Category Archives: Editorials

When government no longer prizes liberty, no one is safe

After 84-year-old Occupy Seattle participant Dorli Rainey was pepper sprayed by Seattle Police yesterday, she wrote: 'This is what democracy looks like. It certainly left an impression on the people who rode the No. 1 bus home with me. In the women's movement there were signs which said: Screw us and we multiply.'

When officials from 40 cities across America participated in conference calls on tackling the Occupy protests, they said their goal was to make the camps safe.

It sounds like the infamous attack on Ben Tre in the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

On a National Police Radio news bulletin yesterday afternoon, New York correspondent Robert Smith, reporting on the ongoing legal fight to reconstruct the camp at Ziccotti Park, said of the dispute: one person’s trash is another person’s free speech — overlooking the fact that what he referred to as “trash” were the personal belongings of others.

Likewise, when NPR reports on the destruction of camps, they happily parrot the police by using the term “dismantle” — as though officers take pains to find matching bags into which they can slip neatly folded sleeping bags, all the while making sure every item gets carefully tagged so later it can safely be returned to its owner.

In truth the camps have been dismantled in much the same way that Israeli soldiers “dismantle” Bedouin villages that the authorities deem illegal.

In many ways, the real clash is between those who cling to the anti-democratic powers that the state grabbed after 9/11, and those who dare to declare that we should no longer be governed by fear.

Tellingly, the authorities in New York planned the assault on Occupy Wall Street like a counterterrorism operation.

“From the beginning, I have said that the city had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters’ first amendment rights. But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority,” Mayor Bloomberg said, asserting that “safety” is more important than liberty.

The New York Times reported:

[T]he police operation to clear Zuccotti Park of protesters unfolded after two weeks of planning and training. Officials had prepared by watching how occupations in other cities played out. A major disaster drill was held on Randalls Island, with an eye toward Zuccotti. Officials increased so-called disorder training — counterterrorism measures that involve moving large numbers of police officers quickly — to focus on Lower Manhattan.

The last training session was on Monday night, on the Manhattan side of the East River. The orders to move into the park came down at the “last minute,” said someone familiar with the orders, which referred to the assignment only as “an exercise.”

“The few cops that I know that were called into this thing, they were not told it was for going into Zuccotti Park,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The only people who were aware of them going into Zuccotti Park were at the very highest levels of the department.”

Once the operation began, the area around the park was declared a “frozen zone”.

What gets frozen in a frozen zone? The U.S. Constitution — no more freedom of assembly, free speech, or free press.

The Associated Press reports on the spontaneously coordinated assault on Occupy camps across America:

As concerns over safety and sanitation grew at the encampments over the last month, officials from nearly 40 cities turned to each other on conference calls, sharing what worked and what hasn’t as they grappled with the leaderless movement.

In one case, the calls became group therapy sessions.

While riot police sweeping through tent cities in Portland, Ore., Oakland, Calif. and New York City over the last several days may suggest a coordinated effort, authorities and a group that organized the calls say they were a coincidence.

“It was completely spontaneous,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group that organized calls on Oct. 11 and Nov. 4. Among the issues discussed: safety, traffic and the fierceness of demonstrations in each city.

“This was an attempt to get insight on what other departments were doing,” he said.

From Atlanta to Washington, D.C., officials talked about how authorities could make camps safe for protesters and the community.

Has the United States really become a country where we are supposed to be afraid of freedom and nervous about democracy?

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UNESCO funding cut by U.S. puts millions of lives at risk — NYT science blogger blames the rest of the world

At his Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, Andrew Revkin points out the devastating consequences which may follow budget cuts at UNESCO, now that U.S. funding has been severed due to the U.N. agency’s acceptance of Palestine as a full member.

Revkin relays a report from Oakley Brooks, author of Tsunami Alert: Beating Asia’s Next Big One, who writes:

There are plenty of things that the multi-tentacled Unesco does, in its slow and bloated way, which the world really needs. One indispensable and thankless Unesco task is organizing tsunami warnings systems and pushing for tsunami education on risky shores around the world.

I have serious reservations about relying on warning systems near fault lines — they tend to make people complacent between events and confused during. But these systems are undeniable saviors for long-distance tsunamis, such as the one that traveled trans-Pacific, from Japan to the U.S. West Coast, last March.

It’s frustrating to think that the ever-widening collateral damage from American Holy Land politics would reach — like its own long-distance tsunami — into the essential work on tsunami science.

Since UNESCO’s loss of funding is due to a law passed by the US Congress back in 1990, before the Oslo Accords and before anyone in Washington professed their support for the creation of a Palestinian state, Oakley correctly attributes the source of the damage to American Holy Land politics.

Revkin, however, wants to locate the problem elsewhere:

To my mind, the 107 nations that voted for Palestine’s membership knew what the financial result would be, and were willing to put the agency’s operations at risk for the sake of making a geopolitical point. That seems unwise. But that’s a personal, not professional view, on my part.

Since the bulk of Revkin’s writing covers environmental issues, whatever views he might have about Israel and Palestine are hard to glean. But he certainly doesn’t lack an interest in politics. In the mid-90s he reported on multiple ways the Bush administration was interfering with science.

Perhaps he sees the UNESCO issue as just another example of politics intruding on the work of scientists. Yet he seems to assign a law passed by Congress with something like the immutable status of a law of physics and think that the political points are only being made at the U.N..

As Ian Williams notes:

The actual legislation [PDF] the state department invokes is a 1990 prohibition on funding “the United Nations or any specialised agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organisation the same standing as a member state”, and another in 1994 banning payments to “any affiliated organisation of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organisation or group that does not have the internationally recognised attributes of statehood”.

Any president, as we have seen, has ways to get around congressional mandates like this. For example, there are questions about which manifestation of Palestine is applying: the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The congressional legislation was passed before the Oslo accords – and before the US began funding the Palestinians directly, so an executive decision could have declared that events had overtaken the intent of the law, and, what is more, that it was not the PLO but the Palestinian state that had been admitted.

As for the second part, US diplomats will have fun explaining why the US maintains membership of the World Bank and IMF – which have admitted Kosovo, whose disputed territory and statehood, rightly or wrongly, has far less general recognition than Palestine’s.

Are there any other indications that Revkin may be subject to his own non-scientific slant when it comes to issues involving the Middle East?

Back in early February, when the Egyptian revolution was in full swing, Revkin was among those helping promote a fear that a wave of uprisings across the region might cause trouble for the United States if oil supplies were disrupted. At that moment, he and his interlocutor, Gal Luft, saw a beacon of hope being raised in Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu with an initiative aimed at ending global dependence on oil.

Revkin also sought council from leading neoconservative, James Woolsey. The former CIA director saw in Revkin’s inquiry an opportunity to preach about the fount of all peril: Iran.

The point is that this Iranian government will use any tool it can – religious and otherwise – to spread its influence. If we see demonstrations in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States it will be highly likely that more is going on, with an Iranian hand behind it, than just impressionable folks watching television and imitating what they see. It will be about Iran moving to build its ability to call the shots.

Does all of this imply that Revkin has his own Middle East agenda? Kind of, but I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with supporting Israel. It sounds more like a strain of environmentalist populism that wants to harness America’s isolationist and xenophobic trends as a means to break our dependence on oil.

The problem with reinforcing prejudice for the sake of a good cause is that the prejudice may end up being served better than the cause.

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Police state: Oakland looks more like Pearl Roundabout than Tahrir Square

If Tahrir Square inspires the Occupy movement, police forces across America appear to think the most useful lessons on handling popular unrest come from Pearl Roundabout, Bahrain. That means that when ordinary American citizens take a stand and symbolically proclaim: this is our land, the police will sooner or later respond with violence in order to assert the power of the state.

From that perspective, the lesson from Bahrain earlier this year was clear: all necessary force must be used in order to prevent protesters retaining their hold on an occupied public space.

This is being done in the name of public order, yet it appears to be a thinly veiled effort to crush political dissent — even while politicians voice sympathy with the concerns of the protesters. (Let’s not forget that the Bahraini royal family also knew how to make timely PR statements.)

Tools designed to quell riots and provide “non-lethal” means to rein in violent protests — tear gas, pepper spray, batons, and stun grenades — are now being used to suppress non-violent political protest.

This is how the Oakland police decided to assert state power yesterday afternoon and evening:

Tim at Occupy Oakland writes: Around 2am word spread that riot police were massing in around the area where Occupy Oakland has been for more than two weeks. Hundreds of people gathered and began to make non-violent barricades at all the entrances to the plaza.

At about 4:30am, riot police appeared on all corners of the encampment. There were roughly 500 to 700 riot police in total.

The entire plaza was completely barricaded on all sides, with palates, trash cans, chairs, a gigantic christmas wreath, police barricades from a neighboring street

Occupiers began chanting ‘go home’ as they always do when police show up at Occupy Oakland, but it quickly became clear that there was an overwhelming number of police from at least four different jurisdictions.

As people continued to chant and fell back within the barricade, off of the street, the police announced that we would be arrested within the encampment. They said [they’d use force to disperse demonstrators within] five minutes, and within a minute they fired the first rounds of flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets, and then tear gas into the camp, hitting and injuring multiple people. [Continue reading and see photos…]

San Francisco Chronicle reports: Police fired tear gas at least five times Tuesday night into a crowd of several hundred protesters backing the Occupy movement who unsuccessfully tried to retake an encampment outside Oakland City Hall that officers had cleared away more than 12 hours earlier.

Police gave repeated warnings to protesters to disperse from the entrance to Frank Ogawa Plaza at 14th Street and Broadway before firing several tear gas canisters into the crowd at about 7:45 p.m. Police had announced over a loudspeaker that those who refused to leave could be targeted by “chemical agents.”

Protesters scattered in both directions on Broadway as the tear gas canisters and several flash-bang grenades went off. Regrouping, protesters tried to help one another and offered each other eye drops.

One wounded woman, who others said had been hit by one of the canisters, was carried away by two protesters.

One protester, 35-year-old Jerry Smith, said a tear gas canister had rolled to his feet and sprayed him in the face.

“I got the feeling they meant business, but people were not going to be intimidated,” Smith said. “We can do this peacefully, but still not back down.”

Police forcibly dispersed the crowd with tear gas again about 9:30 p.m., when protesters began throwing objects at them. As protesters scattered, police closed off Broadway between 13th and 16th streets.

Minutes later, protesters regrouped at the 15th Street entrance to the plaza. Protesters began throwing objects again. Police responded by firing more tear gas canisters.

The protesters were trying to make good on a vow to retake an encampment that Occupy Oakland activists had inhabited for 15 days, until police evicted them early Tuesday.

The evening protest started around 5 p.m., when about 400 people began marching from the main library at 14th and Madison streets toward the plaza, which police had barricaded and city officials had declared would be closed for at least several days.

“We’re going to march and reclaim what was already ours, what we call Oscar Grant Plaza and what they call City Hall,” said protester Krystof Lopaur, referring to the unarmed man shot to death by a BART police officer in January 2009.

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Saudi Arabia needs powerful enemies more than ever

Tariq Alhomayed, Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, advises his readers that they should develop their understanding of the Washington bombing plot by paying attention to official statements — not the media. As the editor of a publication supporting the Saudi government, I guess he sees himself as more of a mouthpiece of government than as a journalist.

Reviving one of the favorite claims of the neocons, Alhomayed insinuates that al Qaeda is a proxy for Iran:

Had the planned assassination of the Saudi Ambassador succeeded – God forbid – we would have seen a statement issued by al-Qaeda claiming that the operation was in retaliation to the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the real story would be lost as usual.

Alhomayed then gets even more carried away by likening Saudi Arabia to the World Trade Center and Iran to the 9/11 hijackers:

Tehran wants to target the only high-rise building in our region, namely Saudi Arabia, more than ever before. With the consecutive impact of the Arab political earthquake upon most principal Arab states, only one Arab edifice remains intact; Saudi Arabia, with its religious, economic and political weight.

What for others is likened to Spring, for the Saudis feels like an earthquake.

Ironically, Saudi Arabia and Iran both face the same enemy: democracy. Yet each must direct attention away from this internal threat by pointing to an external and existential threat. The fact that the US government is such a willing collaborator in this counter-democratic program suggests that it too is becoming unnerved by emerging and unwelcome democratic possibilities.

The Obama administration’s willingness to support Saudi Arabia’s counter-revolutionary efforts has nowhere been more evident than in Washington’s tepid response to the brutal suppression of Bahrain’s democracy movement. This has provided part of the context in which the Saudis now feel at liberty to inject yet another twist to a story that is still being written.

McClatchy reports:

[A]n adviser to the Saudi government said that Gholam Shakuri, named in the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal complaint as the Iranian official supporting the plot, was already known to the Saudi government as one of the officers who directed Iranian support to Shiite Muslims in Bahrain when they rose up in February to demand political rights from the minority Sunni regime.

“The officer does exist, and we have known him for a while,” said the adviser, Nawaf Obeid. He said that based on telephone intercepts and other intelligence, the Bahraini and Saudi governments believe that Shakuri, a colonel, had urged protesters to go to the Saudi embassy and backed a plan to take control of Bahrain’s state television.

Like Gaddafi, the Saudis want to cast the Arab Awakening as a destabilizing force, not only as great as the threat from terrorism but intimately tied to terrorism.

Meanwhile, the people of Bahrain understand that an American president who shows much more concern about the danger posed by a scatterbrained used-car salesman than he does about the threat the Bahrain government poses to its own people, also know that the struggle for freedom is one they must continue to fight largely on their own. Obama has no tangible support to offer.

Reuters reports:

In a defiant show of unity, Bahrain opposition parties have jointly denounced the Sunni-ruled Gulf Arab island as a police state and demanded a transition to a constitutional monarchy.

Five groups, including the main Shi’ite party Wefaq and the secular Waad party, vowed to keep up a pro-democracy campaign with peaceful rallies and marches — despite a Saudi-backed government crackdown that crushed similar protests in March.

In their “Manama Document,” the first such joint statement since the unrest, the opposition groups said Bahrain was a police state akin to those that prevailed in Egypt and Tunisia before popular uprisings swept their leaders from power.

The document, issued on Wednesday, said the ruling Al Khalifa family’s role should be to “govern without powers” in a constitutional monarchy, drawing attacks from pro-government media which described it as a power grab by majority Shi’ites.

Unrest still roils Bahrain months after the ruling family brought in troops from Sunni allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help crush a protest movement they said was fomented by Iran and had Shi’ite sectarian motives.

The government says nightly clashes between police and Shi’ite villagers and other forms of civil disobedience are hurting the economy of the banking and tourism hub. Many firms have relocated elsewhere in the Gulf.

A military court has convicted 21 opposition figures, human rights campaigners and online activists who led the protests of trying to overthrow the ruling system. Eight were jailed for life. Waad leader Ibrahim Sharif, a Sunni, received a five-year sentence.

“In pursuit of democracy, opposition forces intend to fully and solely embrace peaceful measures,” the Manama Document said, calling for a direct dialogue between the government and opposition, backed by unspecified international guarantees.

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Overblown fears about the rise of Islamists in Libya

In the United States, the term Islamist is often one small step away from al Qaeda. The idea that someone could be an Islamist and not an extremist seems barely conceivable. And the existence of pro-Western Islamists sounds about as probable as the discovery of unicorns.

When the New York Times declares, in one of its typically meal-mouthed headlines, “Islamists’ Growing Sway Raises Questions for Libya” we know that “questions” is an oblique way of saying fears.

Yet Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and the first high-level US official to visit Libya since the fall of Gaddafi, says:

“We aren’t concerned that one group is going to dominate the aftermath of what has been a common struggle by the Libyan people to open the door to a better future.”

He added: “I think it is something that everybody is watching; first of all, the Libyan people themselves are talking about this.”

But based on what he has heard from Libyans across the political spectrum, Mr. Feltman said, there is “a shared desire for a different type of Libya that is going to have to take into account a lot of political trends.”

One of the most commonly voiced fears about the Islamists is that they are well organized — as though their organizational skills give them an unfair advantage.

“There will be attempts by some parties to take over; it’s only natural,” said one prominent official with the Transitional National Council, who spoke anonymously so as not to alienate Islamists. “And definitely [the Islamist umbrella group] Etilaf is trying to increase its influence. And we’re hearing much more from the Islamists in the media because they are more organized and they are more articulate.”

Aref Nayed, coordinator of the Transitional National Council’s stabilization team and a prominent religious scholar, responds:

“My answer to anyone who complains about that: You must be as articulate as they are and as organized as they are,” he said. “And I think we’re starting to see that among various youth groups.”

The inclination of journalists and other Western observers to see in Libya the makings of a potentially violent power struggle seems to say more about their own preconceptions than it does about what’s actually happening.

Rory Stewart, who had been critical of NATO for, in his opinion, moving well beyond its mandate, nevertheless saw, during his recent visit, evidence that the power dynamics in the new Libya are refreshingly healthy.

Since Gaddafi’s state was not powerful, its fall may have comparatively little effect. Security in the streets was provided almost from the start by neighbourhood committees, many organised from mosques; their effectiveness and legitimacy was taken almost for granted and they did not seem (yet) to be abusing their power. The lack of foreigners allowed Libyans to feel that the revolution was theirs, not an international production. It also meant that our curious priorities and processes were not imposed on Libyan politics. The Islamists and the Gaddafi loyalists couldn’t portray the new government as a puppet, or market themselves as fighting for Libya and Islam against a foreign military occupation.

Even the improvisatory, passive nature of the opposition may have been constructive. It included many members of Gaddafi’s government who were working from the very beginning to make links with their former colleagues. When the politician Abdul Hafiz Ghoga arrived in Benghazi and criticised the council, they invited him in. They seemed to be able to incorporate Islamists with equal ease. Every time they described their strategy, they talked about compromise and negotiation. Sometimes people spoke like this in Afghanistan and Iraq too – explaining how easy it would be to cut deals with the Taliban or the Sunni insurgency – but the US-led coalition rarely let them try.

And then there was their attitude to the West. I expected the minister of health – a British-Libyan doctor who knew I was an MP – to present a shopping list of demands. But when I asked him about foreign support, he said that Libya had been ‘well-supported by Qatar and the UAE, by Turkey and Tunisia’. And there he stopped. When I asked about the UN agencies and NGOs, he said he had seen a bit of them in ‘stake-holder meetings’ held on Tuesdays in Benghazi, but the meetings had petered out. He implied that the processes for getting support from Western aid agencies were far too bureaucratic, that he would stick with Middle Eastern cash, confident that Libya would get what it needed. The mixture of self-importance and desperation that created the destructive, co-dependent marriage between foreigners and locals in Afghanistan seems to be entirely absent in Libya.

Abdul Basset Haroun al-Shahaidi, a top rebel commander, tells the Washington Post: “The Islamic groups want a democratic country, and they want to go to the mosque without being arrested. They’re looking for freedom like everyone else.”

What concerns many Libyans now, more than Western fears about Islamists, is the ability of remnants of the old regime to incorporate themselves into the new government.

“I’m not an Islamist, but I feel like I have more in common with the Islamists than I do with the secularists who are in the picture right now,” an NTC official tells a correspondent for Time. “Why? Because I think the Islamists have no connection with the old regime. They’re more nationalist. And they have no frozen assets, that’s for sure.”

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How can Israel survive without growing up?

“Which prosperous ally gets $3 billion a year in aid, and a veto power over America’s entire Mid-East foreign policy? Which ally refuses to cooperate with its military and political protector – even to the point of humiliating a duly elected American president? Which ally violates the Non-Proliferation treaty and manages to get its super-power protector to maintain total silence on this glaring fact? Which ally is threatening conventional warfare if its own nuclear monopoly in the region is in any way threatened?” asks Andrew Sullivan.

“Israel is the exception to every rule. And its intransigence is beginning to force the US toward a horrible choice between allying ourselves with the tectonic democratic forces in the region, or backing a fundamentalist-dominated state bent on expansion and war.”

Sullivan hasn’t turned into a fringe anti-Zionist blogger. He’s merely echoing views that are expressed much more freely in Washington than mainstream media reports generally reveal.

Robert Gates, having served as defense secretary for both presidents Bush and Obama, clearly wasn’t a political maverick when he ran the Pentagon, yet his assessment of Israel was no less blunt than Sullivan’s.

As Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg recounted last week:

In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security — access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing — and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee.

Gates has expressed his frustration with Netanyahu’s government before. Last year, when Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was marred by an announcement of plans to build new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, Gates told several people that if he had been Biden, he would have returned to Washington immediately and told the prime minister to call Obama when he was serious about negotiations.

Even so, having thoroughly alienated himself from the Obama administration, who does Netanyahu turn to in a desperate situation?

Former Director of the Mossad Efraim Halevy, speaking in New York on Monday night, described the predicament the Israeli prime minister found himself in on Friday as protesters in Cairo were storming the Israeli embassy and six Israelis remained trapped inside.

[Netanyahu] turned to one man, to the President of the United States, and he spoke to him. And the president of the United States, without having much time to consult with Congress, and with the media, and with the analysts and with all of the other people who have to be consulted on major and grave decisions. He took a decision to take up the telephone and get on the line with the powers that be in Egypt, and get them to order the release of these six people, and the detail of the Egyptian commando forces entered and saved them.

I think that this decision by President Obama was a unique decision in many ways. Because I don’t have to tell you, and this was just said time and time and over again this afternoon/this evening, that the United States is not in a position the way it was many years ago in the Middle East, it has its problems, it has its considerations, and rightly so. But I believe the leadership that the President of the United States showed on that night was a leadership of historic dimensions. It was he who took the ultimate decision that night which prevented what could have been a sad outcome—instead of six men coming home, the arrival in Israel of six body bags.

And I want to say to you very openly and very clearly that had there been six body bags, there would have been a much different Israel today than we have been used to seeing over recent years. This would not have been one more incident, one more operation, one event. And the man who brought this about was one man and that was President Barack Hussein Obama.

And I believe it is our duty as Israelis, as citizens of the free world, to say, not simply thank you President Obama, but also we respect you for the way and the manner in which you took this decision.

Note first the ominous way in which Halevy says that had these Israelis died this would not have been “one more incident” — unlike, say, the deaths of six Egyptian border guards shot by Israelis in late August, or the deaths of nine Turkish activists killed by Israeli commandos on board the Mavi Marmara just over a year ago.

But note also that Israel, while pursuing what a senior Israeli official describes as a “porcupine policy” to defend itself, when caught in this particular corner found its prickles of no use and instead was compelled to turn to its only reliable protector, the United States.

As Tzipi Livni, the head of the Kadima Party, told Goldberg: “For Israelis, when they wake up in the morning and ask themselves, what is the general situation today, the litmus test for them is the health of the relationship between Israel and the United States.”

And thus we see the contradiction which is Israel — forever pumping itself up, flexing its muscles and showing its neighbors that no one should risk messing with the mighty Zionist state, yet all the while knowing that without the protection of the United States, Israel’s survival would depend on a revolutionary transformation.

Absent American protection, Israel, for the first time, would have to seriously take on the challenge of getting along with its neighbors and not, as it has for the last two decades, simply use diplomacy as a facade behind which it can pursue its policies of territorial expansion.

Is the West’s spoiled child ready to grow up? And is the United States ready to see that its own patronage is what has allowed the Jewish state to trap itself in such a prolonged adolescence?

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The cowards’ logic that has governed America since 9/11

In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has provided grants for hundreds of police departments across America to buy $300,000 Lenco BearCats in the name of counter-terrorism.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, a strange consensus quickly emerged in Washington: this was just al Qaeda’s first homeland assault. There would be further attacks and most likely what was to come would be even worse — far worse.

With a sense of foreboding and determination we ventured into the third great era for America as world leader — what was briefly dubbed a New American Century.

First came the fight against global fascism which resulted in unqualified victory at the end of World War Two.

Then came the American-led Western alliance to halt the advance of communism.

Even if the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t bring communism to an end, the end of the Cold War supposedly marked the dawn of a New Global Order in which America reigned supreme as the sole Super Power.

And if after the Cold War, a decade of globalization lacked the ideological clarity needed to satisfy conservative America’s sense of righteousness and moral purpose, or the military focus that would satisfy the Pentagon, all of that was to end with 9/11 as once again the United States assumed its role as world savior.

A president whose own sense of purpose had until then extended no further than his desire to continue a family tradition, was now fired up with a mission as he led the world in a struggle between good and evil.

Yet behind Bush’s apparent boldness was the confidence of a man making a very safe bet.

In response to the attacks the president and the political class across America made a simple calculation: if they were to overstate the threat posed by terrorism they could do so with virtually no political risk and potentially great political rewards. Indeed, the greater the exaggeration the less the risk.

At the same time an honest assessment of the threat posed by al Qaeda would be freighted with enormous risk.

That meant that a dishonest assessment of the threat posed by terrorism would also be a safe assessment.

If there were no further major attacks then this would be taken as the measure of a successful counter-terrorism policy; not a reflection of al Qaeda’s inherent weakness.

Bush immediately understood this and quickly declared war. This, the neocons rapturously declared, was Bush’s great “insight”: we’re at war.

Since we couldn’t be sure exactly where the enemy was located, then just to be safe, we assumed he was everywhere. So this wasn’t going to be just another war — it would be a global war.

America had defeated fascism and then communism and now it was going to take on a battle soon predicted to last for the rest of our lives: a long war against global terrorism.

With the smoke still rising from the ruins of the Twin Towers, no one had the guts to state the obvious: whatever threat al Qaeda might pose, it was surely minute compared to the Soviet nuclear arsenal during the Cold War or the nation-crushing military forces of Japan and Germany during World War Two.

If 9/11 had really been another Pearl Harbor, where was the amassed power that made it clear: this is just the beginning, there is much worse to come?

Asymmetric threats notwithstanding, could a few terrorist camps in eastern Afghanistan really constitute a credible threat to the preeminent military and economic power in the world?

Even if there was evidence that al Qaeda had diabolical ambitions, the evidence of its capabilities was much less impressive. When the long-predicted follow-up attacks emerged, they weren’t exactly attacks on America. Shoe bombers and underpants bombers could put hundreds of lives at risk but they didn’t really threaten a whole nation.

The cowards’ logic dictates, however, that no risk is too small and no security strategy too expensive. America could never become too safe.

The application of this logic not only opened the door to the creation of a massive new government bureaucracy, Homeland Security — along with its attendant terrorism industry — but it also made a war against Iraq look unavoidable.

An operational link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda did not need to be conclusively proved; it would be sufficient to merely generate fear about such a possibility. We didn’t need to know that he had weapons of mass destruction; we merely needed to fear that he might soon possess them.

Again and again we were impressed to believe that possible threats were more important than imminent danger. Fear became the signpost to necessity.

And the political class, whether inside or outside government, bought into this idea with virtually no dissent.

By the time this strategic outlook could be seen to have bankrupted this country, everyone who had been promoting it would have already reaped their own political and material rewards.

If challenged — don’t you think you’ve spent too much? — the glib answer was bound to come back: who can set a price on the value of American life?

Well, tell that to the unemployed. Tell that to Americans who have vastly less reason to worry about al Qaeda than they do about paying their mortgage.

A decade after 9/11 how many Americans should be in any doubt that $6 trillion is too much?

“There’s going to be a terrorist strike some day,” warns former Bush administration official Richard Clarke. “And when there is, if you’ve reduced the terrorism budget, the other party — whoever the other party is at the time — is going to say that you were responsible for the terrorist strike because you cut back the budget. And so it’s a very, very risky thing to do.”

But note, very clearly: that is a political risk — much less a security risk. It endangers politicians much more than the people they represent.

“You can look, if you’re objective,” acknowledges Clarke, “at all of this money and all of this effort and say: What would have happened if we hadn’t done that? And in almost every case, nothing would have happened.

“It’s true that there hasn’t been another attack. It’s not true that all of this expenditure and all of these people have stopped it.”

Immediately after 9/11 the most frequently cited threat to America supposedly came from al Qaeda sleeper cells — an invisible enemy within, poised to strike again. Such sleeper cells either never woke up, or more likely never existed.

Instead, a different threat emerged — not one made up of a few fanatical Muslims, but instead filled with thousands of seemingly loyal Americans. Men and women who thought that they could help protect this country and get rich in the process. Like traders in a stock market for emotions, they realized that fear would never get over-priced.

As this country faces a much graver economic threat than any threat from terrorism, political boldness and courage are called for, yet none can be found. America’s political, military and commercial elites have spent the last decade betting on fear, investing in fear and consumed by fear.

In a culture of unchallenged fear, we find thus ourselves ruled by cowards.

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Israel’s only diplomat in Egypt now hiding in US embassy in Cairo

At some point, will it dawn on the Israelis that constructing walls is not the magic solution to all their security problems?

After Israel enraged many Egyptians by killing five border guards on August 18 (a sixth who was shot in the same incident died today), the Israeli government thought it would be prudent to install a 15-foot concrete barrier around its embassy in Cairo.

Bad move. As Issandr El Amrani noted:

The construction of a wall outside the embassy was almost a provocation to people to come and bring it down. The symbolism of a wall was not lost on any one and merely angered people.

After protesters stormed the embassy on Friday night, Egyptian authorities only moved in to protect the Israeli staff after the Obama administration interceded on Israel’s behalf. Even then, it took two hours before U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was able to speak to Supreme Military Council head Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

Haaretz reported:

“There’s no time to waste,” Panetta reportedly told Tantawi in the 1 A.M. call, warning of a tragic outcome that “would have very severe consequences.”

The U.S. source also said that Tantawi failed to answer incoming calls from U.S. officials throughout the evening, finally answering after more than two hours of attempts.

Nominally, Egypt is one of Israel’s only allies in the Middle East, but as Israelis are now acutely aware, there’s a big difference between an alliance with Hosni Mubarak and cordial relations with the Egyptian people.

Israel has now pulled out all its embassy staff and their families leaving behind just one diplomat, its deputy ambassador who has taken refuge at the US embassy.

The flight of the Israelis from Egypt comes just a few days before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan is about to arrive in Cairo where he will address a meeting of Arab foreign ministers on Tuesday. Some reports say that he might travel from Cairo for a brief visit to Gaza.

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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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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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The CIA’s ties to the Gaddafi regime

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency and Libyan intelligence services developed such a tight relationship during the George W. Bush administration that the U.S. shipped terror suspects to Libya for interrogation and suggested the questions they should be asked, according to documents found in Libya’s External Security agency headquarters.

The relationship was close enough that the CIA moved to establish “a permanent presence” in Libya in 2004, according to a note from Stephen Kappes, at the time the No. 2 in the CIA’s clandestine service, to Libya’s then-intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa.

The memo began “Dear Musa,” and was signed by hand, “Steve.” Mr. Kappes was a critical player in the secret negotiations that led to Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s 2003 decision to give up his nuclear program. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Kappes, who has retired from the agency, declined to comment.

A U.S. official said Libya had showed progress at the time. “Let’s keep in mind the context here: By 2004, the U.S. had successfully convinced the Libyan government to renounce its nuclear-weapons program and to help stop terrorists who were actively targeting Americans in the U.S. and abroad,” the official said.

The files documenting the renewal of ties between the CIA and Libyan intelligence were reviewed and copied by researchers from Human Rights Watch during a tour of Libya’s External Security agency headquarters in downtown Tripoli. Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert said he was touring the building on Friday as part of the group’s effort to help the Libyan transitional authority secure sensitive documents left by the Gadhafi regime, which collapsed in August after a five-month rebellion.

Mr. Bouckaert said he discovered the files inside the complex in a room that guards described as the former office of Mr. Koussa, who became foreign minister in 2009. Mr. Bouckaert photographed the documents, leaving the originals in their place, and gave copies to The Wall Street Journal.

Human Rights Watch has been critical of the U.S. policy of sending terror suspects to third countries for interrogation, a practice known as rendition. The practice dates at least to 1995, when Egypt began aiding the U.S. with rendition.

U.S. officials say they obtained assurances from the recipient countries that the rendered detainees would be treated humanely. “There are lots of countries willing to take terrorists off the street who want to kill Americans,” the U.S. official said. “That doesn’t mean U.S. concerns about human rights are ignored in the process.”

In an April 15, 2004 letter to Libyan intelligence, the CIA proposed the rendition of another man, saying, “We respectfully request an expression of interest from your service regarding taking custody.”

Citing “recently developed agreements,” the CIA asked the Libyans to “agree to take our requirements for debriefings of [the suspect], as well as a guarantee that [his] human rights will be protected.”

The files also show the close relationship that some British intelligence officials had with Mr. Koussa.

Mr. Koussa, who defected from Col. Gadhafi’s government in March, was credited with helping negotiate Libya’s rapprochement with the international community and bartering an end to sanctions in return for Libya renouncing its weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Yet he was also one of the stalwarts of the Gadhafi regime and headed the foreign intelligence service during a time when many Western officials believed Col. Gadhafi was funding and supporting international terrorist groups. In 1980, he was expelled from his diplomatic post in the U.K. after calling in a newspaper interview for the killing of Libyan dissidents in Great Britain. Libya later claimed he had been misquoted.

By the early years of the George W. Bush administration, however, as seen in the 2004 memo, Mr. Kappes was writing to Mr. Koussa: “Libya’s cooperation on WMD and other issues, as well as our nascent intelligence cooperation mean that now is the right moment to move ahead.”

The intelligence services had discussed the move for “quite some time” Mr. Kappes wrote.

The files provide an extraordinary window into the highly secretive and controversial practice of rendition, whereby the agency would send detainees to other countries for interrogation, including ones known for harsh treatment of detainees. The program was ramped up for terror detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks.

When taking over the CIA at the outset of the Obama administration, then-director Leon Panetta said the agency would continue to use rendition, but would seek assurances that the detainee wouldn’t be tortured—which has been the standing U.S. policy. Mr. Panetta left the CIA two months ago to lead the Pentagon.

“We are eager to work with you in the questioning of the terrorist we recently rendered to your country,” Mr. Kappes wrote in the memo, adding that he would like to send two more officers to Libya to question a suspect directly.

A lengthy profile of Kappes appeared in Washingtonian Magazine last year written by Jeff Stein, the SpyTalk columnist for the Washington Post. Stein’s account describes Kappes as resolutely loyal, dedicated, well-liked, politically skilled, and incompetent. Under his watch, the CIA was implicated in fraud, rape, and homicide.

Jeffrey Castelli, a friend of Kappes, had a pivotal role in propagating myths about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Castelli passed along the bogus intelligence that allowed President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech to claim that Saddam had attempted to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger.

Castelli then oversaw the kidnapping of Abu Omar off a Milan street, which led to him and 24 other CIA agents being indicted by Italian magistrates.

In spite of this track record, “in 2008, Kappes picked Castelli to run the CIA’s New York station, one of the agency’s most prestigious appointments. Shock turned into protest, according to CIA insiders, forcing Kappes to drop the idea. Castelli soon retired.”

Kappes’s rise to behind-the-scenes stardom in the intelligence community is a lesson in how to maneuver in Washington: It’s one thing to be successful in the field; it’s more valuable to convince Congress you’re effective. “Kappes runs better ops on the Hill and with the White House than he ran human sources in the field,” a CIA veteran says in what turns out to be a consistent refrain.

“He’s the Teflon Don,” says a veteran of the CIA’s Operations Directorate, renamed the National Clandestine Service in 2005. “Nothing bad ever sticks to him.”

Over more than 20 years with the CIA, Kappes’s career has taken him through most of the world’s cold- and hot-war battlefields from India and Pakistan to Germany and Russia. But the journey of Kappes from secret agent to CIA superstar began in Libya.

In March 2003, leader Muammar Qaddafi signaled that he was ready to jump-start his on-again, off-again campaign to end his long diplomatic and commercial isolation, get off Washington’s list of terrorist states, and get back into the oil business with the West. Two years earlier, he’d dispatched one of his top operatives, Michigan State–educated Mousa Kousa, to a clandestine meeting in London with top CIA and British intelligence officials. Kousa carried with him the names of some of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates, including Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan who would soon be the first major catch in the CIA’s pursuit of al-Qaeda. But with Qaddafi dragging his feet on final payouts over Libya’s 1988 downing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, negotiations stalled.

Then, with American and British troops massing to invade Iraq, Qaddafi decided it was time to talk again—in secret.

President George W. Bush and CIA chief George Tenet, desperate for intelligence on al-Qaeda, decided the time was ripe, too. But they wanted something big in return, a “deliverable,” as Bush put it: Qaddafi’s public renunciation of his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

For the secret mission to Tripoli to work out the deal, they chose Steve Kappes.

By 2003, Kappes was deeply schooled in the dark arts. He had been station chief in Kuwait and Moscow. At a CIA station in Frankfurt, he had run highly sensitive operations targeting Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, and he had served in Pakistan, which sheltered its own nuclear-bomb effort. For the past year, as associate deputy director for operations, he had supervised some of the CIA’s most secret programs, from “extraordinary renditions”—kidnapping terrorist suspects abroad—to the agency’s secret foreign prisons to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Then came Libya.

“Clearly, Kappes was a man who could keep a secret, and Bush gave him one: No one at State or Defense, not even Rumsfeld or Powell, should know about this major initiative,” Ron Suskind wrote in the Washington Monthly. Suskind’s account of the clandestine affair was one of a flurry of flattering articles about Kappes that began surfacing in the spring of 2006 as pressure was building to bring Kappes back to Langley.

The Libyan mission was a “lengthy dialogue, a delicate and subtle dance,” wrote Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball, quoting an anonymous former agency official. “And Steve handled it very well.”

Qaddafi did renounce his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, allowing the Bush administration to claim that regime change in Iraq was already paying dividends elsewhere. After the Lockerbie claims were finally settled, diplomatic recognition came. The oil companies moved into Libya.

Washington, the story went, had eliminated a potential threat and gained an ally in the “war on terror.”

But on closer examination, some thought Qaddafi got the better end of it: His nuclear effort had never really gotten off the ground, intelligence sources say, despite the acquisition of millions of dollars of black-market equipment and supplies from Pakistani rogue nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan.

Qaddafi liked to buy stuff that was way beyond his scientists’ ken to assemble, a former top CIA official says.

Nor were Qaddafi’s other WMD programs much to write home about, according to the Monterey Institute’s Jonathan Tucker, one of the foremost WMD experts.

Libya’s chemical-warfare capability was “quite limited,” Tucker says. “Although Libya wanted to expand its chemical arsenal to include nerve agents, it did not have the materials, equipment, or know-how needed to do so. The nuclear program, however embryonic, was perceived as being of greater potential value, but after the interdiction of [A.Q. Khan’s] centrifuges en route to Libya, Qaddafi began to view his WMD programs as a security risk rather than an asset.”

Kappes has a reputation for micromanagement, right down to his recent insistence on selecting applicants for a two-person station. Therefore, says a former high-level official, Kappes had to know—and approve of—virtually everything that went on in the counterterrorism program after 9/11.

“All decision making in the Directorate of Operations flowed through the ADDO,” or assistant deputy director of operations, the position Kappes held when the war on terror ramped up in 2002–04, says a former top official during that era. “And he was specifically in a position of decision making and influence and persuasion. . . . So any decision or voice he gave to a particular point of view would have been, and was, given great consideration.”

“So if he was opposed to [waterboarding] and made his position known,” the former official adds, “that would have carried great weight. After all, not only was he ADDO, but don’t forget that at the same time he was carrying water for the White House on the Libya stuff and had a personal relationship, he claimed, with the President. So if he was able to do what he did on Libya, he should have been able to persuade the same decision makers with respect to enhanced interrogation techniques if he actually was opposed to them.”

It’s not likely Kappes was opposed to such programs, says a retired station chief who knows Kappes well: “He’s very jingoistic, very much a believer in American exceptionalism and the leading place the United States has in the world.”

Says John Sifton, a private investigator and attorney in New York who has carried out extensive research on the CIA’s secret programs for law firms and human-rights groups: “It strains credulity for him to say, ‘I didn’t know, I wasn’t involved.’ His denials would be like the Yankees pitching coach saying he didn’t know the playoffs rotation.”

“He became ADDO in the fall of 2002,” Sifton said, “just as the CIA was expanding its program for secret prisons and harsh interrogations and as it continued its renditions program with zeal.”

In at least one case, Kappes didn’t stay far away, sources say. According to an internal investigation, he helped tailor the agency’s paper trail regarding the death of a detainee at a secret CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan, known internally as the Salt Pit.

The detainee froze to death after being doused with water, stripped naked, and left alone overnight, according to reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He was secretly buried and his death kept “off-the-books,” the Post said.

According to two former officials who read a CIA inspector general’s report on the incident, Kappes coached the base chief—whose identity is being withheld at the request of the CIA—on how to respond to the agency’s investigators. They would report it as an accident.

“The ADDO’s direction to the field officer anticipated that something worse had occurred and so gave him directions on how to report the situation in his cable,” one of the former officials says.

“The ADDO basically told the officer, ‘Don’t put something in the report that can’t be proved or that you are going to have trouble explaining.’ In essence, the officer was told: Be careful what you put in your cable because the investigators are coming out there and they will pick your cable apart, and any discrepancies will be difficult to explain.”

As a result, the former official says, the Salt Pit officer’s cable was “minimalist in its reporting” on what happened to the prisoner. “It seems to me the ADDO should have been telling him, ‘Report the truth, don’t hold anything back, there’s an investigative team coming out, be honest and forthright. But that was not the message that was given to the chief of base by the ADDO.”

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How Israel got away with murder on the Mavi Marmara

The long-delayed and long-awaited UN report [PDF] on the Mavi Marmara massacre has finally been released by the New York Times.

I guess the newspaper feels a responsibility that it should spin this as much in Israel’s favor as possible before the report get’s officially released.

“Report Finds Naval Blockade by Israel Legal but Faults Raid,” says the headline. The siege is OK. Executing unarmed activists is not OK.

“Israel considers the report to be a rare vindication for it in the United Nations,” we are told.

There are a few unpleasant pesky detail however. Go all the way down to paragraph seventeen of the Times article and we learn:

The report assailed Israel for the way in which the nine were killed and others injured. “Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel,” it says. The report does, however, acknowledge that once on board the commandos had to defend themselves against violent attack. The report also criticizes Israel’s subsequent treatment of passengers, saying it “included physical mistreatment, harassment and intimidation, unjustified confiscation of belongings and the denial of timely consular assistance.”

Like so many elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the events on the Mavi Marmara produced two fiercely competing narratives, each full of self-justification and contempt for the other.

And couldn’t we move forward so much more easily if it wasn’t for those fiercely competing narratives.

But just a minute. The panel — even if it’s conclusion amounted to saying, can’t you all just learn to get along — did actually note that Israel provided no information whatsoever on the circumstances in which nine men were killed. And had those deaths not occurred, there would have been no inquiry.

Let’s repeat that. After nine men were killed on board the Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010, and the United Nations conducted a commission of inquiry into this incident, Israel provided no information whatsoever on the circumstances in which each of these deaths occurred.

The Israeli Point of Contact sought to explain to the Panel that the chaotic circumstances of the situation, made it “difficult to identify specific incidents described by soldiers as related to a specific casualty from among the nine activists who died during the takeover.” This is greatly to be regretted.

Indeed — especially since the evidence — bullets shot between the eyes or in the back of the head — strongly suggests that several of these deaths involved cool calculation. In other words, these were execution-style killings.

These are the descriptions of deaths about which the UN panel regrets Israel could offer no further information:

In the Panel’s view the following facts are of particular concern and have not been adequately answered in the material provided by Israel. Although the Israeli Point of Contact provided a general response to these points, he was unable to provide the Panel with more detailed information, particularly with respect to the death of the passenger described below:

  • Seven of the nine persons killed received multiple gunshot wounds to critical regions of the body: Ali Bengi, Cengiz Akyüz, Çetin Topçuoğlu, Fahri Yaldız, Furkan Doğan, İbrahim Bilgen and Necdet Yıldırım.
  • Five of those killed had bullet wounds indicating they had been shot from behind: Cengiz Akyüz, Çetin Topçuoğlu, Necdet Yıldırım, Furkan Doğan and İbrahim Bilgen. This last group included three with bullet wounds to the back of the head: Cengiz Akyüz, Çetin Topçuoğlu and Furkan Doğan. İbrahim Bilgen was killed by a shot to the right temple.
  • Two people were killed by a single bullet wound: Cevdet Kılıçlar was killed by a single shot between the eyes; and Cengiz Songür was killed by a shot to the base of the throat.
  • At least one of those killed, Furkan Doğan, was shot at extremely close range. Mr. Doğan 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.
  • No evidence has been provided to establish that any of the deceased were armed with lethal weapons. Video footage shows one passenger holding only an open fire hose being killed by a single shot to the head or throat fired from a speedboat.
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White House guidelines on 9/11 messaging — don’t mention Baghdad

The New York Times in its Izvestia-like role as mouthpiece for the White House, shares some of the guidelines that have been sent to government officials with directions on how they should talk about 9/11, as its tenth anniversary approaches. Goodness knows what any of them might say if they were not provided with clear instructions on how to speak and think.

The documents being reported on have been distributed to hundreds, perhaps thousands of officials. They are referred to as “internal documents” which leads me to doubt that they are even classified as confidential, yet the Times, prissy as ever, didn’t publish the documents — merely quoted from them liberally.

There are two sets of guidelines — one on how American officials should communicate with other Americans and the other on how to talk to everyone else.

[T]he guidelines aimed at foreign audiences … call on American officials to praise overseas partners and their citizens, who have joined the worldwide effort to combat violent extremism.

“As we commemorate the citizens of over 90 countries who perished in the 9/11 attacks, we honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation around the world,” the overseas guidelines state. “We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families, and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London.”

Bali or Belfast?

There was a much more obvious city beginning with “B” to couple with Bali.

Baghdad.

After all, more innocent civilians have died in terrorist attacks in that city alone in the last decade than in every other location on the planet where attacks have occurred.

Of course the subject of terrorism in Iraq is awkward for Americans since the lines between terrorism and warfare so often became blurred on an American-made battlefield that quickly became a terrorist training ground.

The report notes:

Some senior administration officials involved in the discussions noted that the tone set on this Sept. 11 should be shaped by a recognition that the outpouring of worldwide support for the United States in the weeks after the attacks turned to anger at some American policies adopted in the name of fighting terror — on detention, on interrogation, and the decision to invade Iraq.

So what tangible form does that recognition take?

Everyone should maintain a polite silence about Iraq. Oh… and don’t mention al Qaeda either. With bin Laden dead, al Qaeda is totally passé.

Let’s focus on the future (“present a positive, forward-looking narrative”) while we remember the past.

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The myth of terrorism

The power of language cannot be overstated. Nowhere is this more evident than in the power embedded in the word terrorism — a word which has governed political thought for much of the last decade.

Political acts of violence are older than humanity. Among chimpanzees, for instance, the contest for social power can sometimes be deadly. The killing of an alpha male by socially related chimps is a political act of violence for the purpose of realigning the social order, yet no one would be silly enough to suggest that chimpanzees face a threat from terrorism (even if chimps can indeed terrorize their companions!).

Political acts of violence is a phrase and not a word because it refers to a very broad collection of events that cannot neatly and meaningfully be circumscribed and turned into a thing. Such acts are as diverse in their reasons as they are in their distribution.

But give this amorphous entity a name, terrorism, and suddenly it becomes homogenous. One act of terrorism can be linked to another because they are both, supposedly, the same thing — both performed by the same people: terrorists. The idea that terrorists all share common attributes then reinforces the idea that wherever terrorism takes place we should be united in our response.

Whether it’s an attack in New York or Tel Aviv, Moscow or Mumbai, united we must stand in facing this terrible threat. Political analysis can conveniently be tossed out of the window once we have submitted to the demand that security preempts all other concerns.

Larry Derfner, who until today was a columnist for the rightwing Jerusalem Post, wrote a piece a few days ago in which he made a fine attempt to deconstruct the Israeli myth of Palestinian terrorism, but he made a few mistakes.

Israelis who don’t regard the Irgun and Lehi armed resistance to British rule as terrorism, are in no position to apply the same label to Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. But what Derfner says in this regard in his column, is: “If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t. And that’s not easy for a nation that sanctifies the right to self-defense; a nation that elected Irgun leader Menachem Begin and Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister.”

The problem with phrasing his argument this way is that the almost universally accepted dogma these days is that there is no form of terrorism — whether practiced by Palestinians or anyone else — that is justifiable. Not even opponents of the occupation say terrorism is justifiable. On the other hand, what many will acknowledge is that Palestinians, like anyone else living under military occupation, have the right to engage in armed resistance.

Ironically, what inspired Derfner to make his argument was a series of attacks in southern Israel, near Eilat, carried out by gunmen whose identities are in dispute. Some of them have been reported to be Egyptian and not a single Palestinian has been named.

The attacks perfectly illustrate the way in which the label “terrorism” is used to silence those who dare to question the official version of events. But when we don’t actually know who the gunmen were, we can hardly pretend to understand their motives.

If, as many of us suspect, they were salafist militants based in the Sinai whose goal is to establish an Islamic emirate in the largely ungoverned region, their reasons for attacking Israelis might be quite different from those of a Palestinian militant group. At the same time, even if they were Palestinians, we can’t take it as a given that their attack was conceived as yet another strike in the fight against the occupation.

Call a bloody act of political violence an act of terrorism, however, and those of us who insist that we can’t understand what happened if we don’t know who was involved or what motivated them — we will be dismissed as apologists of terrorism or even terrorist sympathizers. Others, buoyed up by their own self-righteousness, anger and indignation will declare that terrorism must be vigorously condemned and tirelessly fought — as though governments are the sole arbiters of the legitimacy of political violence.

Here’s the column blog post, “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror,” that got Derfner fired:

I think a lot of people who realize that the occupation is wrong also realize that the Palestinians have the right to resist it – to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis, especially when Israel is showing zero willingness to end the occupation, which has been the case since the Netanyahu government took over (among other times in the past).

But people don’t want to say this, especially right after a terror attack like this last one that killed eight Israelis near Eilat. And there are lots of good reasons for this reticence, such as: You don’t want to further upset your own countrymen when they are grieving, you don’t want to say or write anything that could be picked up by Israel’s enemies and used as justification for killing more of us. (These are good reasons; fear of being called a traitor, for instance, is a bad reason.)

But I think it’s time to overcome this reticence, even at the cost of enflaming the already enflamed sensitivities of the Israeli public, because this unwillingness to say outright that Palestinians have the right to fight the occupation, especially now, inadvertently helps keep the occupation going.

When we say that the occupation is a terrible injustice to the Palestinians, but then say that Palestinian terror/resistance is a terrible injustice to Israel, we’re saying something that’s patently illogical to anyone but a pacifist, and there aren’t many pacifists left, certainly not in Israel. The logical, non-pacifist mind concludes that both of those statements can’t be true – that if A is hurting B and won’t stop, then B damn sure has the right to hurt A to try to make him stop. But if everybody, not only the Right but the Left, too, is saying that B, the Palestinians, don’t have the right to hurt A, the Israelis, then the logical mind concludes that Israel must not be hurting the Palestinians after all, the occupation must not be so bad, the occupation must not be hurting the Palestinians at all – because if it was, they would have the right to hurt us back, and everybody agrees that they don’t. So when they shoot at us or fire rockets at us, it’s completely unprovoked, which gives us the right, the duty, to bash them and bash them until they stop – and anybody who tries to deny us that right doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so we’re just going to keep right on bashing them. And when the Palestinians complain about the occupation, we Israelis can honestly say we don’t know what they’re talking about.

This, I’m convinced, is how the Left’s ritual condemnations of terror are translated in the Israeli public’s mind – as justification for the occupation and an iron-fist military policy.

But if, on the other hand, we were to say very forthrightly what many of us believe and the rest of us suspect – that the Palestinians, like every nation living under hostile rule, have the right to fight back, that their terrorism, especially in the face of a rejectionist Israeli government, is justified – what effect would that have? A powerful one, I think, because the truth is powerful. If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t. And that’s not easy for a nation that sanctifies the right to self-defense; a nation that elected Irgun leader Menachem Begin and Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister.

But while I think the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us, I don’t want them to use it, I don’t want to see Israelis killed, and as an Israeli, I would do whatever was necessary to stop a Palestinian, oppressed or not, from killing one of my countrymen. (I also think Palestinian terrorism backfires, it turns people away from them and generates sympathy for Israel and the occupation, so I’m against terrorism on a practical level, too, but that’s besides the point.) The possibility that Israel’s enemies could use my or anybody else’s justification of terror for their campaign is a daunting one; I wouldn’t like to see this column quoted on a pro-Hamas website, and I realize it could happen.

Still, I don’t think Hamas and their allies need any more encouragement, so whatever encouragement they might take from me or any other liberal Zionist is coals to Newcastle. What’s needed very badly, however, is for Israelis to realize that the occupation is hurting the Palestinians terribly, that it’s driving them to try to kill us, that we are compelling them to engage in terrorism, that the blood of Israeli victims is ultimately on our hands, and that it’s up to us to stop provoking our own people’s murder by ending the occupation. And so long as we who oppose the occupation keep pretending that the Palestinians don’t have the right to resist it, we tacitly encourage Israelis to go on blindly killing and dying in defense of an unholy cause.

And by tacitly encouraging Israelis in their blindness, I think we endanger their lives and ours, their country and ours, much more than if we told the truth and got quoted on Hamas websites.

There’s no time for equivocation anymore, if there ever was. The mental and moral paralysis in this country must be broken. Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack. They had the same right to fight for their freedom as any other unfree nation in history ever had. And just like every harsh, unjust government in history bears the blame for the deaths of its own people at the hands of rebels, so Israel, which rules the Palestinians harshly and unjustly, is to blame for those eight Israeli deaths – as well as for every other Israeli death that occurred when this country was offering the Palestinians no other way to freedom.

Writing this is not treason. It is an attempt at patriotism.

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Israel’s faux revolutionaries

Israel’s July 14 social justice movement is really like a campaign in support of sunshine. Who’s going to oppose it? The supporters of social injustice?

To the extent that Israelis were inspired by the example of the Egyptian revolution, this seems to have gone no further than sharing in the empowering experience of being among thousands of people who have taken to the streets, joined by a sense of solidarity. But solidarity around what?

The difference between J14 and the Egyptian revolution is the difference between asking for a pay raise or telling your boss, “You’re fired!”

As Ami Kaufman wrote recently, “Although the protesters are demanding ‘social justice,’ what they’re really asking for is ‘more money!’”

Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal explain how easy it has been for Israelis to call for social justice while ignoring the occupation.

The decision to exclude the occupation from the grievances of the July 14 movement was entirely organic. No hired gun consultant advised movement activists to avoid the hot button issue in order to broaden the appeal of the demonstrations. The mainstream of the Jewish public decided on its own, and without much internal reflection, that social justice could exist alongside a system of ethnic exclusivism. Thus, while the July 14 movement proceeded through cities across Israel bellowing out cries for dignity and rights, Palestinians remained safely tucked away behind an elaborate matrix of control — the Iron Wall. Ten years of separation had not only rendered the Palestinians invisible in a physical sense. It had erased them from the Israeli conscience.

“It’s very strange to see a social justice protest without mentioning occupation,” Gidi Grinstein, a confidant of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who heads the Reut Institute, a government-linked Israeli think tank remarked. “But most people in Israel don’t even believe there is an occupation anymore. They see the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and think there is a functioning government. They hear about the Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN in September, and they think Palestine is a real state. So there is this cognitive dissonance among Israelis.”

For years Israel’s tiny but intensely motivated left-wing tried to mobilize mass protests against the occupation, hoping they could shake Israeli society out of its slumber. But the settlements grew, and the occupation became more and more entrenched. Suddenly, with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots in the streets demonstrating against the most right-wing government in their country’s history, some leftists began conjuring visions of a revolution.

“We have failed to end the occupation by confronting it head on but the boundary-breaking, de-segregating movement could, conceivably, undermine it,” wrote Dimi Reider. Reider claimed the demonstrations could achieve dramatic change because they “may challenge something even deeper than the occupation.” Hagai Mattar, a veteran anti-occupation activist and widely read journalist, echoed Reider’s unbridled enthusiasm. “For the first time in decades, perhaps, we are witnessing the impossible becoming possible,” Mattar wrote on the popular Hebrew website MySay. “What appeared to be a mere fantasy half a year ago… has become a vivid reality.”

Many members of the Israeli left have suffered for their activism. Some have been injured by Israeli soldiers during protests in the West Bank, where they routinely dodge rubber bullets and high-velocity teargas projectiles. Others have served months in prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli Army. With a suite of anti-democratic laws passed by the Knesset, they fear a coming crackdown. But perhaps the greatest source of suffering for Israeli leftists is having been cast out of one of the most tribalistic societies in the world. Many are turned down for housing and employment on the grounds that they refused military service. The very word “leftist,” or smolini, has become an insult in the Hebrew language. Hoping to replace the communal bond their society had denied them, the radical leftists who have not escaped to the squats of Berlin or Barcelona formed a tribe within the tribe.

As the July 14 protests gathered momentum and manpower, members of the radical left bolstered the movement with their tactical experience and fearlessness in the face of police intimidation. On July 23, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Israeli police forces arrested 43 demonstrators. Most of them were leftists who attempted to block a major intersection. The most prominent among them was Matar. Normally, the arrests of left-wingers at anti-occupation protests go unreported. In this instance, however, the arrests were broadcast to a national audience during the prime time news. After being released from their jail cells, the demonstrators were greeted by their fellow Israelis not as traitors but as heroic leaders.

“The radical left is no longer an outsider, but forms an important part of the mainstream,” Matar wrote recently in an article celebrating the protests. If this new movement welcomed leftists, and upheld them as its vanguard, how could it not be revolutionary?

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How Israelis (and many others) shirk moral responsibility for their actions

It’s a clever maneuver and it’s used again and again.

They are attacking me not because of what I did. They are attacking me because of who I am.

Not only does this put the self-declared victim in an invulnerable position — no one can change or should need defend their simple identity — but this also deflects criticism by insinuating that it springs from bigotry or blind hatred.

A few months after the Israeli Defense Forces had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians — men, women and children — in Gaza in 2009, Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, Gaby Levy, spoke to the US ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, and expressed his concern about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations.

Levy’s explanation, with which Jeffrey concurred, was that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hates Israel. “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously,” Levy claimed.

Jeffrey commented: “Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel.”

In other words, Erdoğan’s attitude towards Israel had nothing to do with his reaction to Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians. It was the product of simple hatred — the implication thus being that there would be nothing that poor little Israel could do in order to make amends.

Erdoğan has been in office since 2003. In early 2006, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described relations with Turkey as “perfect.” In 2007, Israel’s President Shimon Peres was honored by being invited to address the Turkish parliament — it was the first time an Israeli president had addressed the parliament of a Muslim-majority country.

In 2008, right up until Israel launched the war on Gaza, Turkey was helping mediate indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria.

Turkey mediated five rounds of talks between Israeli and Syrian officials. Toward the end of Olmert’s term the two sides were on the verge of resuming direct negotiations.

At the last meeting between Olmert and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish leader called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and relayed messages to and from Olmert. But after Operation Cast Lead began in December 2008 and the freeze in negotiations with Syria, Erdoğan said Olmert had stabbed him in the back.

In 2010, while Israel was refusing to allow Turkey to serve as a mediator with Syria, former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Omert said during a conference at Tel Aviv University:

We can reach an understanding with the Syrians which would change the map in the Middle East. A decision on this issue must be made. It’s too easy being angry at Erdogan, but it would be wise to reconcile with him. He is a fair mediator. We need negotiations with Turkish mediation.

Now we learn from Wikileaks that during this period in which Turkey, under Erdogan’s leadership, had made unprecedented efforts to serve as a peace-broker between Israel and its neighbors, key Israeli and American diplomats were in collusion with each other, reinforcing their shared and counter-productive view of Turkey’s prime minister.

Levy and Jeffrey were not looking at a real obstacle to diplomacy. They were revealing their own incompetence as diplomats by playing the game: it’s not what we do; it’s who we are.

This is the cable:

C O N F I D E N T I A L ANKARA 001549

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR EUR/SE

E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/26/2019
TAGS: PREL PGOV TU IS
SUBJECT: ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TRACES HIS PROBLEMS TO ERDOGAN

REF: ANKARA 1532

Classified By: AMB James F. Jeffrey, for reasons 1.4(b,d)

¶1. (C) During an October 26 call on the Ambassador, Israeli Ambassador Gabby Levy registered concern over the recent deterioration in his country’s bilateral relations with Turkey and the conviction that the relationship’s decline is attributable exclusively to Prime Minister Erdogan. Levy said Foreign Minister Davutoglu had relayed a message to him through the visiting Czech foreign minister that “things will get better.” He had also fielded messages from senior civil servants, xxxxx urging him to weather quietly Erdogan’s harsh public criticisms of Israel. The latter claimed Erdogan’s repeated angry references to the humanitarian situation in Gaza are for “domestic political consumption” only.

¶2. (C) Levy dismissed political calculation as a motivator for Erdogan’s hostility, arguing the prime minister’s party had not gained a single point in the polls from his bashing of Israel. Instead, Levy attributed Erdogan’s harshness to deep-seated emotion: “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously” and his hatred is spreading. Levy cited a perceived anti-Israeli shift in Turkish foreign policy, including the GoT’s recent elevation of its relations with Syria and its quest for observer status in the Arab League.

¶3. (C) Comment: Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel. xxxxx discusses contributing reasons for Erdogan’s tilt on Iran/Middle East isues, but antipathy towards Israel is a factor.

JEFFREY

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