How secret renditions shed light on MI6’s licence to kill and torture

The Guardian reports: In fiction, James Bond drew quite judiciously upon his licence to kill, bumping off just 38 adversaries in a dozen Ian Fleming novels. In each case, the individual received his or her just deserts.

In real life, MI6 insists its officers do not kill anyone. “Assassination,” its former head Sir Richard Dearlove has said, “is no part of the policy of Her Majesty’s government” and would be entirely contrary to the agency’s ethos.

But there can be circumstances in which MI6 officers do have a licence to kill or commit any other crime, enshrined in a curious and little-known law that was intended to protect British spies from being prosecuted or sued in the UK after committing crimes abroad.

Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act offers protection not only to spies involved in bugging or bribery, but also to any who become embroiled in far more serious matters, such as murder, kidnap or torture – as long as their actions have been authorised in writing by a secretary of state.

And as such, the section is certain to come under intense scrutiny in the months ahead, as detectives and human rights lawyers pore over the details of the secret rendition operations that MI6 ran in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004.

Last month Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the operations, in which two leading Libyan dissidents were abducted and taken to Tripoli with their families, were to be the subject of a criminal investigation.

A few days later lawyers for both families began civil proceedings against Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, accusing him of complicity in their “extraordinary rendition”, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Proceedings against the government, MI6 and MI5 are to follow.

The case is based in large part upon a batch of documents discovered in an abandoned Libyan government office last September. These showed that the abductions were plotted with the help of MI6: it was all part of the rapprochement between Gaddafi and the UK and US that saw the dictator abandon his WMD programme and open oil and gas exploration opportunities to western firms.

When a researcher for Human Rights Watch stumbled upon the documents, no attempt was made to deny MI6 involvement in the rendition operations they described.

Instead, Whitehall sources immediately said the operations were part of “ministerially authorised government policy”. The statement was intended as a clear signal that a secretary of state had signed off a “clause 7 authorisation” under the Intelligence Services Act.

Section 7 is entitled Authorisation of Acts outside the British Islands, and says: “If, apart from this section, a person would be liable in the United Kingdom for any act done outside the British Islands, he shall not be so liable if the act is one which is authorised to be done by virtue of an authorisation given by the secretary of state under this section.”

It adds that liable in the United Kingdom “means liable under the criminal or civil law of any part of the United Kingdom”.

The “acts” can take place only overseas and remain illegal both under the laws of the country where they are committed and possibly under international law. But, section 7 says, with the stroke of a pen a secretary of state can rule that no UK law can be brought to bear.

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Remembering and forgetting

Jenny Diski reviews Memory: Fragments of a Modern History by Alison Winter: I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. My father looks like my father in pictures I have of him. I look like … well, actually I don’t have any pictures of me at that age. But I’m sure I looked pretty much like the memory I can call up at will. It’s not particularly interesting as a memory. Nothing special is happening. It could be a painting, or a photograph, except that I shift about as a child does sitting on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture, even though I am in it. I can’t in other words look out at the room from my place on the chair. How can that be a memory? And if it isn’t, what is it? When I think about my childhood, that is invariably one of the first ‘memories’ to spring up, ready and waiting: an untraumatic, slightly-moving picture. It never crossed my mind to notice the anomalous point of view until I was middle-aged. Before then it went without saying that it was a ‘real’ memory. Afterwards, it became an indicator of how false recollection can be.

Memory has always been a worry to us. The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves (no memory, no me) is also something we know to be treacherous, overaccommodating, fugitive: delightfully and fearfully unreliable. We’re stuck inside our own heads with our recollections (or old photos and now videos that have become memories) and there is no way, except sometimes by trusting to the probably unreliable memories of other people, to be absolutely sure that we know what we think we know, or are who we think we are. That anxiety about the accuracy of our grasp of our past selves accounts for the way many other alarming aspects of being alive have become attached to the subject of memory; the theme changes and goes through cycles over time (law, war, politics, medicine, family, sexuality), but always serves to remind us to worry about the consequences of never being quite sure of what we and others remember. People have thrown all the expertise they can find or invent at the problem. We have asked shamans, clairvoyants, hypnotists, historians, scientists, surgeons, law-makers, artists and writers, social psychologists and psychoanalysts to investigate the truth, the facts, the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer.

Yet, alongside our anxiety about the trustworthiness of remembering, there is an opposite pull, which is quite as powerful, towards the commonsense feeling that we can all know and trust our own memories; that we know our own minds. Memories when they rise feel reliable. Whatever scientists or other experts do in the laboratory, library or consulting room, individuals, including the experts themselves when off duty, proceed in their everyday lives as if their personal memories are a valid basis for action and interaction, just as physicists continue to walk on apparently solid floors while knowing that they are largely made up of empty space. We would be mad not to. Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper. It’s considered a fault not with recording, but with playback. I was in no doubt about that as a small child. I had a small deep-red memory stone lodged in my left temple, and when I was asked a question at school it moved slowly and steadily from one side of my forehead around to the other. Before it was at the midway point, I tried for the answer, knowing it was in my mind, available to me; but once the stone passed the centre line between my eyes, I stopped worrying about it: I knew I didn’t know the answer, it simply wasn’t ‘there’. I supposed it was how everyone knew what they did and didn’t know. Looking back, it was an efficient filing and retrieval machine that unhandily had vanished by the time I reached secondary school. I recall the memory stone with some nostalgia; these days it’s the inefficiency of my mind-machine that exercises me. [Continue reading…]

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Video: Is the U.S. occupation of Iraq really over?

Alternate Focus: With the departure of the last American soldier from Iraq, a bloody and expensive adventure ends—not with a bang, but with a whimper. As the Iraq War passes into history, Raed Jarrar, Tom Hayden, Nadia Keilani, and Johan Galtung comment on the lessons learned from this nine-year event, and debate whether the war and occupation are really over.

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The U.S.-Israeli don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on murder

One man uses a bomb to kill another and he’s a terrorist. Another does the same and it’s a form of kinetic activity. I guess that makes the latter a kineticist. However, this kinetic activity is something that Americans are not allowed to engage in — because it’s illegal. It’s illegal because in the view of American law it’s not called kinetic activity; it’s called murder.

Newsweek reports: [W]hile the U.S. relationship with Israel is generally strong on security and intelligence matters, there is disagreement on both methods and strategy. Israel has no qualms about assassinating Iranians involved in nuclear research, for instance; U.S. law forbids it. (Drone strikes against jihadist leaders are considered acts of war.) “The Israelis handled everything that was kinetic, and we did the nonkinetic activities, sometimes along with the Israelis,” says a Pentagon source who was involved. A senior U.S. intelligence official says that both sides performed a kind of “Kabuki dance” on the assassinations and industrial “accidents” that have increased in Iran during the past year: “The Israelis don’t want to say and we don’t want to know.”

The United States, moreover, has conducted regular reviews of cooperation with Israel to make sure that American intelligence does not leak into operations that violate U.S. law. “We were always careful about what we said to the Israelis in meetings, and they knew why,” says the Pentagon source. “They knew that if we gave them certain kinds of information we’d run the risk of breaking the law. We often held things back from them—satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence that could have helped them with their activities.”

From the get-go, Obama had a frosty relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. “There’s no question that tension grew between the two, because we felt like … they had a different estimation [of the timeline for Iran to get nuclear-weapons capability],” says the Pentagon source, “and we felt like some of their [kinetic] activities undermined what we were trying to do. Obama’s view was, why would you remove the opportunity for a diplomatic solution for something that was so incrementally significant [as killing a scientist]?”

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Dear Israel Lobby, we give up — please give us an acceptable way of insulting you

Joshua Holland writes: The latest round in the long and nasty debate over Israel, Palestine and our own government’s Mideast policy began with a coordinated campaign — initiated by a former AIPAC staffer and eagerly picked up by the conservative media — to marginalize a handful of progressive bloggers at the Center for American Progress and Media Matters who wrote critically of Israel’s hard-right government and called its enablers in the United States “Israel Firsters.” (I wrote about the dust-up in December.)

The back and forth has continued since then, and it’s now become clear that we need to offer a simple challenge to those who say that such terms are beyond the pale because they bear some vague resemblance to some old “anti-Semitic trope” or another. What, exactly, is an acceptable way of mixing it up with these people? How can we marginalize their malign policy preferences without being smeared as anti-Semites or self-loathing Jews?

America’s political discourse is not a garden party. We’re factionalized, and we throw sharp elbows, especially online, where conservatives call liberals “moonbats,” and accuse them of hating America, and liberals lob back terms like “wingnut,” and accuse their counterparts of being morons.

In the debate over Israel and Palestine – and U.S. policy in the Middle East – one side has been disarmed, their derogatory labels rejected as singularly unacceptable, while their opponents remain free to use the coarsest insults against them with impunity.

The problem stems from the objective fact that there are a group of Americans – disproportionately represented among right-wing Christian evangelicals and older generations of Jewish-Americans – who ally themselves with the Israeli government. They do so regardless of its ideological bent at the moment and deny that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances (sometimes going so far as to deny their existence). They wish away the cruelty of the occupation, pretend that there are only rejectionists on the Palestinian side and Israel only wants peace, claim Israel has never violated international law or trampled on human rights, insist that Israeli Arabs don’t face hostility and discrimination and go around calling everyone who disagrees anti-Semites and terror supporters.

And despite the fact that their views are totally out of sync with most liberal Israelis, and many of the policies they favor, like a military attack on Iran, would likely result in an utter disaster for Israel as well as its neighbors, they insist on calling themselves “pro-Israel.”

People who do not accept these arguments have attempted to characterize the views of this group and to come up with a variety of typically rough-and-tumble labels to apply t it. But all of them have been condemned as entirely out of bounds because, if held up to the light in just the right way, they kind of, sort of resemble some old anti-Semitic stereotype.

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The Israeli leadership is at war with itself over Iran

Yossi Melman writes: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Mossad chief Meir Dagan have a lot in common. They are both chubby and in their late sixties. They are both war heroes, decorated generals. And each rose to the highest positions in the Israeli defense establishment. But don’t mistake such biographical similarities for personal affinity. Barak and Dagan hate each other. Their animosity goes back years—and at the heart of their dispute is the critical question of how the Jewish state should deal with its enemies’ nuclear ambitions.

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

In Melman’s analysis of the struggle between Dagan and Barak, he pays a lot of attention to Israel’s attack on a nuclear reactor that Syria was alleged to be constructing in 2007. At the time and no doubt still now, there are those who viewed these allegations as part of a neocon conspiracy. The Syrians themselves claimed that the facility which got flattened in the Israeli attack was an agricultural research facility. Were that the case, it’s hard to understand why Bashir Assad would have failed to then make use of such a valuable propaganda opportunity. Western reporters could have been escorted around the site and shown all the shattered plant pots. Instead, bulldozers were swiftly moved in to bury every last trace of whatever the Syrians had been constructing. If they wanted to prove they had been falsely accused, this was a strange way of going about it.

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Unfazed by U.S. sanctions, India to step up ties with Iran

The Times of India reports: Unfazed by US sanctions and Israel linking Tehran to the attack on an Israeli embassy car here, India is set to ramp up its energy and business ties with Iran, with a commerce ministry team heading to Tehran to explore fresh business opportunities.

The team is expected to go to Tehran later this month to discuss steps to expand India’s trade with Iran, part of a larger strategy to pay for Iranian oil, said highly-placed sources.

Despite the US and European Union sanctions on Iran, India recently sealed a payment mechanism under which Indian companies will pay for 45 percent of their crude oil imports from Iran in rupees.

Not just oil, India is also stepping up the refurbishing of the Chabahar Port in Iran and a strategic railway link that will offer it direct access to Afghanistan and the energy-rich Central Asia.

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Explosions in Bangkok but no known target

The New York Times reports from Bangkok: A series of explosions rocked a residential neighborhood here on Tuesday, leading Thai authorities to a cache of bombs in a rented house and the capture of two men identified in Thai media reports as Iranians. A third suspect was being sought.

Witnesses said the three men, all of whom appeared to be foreigners, fled a house in the Sukhumvit neighborhood of Bangkok after an explosion in the early afternoon tore off the roof of the house. Two of the men ran immediately from the house, witnesses said; one was later detained at the city’s main international airport. The third man emerged shortly after the first two, seeming disoriented, with his face and ears bloodied, they said. As the third man tried to leave the area, he threw two grenades, one at a taxi and one at approaching police officers. The blast from the second struck him, however, blowing off his legs and injuring several Thais.

As of late Tuesday no evidence had emerged connecting the explosions in Bangkok with the escalating tensions between Iran and Israel. But the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, linked the explosions with the attacks on Israeli Embassy personnel on Monday in the capitals of India and Georgia, which Israel blamed on Iran and on Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group Iran backs.

“The attempted terrorist attack in Bangkok proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to perpetrate terrorism,” Mr. Barak said. “The recent terror attacks are yet another example of this.” Mr. Barak, who had been in Bangkok for a few hours on Sunday, made his comments Tuesday in Singapore, according to a statement from his office. “Iran and Hezbollah are unrelenting terror elements endangering the stability of the region and the stability of the world,” Mr. Barak added.

It’s a bit soon to talk about the geostrategic implications of whatever happened in Bangkok. Whoever these guys were, they clearly didn’t belong to anyone’s A-team. The only thing they seemed to have to had a talent in was unintentionally blowing themselves up.

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Anonymous movement claims attack on U.S. tear gas company

The Associated Press reports: The website of a U.S. company whose tear gas has been used against demonstrators in Egypt is the latest to be broken into by the Anonymous movement, hackers claimed Tuesday.

In a statement posted to the Internet, hackers accused Combined Systems of being war profiteers who sell “mad chemical weapons to militaries and cop shops around the world.”

The company did not respond to calls and emails ahead of U.S. business hours Tuesday.

Anonymous has claimed a series of Web attacks worldwide and has increasingly focused on security companies, law enforcement and governmental organizations. The group has often worked in tandem with the Occupy protest movement in the United States and has expressed solidarity with the pro-democracy protests across the Arab world.

On Tuesday, Anonymous said it had targeted Combined Systems because it was supplying weaponry used to “to repress our revolutionary movements.”

The hackers also claimed to have stolen and published personal information belonging to clients and employees of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based firm. Allegedly intercepted emails were pasted onto the bottom of the statement; one of them appeared to be a warning that Combined Systems’ site had been sabotaged.

“Looks like our web hosts got hacked,” the email says.

Neither the hackers’ claims nor the authenticity of the emails could be immediately verified, although the website was down Tuesday. Messages left for half a dozen employees and technical support staff were not immediately returned.

The company says sells a variety of security wares, including aerosol grenades, sprays and handcuffs. Journalists and activists have reported finding the company’s tear gas canisters at Egypt’s Tahrir Square, where authorities have repeatedly cracked down on demonstrators with deadly force.

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Syria’s slide towards civil war

Paul Wood, reporting for BBC News from Baba Amr in Homs writes: “Is this a civil war?” I was asked from London.

In Baba Amr, it certainly felt like one. But we were seeing a battle over one city. And Homs is not Syria. Not yet, perhaps.

In Homs, the Sunni areas, such as Baba Amr, largely support the uprising. They were being shelled by the Syrian army, from the Alawite and Christian areas, which largely support the regime.

There are Sunnis in the security forces; Christians and Alawites have joined the revolution. It is not yet a purely sectarian conflict. But the pressures for it to become one are enormous.

Yousseff Hannah was a prisoner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – the rebel fighters who have defected from government forces.

He was on a mattress, his thigh bandaged, in the basement of a house near the town of Qusayr, about 25 miles (40km) from Homs.

“Law and order,” he told me, groaning from his wound, in reply to my question about his job.

One of his captors angrily interrupted: “No. You are mukhabarat (secret police). Tell them you are mukhabarat.”

The FSA had snatched him a few days before from his home. He had been recovering there from the leg wound, received in Homs.

Aged 45, he was only a corporal, hardly a big fish. The rebels said they had taken him because his family had their own checkpoint in Qusayr that was harassing people.

They wanted it to stop. For too long, they said, people like him – protected by the regime – had felt they were untouchable, able to act with impunity.

Cpl Yousseff was a Christian. After he was taken, his relatives kidnapped six Sunnis, killing one in the process. In return, around 20 Christians were abducted.

“Some hotheads have been kidnapping Christians,” one of the senior FSA commanders in the area told me. “We have got to calm this down.”

After several days of stalemate, everyone was released, unharmed, including Corporal Yousseff. This was done as part of a deal for him and his family to leave Qusayr permanently.

Discussing the past tense few days, one of the Christian residents told me that Qusayr still had Christians who supported the uprising.

About a dozen attended the big Friday protest. In solidarity with them, the entire demonstration walked off when some at the front grabbed the microphone and started shouting Salafi (Islamist) slogans.

Everyone felt the town had come close to tipping over into serious sectarian bloodletting that week.

Is that the future for Syria? Much depends on the character of the FSA.

All of the fighters we met were Sunni. Perhaps that does not matter.

The commander near Qusayr told me they were fighting for all of Syria’s religions and sects: Christian, Muslim, Alawite, Sunni, Druze, Shia.

“We are experiencing freedom for the first time,” said Maj Ahmad Yaya.

But his next words left no doubt, either, that for many, this is a religious – and Islamic – struggle against the secular Baath regime.

“For the first time,” he went on, “we are able to proclaim the word of God throughout this land.”

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Syrian tanks resume shelling despite UN rebuke

The New York Times reports: Syrian government forces on Tuesday brushed aside a stern castigation from the top United Nations human rights official about its deadly attacks on civilians, resuming what one activist described as the “brutal shelling” of the city of Homs.

A day after the official, Navi Pillay, the United Nations’s high commissioner for human rights, offered a grim appraisal of the Syrian conflict, activists said the shelling resumed in earnest at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, with rockets and tank shells whistling into parts of the city as often as every two minutes.

It was the heaviest shelling in at least five days, activists said, particularly targeted at the neighborhood of Baba Amr. Videos uploaded on YouTube showed gray and black smoke billowing high overhead as shells crashed into the buildings, while the staccato rattle of machine gun fire sounded constantly.

“The idea of safety doesn’t exist anymore in Baba Amr,” said Omar Shakir, an activist in the neighborhood reached via Skype. “Scary is all that exists.”

The neighborhood was hit by occasional mortar shells overnight, he said, with the heavier shells starting at first light. Although some people managed to flee the heart of the area, it was hard to leave entirely because it was hemmed in by government forces as it has been since the shelling started on Feb. 4.

Food was running low, despite efforts by residents to open a shuttered mini-market to get what they could. “We are under full siege, it is horrible here,” Mr. Shakir said. “I have not tasted bread for the past five days.” He estimated that some 60 percent of the buildings in the neighborhood had been damaged by the shelling.

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Israeli intelligence chief: Iran wants Israeli leaders to ‘think twice before they order an attack on an Iranian scientist’

Less than two weeks ago, Yoram Cohen, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, warned that Iran would not allow assassinations of its nuclear scientists to continue without retaliation. Haaretz reported:

Lecturing at a closed forum in Tel Aviv, Cohen said that Iran believes Israel is behind the attacks on its nuclear experts, which have killed four scientists since November 2010. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not that Israel took out the nuclear scientists,” Cohen said. “A major, serious country like Iran cannot let this go on. They want to deter Israel and extract a price so that decision makers in Israel think twice before they order an attack on an Iranian scientist.”

Commenters at the Washington Post, this site, and elsewhere, have been quick to suggest that the bombing in India and attempted bombing in Georgia could have been false flag operations initiated by Israel. Iranian officials have likewise made the same accusation.

This possibility strikes me as wildly improbable for several reasons.

Firstly, Mossad — like any other intelligence service — relies on the support of Israel’s foreign service staff. As deeply committed Zionists as they all might be, for Mossad to injure or kill Israeli diplomats would be impossible to justify and breed massive distrust between two government agencies that depend on each other.

Secondly, Israel doesn’t have too many friends but it counts India as one of them. It’s an alliance that’s worth more to Israel than it is to India. Why put that in jeopardy for a stunt like this?

A much more obvious explanation for these attacks is the one ventured by the head of Shin Bet: Iran is telling the Israelis they can’t continue their campaign of assassinations with impunity. And beyond that there is probably a wider implicit warning: to those who claim that Israel could launch a military strike on Iran without suffering a significant reprisal — think again.

Luckily for Tal Yehoshua Koren, the wife of an Israeli Defense Ministry representative to India, who was injured in today’s attack, she seems to have learned from the example of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who survived an assassination attempt in November 2010.

If you suspect someone has just attached a bomb to your car, jump out as fast as possible.

Update:

Haaretz adds: The bombings sparked the usual tough rhetoric from Israeli officials: Lieberman said Israel “would not overlook” the attacks, while Netanyahu vowed to “continue to act forcefully, systematically and patiently” against Iranian terror. Nevertheless, a harsh Israeli response is seen as unlikely.

One reason for this is that if, as is widely believed, Israel is behind a recent series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran, government officials presumably knew that Iranian revenge attacks were likely and took that possibility into account. Though an innocent diplomat’s wife cannot be compared to a scientist directly involved in Iran’s nuclear program, Monday’s attacks were still limited enough that they didn’t violate the “rules of the game.” Indeed, the modus operandi of the New Delhi bombing exactly mimicked that used to kill several of the Iranian scientists. Hence a direct Israeli military strike on either Hezbollah or Iran seems unlikely.

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Iranian counter-terrorism?

Have we reached a quite predictable moment where counter-terrorism needs redefining? In other words, that when car bombings initiated by one state-sponsor of terrorism provoke a counter-attack of the same kind, that we should call such an attack an act of counter-terrorism?

Only last week there was confirmation from U.S. government officials that Israel is a state-sponsor of terrorism, having trained and deployed Iranian dissidents to conduct car bombings killing civilians in Iran. By internationally accepted definitions of terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism, there’s no question these were acts of terrorism and Israel’s role in instigating them makes it a state-sponsor of terrorism.

Now it would appear that Israel is reaping the reward for its own actions as Israeli diplomats have been targeted in India and Georgia. The attack in Delhi appears to have involved the use of the same method favored by Mossad — a magnetic bomb attached to the Israelis’ car by a passing motorcyclist.

We can now expect intellectual and moral acrobatics from Israel apologists who support the use of car bombs inside Iran but condemn their use anywhere else.

BBC News reports: Bombers have targeted staff at Israeli embassies in India and Georgia, officials say, with Israel accusing Iran of masterminding the attacks.

An explosion in Delhi injured one diplomat and three other people. Witnesses told local TV a motorcyclist had placed a device on the embassy’s car when it stopped in traffic.

A bomb underneath a diplomat’s car in Tbilisi was found and defused.

Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was behind the two incidents.

“Today we witnessed two attempts of terrorism against innocent civilians,” he told a meeting of his Likud party MPs.

“Iran is behind these attacks and it is the largest terror exporter in the world.”

He also blamed Iran for recent plots to attack Israeli targets in Thailand and Azerbaijan that were prevented.

And he suggested that the militant Islamist Hezbollah movement was also involved.

Israel’s foreign ministry said that Israel had the ability to track down those who carried out the attacks.

The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, in Jerusalem, says security at Israeli embassies has been tightened in recent months following warnings of potential attacks, after Iran accused Israel of a series of attacks on its nuclear scientists.

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