Israel welcomes evangelical support — but not an evangelical presence

Pastor Alex Awad from East Jerusalem Baptist Church writes: For more than a year, I have repeatedly visited the office of the Christian Affairs Department at the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs in Jerusalem to seek a clergy visa for Rev. Jeff Hoover. Jeff is a U.S. citizen from Raleigh, North Carolina. Our international congregation in East Jerusalem called Rev. Hoover to come to Jerusalem to serve as an assistant pastor, since I am approaching retirement.

On December 1, 2011, I visited the Christian Affairs Department and spoke with the office’s director to see if there was progress on Rev. Hoover’s application. The official in charge told me openly that his office can’t give a recommendation for a clergy visa for Rev. Hoover because, he stated, “the State of Israel does not recognize the Baptist Church.” The statement surprised me, but not because our attempts to get Rev. Hoover a visa failed. We had many similar setbacks in the past, but this was the first time a lack of recognition was cited as the reason. In the past, the officials did not give us a reason for denying visas, and after a few months of trying, we just gave up. “Not recognized” means that no Evangelical church in Israel is officially recognized because they have not acquired the privilege of “Status Quo.” This privilege was granted during the Ottoman period to historic denominations, and more recently, to the Anglican and the Lutheran churches.

Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs may have the right to deny a Christian clergyperson a visa to enter Israel. But why should it take a year and a half before the applicant learns that his or her church is not recognized? In June, while in Israel, Rev. Hoover was told that if he left Israel, the officials would process his visa application. He returned to the U.S. and after six months, he was told that his application papers which he first submitted in 2010 were lost. He submitted new forms, but that didn’t help. In the last eight months, Rev. Hoover and I both–he from the US and I from Jerusalem–made repeated contacts with officials of the Ministry of Religious Affairs to ask about the status of his visa. All of our efforts came to a halt when I was told, “Baptists are not recognized in the State of Israel.”

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Our name is resistance

The Telegraph reported last week: Until Wednesday morning, Dimitris Christoulas, a respectable middle-class pensioner, was familiar only to the residents of the quiet Ampelokipous district of Athens where he had lived and worked hard for nearly 40 years.

All that changed at 8.45am, rush hour, when the 77-year-old former pharmacist and pillar of his shopkeeping community put a hand gun to his head and shot himself under a giant Cyprus tree on the central Syntagma Square.

He fell to the ground in front of the national parliament that many Greeks have come to blame for the corruption and mismanagement that has plunged their country into crisis, and lay there dead as shocked commuters looked on.

Yesterday, 24 hours after his suicide, the name Dimitris Christoulas is known to most in this troubled country.

“A martyr for Greece” declared the Eleftheros Typos newspaper. “Scream of desperation” said the headline in Avyi next to a picture of Edvard Munch’s celebrated painting. Many press commentaries compared his death to the protest suicides that unleashed the Arab spring in Tunisia and across the Middle East last year.

To many – including neighbours in his close community, he has become a hero.

“He did not rebel from his couch. He was a beautiful man, he will live on in history,” said Pannayotta, a housewife in her late 50s, living on the same street as the pensioner.

The incendiary suicide note Mr Chritoulas left behind urging young Greeks to rise up has also struck a chord with millions of people who see their highly indebted nation’s social fabric being torn apart by economic recession and externally imposed austerity measures.

“I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end,” he wrote. “I believe that young people with no future will one day take up and hang this country’s traitors in arms in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.”

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In Egypt’s military, a march for change

Reuters reports: On a warm Wednesday morning last October, around 500 Egyptian army officers based at the Air Defence Institute on the outskirts of Alexandria staged a mini revolt.

According to a lieutenant colonel with direct knowledge of the protest, the men were angry about the punishment given to a fellow officer by his superiors. After refusing to train, the officers demanded to meet either Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s military and in effect the country’s acting president, or his second in command. They wanted to meet the commanders, they said, to make the case for better treatment.

“Their reasoning was: Egypt is having a revolution and they too have demands,” the lieutenant colonel said.

The rebellion, unreported before now and confirmed by three other officers in the unit, lasted several days. As Egyptians were calling for quicker and deeper change – demands directed at the military council that runs the country – at least one part of the country’s military was itself split.

The popular protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak last year were rooted in the yawning gap between rich and poor, and the desire to get rid of a leader about to enter his fourth decade in power. The wealth in Egypt was, and is, controlled by a small and often uniformed elite. To most Egyptians, Mubarak, a career officer in the air force, was both symbol and cause of those inequities.

As in the country, so in the barracks. Over the past six months, more than a dozen serving or recently retired mid- and lower-ranking officers have said they and their colleagues see Egypt’s revolution as their own chance to win better treatment, salaries, and improved conditions and training. They are tired, they said, of a few very top officers becoming rich while the vast majority of officers and ordinary soldiers struggle.

As the military and the Muslim Brotherhood both press their own candidates ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for May and June – former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman entered the race as the army’s choice last week and Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s deputy, two weeks ago – the tensions in the lower ranks shed light not only on the country’s most powerful institution but on Egypt itself.

“Military ranks struggle like the rest of Egyptians because, like Egyptian society, the wealth of the military is concentrated at the top and does not trickle down. You have to reach a specific rank before wealth is unlocked,” one major said.

Tantawi, his Chief of Staff Sami Annan and other top commanders have moved to contain the officers’ frustration, holding regular meetings with military units in an attempt to boost morale and assure soldiers that their salaries will be raised and their concerns addressed, military leaders and mid-ranking officers who have attended the meetings said.

That seems to have placated the disgruntled officers, who say they will hold off on pushing their demands further until the ruling military council hands over power to an elected civilian government. But they insist they need real change. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian presidential candidate carries banner of the old order and gets Israeli support

The New York Times reports: Former President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief and vice president filed papers in Egypt on Sunday declaring himself a presidential candidate. His entry gives Egyptians a chance to cast a vote against the revolution and for the old order.

The former vice president, Omar Suleiman, has been considered a potential candidate for months, and his formal entry is unlikely to shake up the race. In a recent poll taken by Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-financed research institution, about 9 percent of voters volunteered that Mr. Suleiman was the candidate they would choose, putting him in fourth place. The poll was completed before the popular Muslim Brotherhood nominated its own candidate, Khairat el-Shater.

Mr. Suleiman, a retired general, could become a magnet for the support of Egyptians most unhappy with the revolt that ousted Mr. Mubarak. Although the uprising produced Egypt’s first free and fair parliamentary elections, it has also led to more than a year of continued street protests, soaring crime rates, an economy on the brink of collapse and an increase in the power of both moderate and conservative Islamists.

Although almost no one is calling for Mr. Mubarak’s release from confinement or for a restoration of his government, many long for order. And a few still whisper that it takes a strong hand to control a country like Egypt, with its high rates of poverty and illiteracy.

Mr. Suleiman’s closeness to Mr. Mubarak is hard to overstate, and he was often talked about, along with the former president’s son Gamal, as a potential successor. For decades, Mr. Suleiman was Mr. Mubarak’s closest adviser, often trusted with the most delicate matters, like Egypt’s talks with Israel and the Palestinians.

As chief of intelligence, Mr. Suleiman knew all the secrets of the old government, its friends and its enemies. American officials have said that on matters of foreign policy, talking to Mr. Suleiman was as good as talking to Mr. Mubarak himself, and State Department cables released by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks show that Mr. Suleiman collaborated with the United States in the interrogation of people suspected of being terrorists. Torture was routine under the Mubarak government’s security services.

The Jerusalem Post reports: Labor MK and former defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Monday that Egyptian presidential candidate Omar Suleiman would be “good for Israel.”

Ben-Eliezer, who held close personal ties to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, told Israel Radio that Suleiman is a patriot, “he loves Egypt.” The former Egyptian intelligence chief, Ben-Eliezer added, views relations with Israel as a cornerstone of strategic importance for Egypt.

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Bibi’s Etch-a-Sketch candidate

The New York Times reports: The two young men had woefully little in common: one was a wealthy Mormon from Michigan, the other a middle-class Jew from Israel.

But in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. At the most formative time of their careers, they sized each other up during the firm’s weekly brainstorming sessions, absorbing the same profoundly analytical view of the world.

That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly.

The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney — nurtured over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem, strengthened by a network of mutual friends and heightened by their conservative ideologies — has resulted in an unusually frank exchange of advice and insights on topics like politics, economics and the Middle East.

When Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Netanyahu offered him firsthand pointers on how to shrink the size of government. When Mr. Netanyahu wanted to encourage pension funds to divest from businesses tied to Iran, Mr. Romney counseled him on which American officials to meet with. And when Mr. Romney first ran for president, Mr. Netanyahu presciently asked him whether he thought Newt Gingrich would ever jump into the race.

Only a few weeks ago, on Super Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu delivered a personal briefing by telephone to Mr. Romney about the situation in Iran.

“We can almost speak in shorthand,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. “We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar.”

Mr. Netanyahu attributed their “easy communication” to what he called “B.C.G.’s intellectually rigorous boot camp.”

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Syria’s key to real change

Rami Khouri writes: The UN action in support of the call from special envoy Kofi Annan for a total ceasefire in Syria on 12 April is, like all security council presidential statements, a lot like a new year’s resolution – sincere, grounded in real needs and aspirations, but really difficult to implement.

Of the several different but linked issues at play here, three will determine its fate: the capacity of the security council to intervene in a sovereign state’s affairs; the Syrian government’s sense of its own durability; and the capacity of the opposition to challenge and change the Damascus ruling elite. And my impression is that the ability of the opposition groups to form a more coherent movement will be the crucial factor, drawing on the substantial support they have generated in the Middle East and around the world.

I say this because recent history suggests that the iron will of both the security council and stubborn sovereign governments tend to balance out each other. If military force is employed, as in Kosovo or Libya, global coalitions of states can oust governments. Barring that, only the determination, efficacy and sacrifice of authentic indigenous movements for freedom and citizens’ rights, teamed with global political support, can topple governments and usher in more democratic rule, as perhaps Burma demonstrates.

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Syrian violence spills into Lebanon and Turkey

The Washington Post reports: Conflict in Syria burst into neighboring Lebanon and Turkey on Monday, with one Lebanese cameraman killed and at least four people injured in fighting on the Syria-Turkey border.

The attacks, on the eve of a deadline under a fading U.N.-backed deal for ­Syrian troops to withdraw from cities and cease hostilities amid a widespread uprising, risked bringing the Syrian conflict to what the Turkish government called a “new stage.”

With the populations in neighboring countries divided between those who support the opposition in Syria and those who hope that embattled President Bashar al-Assad will remain in power, some fear that the conflict could expand across the region and widen political, ethnic and religious fault lines.

“I think we can expect more violence along the borders. I think that’s going to be the new normal,” said Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “The more refugees there are trying to escape, the more skirmishes there will be.”

Activists have reported heavy casualties in recent days, with 84 civilians killed Monday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, along with 19 members of the security forces and eight defectors. Hopes are rapidly dimming that a six-point peace plan that U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan negotiated with Syrian authorities can halt the violence.

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Years after acid attack horror, suicide stirs Pakistan

Declan Walsh reports: Fakhra Younas went under the surgeon’s knife 38 times, hoping to repair the gruesome damage inflicted by a vengeful Pakistani man who had doused her face in acid a decade earlier, virtually melting her mouth, nose and ears.

The painful medical marathon took place in Rome, a distant city that offered Ms. Younas refuge, the generosity of strangers and a modicum of healing. She found an outlet in writing a memoir and making fearless public appearances.

But while Italian doctors worked on her facial scars, some wounds refused to close.

On March 17, after a decade of pining for Pakistan, a country she loved even though its justice system had failed her terribly, Ms. Younas climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in the southern suburbs of Rome and jumped. She was reported to be 33 years old.

News of her death filtered back to her home city, Karachi. And by the time her coffin arrived for burial, a storm of outrage had been whipped up — one framed by a glittering Hollywood success.

On Feb. 28, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Karachi filmmaker, won Pakistan’s first Academy Award, for “Saving Face,” a documentary that focuses in gritty detail on victims of acid violence like Ms. Younas. Despite the film’s disturbing topic, the Oscar gave Pakistanis a welcome shot of national pride, while focusing attention on a social ill.

Acid is the preferred weapon of vindictive men against women accused of disloyalty or disobedience. Common in several Asian countries, acid attacks in Pakistan grew sharply in number in 2011, to 150 from 65 in 2010, although some advocacy workers said the increase stemmed largely from better reporting.

The death of Ms. Younas galvanized the Pakistani news media. In Parliament, lawmakers vowed to take action, while one political leader called for a criminal investigation into the case to be reopened. But legal experts were skeptical that would happen, because the man Ms. Younas long accused of the attack — her ex-husband, Bilal Khar — was acquitted at trial nine years ago.

Unlike most men accused in acid attacks, Mr. Khar comes from a wealthy, powerful background. His family owns vast swaths of rich farmland in Punjab Province; his father, Mustafa, is a former provincial governor; his first cousin Hina Rabbani Khar is Pakistan’s foreign minister. In recent weeks, Mr. Khar appeared on television several times to defend his reputation. “My hands are clean,” he said during one broadcast.

The appearances won him little public sympathy, with critics saying that the case exemplified how Pakistan’s rich frequently evade justice. Yet there was a ringing contrast between the howls of condemnation and the virtual silence that greeted Ms. Younas after she was attacked a decade ago. And it raised a question: When this clamor has receded, will Pakistan’s next acid victims stand a better chance of obtaining justice? [Continue reading…]

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“Can a Jew be a good Jew and still be opposed to Zionism and to Israel?”

“Can a Jew be a good Jew and still be opposed to Zionism and to Israel?” This was one of the challenging questions posed by Mike Wallace, a Jew himself, to Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States in 1958. That was back in the days when there wasn’t just daylight between Israel and the United States, but divisions could openly be discussed.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to enjoy the clean satisfying smoke of Parliament cigarettes.

Check out Noam Sheizaf’s post on the whole interview.

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Deir Yassin: No passing over history

Yousef Munayyer writes: On April 9, 1948, scores of Palestinian civilians were massacred at the village of Deir Yassin through co-operative efforts of Yishuv forces like the Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah.

The Zionist narrative on the events of 1948 and the Nakba – the Arabic word for the depopulation of Palestine – talks about the war as a defensive one where there was no intention on behalf of the Israeli forces to shift the demographics by force. Rather, that narrative tells us, the refugees were created during the hostilities which began when five Arab armies invaded Israel the day after it declared its independence on May 15, 1948.

Too often, people who talk about “making peace” advise that we pass over history and look forward without getting lost in the “dueling narratives” of this period. But peace cannot happen without a rectification of past injustices and we cannot approach this without talking about what these injustices are.

The Zionist narrative will counter, defensively, that any injustices are not the fault of Israel and this is where the issue of “dueling narratives” prevents further discussion.

“The goal of the Zionist movement was to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine which had a significant non-Jewish majority of Palestinian Arabs.”

But there are simple, undeniable facts that any two sane people, Zionist or otherwise, should be able to agree on. For example, I think we can all agree that April 9, 1948, occurred before May 15, 1948. This is not a matter perspective, this is chronology.

When you actually look at the history – even versions documented by Israeli historians using official Israeli archival material – what you learn is that a very significant portion of the total refugees were created long before May 15, 1948. Had it not been for the hundreds and thousands of refugees flowing into Arab states and massacres like Deir Yassin, the Arab armies would likely not have been compelled to intervene.

Clearly, indisputable and historically non-controversial chronological facts blow significant holes in the Zionist narrative about cause and effect. But sequence is not the only problem. The other point of contention Zionists hold is that Israeli actions during the war were defensive and not intended to depopulate.

The goal of the Zionist movement was to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine which had a significant non-Jewish majority of Palestinian Arabs. Through years of immigration, the Zionists managed to grow from 11 per cent of Palestine’s inhabitants in 1922 to about 30 per cent in 1946.

The Zionist goal, which was unachievable for decades, came to fruition after 18 months of hostilities when Jews suddenly became 85 per cent of the population of the state of Israel. So, the Zionist narrative will have you believe that the Zionist dream of establishing a state with a Jewish majority, which was unachievable without war then, finally achieved during the fog of one, happened completely by accident.

One does not have to be a supporter of Israel or Palestine to accept this explanation – just astoundingly naïve. [Continue reading…]

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe writes: On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The old village school serves today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village.

As they burst into the village [of Deir Yassin] the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped ad then killed.
Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes:

They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.

Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.

Recent research has brought down the accepted number of people massacred at Deir Yassin from 170 to ninety-three. Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting, and hence were not included in the official list of victims. However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them ‘in battle’ was slight. One only has to be told that thirty babies were among the slaughtered in Deir Yassin to understand why the whole ‘quantitative’ exercise – which the Israelis repeated as recently as April 2002 in the massacre in Jenin – is insignificant. At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe -a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight.

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The Wall, 10 years on: The great Israeli project

It might be the biggest, most expensive and most influential construction project in Israel’s history. To mark the 10th anniversary of its inception, +972 will be publishing in coming days a series of stories about the separation wall and its history, arguments in favor and against its construction, its effects and side effects and an analysis of its possible implications on regional politics in years to come. Chapter one – the Israeli story of the wall.

Haggai Matar writes: Looking at it from here, for just one minute, the whole project of the wall appears to be nothing more than an absurdity. I’m standing at the furthest, deepest part of this massive barrier, in the settlement of Ariel. Located about 20 kilometers east of the green line, less than thirty to the Jordan River, it is the very heart of the West Bank. In front of me I see some olive groves, behind them – the “separation fence” with its electric detection, cameras and barbed wire, and on the other side is the Palestinian village of Marda, the residents of which own these trees. So far, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.

However, a short walk to either direction leads to an abrupt end to the fence. In one direction it reaches a nearby road, and simply doesn’t continue on the other side, as it does elsewhere. Instead, there is a small area near the road with turned earth, suggesting that construction was planned here but was stopped. Oren, the photographer, tells me he was at a demonstration here against the planned route of the fence five years ago, and that nothing has changed on the terrain since. He takes some pictures, and I think of several other places along the route where the fence or wall simply comes to an end, enabling dozens, hundreds or thousands of Palestinians to cross it on a daily basis. Some are caught by patrols. Others aren’t. Looking at it from here, for just one minute, the whole project of the wall appears to be nothing more than an absurdity.

On April 14, 2002 then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that a separation fence would be built in the West Bank (a matter of terminology: The barrier is part fence, part wall. I will be using the two terms interchangeably). It was the height of the second intifada, which started with mass demonstrations that were murderously repressed by the IDF, and continued with a series of deadly suicide attacks against citizens inside Israel. After the 2002 attack on a Passover dinner in a Netanya hotel, Israel launched operation Defensive Shield, during which some 500 Palestinians were killed, and mass destruction caused to houses and infrastructure across the West Bank. At that point, no planned route or budget existed for Sharon’s fence, announced during the operation. But the project, which was to become probably the largest in Israeli history, was born.

Ten years have passed, and much has changed. The route of the wall was drawn, altered and changed time and time again by both the government and the Supreme Court. Construction went ahead, come to a halt, was restarted and frozen once more – due to political debates on its route, international pressure regarding the annexation of Palestinian lands and lack of funds. Here are a few figures to help get an idea what this project is all about:

The entire route of the wall – between 680-709 kilometers (the first is a Ministry of Defense figure, the second B’Tselem’s). This is more than twice the length of the Green Line, Israel’s recognized border with the West Bank (320 kms).

  • Portions already built- 525 kms
  • Portions inside Palestinian territory – 85 percent
  • Palestinian lands currently on the Israeli side of the wall – 8.5 percent
  • Palestinian lands in on the Israeli side in earlier plans – 17 percent
  • 8-meter-high concrete wall comprises 10 percent of the barrier
  • 2-meter-high electronic fence – 90 percent
  • Total cost so far – over NIS 10 billion ($2.6 billion)
  • Cost of maintenance per year – NIS 1 billion ($260 million)
  • Scheduled end of construction – unknown. Most construction has been stopped.

[Continue reading…]

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Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials

The Guardian reports: Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the “alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment” of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

It appears inevitable that Scotland Yard’s detectives will want to question the man who was foreign secretary at the time – Jack Straw.

Ten years before Bouchar’s abduction and rendition, many of her husband’s associates had been permitted to settle in Britain. These men were members of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organisation formed in the early 1990s and dedicated to Gaddafi’s removal. The LIFG was not banned in the UK, and its members appear to have found the country a convenient place to gather and raise funds. There were even reports – officially denied – that MI6 encouraged the LIFG in an unsuccessful attempt on the dictator’s life.

But from 2002 the UK ceased to be such a safe haven for the LIFG. The US and UK governments were beginning to repair their relations with Gaddafi, a rapprochement that would soon see him abandon his WMD programme and open his country’s oil and gas reserves to western corporations.

One Thursday evening in November that year, a 36-year-old LIFG member who was living in London was arrested by armed police as he attempted to board a flight at Heathrow. He was told he was being detained under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, a piece of legislation that had been rushed on to the statute books within weeks of 9/11, and which allowed the British government to detain international terrorism suspects without trial. From that moment the man was anonymised, by court order – in part to protect his relatives in Libya – and could be referred to only as “M”.

When M had arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker eight years earlier, he had readily told Special Branch detectives that he was a member of the LIFG. On his arrest at Heathrow he insisted that the organisation had no connection with international terrorism and was concerned only with the removal of Gaddafi. After being detained at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London, M appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a tribunal that allows the government to give evidence in secret, unseen by the appellant or the appellant’s lawyers.

In March 2004, M became the first and only person detained under the act to win an appeal at SIAC. The tribunal accepted that there were no links between LIFG and al-Qaida, and criticised the Home Office for its “consistent exaggeration” of M’s alleged links with members of al-Qaida. As the law permitted only “international terrorists” to be detained without trial, and not domestic insurgents, M was set free. A few days after SIAC’s decision, notice was passed to the Home Office and MI5, and Fatima Bouchar and her husband were detained in Bangkok.

Bouchar’s husband made no secret of being a leading member of the LIFG. That year, the couple had left China, where they had been living in exile, and attempted to travel to the UK via Malaysia. When they were detained in Kuala Lumpur and questioned about Belhaj’s false Iraqi passport, an acquaintance went to the British high commission to explain that the couple were attempting to reach London. Shortly after this, they were told that they would be permitted to travel to the UK on a BA flight, despite not having EU passports or UK visas. But when the aircraft stopped off at Bangkok, the pair were detained and taken to a US-run detention facility.

It was known that the CIA had been operating a secret prison in Thailand since 9/11, but its precise location was unknown. Bouchar and Belhaj arrived there within minutes of being detained, suggesting that it was located within the perimeter of Don Muang international airport. They were immediately separated.

Belhaj says he was blindfolded, hooded, forced to wear ear defenders, and hung from hooks in his cell wall for what seemed to be hours. He says he was severely beaten. The ear defenders were removed only for him to be blasted with loud music, he says, or when he was interrogated by his US captors. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

Naomi Wolf writes: In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that “former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex”. There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the “underwear bomber” to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the “pornoscanner”.

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

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The U.S. war on drug cartels in Mexico is a deadly failure

Mark Karlin writes: On March 29, 2012, William R. Brownfield, US assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (in other words, Hillary Clinton’s point person on drug issues), testified before the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. His subject was the war on drugs in the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States and Canada. Few, if any, reporters from the US press attended.

Approximately 50,000 or more Mexicans have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a so-called war on drug cartels. (In a recent appearance in Toronto, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed 150,000 people have died in the drug war in Mexico, but the timeline Panetta was referring to was unclear, as was the origin of the figure he cited.) Given that five Juarez police officers were gunned down at a party the night before Brownfield’s testimony, the Spanish-language press, unlike the American media, took an interest in his remarks.

You see, Juarez is kind of a sore spot for Mexicans. In 2010, more than 3,000 homicides took place in the city where killings are committed with general impunity, making it the murder capital of the world that year. Although Juarez’s murder rate has now lowered slightly, the city’s mayor – who lives across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas – indignantly denies that Juarez is the deadliest city on earth, even though it almost certainly remains close to being just that. Borderland writer Charles Bowden writes in “Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields“: “The violence is everywhere. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.” [Continue reading…]

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