Twice in the past three years, the Lithuanian Parliament investigated reports that the CIA secretly imprisoned al-Qaeda leaders in this Baltic country. Both times, legislators concluded that there was no evidence.
Now the Parliament is investigating a third time, and it is looking a little harder. Fresh reports of covert CIA flights carrying prisoners from Afghanistan to Lithuania, as well as the revelation that U.S. contractors built a high-security complex at the edge of a forest near Vilnius, have added to the suspicions.
Many Lithuanian officials said they remain unconvinced that their country’s secret services allowed the CIA to detain international terrorists. A few legislators blame Russia and other outside interests for inventing the allegations in an attempt to besmirch Lithuania’s reputation.
But increasingly, after years of issuing denials, Lithuania’s leaders are no longer ruling out the possibility that the CIA operated a secret prison in this northern European country of 3.5 million people, and that its government will have to deal with the fallout. [continued…]
The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.
“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”
Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004. [continued…]
Opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists’ hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firmly in the first camp, is hopping mad that we are poised to make all the suspect’s dreams come true. As he said on ABC’s This Week: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, when he was first arrested, asked to be brought to New York. I didn’t think we were in the business of granting the requests of terrorists.”
Funny, that. I didn’t think we were in the business of caring one way or another what the terrorists want from us. The criminal justice system is as uninterested in advancing the goals of the accused as it is in frustrating them. The most vocal critics seem to forget that our legal system exists not to grant requests or dash hopes but to bring people to justice. [continued…]
… what we have here is not an announcement that all terrorism suspects are entitled to real trials in a real American court. Instead, what we have is a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled to real trials: namely, those whom the Government is convinced ahead of time it can convict. Others for whom conviction is less certain will be accorded lesser due process: put in military commissions, to which most leading Democrats vehemently objected when created under Bush. Presumably, others still — those who the Government believes cannot be convicted in either forum, will simply be held indefinitely with no charges, a power the administration recently announced it intends to preserve based on the same theories used by Bush/Cheney to claim that power.
A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you’ll get just enough to be convicted isn’t a justice system at all. It’s a rigged game of show trials. This is a point I’ve been emphasizing since May, when Obama gave his speech in front of the Constitution at the National Archives and explained how there were five different “categories” of terrorism suspects who would be treated differently based on the category into which they fell: [continued…]
How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead. [continued…]
On August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house, in Zanghara, a hamlet in South Waziristan. It was a hot summer night, and he was joined outside by his wife and his uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud, who suffered from diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous drip.
The video was being captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone, a remotely controlled, unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected, two miles or so above the house. Pakistan’s Interior Minister, A. Rehman Malik, told me recently that Mehsud was resting on his back. Malik, using his hands to make a picture frame, explained that the Predator’s targeters could see Mehsud’s entire body, not just the top of his head. “It was a perfect picture,” Malik, who watched the videotape later, said. “We used to see James Bond movies where he talked into his shoe or his watch. We thought it was a fairy tale. But this was fact!” The image remained just as stable when the C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards.
Pakistan’s government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible for the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks inside the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in December, 2007, and the bombing, last September, of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than fifty people. Mehsud was also thought to have helped his Afghan confederates attack American and coalition troops across the border. Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council, who is now a partner at Good Harbor, a consulting firm, told me, “Mehsud was someone both we and Pakistan were happy to see go up in smoke.” Indeed, there was no controversy when, a few days after the missile strike, CNN reported that President Barack Obama had authorized it.
However, at about the same time, there was widespread anger after the Wall Street Journal revealed that during the Bush Administration the C.I.A. had considered setting up hit squads to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world. The furor grew when the Times reported that the C.I.A. had turned to a private contractor to help with this highly sensitive operation: the controversial firm Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees demanded investigations of the program, which, they said, had been hidden from them. And many legal experts argued that, had the program become fully operational, it would have violated a 1976 executive order, signed by President Gerald R. Ford, banning American intelligence forces from engaging in assassination.
Hina Shamsi, a human-rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law, was struck by the inconsistency of the public’s responses. “We got so upset about a targeted-killing program that didn’t happen,” she told me. “But the drone program exists. ” She said of the Predator program, “These are targeted international killings by the state.” The program, as it happens, also uses private contractors for a variety of tasks, including flying the drones. Employees of Xe Services maintain and load the Hellfire missiles on the aircraft. Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer, who now teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, observed, “People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one.” But, she added, “mechanized killing is still killing.” [continued…]
The government is considering establishing work camps in the south of the country, where illegal migrant workers will receive shelter, food and medical care, Army Radio reported Wednesday. In exchange, illegal migrants would perform manual labor outside the camps, but would not earn a salary.
They would stay at the camp until their asylum claims are decided, which could take months or years.
The proposal, part of the effort to address the problems posed by illegal migrants, would place asylum seekers at jobs in communities in the Negev and Arava. Their salaries would go to the state, in order to fund the camps.
The issue of illegal foreign migrants and refugees has made the headlines due to the efforts by human rights organizations to block the deportation of 1,200 foreign workers’ children. One of the main arguments by deportation advocates, including Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas), is that allowing them to stay would bring hundreds of thousands more illegal migrants.
They would bring in “a range of diseases such as hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis and AIDS [as well as] drugs,” said Yishai.
“I fear how far we have fallen,” said MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) in reaction to the work camp proposal, adding that he thinks the plan would encourage many more asylum seekers to try to enter Israel.
“The plan [would] induce refugees to come to Israel. A bed is an incentive compared to where they come from. Israel has the right to close its borders, but when someone comes here, you cannot fight with him. This shows that we haven’t learned a thing, as people living in a country established by refugees for refugees,” Khenin added. [continued…]
Israel started recruiting workers from East Asia 20 years ago, after the first intifadeh ended the flood of day laborers from the West Bank and Gaza. The migrants support entire families back in their home countries. Noa Kaufman of the Israeli Children pressure group, says Israel encourages deporting workers after five years or when they have children. But then those departing workers are simply replaced by new arrivals who go through the same turmoil. “The recruitment companies only get money for new workers. If a worker moves jobs once he’s here, the recruitment company doesn’t get any money,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense that there is no naturalization process for someone who was born here or someone who lived here as a refugee for 10 years. They are people, not machines. You can’t expect them not to fall in love, not to give birth.” [continued…]
In a landmark ruling, an Italian judge on Wednesday convicted a base chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans, almost all C.I.A. operatives, of kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003.
The case was a huge symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, who drew the first convictions involving the American practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, often one more open to coercive interrogation techniques.
Critics of the Bush administration have long hailed the case as a repudiation of the tactics it used to fight terrorism. And the fact that Italy would actually convict intelligence agents of an allied country was seen as a bold move that could set a precedent in other cases. [continued…]
One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States “broke the law” in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
“And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this,” said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.
DeSousa says the U.S. “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. [continued…]
Human Rights Watch and its rights-watching peers have heard it all. They’re quasi-terrorists with an anti-U.S. ax to grind or perhaps stealth fighters for global capitalists. They’ve been accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, and anti-African at one time or another. Since the human rights movement began in the early 1970s, the criticism has grown as fast as the stacks of reports, op-eds, and analysis that the organizations’ analysts produce.
Six years ago, we decided it was time to systematically examine the accusations flying from all directions. After subjecting human rights organizations’ work to a barrage of statistical tests, we found that everyone was right. Yes, the watchdogs have biases. But they might make those groups more effective at pushing the human rights cause. Whichever side of the fence you fall on, there’s no denying it: There’s a politics to human rights.
It was bound to happen. Despite the drive for neutrality that watchdogs strive for, they were playing in a political minefield. Just take reporting on Israel, which has been the source of consistent controversy from both sides. The debate turned especially nasty two weeks ago when one of Human Rights Watch’s own — Bob Bernstein, chair of the group’s board from 1978 to 1998 — lambasted his protégé in a New York Times op-ed for dwelling excessively on Israeli abuses. “Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict,” he claimed. [continued…]
A US federal appeals court has ruled that a Canadian man cannot sue the US after he was held at a New York airport and then transferred to Syria, where he alleges he was tortured.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer, was detained by US authorities during a stopover in New York while heading home to Canada in 2002, and then sent to Syria because he was suspected of having links to al-Qaeda.
Arar says he was held in a Syrian jail for almost a year and that he was beaten and whipped with electrical cables during his detention.
In a 7-4 vote on Monday, the US court of appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with a lower court that Arar could not sue US officials, saying that he did not have legal standing. [continued…]
Throughout the day I had been hearing on the grapevine that The Daily Show was having second thoughts about doing the show as they had been getting pressure to cancel it. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — During a week in which J Street — an organization that is attempting to break AIPAC’s stranglehold on the issue of US-Israeli relations — held its first national conference in Washington DC, it’s interesting that Jon Stewart took the opportunity to turn to the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not by inviting J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami onto the show but instead, as Adam Horowitz notes, “a Palestinian leader demanding equal rights and an anti-Zionist Jew calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel towards peace.”
One of the disappointing features of the way the interview got edited for broadcast was that by cutting out much of the applause, the editors took out one of the most significant messages: the Palestinian issue, framed as one of freedom and human rights, resonated well with Jon Stewart’s audience.
While Stewart himself tended to stick to the well-worn tracks that this is a seemingly intractable conflict, that the Palestinians need to stop anti-Semitic incitement, that the Arabs need to do their bit, Barghouti’s constant refrain was that the core issue here is freedom.
That’s a message the J Street and its mainstream two-state-solution supporters really don’t want to see placed at the center of the conversation. They seem to view the conflict not in terms primarily of human rights but in terms of the need to preserve the Jewish state — a state in relation to which Palestinians pose a “demographic threat”. The urgency of implementing a two-state solution is that unless it can be done fast, Palestinians will demand equal rights in a single state — a state in which (thanks to the Greater Israel project that has been in motion for the last 42 years) Jews will be in a minority. That possibility is in the eyes of some, “horrific“.
The mission to move US policy through reforming the Jewish community’s debate over Israel/Palestine has clear political implications. Ben-Ami ended the opening evening by saying the movement J Street is a part of is a “movement rooted in love of Israel,” and while all are welcomed to join J Street in its work, “the heart of this movement has to be in the Jewish community.” From this perspective, it was telling that Gaza was not mentioned once the entire evening (except by Rabbi Andy Bachman who said it was no longer occupied). There was only one panel during the entire conference dedicated to “Palestinian perspectives,” and even the closing panel called “Why Two States? Why Now?” only included speakers to explain Israeli interests and American interests in promoting two states. Two of the most moving parts of the conference for me was hearing Laila El-Haddad, from the Gaza Mom blog, describe life in still occupied Gaza on the unofficial blogger’s panel. She told a story about how her family was almost unable to leave Gaza to visit her in the US and she is totally unable to enter her homeland. Later, Bassim Khoury, the ex-Minister of National Economy for the Palestinian Authority who recently quit in protest to their reaction to the Goldstone report, demonstrated “Israeli apartheid” in Jerusalem through a power point presentation outlining the gross discrepancies in municipal funding between Jews and Palestinians in the city. Both presentation injected an intense dose of reality into a proceeding that seems to be chugging along more on vision and hope.
J Street represents a very important rupture and opportunity in the supposed American Jewish consensus over Israel/Palestine which should be celebrated. Pushing this wedge into the heart of the community could only be a good thing. But, the tenor and message of the J Street conference would seem to indicate that the struggle to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be lead by Jews, after we conquer our own internal issues to reform our community, and on our agenda. Meanwhile, Palestinians will have to continue to catch the brunt of the Israel everyone loves so much. [continued…]
On October 25, while an overflow crowd of 1,500 poured into the first convention of the progressive-leaning Israel-oriented lobbying organization J Street, Elie Wiesel addressed a crowd of 6,000 Christian Zionists at Pastor John Hagee’s “Night To Honor Israel.” According to the San Antonio Express News, while Wiesel sat by his side, Hagee trashed President Barack Obama, baselessly accusing him of “being tougher on Israel than on Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, who appeared at Hagee’s Christians United for Israel summit earlier this year, rejected J Street’s request to speak at their convention, instead dispatching a low-level embassy official to “observe” the event. Oren then accused J Street of “impair[ing] Israel’s interests.”
In blessing Hagee while damning J Street, Wiesel and Oren chose an anti-Semitic group led by a far-right End Times theology preacher over a fledgling progressive organization that bills itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace.” And both Wiesel and Oren seem to be embroiled in yet another controversy over involvement with the extremist preacher. [continued…]
At family gatherings, the young Afghan with the scraggly beard instinctively sits with the children, before others remind him that he is a man now.
Old friends he last saw when they were flying kites are now in college, married with children, enjoying their careers. He’s happy for them, but he feels like he’s watching life flash by and he’s not a part of it.
These are the shadows of the lost youth of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan who many believe was Guantanamo’s youngest prisoner.
“There are such huge changes I need to catch up with,” he says. “I’ve missed a lot.”
Six inches taller and 40 pounds heavier than when he left his country nearly seven years ago, Jawad alternately smiles shyly, tenses with anger, then smiles again, the mood swings of someone trying to figure out how he lost a third of his life. [continued…]
Israel and its courts have always recognized that they are bound by norms of international law that it has formally ratified or that have become binding as customary international law upon all nations. The fact that the United Nations and too many members of the international community have unfairly singled out Israel for condemnation and failed to investigate horrible human rights violations in other countries cannot make Israel immune from the very standards it has accepted as binding upon it.
Israel has a strong history of investigating allegations made against its own officials reaching to the highest levels of government: the inquiries into the Yom Kippur War, Sabra and Shatila, Bus 300 and the Second Lebanon War.
Israel has an internationally renowned and respected judiciary that should be envy of many other countries in the region. It has the means and ability to investigate itself. Has it the will? [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The Netanyahu government’s stonewalling of the Goldstone inquiry does not appear to have purely been an act of self-protection; it also seems to reflect a national spirit of impunity rooted in the conviction: “We had no choice.”
Having turned this declaration into a battle cry, violence was cleansed of doubt as Israel embarked on its own jihad. “We went into Gaza and God went into Gaza with us,” was how one Israeli Special Forces soldier put it.
When the enemy’s homes have been flattened, their bodies incinerated, their land defiled and their water poisoned and all of this is being done under God’s watchful eye and under His protection, the killers return to their homes expecting glorification, not to become the targets of an international inquiry.
There is a vital development — a new ruling from the British High Court — in a story about which I’ve written many times before: the extraordinary joint British/U.S. effort to cover up the brutal torture which Binyam Mohamed suffered at the hands of the CIA while in Pakistan and while he was “rendered” by the U.S. to various countries. While Mohamed, a British resident, was in American custody, the CIA told British intelligence agents exactly what was done to him, and those British agents recorded what they were told in various memos. Last year, the British High Court ruled that Mohamed — who was then at Guantanamo — had the right to obtain those documents from the British intelligence service in order to prove that statements he made to the CIA were the by-product of coercion.
The High Court’s original ruling in Mohamed’s favor contained seven paragraphs which described the torture to which Mohamed was subjected. It has been previously reported that those paragraphs contain descriptions of abuse so brutal that not even our own American media could dispute that it constitutes “torture”: [continued…]
Four years after Khalid al-Jehani’s release from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the 34-year-old Saudi lives a peaceful life in this sprawling coastal city. He has a car, a job and a well-furnished apartment — courtesy of the Saudi government.
The rehabilitation of militants such as Jehani has convinced the Obama administration that Saudi Arabia is the ideal place to send dozens of Yemenis being held at Guantanamo. For months, U.S. officials have applied pressure on Riyadh. But Saudi officials say their success with former detainees such as Jehani lies in members of his family and tribe, who keep constant watch over him, and cannot be duplicated with those whose social networks and roots lie outside Saudi Arabia.
“If I try to do something bad, my family will tell the government about me,” said Jehani, who joined a radical Islamist movement in the Philippines and trained al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “How can you trust that will happen with a family living in Yemen?” [continued…]
Israeli officials on Sunday criticized the British Ambassador to the United Nations John Sawers for backing a controversial United Nations report into Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza last winter, saying that such support could backfire when Britain tries to conduct its own war on terror.
The investigation into the three-week conflict, sparked by rocket fire from Gaza on Israel’s southern communities, was headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone. Israel has dismissed the report as one-sided, while the U.S. is believed to have pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to refrain from supporting its findings.
Sawers told Israel’s Army Radio on Sunday morning that he supports the findings of the Goldstone commission, and called for both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate its conclusions.
“London is waging its own war against terror, and they might find themselves with their hands tied if they back Goldstone’s recommendations,” the Israeli officials said. [continued…]
Almost 1,000 lawsuits alleging war crimes by Israeli ministers and military personnel have now been filed around the world, Israel has admitted.
And the situation could become immeasurably worse for Israel’s politicians and soldiers as efforts continue to have the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel and Hamas of crimes against humanity during last winter’s Gaza Strip invasion, raised at the United Nations.
Last week, Moshe Yaalon, one of four deputies to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, cancelled a planned fundraising trip to Britain because he feared arrest on war-crimes warrants issued by human rights and pro-Palestinian groups.
The week before, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, only avoided arrest on a visit to the British Labour Party conference in Brighton after a court ruled that he had diplomatic immunity.
Israelis travelling without such diplomatic protection now face the possibility of arrest in many countries across the globe, including Norway, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Holland and Canada.
Human rights lawyers are using the principle of universal jurisdiction in international law to file suits worldwide for war crimes, genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.
According to Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and a hardline nationalist, the estimated 964 international lawsuits now outstanding represent “a campaign to delegitimise Israel”. [continued…]
Turkey announced on Sunday the cancellation of an international air force drill at one of the country’s air force bases, which was to include Israeli jets.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been under pressure recently to exclude Israel from the drill, on the grounds that Israel should not be allowed to participate while its planes are bombing the Gaza Strip
Turkey, a secular country ruled by an Islamic-oriented party, had long been Israel’s best friend in the Muslim world. But ties have cooled sharply over Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s sharp criticism of Israel’s winter war in the Gaza Strip, especially in light of a televised fracas between President Shimon Peres and Erdogan at the Davos Conference this past January. [continued…]
As Abbas falls, have no doubt that he got pushed by an inept administration that similarly gets weak-kneed whenever it feels pressure from either the Israel lobby or the Israeli government.
Yesterday, State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, was asked: “What role specifically did the United States play in pressuring the Palestinian Authority to make that decision [to shelve the Goldstone report]?
Kelly, squirming like an eel, responded:
Well, I don’t know if I would accept your characterization of pressuring. I think that we recognized that we had serious concerns with the recommendations and some of the allegations. We felt very strongly that while these investigations should be investigated and addressed, that we thought on the one hand that Israel had the kind of institutions that could address these allegations. And of course, we urged Israel to address these very serious allegations.
But I think we had a broader concern that we didn’t want the report to distract us from our ultimate goal, which was to address the root causes of the tragic events of last January, and that’s the lack of a regional and lasting peace between the two parties – between the Israelis and the Palestinians. So we were concerned that we stay focused on that ultimate goal.
And we are not saying that the allegations in the report – we’re not saying that they should be ignored. We simply do not want the report itself to become any kind of impediment to this ultimate goal. We appreciate the seriousness with which the Palestinians approach this very, very difficult issue, and we respect this decision to defer discussion of the report to a later date for the reasons that I just stated – that we want to make sure that we stay focused on the ultimate goal here.
(Goldstone discussion begins at 6 minutes 55 seconds.)
What kind of tortured logic is this? On the one hand war crimes committed in Gaza are somehow extraneous to an understanding of the root causes of the conflict, yet the root cause of the conflict is conflict itself?
The administration needs to make up its mind: Either this conflict is all about violence, in which case Israeli violence can’t be ruled out of the equation. Or, the violence is merely symptomatic of underlying political injustices and a natural outcome of addressing those injustices will be a long sought peace. Take your pick.
Of course, the true sentiment that few American officials are crass enough to utter, yet apparently everyone believes, is that when Israelis kill hundreds of Palestinians they really don’t intend to kill any (“we shoot and we cry”), yet when Palestinians kill a dozen Israelis they merely fall short of accomplishing their genocidal intentions.
* * *
After taking stabs at solving the Middle East conflict, engaging Iran, bringing about global nuclear disarmament, healing the rift between Muslims and the West, shoring up the global financial system, tackling climate change and reforming America’s health care system, there are strong indications that Obama came into office intoxicated by his image as a world savior.
Even so, his cool created the impression that he might actually be impervious to the influence of adulation, but even though some of us thought he had risen above the massive projections that were being imposed on him, the evidence is that to some extent he got sucked into the myth that had been created around him.
To see Obama now as either a tragic figure or as the victim of circumstances essentially absolves him of responsibility for his own actions.
I don’t think it’s premature to be conducting an autopsy on Obama’s Middle East initiative and the first question to ask is this: Did he manage to cross the most minimal threshold for a defensible approach? That is, can he claim at least to have done no harm?
Unfortunately, the harm appears grossly evident and it hinges on his choice to raise expectations across the region and then allow those expectations to founder. Expectations dashed are much more destructive than expectations never formed. (George Bush never disappointed anyone because no one took his promises seriously. In office and life he mastered the art of setting a low bar.)
So, could Obama have entered the situation differently and put himself in a better position to at least live up to the Hippocratic oath (which, incidentally, all politicians should be forced to take)?
He could have acknowledged that he had on his plate more than any human president could address (“sorry folks, I’m not the Messiah”) and he could in his first days in office have said something like this:
“The Middle East conflict is a wound to which no easy remedy can be applied. I do not come into office claiming to have any greater powers than all of my predecessors who struggled with limited success to deal with this issue.
“I do know this, however: setting aside the many intractable political issues, there is right now a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We haven’t had time to assess the scope of this crisis but having appointed George Mitchell as my Middle East peace envoy, I’ve asked him to put the crisis in Gaza at the top of his agenda. In the next few days he will be visiting the area to assess which needs must most urgently addressed.”
At that point, the Israel Lobby’s wheels would have started spinning frantically. But how do you conduct a campaign focused on preventing Mitchell going to Gaza and addressing a humanitarian crisis?
No doubt, phones in the White House and the State Department would have been ringing off the hook as Abe Foxman and other Jewish community leaders and Israeli officials objected, saying that such a move would not be “helpful”. But seriously, how do you conduct a public campaign whose direct aim is to prevent help reaching tens of thousands of people whose homes had been flattened?
What happened in reality? Obama and Mitchell made the choice of staying out of Gaza. Neither of them had a gun pointed at his head.
Obama had the opportunity to craft a policy that grew modestly and organically from the facts on the ground. A combination of fear, arrogance and perhaps lack of political imagination, led him to pass up that opportunity.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas was on Tuesday “seriously studying” the possibility of asking that a UN Gaza war report be passed on to the Security Council, a senior official said.
“President Abbas is seriously studying the possibility of asking the Arab and Islamic bloc to officially take the Goldstone report to international bodies, including the UN General Assembly and the Security Council,” chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said in a phone call from Amman.
The move appeared to mark a change in position, as the Palestinian delegation on Friday backed a move at the UN Human Rights Council to defer a vote on whether the report should be passed on. [continued…]
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vigorously took up the country’s latest strategy for responding to allegations of human rights abuses: kill the messenger. He denounced a recent report by the UN’s Human Rights Council that had accused Israel of possible crimes against humanity during its assault on Gaza last winter, calling it a “travesty,” a “farce” and a “perversion.” The Hamas terrorists Israel was up against had committed acts akin in history only to the Nazi blitz of British civilians during World War II, Netanyahu asserted. Indeed, in denying a nation’s right to resist attack, the report sought to undermine Israel’s “legitimacy.”
The head of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Judge Richard Goldstone, was “upset” by the speech. “It is disingenuous, to put it lightly, what Netanyahu said,” he told The Nation. “The idea that this is aimed at delegitimating the state of Israel–that is the last thing I would want to do.” Goldstone, a Jew and a Zionist, said that Israel’s leaders were behaving contemptuously, “ignoring the specific allegations and simply launching a broadside.” [continued…]
Turkish civil society organizations and thousands of people on Monday protested Israeli invasion of Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Jewish provocations in Taksim Square, calling on Turkey to act against the destruction policy.
Started at 17 pm, people from different disticts of Istanbul attended the protest, as well as people from different cities.
Gathered in Taksim Square walked through Galatasaray High School on Istiklal Street, protesters shouted slogans in solidarity with Palestinians to condemn Israeli actions.
The group then burned the Israeli flags. [continued…]
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