 commission at the National Archives make clear that not all investigators agreed.

One detective, whose name has been redacted, told the commission he believed Mr. Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” An F.B.I. agent, also unidentified, said that “if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been” the cleric, since “someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused.”

The 9/11 commission staff members themselves had sharp arguments about him. “Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something?” said one staff member, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. “Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it.”

Let’s assume that the suspicions about Awlaki are well-founded. And let’s set aside questions about the legality or morality of Obama’s policy of targeted killing. The question this administration should soberly consider, now that Awlaki has been designated a target for assassination, is whether this influential imam poses a greater threat dead or alive?

Are we really to believe that while Awlaki remains a fugitive in Yemen and is dodging drone attacks, he is also handling an operational role in planning new attacks on the US? After all, one of George Bush’s favorite expressions, “on the run,” did actually have some practical and realistic implications.

And are we really to believe that once granted the status of martyr, Awlaki’s widely disseminated lectures and his iconic status would exert less and not more influence among those most likely to become radicalized in their hostility towards the United States?

In other words, right or wrong, is killing Anwar al-Awlaki really a smart idea?

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The terrorism recruiting myth

After almost a decade of a US-led global war on terrorism, America’s approach to the issue has barely advanced from being a deadly game of Whack-a-Mole.

On CBS, Scott Pelley asked Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton: “I wonder if there’s anything about U.S. foreign policy that needs to change in your estimation to put more pressure on these terrorist groups where they live, like in Pakistan?”

“Well, we are doing that. And we’re increasing it. We’re expecting more from it. This is a global threat. We have probably the best police work in the world. But we are also the biggest target. And therefore, we just have to be better than everybody else,” Clinton replied.

Earlier in the interview she said: “We’ve made it very clear [to the Pakistani government] that, if, heaven forbid, that an attack like this [in Times Square], if we can trace back to Pakistan, were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”

The US will start bombing Pakistan? Special Forces will start conducting operations in North Waziristan? Clinton would not specify what form these severe consequences might take.

In response to the Times Square incident, Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism coordinator for the Bush administration writes:

The reason such attacks are hard to stop is rooted in the identity of the attackers. They often seem to be successful or well-educated members of society, uninvolved in any form of radicalism. But then, the drip-drip of terrorist propaganda — either on the Internet or circulated through friends — has its effect. They quietly make contact with radical groups overseas, perhaps even traveling abroad for training and indoctrination. They throw away the life they have made in the West and agree to stage an attack. Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square terrorist, fits that profile, as have others in the United States and Europe.

For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities, these newly minted terrorists are the hardest to stop. They may not be part of any known cell; there is no reason for their phones or e-mail accounts to come under surveillance. When they buy rifles, handguns, tanks of propane gas or fertilizer, they are doing nothing out of the ordinary in American society.

If they succeed in inflicting harm on us with terrorist acts designed to rivet media and public attention, our political debate may once again be as wrongheaded as it will be predictable. Some elected officials will claim that their party would have done a much better job protecting the country. Critics of America’s Middle East policy — or our energy policy, or our foreign policy writ large — will also fault whatever administration is in power.

Likewise, in a 60 Minutes report that aired last night, the prism through which the issue is filtered is one in which individuals are turned into the tools of a deadly ideology. Vulnerable young men are in jeopardy of being recruited by merciless ideologues and terrorist planners.

But as Scott Atran points out, the idea that Shahzad and those like him have to be recruited, does not fit the evidence.

Shahzad was also apparently inspired by the online rhetoric of Anwar al-Awlaki, a former preacher at a Northern Virginia mosque who gained international notoriety for blessing the suicide mission of the failed Christmas airplane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallib, and for Facebook communications with Major Nadal Hasan, an American-born Muslim psychiatrist who killed thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009. Although many are ready to leap to the conclusion that Awlaki helped to “brainwash” and “indoctrinate” these jihadi wannabes, it is much more likely that they sought out the popular Internet preacher because they already self-radicalized to the point of wanting reassurance and further guidance. “The movement is from the bottom up,” notes forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, “just like you saw Major Hasan send twenty-one e-mails to al-Awlaki, who sends him back two, you have people seeking these guys and asking them for advice.”

The CBS report, stuck on the track that recruitment is a central issue, homes in on the role of the internet. The would-be terrorist is someone whose deadly intent is sure to be triggered by something he sees online.

Phillip Mudd, who until a few months ago was the senior intelligence advisor to the FBI and its director says:

They’re seeing images, for example, of children and women in places like Palestine and Iraq, they’re seeing sermons of people who explain in simple, compelling, and some cases magnetic terms why it’s important that they join the jihad. They’re seeing images, and messages that confirm a path that they’re already thinking of taking.

CBS helpfully provides such an image, but predictably neglects to add any commentary.

What are we seeing? An Israeli soldier terrorizing a Palestinian mother and her two girls.

And there we have it: exactly the kind of image the foments terrorism.

Viewed through the American counter-terrorism lens, the problem lies with the propagation of the image and the violent reaction such an image can provoke. Why? Because any serious consideration of the foreign policy issues that the image signals is still off-limits.

But here’s what everyone in the Middle East sees: An Israeli Jew brandishing an American-made weapon, serving America’s closest ally in the Middle East, is threatening a Muslim family. This is the narrative that no amount of spin or cleverly fought battles in a war of ideas, can undo.

Yet here is the foreign policy dilemma for Washington: How can the United States adopt a posture in the Middle East that acknowledges the role America has played in fueling terrorism, without appearing to capitulate to terrorist demands?

The answer is to trust in the universally recognized truth: actions speak louder than words.

What Obama does in Pakistan matters more than what he said in Cairo.

In April 2003, the Bush administration made a step in the right direction when it withdrew American troops from Saudi Arabia. The moved turned out to be of little consequence since it was triggered by utterly false expectations about the war in Iraq. Yet there was an implicit recognition: the presence of American soldiers in close proximity to Islam’s holiest sites sends an ugly message to the Muslim world.

Seven years later, as the Obama administration puts increased pressure on the Pakistani government to launch a major offensive in North Waziristan — an operation that would yet again result in the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians — and as the CIA continues to expand a drone war that has resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths, what kind of signal is this sending to those who might now contemplate following in the footsteps of Faisal Shahzad?

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To See If I Am Smiling

In the documentary, To See If I Am Smiling (released in 2007), six young Israeli women recount their experiences of military service in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The title comes from a story told by Meytal, a medic and medical officer. Having described how cleaning the corpses of Palestinians after they had been brutalized by Israeli soldiers had become a routine part of her job, she goes on to recount a particular moment that still haunts her: when she posed for a photograph next to a corpse.

I’m not sure when it was, but at some point I became very ashamed of that picture. And I didn’t tell anyone about it, that it existed. I forgot about it a little. But I would like to see it. To see if I look different. I want to see if I’m still smiling.

The photograph is not shown in the documentary, but in the mind’s eye of most Americans it probably evokes memories of Abu Ghraib.

Such images are iconic because they capture the moment in which a soldier discovers that he or she has become the very thing they fear. The dehumanized other is a vortex from which there is no escape.

If a nation can have such a thing as a soul, To See If I Am Smiling, reveals how profoundly Israel’s soul has been scarred by 43 years of occupation. A fully militarized society has shackled itself to a conviction — we have no choice — whereby each individual can then bury their own awareness of complicity and moral responsibility under a collective weight of irresistible necessity.

But even among Israelis who are comfortably indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, one has to wonder: how do they account for what they have done to their own sons and daughters?

As a nation struggles to avoid looking at itself, no wonder the fury and passion with which it attacks those who hold up a mirror.

Watch this 60-minute documentary.

Tamar Yarom, the film’s director, gave the following interview in 2008 at the ZagrebDox international documentary film festival:

(H/t to Marsha Cohen.)

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IAEA set to focus on Israel

The Associated Press reports:

Israel’s secretive nuclear activities may undergo unprecedented scrutiny next month, with a key meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency tentatively set to focus on the topic for the first time, according to documents shared Friday with The Associated Press.

A copy of the restricted provisional agenda of the IAEA’s June 7 board meeting lists “Israeli nuclear capabilities” as the eighth item — the first time that that the agency’s decision-making body is being asked to deal with the issue in its 52 years of existence.

The agenda can still undergo changes in the month before the start of the meeting and a senior diplomat from a board member nation said the item, included on Arab request, could be struck if the U.S. and other Israeli allies mount strong opposition. He asked for anonymity for discussing a confidential matter.

Even if dropped from the final agenda, however, its inclusion in the May 7 draft made available to The AP is significant, reflecting the success of Islamic nations in giving concerns about Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal increased prominence.

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Israel still might not dodge a human rights threat from Britain

“Sighs of relief will have been heard in Israel’s London embassy on Friday morning as it emerged that Britain’s Liberal Democrat party had failed to capitalize on a surge in pre-election opinion polls,” Haaretz reported.

Cleggmania might have proven to be short-lived — or at least not translated well in a parliamentary system that disregards the size of the vote. Still, I’d says those breaths released in relief should probably have been held in. An Israeli nightmare might still come to pass: Foreign Secretary Nick Clegg in a coalition government. As of Friday afternoon, that outcome is still in the cards.

But why should Israel be so afraid of Britain’s newest political star?

“Clegg is bad news for Israel,” one official here said. “His party is running on a human rights platform, and the atmosphere is hostile to Israel. We remind the Liberal Democrats of South Africa during apartheid. Even if Clegg decides not to take the foreign portfolio, the very fact that Liberal Democrats sit in the cabinet is likely to mean trouble for us.”

Israel’s Lieberman-run ministry of foreign affairs might make a mockery of diplomacy, but it should never be faulted for its bluntness: Good for human rights; bad for Israel. There’s a slogan to remember!

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Lieberman’s TEA party and dual loyalty

Joe Lieberman’s Terrorist Expatriation Act is designed to strip the constitutional rights from any American who is accused of supporting terrorism, but the political sentiment he’s tapping into is simply, America first. Does Lieberman have no concern about where this might go?

How about this New Yorker who Max Blumenthal interviewed recently? Presumably she’s an American citizen, but it sounds like she puts Israel first:

As for where Lieberman is finding support, it isn’t coming from the White House but other Democrats have spoken favorably:

Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take “a hard look” at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.

“United States citizenship is a privilege,” she said. “It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers — or in this case, foreign terrorists — are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she supported the “spirit” of the measure, although she urged caution and said that the details of the proposal, like what would trigger a loss of citizenship, still needed to be fleshed out.

Interesting comment from Clinton… Makes me wonder: how does she feel about Rahm Emanuel serving in the Israeli Defense Force? I know that doesn’t count as an infraction of the law because Israel is not a country hostile to the US, but there’s no avoiding the fact that serving in the Israeli military is serving a foreign power.

As for the “spirit” of the measure, I guess Pelosi will have to explain what she means, but Megan McArdle is not alone in finding this spirit hard to discern:

Can someone explain to me–hopefully using graphs, and small words–why Joe Lieberman is willing to share the precious blessing of American citizenship with Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway, and David Berkowitz, but wants citizenship stripped from a guy who strapped some firecrackers to a bag of non-explosive fertilizer?

Indeed. And if even Glenn Beck and Chuck Schumer both doubt the wisdom of Lieberman’s bill, that might be a hint that this truly is an act of idiocy.

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An arrest warrant needs a name on it; a death warrant needs none.

In the narrative that sketches the legality of the war on terrorism, the tribal nature of the “battlefield” is the pretext used to justify killing people instead of attempting to arrest them. Counterterrorism experts scoff at the notion that FBI agents (or Pakistani law enforcement officials for that matter) could possibly waltz into a village in South Waziristan and handcuff a Taliban or al Qaeda suspect. The logistics of such an operation would indeed be daunting.

But here’s the thing: The United States is now killing people when it doesn’t even have a legal basis for even initiating their capture.

In the US — and most other legal jurisdictions — an arrest warrant needs to show probable cause connecting a crime that has been committed to the person named on the warrant.

In Pakistan, the CIA can target someone for assassination without knowing their name, without witnessing them commit a crime — simply on the Orwellian pretext that their “pattern of life” can be deemed a threat to the United States.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.

The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as “pattern of life” analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.

The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known, the officials said. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list.

The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said.

At a time when Faisal Shahzad — a name that might not evoke much terror — is a name uppermost in many people’s minds, it’s worth remembering Mir Aimal Kasi.

In 1993 he too had conducted a pattern of life analysis, having noted the turn lane that directed traffic into the CIA’s Langley headquarters. In his targeted killing operation, he too had found the high-value targets of his choice — James Woollsey and Robert Gates — were too illusive and so he opted to shoot CIA employees whose names he didn’t know.

Soon before receiving a death sentence in 1998, Kasi told Salon:

“I am not against the USA or the American people. I am against the policies of the U.S. government toward Islamic countries or toward Muslims.”

“A lot of young people in Pakistan,” he said, “think mostly the same.”

Whoever follows in the footsteps of Faisal Shahzad may have less interest in constructing a Rube Goldberg type contraption than in causing mayhem the America way — as did Mir Aimal Kasi, John Allen Muhammad, and Nidal Malik Hasan.

“This is a blow back. This is a reaction. This is retaliation. And you could expect that,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Mahkdoom Qureshi told CBS News after the Times Square bombing attempt. “Let’s not be naive. They’re not going to sort of sit and welcome you eliminate them. They’re going to fight back.”

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The Israeli exception

At Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer draws attention to the contradiction between Israel’s behavior as a rogue state and the fact that it is about to be granted the privileged status of membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — unless, that is, a country such as Turkey steps up and exercises its right to cast a veto.

North Korea and Israel have a lot in common.

Neither is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and both employ their nuclear weapons in elaborate games of peek-a-boo with the international community. Israel and North Korea are equally paranoid about outsiders conspiring to destroy their states, and this paranoia isn’t without some justification. Partly as a result of these suspicions, both countries engage in reckless and destabilizing foreign policies. In recent years, Israel has launched preemptive strikes and invaded other countries, while North Korea has abducted foreign citizens and blown up South Korean targets (including, possibly, a South Korean ship in late March in the Yellow Sea).

And they’re both exceptions in their regions: Israel is a Jewish state in an Arab region; North Korea is an old-style feudal dictatorship in an Asian region marked by relative prosperity and political openness. But the two countries often behave as if they are exceptions to all other rules as well. For instance, they both share an antipathy toward human rights organizations that attempt to hold them to international standards. Witness the recent attacks by Israel (and its hard-right supporters) of Human Rights Watch because of reports critical of Israel’s human rights record. North Korea also routinely rejects human rights inquiries as a challenge to its sovereignty. (For a proposal on a better strategy to engage North Korea on human rights issues, check out my latest piece Starting Where North Korea Is.)

Despite these similarities, these two roguish powers haven’t had a great deal of interaction. Between 1992 and 1994, Israel secretly negotiated a billion dollar buy-out of North Korea’s missile export program to the Middle East, and the United States intervened to nix the deal (only to explore a similar option with North Korea at the end of the Clinton administration). In 2007, Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria that may or may not have been built with North Korean assistance. Otherwise, the two countries maintain their innocence and distance.

And yet one country is an official rogue and the other country only plays one on Arab TV. The difference in designation owes much to U.S. policy. One of the perks of world domination is the chance to make like Adam in Genesis and name all the animals. North Korea, according to Washington, is beyond the pale. Israel, however, is “one of us”: firmly ensconced in the Judeo-Christian tradition, accorded honorary European status, and even considered worthy of membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports:

Britain has refused to allow Israel’s Mossad secret service to send a representative back to the country’s London embassy following the row over the killing of a Hamas operative by agents using forged UK passports.

Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported yesterday that the Foreign Office is digging in its heels because Israel is refusing to commit itself not to misuse British passports in future clandestine operations.

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Afghanistan: is it time to talk to the Taliban?

In The Guardian, Jonathan Steele writes:

Eight years after they were overthrown by US air power, a drumbeat is starting to sound across Afghanistan in favour of talking to the Taliban, the country’s once-hated former rulers. An idea that used to seem absurd, if not defeatist, is coming to be seen as the only credible way to end an ever-widening war. Moreover, the proposed agenda of negotiations is not a Taliban surrender, but an offer to share power in Kabul.

President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan politicians support the idea. So too do a growing number of foreign governments, including Britain’s – at least tentatively – now that British troops are being killed at twice the rate they were in early 2009.

Perhaps most surprisingly, even among Afghanistan’s small but determined group of woman professionals, the notion of making a deal with the ultra-conservative men who forced them into burkas and denied them the right to work outside the home is no longer anathema. A desperate desire for peace is trumping concern over human rights.

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