National Journal reports: Twelve years of war is a long time—not just for the troops fighting, but also for the American public watching the final stages of the U.S. drawdown. And it looks as if this war fatigue is translating in the polls.
Americans are now questioning the very motivation for going to war in the first place.
Now, only 28 percent of Americans think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Friday. Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans, by and large, were united in wanting to track down the people responsible (as high as 90 percent in 2002). But after 2,000 deaths in America’s longest war, 67 percent of Americans don’t think it was worth it.
This poll, conducted July 18-21, represents an 11-point drop since March. During that time, countless headlines about Afghanistan have been marked with the unmistakable tension between the U.S. and Afghan governments.
The sentiments of the American public are also apparent in responses to a question asking whether U.S. fighting in Afghanistan has contributed to the long-term security of the United States; 50 percent of Americans don’t think it has. Only 17 percent think it’s contributed a great deal, while another 26 percent think it has helped somewhat. [Continue reading…]
Chase Madar writes: Bradley Manning released hundreds of thousands of government documents and files to Wikileaks, most famous among them the unclassified video Wikileaks dubbed, “Collateral Murder”, a harrowing gun-sight view of an Apache helicopter slaughtering a couple of armed men and a much larger group of civilians on a Baghdad street in July, 2007.
The court-martial of Pfc. Manning, finally underway over three years after his arrest, is likely to cause a great deal of collateral destruction in its own right. In this case the victim will be American journalism.
The most serious of the charges against Manning is the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.” (Team Obama has made it clear it won’t seek the death penalty, but a life sentence is possible.) The enemy that the prosecution has in mind is not Wikileaks or the global public but Al Qaeda; because this group had access to the internet, the logic goes, they could read Manning’s disclosures just like everyone else.
The government does not have to prove Manning’s conscious intent to help Al Qaeda, but must only meet the squishier standard of proving the defendant had “specific knowledge” that the terrorists might benefit from his cache of documents.
If this charge sticks, it will be a serious blow to American journalism, as it puts all kinds of confidential informants at risk of being capital cases. A soldier in Afghanistan who blogs about the lack of armoured vehicles – a common and very public complaint from the ranks in the Iraq War – could be prosecuted for tipping off the Taliban. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The lawyer representing the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning has asked the judge presiding over the soldier’s court martial to decide between two stark portrayals of the accused – the prosecution’s depiction of him as a traitor and seeker of notoriety, and the defence’s account that he was motivated by a desire to make a difference in the world and save lives.
Over four hours of intense closing arguments at Fort Meade in Maryland, David Coombs set up a moral and legal clash of characterisations, between the Manning that he laid out for the court, and the callous and fame-obsessed Manning sketched on Thursday by the US government. “What is the truth?” the lawyer asked Colonel Denise Lind, the presiding judge who must now decide between the two accounts to reach her verdict.
“Is Manning somebody who is a traitor with no loyalty to this country or the flag, who wanted to download as much information as possible for his employer WikiLeaks? Or is he a young, naive, well-intentioned soldier who has his humanist belief central to his decisions and whose sole purpose was to make a difference.”
Coombs answered his own rhetorical question by arguing that all the evidence presented to the trial over the past seven weeks pointed in one direction. “All the forensics prove that he had a good motive: to spark reforms, to spark change, to make a difference. He did not have a general evil intent.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: “It is a lot like playing a video game,” admits a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly to the artist Omer Fast. “But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level.” His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.
The remarkable insight into the working life of one of the most modern of military operatives is provided in a 30-minute film which will show at the Imperial War Museum in London from Monday, the first in a new programme of exhibitions under the title IWM Contemporary.
The project is something of a departure for the museum in one way, although it has been commissioning and showing artists since the first world war. “The idea behind this strand is to present a consistent offer,” said Sara Bevan, a curator in the art department. “So people do identify us with contemporary art because it sometimes does get a bit lost.” It will also allow the gallery to perhaps be more provocative and more reactive to contemporary events.
The work by Fast, an Israel-born artist who lives and works in Berlin, is called 5,000 Feet is the Best, which takes its name from the optimum flight altitude of a Predator drone. [Continue reading…]
Sarah Carr writes: Every time I go to the Rab3a sit-in I think that it would be an almost impossible task to clear the people crammed into it; surely not even the Interior Ministry and armed forces would want to take on that task, not because they are concerned about loss of life but because of the logistical difficulty, and the political fallout internationally (the July 26 protests demonstrated that the anti-terrorism crowd seem to care about what the international community thinks).
So I did some cursory reading (Wikipedia, what else) on how Tiananmen Square was cleared of the pro-democracy protesters on June 4 1989 and so far there have been close parallels between the events that led up to that clearing, and events in Egypt. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: The bloodied and mangled bodies of more than a dozen supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi lined the floors of an improvised hospital in eastern Cairo on Saturday after a night of clashes between security forces and demonstrators calling for Morsi’s reinstatement left at least 46 people dead and hundreds wounded, according to the Ministry of Health.
Medics at a field hospital embedded in a pro-Morsi sit-in in eastern Cairo said they had received 37 bodies and treated hundreds of wounded in rooms that were crowded Saturday with wailing relatives and strewn with battered equipment and bloodied sheets.
Saturday’s violence erupted hours after Egypt’s interior minister and interim president warned that a nearly month-long sit-in by Morsi’s supporters and others “blocking” roads and bridges would soon be broken up.
“These sit-ins will be ended soon, within the limits of the law,” Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told the al-Hayat television station.
“We cannot accept this security chaos, and the road blocking and the bridge blocking,” interim president Adly Mansour said in a separate call to the station. “We can’t accept the attacks on public property. The state has to enforce its sovereignty.” He urged Morsi’s supporters to “go back to your homes,” adding that if they did, “no one will pursue you.”
On Friday, millions of Egyptians took to the streets, heeding a call by the nation’s military chief to support the security forces’ “mandate” to confront violence and “terrorism” — words that rights groups and Morsi’s supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood interpreted as signaling an imminent crackdown.
[…]
Grief and shock mingled with outrage in the chaotic rooms of the makeshift hospital at the Brotherhood-led protest camp in eastern Cairo on Saturday.
“Tell everyone in the village he is a martyr,” one man sobbed into a cellphone while waiting to take the body of his brother from a room that had been converted into a morgue.
Doctors and witnesses said the wounded began streaming in around 11 p.m. on Friday, as separate groups of protesters on a nearby highway and outside Cairo’s al-Azhar University came under attack.
At first, most of the victims were suffered from the suffocating effects of tear gas, then later, birdshot wounds, doctors said. By 4 a.m., a flood of people with gunshot wounds arrived, as security forces and plainclothes “thugs” clashed with pro-Morsi demonstrators on roads leading to the protest camp, witnesses and doctors said. Many victims were afraid to go to official hospitals because they feared arrest, doctors said.
Mohamed Elatfy, an emergency room doctor who practices in Britain but was visiting family in Egypt, said he hurried to help after he saw an appeal for doctors at the field hospital while watching al-Jazeera late at night.
At the time of Morsi’s ouster, he said, he was “totally against the regime.”
“It was a failing regime,” he said. But Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the chief of the armed forces, “is calling for a civil war,” he said. “And to be honest, I can’t understand why some Egyptians are calling for a bloodbath. I was watching the marches yesterday, and I was in shock.”
Omar Encarnación writes: To understand the swift and dramatic demise of Egypt’s first democratically elected leader and what it might portend for the country’s future, it helps to take a broad comparative perspective. The manner in which the country’s military deposed President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, is by no means an isolated case. In fact, it fits rather perfectly within the model of a civil society coup, a concept I first described in a 2002 World Policy Journalessay that explained the brief removal from power of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez by a coalition of business, labor, and civic groups. Other scholars have subsequently applied the idea to other coups, such as those in the Philippines in 2001, in Ecuador in 2002, in Thailand in 2006, and in Honduras in 2009. All of these cases show that civil society coups are not the fix for democracy that they purport to be, which looks to be true in Egypt as well.
Endemic to new democracies, civil society coups entail the removal from power of an elected leader through sustained protest, usually with the aid of the military. Indeed, it is the partnership between civil society and the military — not usually known for acting in concert — that distinguishes a civil society coup from an ordinary one. More often than not, those behind the coup justify it by claiming that they intend to rescue democracy, which is paradoxical since they are, in fact, uprooting it. This is Tocqueville’s civil society gone rogue; rather than working patiently and discreetly toward improving the quality of democracy, it turns angry and restless and plots for sudden and radical political change.
In my original essay on Chávez’s removal from office, I identified three preconditions for a civil society coup. The first is the rise to power of a leader whose commitment to democracy is at best suspect. The second is a political apparatus that fails to meet public expectations about economic growth and stability, usually because of its corruption, incompetence, and neglect of the country’s basic needs. The third is the emergence of civil society actors — trade unions, religious associations, and civic groups — rather than formally organized political forces, which have either disintegrated or which never fully developed in the first place, as the main opposition to the government. The combined result of these conditions is the emergence of an adversarial relationship between an invigorated civil society and a delegitimized political system against a background of widespread societal discontent and the collapse of the rule of law. Under such conditions, disputes and political crises are solved on the streets rather than in the legislature.
François Nicoullaud, France’s ambassador to Tehran from 2001 to 2005, writes: As Hassan Rouhani prepares to become the next president of the Iranian Islamic Republic, it is worth recalling the leading role he played as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in late 2003, when the clandestine program run by the Revolutionary Guards to produce a nuclear weapon was halted.
The halt in the weaponization program — as distinct from the program for uranium enrichment, power production and civilian research — was acknowledged in November 2007 by American intelligence services in their National Intelligence Estimate, and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in November 2011 in a report from the director general, who wrote: “work on the AMAD Plan [i.e. the undeclared nuclear weaponization program] was stopped rather abruptly pursuant to a ‘halt order’ instruction issued in late 2003 by senior Iranian officials.”
Based on conversations that I had at the time, as French ambassador to Tehran, with high Iranian officials close to the matter, I firmly believe that Rouhani was the main actor in the process. Of course, Iranians could not admit to a foreigner that such a program ever existed, and I cannot name the officials I spoke to. But two conversations in particular remain vivid in my mind.
The first one took place a little after Rouhani became Iran’s top nuclear negotiator in October 2003 and had reached an agreement about the suspension of Iranian sensitive enrichment activities with the German, British and French foreign ministers during their joint visit to Tehran. [Continue reading…]
Eilat Maoz writes (translated from Hebrew by Guy Eliav and edited by Ami Asher): A laboratory is a site where scientists conduct experiments under controlled conditions – a space where large-scale phenomena such as hurricanes are miniaturized and tiny objects such as microbes are magnified to observe complex processes and learn how to control them. A laboratory is where the world is divided into predictable phenomena and observable objects. Where knowledge is created and later disseminated, making the world better understandable and better organized, through the lens of the knowledge we have accumulated about it.
Yotam Feldman’s new film, “The Lab,” introduces us to the men who made the Occupied Palestinian Territories the largest and most advanced weapon-testing laboratory: arms dealers and developers, defense experts and industry leaders. Despite the urge to compare it to other Israeli documentaries which have recently exposed the secret lives of the people running the occupation (such as “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers”), “The Lab” is above all a film about knowledge. Security knowledge created in the flexible zone between two dimensions separated by a very blurred line: the military and the market.
On the first plot level, “The Lab” follows Naomi Klein’s claim that the main reason for Israel’s economic prosperity at a time of political instability and global crisis lies not in its outstanding human capital that enables it to smoothly escape the negative economic repercussions, but rather the continuation of regional conflicts. In The Shock Doctrine, she shows that most of Israel’s economic growth can be attributed to the huge defense industry, which has become Israel’s main export industry, particularly following 9/11 (In 2012, Israel was ranked the world’s sixth largest arms exporter). She also claims that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not only the world’s largest open-air prisons, but also the world’s largest test-labs, where “Palestinians are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.” [Continue reading…]
In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”
So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.
At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.
The Pentagon responded 2013 but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”
A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”
“Because elements that might be considered 2018associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”
It’s not an abstract question: U.S. drone strikes and other actions frequently target “associated forces,” as has been the case with dozens of strikes against an Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen.
During the May hearing, Michael Sheehan, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, said he was “not sure there is a list per se.” Describing terrorist groups as “murky” and “shifting,” he said, “it would be difficult for the Congress to get involved in trying to track the designation of which are the affiliate forces” of Al Qaeda.
Sheehan said that by the Pentagon’s standard, “sympathy is not enough2026. it has to be an organized group and that group has to be in co-belligerent status with Al Qaeda operating against the United States.”
The White House tied Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and “elements” of Al Shabaab in Somalia to Al Qaeda in a recent report to Congress on military actions. But the report also included a classified annex.
Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has writtenon this question at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are 2018inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name.”
The law underpinning the U.S. war against Al Qaeda is known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, and it was passed one week after the 9/11 attacks. It doesn’t actually include the words “associated forces,” though courts and Congress have endorsed the phrase.
As we explained earlier this year, the emergence of new or more loosely-aligned terrorist groups has legal scholars wondering how effectively the U.S. will be able to “shoehorn” them into the AUMF. During the May hearing, many lawmakers expressed concern about the Pentagon’s capacious reading of the law. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., described it as a “carte blanche.”
Obama, in his May speech, said he looked forward “to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.” But he didn’t give a timeframe. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., introduced an amendment that would sunset the law at the end of 2014, to coincide with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was voted down the same day, 185 to 236.
The AUMF isn’t the only thing the government relies on to take military action. In speeches and interviews Obama administration officials also bring up the president’s constitutional power to defend the country, even without congressional authorization.
Foreign Policy: The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday’s shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment’s defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic.
Ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA’s ability to collect data on Americans’ telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aid with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable.
“Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that had a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything Alexander had to say,” said the source, keeping in mind concerted White House efforts to influence Congress by Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Had Pelosi not been as forceful as she had been, it’s unlikely there would’ve been more Democrats for the amendment.”
The Associated Press reports: The secretive court that weighs whether to let the U.S. spy on terror and espionage suspects would have to hear from lawyers arguing against doing so under a new plan introduced Thursday on the heels of Congress’ rejection of sharp limits on government surveillance.
The new plan by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would force the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to hear both sides of classified cases. The court, which isn’t open to the public, currently hears only from Justice Department attorneys when it considers approving applications to seize Internet and phone records from private companies. The government uses those records to target foreign suspects in terror and spy cases.
The surveillance court has been under rare scrutiny and criticism after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden revealed in June two classified programs that aim to thwart terror attacks but that critics say invade privacy rights. The court approved one of the programs, letting the government sweep up millions of Americans’ telephone records each day.
Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said allowing a court debate would give “the benefit of an adversarial process and hearing conflicting views.”
The Jerusalem Post reports: Minister Silvan Shalom said Friday that no Israeli prime minister would be able to implement a peace agreement with the Palestinians if a referendum on the issue showed that a majority of Israelis supported such a deal and that outcome had been decided by non-Jewish citizens of the state.
Speaking to Israel Radio, the former foreign and finance minister said that the definition of what constitutes a majority in such a referendum should be determined in advance, as it would complicate matters if the outcome of the vote ran contrary to the wishes of the majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports: The United Nations human rights chief, Navi Pillay, urged Israel to reconsider legislation that could lead to the demolition of Bedouin villages in the Negev desert, asserting that Israel was actively pursuing discriminatory policies by forcibly displacing its Arab citizens.
“I am alarmed that this bill, which seeks to legitimize forcible displacement and dispossession of indigenous Bedouin communities in the Negev, is being pushed through the Knesset,” Ms. Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement released in Geneva on Thursday. The measure would likely result in the demolition of up to 35 Bedouin villages and the eviction of 30,000 to 40,000 Bedouin Arabs from ancestral lands and homes, she said.
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, write: Every day, it seems, brings disturbing new revelations about the National Security Agency’s program to collect phone and email metadata, raising serious questions for our country. Reports indicate that the NSA is gathering metadata on millions of people in the United States and around the world, targeting diplomatic missions of both friends and foes.
The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.
When the Congress and the courts work in secret; when massive amounts of data are collected from Americans and enterprises; when government’s power of intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens, augmented by the awesome power of advanced technologies, is hugely expanded without public debate or discussion over seven years, then our sense of constitutional process and accountability is deeply offended.
Officials insist that the right balance has been struck between security and privacy. But how would we know, when all the decisions have been made in secret, with almost no oversight? [Continue reading…]
CNet: The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.
If the government is able to determine a person’s password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.
“I’ve certainly seen them ask for passwords,” said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We push back.”
A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies “really heavily scrutinize” these requests, the person said. “There’s a lot of ‘over my dead body.'”
Some of the government orders demand not only a user’s password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.
A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: “No, we don’t, and we can’t see a circumstance in which we would provide it.”
Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has “never” turned over a user’s encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. “We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously,” the spokesperson said.
Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users’ passwords and how they would respond to them. [Continue reading…]
Shane Harris writes: Now that the House of Representatives has voted down an amendment that would have significantly restricted what information the National Security Agency can collect about Americans, the best hope of curtailing the spy agency’s powers lies with the courts. And while NSA critics have failed to rein in the eavesdropping agency through legislative action, they may have more luck with the third branch of government — thanks to a leaked classified document, a rare bit of good fortune for a leading civil liberties group, and a sympathetic justice of the Supreme Court.
The fact that more than 200 lawmakers voted against a key NSA collection program, and one authorized by the long-controversial Patriot Act, represents a victory of sorts for surveillance critics. There has rarely been such a pronounced opposition to surveillance authorities, and the fact that the Obama administration had to mount a full court press to preserve the program, and still only eked out a narrow win, may give opponents some hope that a legislative effort could be mounted again with a different result. But there is no clear next step legislatively. No bill or amendment on the table. Yet there is a path forward on the judicial front.
Challenges to the NSA’s surveillance programs have historically failed in large part because no one has been able to prove he had his communications scooped up in the agency’s electronic dragnets. That information is an official secret. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the most stalwart opponents of the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities, failed to challenge the agency’s operations in the Supreme Court because of this Catch-22. It couldn’t prove it had been spied upon, even though the government acknowledged — generally — that such spying does occur.
But now, classified documents released by the ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leave no doubt that at least one telecommunications company, Verizon Business Network Services, has handed over bulk telephone metadata to the NSA under a court order.
The key for a new challenge by the ACLU, which it filed last month in U.S. District Court, is that it’s a customer of Verizon Business Network Services. Not just Verizon, but this particular division of Verizon. This is the closest thing the group has had to a smoking gun, and conceivably it could be sufficient to establish legal standing to bring the lawsuit. The case could end up in the Supreme Court.
But to succeed, the ACLU — or any challenger — will have to convince jurists that the long-standing legal treatment of metadata is outdated and needs to be changed. [Continue reading…]
William J. Dobson writes: Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi certainly knows how to dress the part. On Wednesday, wearing dark sunglasses, full military dress, and a chest full of medals—despite never having seen combat—Egypt’s defense minister looked every bit the junta leader that his critics say he is. “Come out to give me the mandate and order that I confront violence and potential terrorism,” he declared in a nationally broadcast speech, as he called for Egyptians to take to the streets in a show of support for him and the rump government the country’s generals have propped up. “I’ve never asked you for anything. I’m asking you to show the world. If violence is sought, or terrorism is sought, the military and the police are authorized to confront this.” After weeks of violent clashes, Gen. el-Sissi wasn’t interested in tamping down the unrest or demanding a return to calm; he was stirring Tahrir for his own ends.
He sounds like a man looking to start a fight — or at least for the political cover to begin a crackdown on his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood. Ever since el-Sissi ousted Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, on July 3, the government has increasingly used the “terrorist” label in association with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian military may desperately need that label to stick—because a threat like terrorism is the perfect legitimizing tool for a government that is being ruled by a military cabal. Having come to power through undemocratic means, the generals know that Egypt’s chaos can make their rule more necessary than ever. [Continue reading…]
Jonathan Cook writes: Over the past decade, Israel has surged up the arms trade’s international rankings. Despite having a population smaller than New York City, Israel has emerged as one of the world’s largest exporters of armaments.
Last month, defence analysts Jane’s put Israel in sixth place, ahead of China and Italy, both major weapons producers. Surveys that include Israel’s growing covert trade put it even higher, in fourth place, ahead of Britain and Germany, and beaten only by the United States, Russia and France.
The extent of Israel’s success in this market can be gauged by a simple mathematical calculation. With record sales last year of $7 billion (Dh25.7 billion), Israel earned nearly $1,000 from the arms trade per capita – up to 10 times the per capita income the US derives from its manufacture of weapons.
The Israeli economy’s reliance on arms dealing was highlighted this month when local courts forced officials to reveal data showing that some 6,800 Israelis are actively engaged in the business of arms exports. Separately, Ehud Barak, the defence minister in the last government, has revealed that 150,000 Israeli households – or about one in 10 of the population – depend economically on the weapons industry.
These disclosures aside, Israel has been loath to lift the shroud of secrecy that envelopes much of its arms trade, arguing further revelations would harm “national security and foreign relations”.
But a new documentary lifts the lid on the nature and scope of its arms business.
The Lab, which won a recent award at DocAviv, Israel’s documentary Oscars, is due to premiere in the US early next month. Directed by Yotam Feldman, the film presents the first close-up view of Israel’s arms industry and the dealers who have enriched themselves. The title relates to the film’s central argument that Israel has rapidly come to rely on the continuing captivity of Palestinians, in what are effectively the world’s largest open-air prisons. Massive profits are made from testing innovations on the more than four million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Attacks such as Operation Cast Lead of winter 2008-09 or last year’s Operation Pillar of Defence, the film argues, serve as little more than laboratory-style experiments to evaluate and refine the effectiveness of new military approaches, both strategies and weaponry. Gaza, in particular, has become the shop window for Israel’s military industries, allowing them to develop and market systems for long-term surveillance, control and subjugation of an “enemy” population. [Continue reading…]
This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning. By closing this banner, you agree to the use of cookies.
