Monthly Archives: September 2011

Turkey crisis: unconditional U.S. backing has helped Israel to isolate itself

Tony Karon writes:

Israel’s fallout with long-time ally Turkey is no isolated spat that will be repaired any time soon; it’s a dramatic illustration that no amount of U.S. backing can prevent the growing international isolation resulting from Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. Indeed, the unconditional nature of Washington’s backing may, in fact, have become dysfunctional to Israel’s diplomatic standing: A U.S. domestic political climate in which challenging Israel on anything is about as wise as threatening to cut medicare payments leaves Washington unable to restrain the most right-wing government in Israeli history from its most self-destructive urges, while economic changes and the radical policies adopted by the United States in the decade since 9/11 have left Washington’s influence in the Middle East at its weakest since World War II.

The trigger for Turkey expelling Israel’s ambassador, cutting defense ties and vowing to wage a diplomatic campaign against the blockade of Gaza and in support of the Palestinian move for recognition of statehood at the United Nations was the Netanyahu government’s refusal to apologize for the killing of nine Turkish citizens and a Turkish American in last year’s raid on the Gaza flotilla. The Obama Administration had tried to broker a rapprochement involving some form of Israeli apology, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly been inclined to accept but his ultranationalist foreign minister and key coalition partner (as well as rival) Avidgor Lieberman refused to countenance it.

The breakdown, however, is about a lot more than an apology: The flotilla itself, after all, had sailed in direct challenge to the Gaza blockade, with the support of the Turkish government — an expression of the fact that Ankara was no longer willing to follow its NATO allies, under U.S. leadership, in turning a blind eye to the plight of the beleaguered Palestinians. Israeli leaders and their most enthusiastic boosters in Washington like to paint this as a sign that Turkey had “gone over” to the region’s Iranian-led “resistance” camp, but despite the ruling AK Party’s roots in moderate political Islam and its insistence on a political solution to the nuclear standoff with Iran, Turkey is in fact a regional rival for influence with Tehran. Ankara’s stance on the Palestinians, like its refusal to support or enable the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and its stance on the Iran nuclear issue or its break with the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, is based on its own reading of what’s good for the region — which is quite different from Washington’s — and on Turkish public opinion. And, as if to underscore the fact that its break with Israel doesn’t threaten its commitment to NATO, Turkey announced last week that it had agreed to host radar installations for a NATO missile defense system targeting Iran.

Turkey’s actions also reflect a growing international impatience with and loss of faith in Washington’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is worried, with good reason, that Egypt — whose foreign policy has been made more responsive to public opinion by the overthrow of the Israel-friendly U.S.-backed President Hosni Mubarak last February — may follow the Turkish example.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports:

Rising tensions with some of its closest and most important allies have left Israel increasingly isolated ahead of a momentous vote on Palestinian independence at the United Nations.

Troubles with Turkey, Egypt and even the U.S. are adding to Israel’s headaches ahead of the vote, which is shaping up to be a global expression of discontent against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinians plan to ask the United Nations this month to recognize their independence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem – areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war – probably by embracing them as a “nonmember observer state.” The measure is expected to pass overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.

The assembly’s decisions are not legally binding, so the vote will be largely symbolic. But the Palestinians hope the measure will increase the already considerable pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, and add leverage should peace talks resume. The Palestinians refuse to negotiate while Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian government in the West Bank, said Israeli isolation is playing right into Palestinian hands. “We are seeing that result in increased support for us in the United Nations,” he said.

On Wednesday, China announced it would support the Palestinian bid. And a French Mideast envoy, Valerie Hoffenberg, said she had been fired after publicly arguing against the Palestinian initiative. France has not publicly said how it will vote, but her comments signaled that the government favors the Palestinians.

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As ties with Turkey collapse, Israeli politicians, media and intelligence push for more conflict

Max Blumenthal writes:

The “Periphery Doctrine” has been a cornerstone of Israel’s strategic approach to the Middle East since the state’s foundation. Devised by David Ben Gurion and Eliahu Sassoon, an Israeli Middle East expert who became Israel’s first diplomatic representative in Turkey, the doctrine was based on maintaining alliances with non-Arab states and ethnic minorities in the region as a counterweight to pan-Arabism. Though three countries — Iran, Ethiopia, and Turkey — became key regional allies of Israel, Ben Gurion was keenly aware that the relationships were temporary, and could not substitute for peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors (something Ben Gurion ironically tried to manufacture through his “activist” foreign policy of unilateral military strikes and disproportionate force). From Turkey’s perspective, the relationship with Israel was never a proper strategic alliance, but rather a means of establishing leverage against nationalistic Arab governments.

This week’s events delivered the death knell to the terminally ill Periphery Doctrine. Following the Palmer/Uribe report’s factually flawed claims about the legality of Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to apologize for Israel’s execution-style massacre of 9 activists on the deck of the Mavi Marmara — “We need not apologize!” the Prime Minister boomed three times during a recent press conference — the Turkish government significantly downgraded its relations with Israel. Turkey not only expelled Israel’s ambassador from Ankara, it suspended all military relations between the two states. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suggested further sanctions will follow, exposing Netanyahu’s bravado as empty and self-destructive.

Though Netanyahu claimed today in a speech that “we sincerely want improved relations” with Turkey, he reiterated his refusal to apologize. The optics of the speech, which featured Netanyahu addressing a crowd of naval officers and hailing the bravery of the commandos who stormed the Mavi Marmara, were calculated to project an image of defiance. Meanwhile, elements in the Israeli political arena, security establishment and media are cultivating public opinion for an open conflict with Turkey, and with no apparent shortage of enthusiasm.

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Libya, after Gaddafi

Nicolas Pelham writes:

While the foreign media focus on catching the colonel, Libyans seem to consider him to have already passed into history. Finding the deposed despot in a country of 679,358 square miles is a task that has been made all the arduous by the insouciance Libyans display toward the question of his whereabouts. For someone whose persona dominated Libya for four decades, it is striking how fast he has slipped from the public consciousness. His images have long been torn down, and his Green Book aphorisms torched. No one made an effort to stage rallies marking “Fatah September” — the forty-second anniversary of his military takeover on September 1, 1969 — or to respond to his plea for a million-man march on the capital. Threats to unleash stockpiles of mustard gas and al-tarbur al-khamis, or the fifth column, have passed without incident. Having cried wolf once too often, the colonel now sees his warnings of imminent car bombings and a guerrilla “war of bees that sting” dismissed with a complacent shrug. The ubiquitous graffiti drawings of Abu Shafshoufa, or “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” have reduced a dictator who kept power by terrorizing his population to a joke. Of all the problems facing Libya’s new order, the specter of Qaddafi’s comeback falls far down the list.

In the wake of the colonel’s flight from the capital on August 21, cautious Tripolitanians dithered for a bit more than a week, and then decided that the wind is blowing firmly his successors’ way. Ten days later, they partied in the streets with popcorn, paper lanterns and some 30,000 new Libyan tricolors. The extent of popular participation is inspiring. Where hitherto the Great Leader was so obsessed with omnipresence that he banned soccer players from sporting their own names on their jerseys, a surfeit of new actors has stepped into the vacuum. And in a country where hitherto decision-making was routed through one man, new local coping mechanisms have emerged to address the hardships caused by an absent government, a plugged-up water supply, intermittent electricity and unpaid salaries.

The sense of local ownership of the revolution is important: No one has stripped the electricity cables from pylons for their copper, as Iraqis did after the US invaded their country and toppled Saddam Hussein. Libyans, who before the uprising depended on an army of foreign labor, farm their own allotments, run their own shops, sweep the streets and volunteer as hospital nurses. Homeowners with private wells open their doors to those with none. On their own initiative, policemen in Fashloum, a working-class district in the center of town, met in the mosque on the first Friday after the colonel’s flight and agreed to reestablish a local force. By midday the following day, a score of its hundred policemen had reported for duty.

Residents of housing estates who rarely spoke to each other under Qaddafi have created neighborhood councils, merging elders from the traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, the lijan al-sulh (reconciliation committees), with the underground leadership that planned the revolt, as well as respected men from the mosque. Within a week, their subcommittees were supplying better services than the city’s five-star hotels. The mosque in Hadaba’s Haddad quarter, a poor district of rural migrants, offered air conditioning and so much water it spilled into the streets. Ironically, in the colonel’s absence, Tripolitanians created the very social system he had taught but never realized — a jamahiriyya, a decentralized network of grassroots, non-partisan people’s committees.

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Rarely seen victims of 9/11

The Boston Globe reports:

“Flight attendant Cameron?’’ the voice from Dallas barks. “Are you going to sign in for your trip? Are you stuck in traffic?’’

Halle Cameron squints at the clock on her nightstand: 7 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 departs in 45 minutes from Logan International Airport, nonstop to Los Angeles.

She had finally earned the seniority to pull cross-country flights like this, after 10 years of short-hop connections and layovers in Des Moines. But she came home yesterday from playing in a golf tournament feeling shaky, maybe heatstroke, maybe more.

Dragging her to dinner, a flight attendant friend had urged her not to waste a sick day on such a good route, reminding her how she loved the beds at the Westin in Los Angeles.

So she packed her bags and set the alarm for 4. But when she couldn’t sleep, she called American’s automated line to withdraw from the flight. Or so she thought.

“I called in sick last night,’’ she says.

“Oh,’’ the voice from Dallas says, hesitating. “That was you.’’

A rare glitch. Now someone is scrambling at headquarters, someone else is scrambling in Boston. On standby at Logan, 24-year-old Jean Roger gathers her belongings and hustles to Gate 32.

THIS IS WHERE it began. Two flights, one airport. Everyone knows how it ended. Nearly 3,000 dead, families devastated, a crater in the earth.

Back home, Logan reinvents itself. Around the airfield, a 10-foot-high concrete barrier, prison-camp thick, with razor wire on top. Inside, a new security force, full-body scanners, hundreds of cameras, liquids in bags, beltless travelers in socks. And unseen, scars unwilling to fade.

They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks: the security guard, the ticket agent, the baggage handler on the ramp. They made it home that night, but with images they couldn’t shake, a pain uncomfortable to voice. They can’t believe it has been 10 years. They can’t believe it has only been 10 years. [Continue reading…]

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The enduring mysteries of 9/11

Justin Elliot writes:

No small part of the public discourse surrounding Sept. 11, 2001, has been polluted by Truthers — those who believe that the attacks were an “inside job,” or that World Trade Center Building 7 was destroyed in a “controlled demolition,” or that the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, despite no compelling evidence for any of these theories.

Perhaps the most corrosive effect of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that they have distracted attention from real unanswered questions about the attacks.

Here, we look at some of the most important of those questions. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list.

What’s in the famously redacted 28 pages?

A joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees produced an 800-plus page report on activity of the intelligence community in connection with the 9/11 attacks, completed in December 2002. But 28 pages were redacted in the public version, all in the section titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.” It has been widely reported that those pages — which neither the Bush nor Obama administration have declassified — deal with links between 9/11 hijackers and Saudi government officials. Newsweek, for example, reported that the section “draws apparent connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers.”

As long as those pages remain classified, though, it’s impossible to assess the nature of those connections.

What was the role of the Saudi government?

Short of getting a look at those redacted 28 pages, the best source of information on this crucial question is the “The Eleventh Day,” a new account of 9/11 by journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Bob Graham, the Florida senator who co-chaired the joint inquiry, told the authors that the investigation found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. … It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis, I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government — which includes all of the elite in the country.”

That’s from an excerpt of the book recently published in Vanity Fair.

There has been particular interest in a San Diego-based Saudi national named Omar al-Bayoumi, who in California had extensive contacts with — and gave money to — the first two hijackers to enter the United States, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Bayoumi, along with two other Saudis of interest, was interviewed by commission staffers in Saudi Arabia in 2003-04. None was ever charged with a crime.

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Gaddafi used torture squads in bid to preserve rule

Reuters reports:

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi deployed special squads which held suspected opponents in shipping containers, tortured them for information about insurgent networks and disposed of their bodies in unmarked graves in a campaign to smash the revolt against his rule.

Evidence gathered by Reuters in the provincial town of Khoms shows an organised system of repression with methods including delivering electric shocks to suspects’ genitals, keeping them for weeks in baking heat with only a few sips of water a day, and whipping them with an electrical cable while their hands were bound with plastic ties.

It was all part of a deliberate strategy, said Nabil Al-Menshaz, an official in the rebel council which took over Khoms after Gaddafi’s rule there collapsed last month. “They wanted to frighten the people, so if anyone was thinking of going over to the rebels, they would change their minds,” he said.

The brutality of Gaddafi’s forces in the capital, Tripoli, in the final, chaotic days before rebels overran the city has been well documented. Dozens of bodies were left lying in the streets, and witnesses described prisoners being massacred before their gaolers fled. Thousands more were killed in battles in cities like Misrata and Zawiyah.

But accounts from Khoms paint a different, and in some ways even more sinister picture. Months before the rebel victory, and out of sight of the outside world, Gaddafi was operating a system of torture – separate from the army and police – that was so well-organised the units has their own command structures and bureaucracy.

On a wall at a construction site just outside Khoms that one of the units used for detaining suspects, pro-Gaddafi forces had scrawled in red crayon the name of their unit: “Soqur Al-Fatah” – or “Hawks of Al-Fatah,” a reference to the 1969 Al-Fatah Revolution that brought Gaddafi to power. Underneath that, in the same handwriting, someone had written the words: “Death Group.”

Al Jazeera reports:

A large convoy containing between 200 and 250 Libyan armoured vehicles has crossed into Niger.

Military sources from France and Niger told the Reuters news agency that the convoy, escorted by the Niger army, arrived in the northern desert town of Agadez on Monday.

Amid the reports about the convoy, Libyan opposition fighters have been holding talks with tribal leaders in Bani Walid to enter the town peacefully.

They are also negotiating with some tribes in Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, to lay down arms.

Monday’s convoy included officers from Libya’s southern army battalions and pro-Gaddafi Tuareg fighters, and likely crossed from Libya into Algeria before entering Niger, the sources said.

The French military source said he had been told Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam might be considering joining the convoy en route to Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African state which has offered Gaddafi and his family asylum and has a border with Niger.

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Endless war served by endless distraction

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The Washington Post woke up a few days ago and realized that despite everything that has happened since 9/11 — no successful Terrorist attacks on the Homeland in 10 years, a country mired in debt and imposing “austerity” on ordinary Americans, and the election of a wonderfully sophisticated, urbane, progressive multinationalist from the storied anti-war Democratic Party — we are still smack in the middle of “the American era of endless war” with no end in sight.  Citing the Pentagon’s most recent assessment of global threats, the Post notes that in contrast to prior decades — when “the military and the American public viewed war as an aberration and peace as the norm” (a dubious perception) — it is now clear, pursuant to official doctrine, that “America’s wars are unending and any talk of peace is quixotic or naive,” all as part of “America’s embrace of endless war in the 10 years since Sept. 11, 2001.” 

We are now enduring a parade of wistful, contemplative, self-regarding pundit-meditations on The Meaning of 9/11 Ten Years Later or, far worse, self-righteous moralizing screeds about the nature of “evil” from war zealots with oceans of blood on their unrepentant hands (if I could impose one media rule, it would be that following every column or TV segment featuring American political commentators dramatically unloading their Where-I-Was-on-9/11-and-how-I-felt tales, there would be similar recollections offered from parents in the Muslim world talking about how their children died from the pre-9/11 acts of the U.S. and its client states or from post-9/11 American bombs, drones, checkpoint shootings and night raids:  just for the sake of “balance,” which media outlets claim to crave).  Notwithstanding this somber, collective 9/11 anniversary ritual descending upon us, the reality is that the nation’s political and media elite learned no lessons from that attack. 

The mere utterance of the word Terrorism (which now means little more than: violence or extremism by Muslims in opposition to American or Israeli actions and interests) is — at least for America’s political and media class — as potent in justifying wars, civil liberties assaults, and massive military spending as it was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  And worship of the American military and all that it does — and a corresponding taboo on speaking ill of it except for tactical critiques (it would be better if they purchased this other weapon system or fought this war a bit differently) — is the closest thing America has to a national religion.

But it’s not merely the existence of ongoing Endless War that is so destructive — both to the nation perpetrating it on the world and to its victims.  Far worse is what is being done to prosecute that war, the transformation of government institutions and their relationship to the citizenry to sustain it, and, most enduringly of all, the mentality that it has spawned and entrenched.

In his conclusion, Greenwald says, “Renouncing the duty of holding accountable political leaders who exercise vast power makes one directly responsible for the abuses they commit.” But what is that facilitates this form of political indifference among most Americans?

First and foremost it springs from a profound and pervasive sense of impotence. Few people believe they have any real capacity to effect political change. So why take much interest in the contours of a political landscape over which one apparently exerts no influence?

Second, we witness that those who wield great power generally do so with impunity. However great their blunders, they never seem to pay any price. It’s easy enough to say that we should hold them accountable, but how exactly is this demand to be meaningfully expressed?

Third, the experience of powerlessness and the indifference this engenders feeds the desire for sensations which even if they are meaningless restore some feeling of our own existence. We both lose and find ourselves in endless distraction.

America’s endless wars continue not because we believe in them but because they have become nothing more than white noise in the background of the well-anesthetized American way of life.

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How not to become a whistle-blower

The New York Times reports:

When Shamai K. Leibowitz, an F.B.I. translator, was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year for leaking classified information to a blogger, prosecutors revealed little about the case. They identified the blogger in court papers only as “Recipient A.” After Mr. Leibowitz pleaded guilty, even the judge said he did not know exactly what Mr. Leibowitz had disclosed.

“All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams Jr., of United States District Court in Maryland, said at the sentencing in May 2010. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”

Now the reason for the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s first prosecution for leaking information to the news media seems clear: Mr. Leibowitz, a contract Hebrew translator, passed on secret transcripts of conversations caught on F.B.I. wiretaps of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Those overheard by the eavesdroppers included American supporters of Israel and at least one member of Congress, according to the blogger, Richard Silverstein.

In his first interview about the case, Mr. Silverstein offered a rare glimpse of American spying on a close ally.

He said he had burned the secret documents in his Seattle backyard after Mr. Leibowitz came under investigation in mid-2009, but he recalled that there were about 200 pages of verbatim records of telephone calls and what seemed to be embassy conversations. He said that in one transcript, Israeli officials discussed their worry that their exchanges might be monitored.

Those same officials are probably now chuckling as they read this story.

A story that could have shed much needed on light on the extent of the Israeli government’s influence in Congress is instead now a story about the FBI tied up with a blogging melodrama. Moreover, the ability for the FBI to continue conducting this kind of surveillance may well have been impaired.

Predictably, there are commentators who see this as an opportunity to attack the FBI and defend Israel.

Jacob Heilbrunn writes:

Should the FBI, then, be spying on embassy conversations? Much of it is probably a waste of time and resources, which includes having to punish Leibowitz for transgressing the law. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has made no secret of his desire to take out Iran’s facilities. What Israeli leader wouldn’t want to do so—if the costs didn’t exceed the benefits? It doesn’t require monitoring the phones of the Israeli embassy to figure that out.

Oh. And we can take it as a given that such a cost-benefit analysis conducted by Israel would reach a conclusion that also served US interests?

The reason the US government sees the need to closely monitor the clandestine activities of Israel inside the United States is precisely because the interests of the two governments do not perfectly overlap.

As for Shamai K. Leibowitz — who Heilbrunn refers to as a “self-appointed whistle-blower” (is there any other kind?) — I have my doubts whether he really was a whistle-blower of any kind.

Anyone who has sensitive information that they believe as a matter of conscience needs to get into the public domain should choose their outlet carefully. A leak that goes up in smoke creates more mystery than revelation.

Did Leibowitz like the idea of becoming a whistle-blower but then had second thoughts when he realized he could end up in jail? Or was he one blogger sharing some hot information with another blogger without thinking carefully about where this might lead?

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Israel’s ability to kill Americans with impunity

Roger Cohen writes:

Here’s what the United Nations report on Israel’s raid last year on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara had to say about the killing of a 19-year-old U.S. citizen on board:

“At least one of those killed, Furkan Dogan, was shot at extremely close range. Mr. Dogan sustained wounds to the face, back of the skull, back and left leg. That suggests he may already have been lying wounded when the fatal shot was delivered, as suggested by witness accounts to that effect.”

The four-member panel, led by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former prime minister of New Zealand, appears with these words to raise the possibility of an execution or something close.

Dogan, born in upstate New York, was an aspiring doctor. Little interested in politics, he’d won a lottery to travel on the Gaza-bound vessel. The report says of him and the other eight people killed that, “No evidence has been provided to establish that any of the deceased were armed with lethal weapons.”

I met Dogan’s father, Ahmet, a professor at Erciyes University in Kayseri, last year in Ankara: His grief was as deep as his dismay at U.S. evasiveness. It’s hard to imagine any other circumstances in which the slaying in international waters, at point-blank range, of a U.S. citizen by forces of a foreign power would prompt such a singular American silence.

Unless, that is, one considers the case of the USS Liberty, the American ship that was attacked by Israeli forces in international waters in 1967 during the Six-Day War, resulting in the deaths of 34 crew members and the injury of 170.

Two squadrons of US Navy fighter-bombers were sent to repel the unprovoked Israeli attack and could have reached the Liberty in time to prevent a torpedo attack that killed 26 Americans, but the operation was aborted. As far as the White House was concerned, it was more important to avoid embarrassing Israel than it was to protect American lives.

After newly declassified government documents were released in 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported:

J.Q. “Tony” Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America’s carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”

McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has “absolutely no recollection of what I did that day,” except that “I have a memory that I didn’t know at the time what was going on.”

The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel’s claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis’ explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.

Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson’s intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was “inconceivable” that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” the NSA’s director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.
[…]
For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag — the ship’s “holiday colors” — that measured 13 feet long.

Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: “Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag — and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification.”

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Israel’s idea of ‘tolerance’ when facing non-violent Palestinian protesters

Reuters reports:

Brigadier-General Michael Edelstein, the officer crafting Israel’s counter-demonstration doctrines, said troops were now better equipped and trained to police the occupied West Bank and the boundaries with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

“The balance has changed. We have more means that we can use, therefore the use of lethal weapons will decrease,” he told foreign reporters in a briefing.

He said there was no plan to reinforce military garrisons, which had been practicing non-lethal riot control techniques.

Israel has also invested heavily in riot-dispersal gear including accurate tear-gas launchers, high-powered loudspeakers that emit an intolerable buzzing noise, and cannons for dousing crowds with water or a foul-smelling liquid known as “skunk.”

The objective, Edelstein said, was “to be able to handle riots while diminishing casualties on both sides.”

Asked if this meant that Israeli forces, accused in the past of shoot-on-sight policies against Palestinians, would now show more tolerance, he said: “Much more tolerance.”

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Libyan rebel leader says MI6 knew he was tortured

The Independent reports:

“They knew I was being tortured, I have no doubt of that,” Abdelhakim Belhaj, a former prisoner who is now the rebel security chief of the Libyan capital, said about the British intelligence agents who came to interrogate him while he was in the hands of Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

“I hoped they would do something about it. I was too terrified during the meeting to say out loud what was being done to me because I thought the Libyans [secret police] were taping what was going on. When the Libyan guards left I made sign movements with my hands.

“The British people nodded, showed they understood. They showed this understanding several times. But nothing changed, the torture continued for a long time afterwards.”

The appalling treatment inflicted on Mr Belhaj, a former head of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG), is now in the centre of an international diplomatic storm. The Independent revealed, after discovering secret files in Tripoli, how Britain played a key role in the rendition of Mr Belhaj, which delivered him into hands of the Gaddafi regime for seven years of incarceration, six of them in solitary confinement.

Mr Belhaj’s vehement claims that British officials were fully aware of the maltreatment he was undergoing and lays the UK intelligence services open to charges of direct complicity. There is nothing to suggest in a tranche of MI6 papers that the UK raised concerns about his ordeal with the regime.

Instead there are repeated requests to the Libyan secret police for information about Mr Belhaj, including one believed to be from Sir Mark Allen, who was then MI6’s head of counter-terrorism and now works for BP, when arranging Tony Blair’s visit to meet Colonel Gaddafi. “I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week. Abu Abd Allah’s [a nom-de-guerre for Mr Belhaj] information on the situation in this country is of urgent importance to us.”

Speaking to The Independent in a Tripoli hotel now being used by the Transitional National Council (TNC), Mr Belhaj described being interviewed by three British agents, one woman and two men, at the security headquarters of Moussa Koussa, who was then Libya’s spymaster. The two questioning sessions each lasted about two hours. The name of the female officer is known to The Independent but it is not being published for security reasons. Documents show that she was one of the most frequent visitors to Tripoli under the Gaddafi regime.

“The British people they sent were real experts, they knew the names of LIFG members in England, even their codenames. I have been told [by regime officials] that if I named them as being involved with al-Qa’ida they would be returned to Libya and my own conditions would improve. I was given names of other opposition people who were not even members of LIFG, who I did not even know,” Mr Belhaj, 45, said.

“I told the British, as I told everyone else, that LIFG had no link with al-Qa’ida. I knew making a link would stop what was happening to me, but I was not going to do it. I showed the British about what was happening to me.”

Mr Belhaj’s sense of being betrayed extends beyond the unheeded plea for help to the UK agents during his interrogation. After being arrested in Malaysia as a suspect during the US-led “war on terror”, he had applied for asylum to the UK, which was supposedly granted. Instead, British intelligence used the system to start a chain of events that led to his rendition to Libya. As Mr Belhaj and his wife, who was four months pregnant, travelled from Kuala Lumpur to the Thai capital, Bangkok, on the way to London in March 2004 they were arrested by CIA officers and the Thai police.

Mr Belhaj said he was subjected to physical abuse in Thailand before being moved to Abu Salim prison, a place of fear for Libyans where torture became a daily occurrence and often involved being suspended from the ceiling by his wrists.

Mr Belhaj, who was released from prison under an amnesty by the regime earlier this year, said yesterday: “My wife is still badly affected by what happened, even after all these years. It was very frightening for her. I am angry that the asylum application was used in this way. I thought Britain was a place where human rights were respected. I thought it was a place I could go to be safe. Instead, they used this to trap me.

Patrick Cockburn writes:

Here is an account by a Libyan, who did not want to disclose his name, of what it was like to be tortured by Libyan security. He says: “I was blindfolded and taken upstairs. I was shocked with electricity and made to sit on broken glass. They were kicking and punching me until I confessed. I said ‘No’.” This went on for over a week.

One day the interrogators tied his hands behind his back and took him upstairs. He continues: “They opened the door and I saw my son and wife. There were five or six members of security with masks. They tied me to a chair and one of them said: ‘Do you want to sign or should we torture them?'”

According to the prisoner one of the interrogators took his 10-month-old son and put a wire on his hand and “he screamed and his face turned red”. The little boy appeared to stop breathing. Soon afterwards the prisoner signed the confession demanded by Libyan security.

The testimony about the baby’s torture in front of his father was recorded by Human Rights Watch in Tripoli in 2005. The same year the UK signed a Memorandum of Understanding accepting Libyan diplomatic assurances that torture would not be used against Libyan exiles repatriated from the UK to Libya. Few documents agreed to by a British government exude so much hypocrisy and cynicism.

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America’s inability to win wars, pay for them, or explain why it fights

Gary Younge writes:

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about “how [to] capitalise on these opportunities”. The primary opportunity came from a public united in anger, grief and fear which the Bush administration sought to leverage to maximum political effect. “I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen,” Rice told the New Yorker six months afterwards. “Events are in much sharper relief.”

Ten years later the US response to the terror attacks have clarified three things: the limits to what its enormous military power can achieve, its relative geopolitical decline and the intensity of its polarised political culture. It proved itself incapable of winning the wars it chose to fight and incapable of paying for them and incapable of coming to any consensus as to why. The combination of domestic repression at home and military aggression abroad kept no one safe, and endangered the lives of many. The execution of Osama bin Laden provoked such joy in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure.

Inevitably, the unity brought about by the tragedy of 9/11 proved as intense as it was fleeting. The rally around the flag was a genuine, impulsive reaction to events in a nation where patriotism is not an optional addendum to the political culture but an essential, central component of it. Having been attacked as a nation, people logically felt the need to identify as a nation.

But beyond mourning of the immediate victims’ friends and families, there was an element of narcissism to this national grief that would play out in policy and remains evident in the tone of many of today’s retrospectives. The problem, for some, was not that such a tragedy had happened but that it could have happened in America and to Americans.

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Can Israel adapt to democracy?

While Israel’s ability to develop internally as a democracy is shackled by the undemocratic nature of Zionism, it’s hardly surprising that the growth of democracy outside Israel — notably in Turkey and Egypt — presents a conundrum for the Jewish state: how can harmonious relations be maintained with historically friendly governments without also attempting to cultivate friendly relations with the people that those governments represent?

Democracy is a simple idea: people matter. And if Israel doesn’t get this, it doesn’t get democracy.

İhsan Dağı writes:

Public opinion has had an increasing impact on Turkey’s foreign policy-making in recent years. Democratization and a growing participation in civil society, due to economic development and the EU accession process, have empowered public opinion to assert itself on the matter of foreign affairs, which was not the case a decade ago. Thus Turkey’s relationship with Israel was questioned whenever Israel engaged in violent policies in the region, like the war in Lebanon and the attacks on Gaza. Public reaction to Israeli aggression in the region is bound to be taken into consideration by a government that is accountable to its people.

Especially after the killing of eight Turks and one Turkish-American aboard the Mavi Marmara by Israeli soldiers, public opinion is ever more important. It will be very difficult to win the people over to a rapprochement with Israel, without at least an official apology and compensation.

It is therefore a mistake to assume that the Erdoğan government is the source of the problem, and to claim that Turkish-Israeli relations would return to normal under a non-AK Party government. To refute this I will say two things: First, the AK Party government is only responding to the public mood and demands. Second, the AK Party is very unlikely to disappear from the political scene in Turkey. That is to say that both the current public mood and the AK Party’s rule appear as though they will be around for a while. So instead of sitting and waiting in vain for them to disappear, Israel and its friends should try to not lose Turkey’s support permanently.

My advice to the Israeli government is that it should get used to living and working with the AK Party government, and to try to understand the “new Turkey” because even in a future post-AK Party period things will never be the same as in days past.

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Ankara and Tel Aviv, collision course or path to progress?

Haaretz reports:

Turkey on Monday informed Israel’s top diplomat in Ankara that nearly all senior Israeli embassy personnel must leave the country by Wednesday.

Ella Ofek, the deputy to the Israeli ambassador to Turkey and the person currently in charge of the Israeli embassy in Ankara, was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Monday. Ofek was informed that all Israeli diplomats ranked above the level of second secretary, including the IDF military attaché, must depart Turkey by Wednesday.

The only Israeli diplomats permitted to remain include embassy spokesman Nizar Amir and personnel who provide consular services.

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Turkish FM says flotilla issue not just between Israel and Turkey

Today’s Zaman reports:

Firmly opposing the portrayal of the recent escalation of the crisis between Turkey and Israel solely as a bilateral affair which must be resolved between the two countries, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has warned that when dealing with Israel’s lethal 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, in which nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, the international community should not ignore the fact that Israel’s repeated breaches of international law and ethics lie at the core of the issue.

Davutoğlu made these remarks when he was called upon to answer various questions concerning a new set of Turkish measures against Israel from his European counterparts at an informal meeting of the European Union. The meeting on Saturday gathered together 27 ministers from EU member countries, as well as their counterparts from Iceland, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro and Macedonia, all nations aspiring to join the bloc, in the Baltic Sea resort of Sopot, Poland.Davutoğlu was the last minister to take the stage, where he answered questions apparently prompted by his announcement Friday in Ankara that Turkey has downgraded its diplomatic ties with Israel to the level of second secretary, and giving the Israeli ambassador and other high-level diplomats until Wednesday to leave the country.

In other measures against Israel, Turkey suspended military agreements, promised to back legal suits brought against Israel by the families of the raid victims, and vowed to take steps to ensure that freedom to navigate is maintained in the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaking with Today’s Zaman late on Saturday en route from Sopot to Turkey, Davutoğlu said he first explained to the assembled ministers how the situation in the eastern Mediterranean has been prone to escalating tensions due, to the unresolved Cyprus conflict and the ongoing crisis in Syria. “I brought up the issue of the overall dynamics in the eastern Mediterranean. I noted that everyone should be careful, and told them about the Israel issue. Everyone came up to me and asked if there is anything they can do about it. They agree that Turkey is right, and they advise us to ease up the tension. I told them that it is an issue in its own right for us, with or without the Arab Spring or the Middle East conflict. When the incident happened a year ago, there was no Arab Spring. It is about principles for us. Our people were murdered by an army outside of combat conditions,” Davutoğlu told Today’s Zaman.

“I told them that this is what upset us: Among those detained on that ship there were people from most of the countries sitting around this table. We brought them from Tel Aviv to İstanbul and sent them back to their countries. When our people returned, the issue was suddenly dubbed an Israeli conflict. If they had stayed there, it would have been your issue too. This is not a particular issue between us and Israel; it is an issue between Israel and international law and ethics and the international community. So if you want to help, go tell Israel to apologize and pay compensation. If you just do that, that would be best help,” the minister added. The foreign minister was referring to the fact that the Mavi Marmara, aboard which eight Turks and one Turkish-American were killed during the May 31, 2010 raid, was part of a flotilla which included about 600 activists from 32 different countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Greece, France, Sweden and the US.

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