| Al Jazeera,April 23, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||
The UN Security Council has demanded that Tamil separatists holding out against the Sri Lankan military surrender and allow civilians trapped in the war zone to leave. Wednesday’s call by Claude Heller, the council’s rotating president, came as rights groups pressed the UN to do more, warning that tens of thousands of civilians remain stuck in “catastrophic” conditions. Heller said: “We demand that the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] immediately lay down arms, renounce terrorism, allow a UN-assisted evacuation of the remaining civilians in the conflict area, and join the political process.” ‘Human shields’ Diplomats told reporters after the closed session that the security council “strongly condemned” the Tigers and accused them of using civilians trapped in a small strip of land as human shields.
The security council also expressed its “deep concern” about the worsening humanitarian situation, but so far has not taken any action. Rights groups are calling for a two-week ceasefire to let civilians out. Anna Neistat, of Human Rights Watch, said: “We do have numerous civilian casualties, but we are not yet at the stage where a Tamilloodbath is going on full scale. It is a matter of days if not hours.” The Sri Lankan military says it has “rescued” 80,000 Tamils over the past three days. The government ordered the Tigers to surrender on Tuesday, saying the military was about to start its final assault. Catherine Bragg, the UN deputy humanitarian affairs chief, said the UN had not yet received permission to enter the conflict zone or to monitor the screening of civilians who manage to escape the fighting, a claim disputed by the Sri Lankan government. The Sri Lankan government was also criticised for not providing full assistance to all civilians fleeing the Tiger-held zone. ‘Human sandbags’ David Chater, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the northeastern Trincomalee, said: “[The government] sfay that it is the Tamil Tigers who are holding the Tamil civilians there, using civilians as human sandbags. I’ve certainly talked to many people and they’ve told me that is correct.
“I think perhaps the Sri Lankan government could be held responsible for some of the injuries if they are being caused by indirect fire – that is shelling, bombing, mortars,” he said.”But they made it very clear to me that they say they are using minimum force, these are their fellow civilians they do not want to harm them, their target is the Tamil Tigers.” Chater said that many of the refugees said that they were bitter about the way the LTTE had treated them. “There seems to have been a sea change in the opinion of the Tamil civilians about the Tamil Tiger leadership. “[After] seeing the men that were supposed to be protecting them, fighting for their own homeland, exploiting them, shooting at them when they tried to escape, stealing the humanitarian food supplies. Chater said that this that has had eroded support for the LTTE which could hamper any guerrilla force operating after the conventional military war is over. Susan Rice, the US ambassador, suggested that both sides might be guilty of violating international law. “The fact that both sides have been shooting at civilians as they leave the safe zone is one gross manifestation of the apparent violation of international humanitarian law,” she said. In remarks to the US congress on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said “the Sri Lankan government knows that the entire world is very disappointed” at the “untold suffering” being brought by its offensive against the Tigers”. She added that “there seems to be very little openness on the part of the Tamil Tiger leadership to cease their efforts so that we could try to get in and help the people”. Prominent Tigers ‘surrender’ China and Russia are among some countries which have opposed the idea of a formal security council discussion of the conflict, which has spanned 26 years, saying it is an internal matter for the Sri Lankans.
The UN estimates that more than 4,500 civilians have been killed in the past three months and the International Committee of the Red Cross says up to 50,000 people remain trapped in the less than 20sq km area still held by the Tigers.The Sri Lankan military said on Thursday that the group’s former media spokesman and an interpreter who both played prominent roles in dealing with the media, had surrendered. The Tigers have been fighting for an autonomous homeland for ethnic Tamils in the north of the country, arguing that they are marginalised by the majority Sinhalese government. A Norway-brokered ceasefire fell apart during 2007 and the government said it would “wipe out” the Tigers by the end of 2008. |
Archive for the ‘Human rights’ Category
UN urges Tamil Tigers to surrender
April 23, 2009
What credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott?
April 23, 2009
The Iranian president’s repugnant rhetoric doesn’t give Israel’s sponsors the right to cry foul when it’s called racist
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- Seumas Milne
- The Guardian, UK, Thursday 23 April 2009 01.30 BST
What do the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week’s UN conference against racism in Geneva – even before Monday’s incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states.
In international forums, it’s almost unprecedented to have such an undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-the-rest. And for that to happen in a global meeting called to combat racial hatred doesn’t exactly augur well for future international understanding at a time when the worst economic crisis since the war is ramping up racism and xenophobia across the world.
Didn’t Canada or Australia have anything to say about the grim condition of their indigenous people, you might wonder, or Italy and the Czech Republic about violent attacks on Roma people? Didn’t any of the boycotters have a contribution to make about the rampant Islamophobia, resurgence of anti-semitism and scapegoating of migrants in their countries over the last decade?
The dispute was mainly about Israel and western fears that the conference would be used, like its torrid predecessor in Durban at the height of the Palestinian intifada in 2001, to denounce the Jewish state and attack the west over colonialism and the slave trade. In fact, although it was the only conflict mentioned in the final Durban declaration, the reference was so mild (recognising the Palestinian right to self-determination alongside Israel’s right to security) that the then Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, called it “an accomplishment of the first order for Israel”.
In this week’s Geneva statement, Israel isn’t mentioned at all. But the US bizarrely still used its reaffirmation of the anodyne Durban declaration to justify a boycott, to the anger of African American politicians such as Jesse Jackson and Barbara Lee, who chairs the US Congressional Black Caucus. In fact, like the other boycotting governments, the US administration had been intensely lobbied by rightwing pro-Israel groups, who had insisted long in advance that the conference would be a “hatefest”.
Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding played straight into that agenda. The most poisonous phrases in the printed version of his speech circulated by embassy officials referred to the Nazi genocide as “ambiguous and dubious” and claimed Zionist “penetration” of western society was so deep that “nothing can be done against their will”. That a head of state of a country of nearly 70 million people is still toying with Holocaust denial and European antisemitic tropes straight out of the Tsarist antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is not only morally repugnant and factually absurd. It’s also damaging to the Palestinian cause by association, weakens the international support Iran needs to avert the threat of attack over its nuclear programme, and bolsters Israel’s claims that it faces an existential threat.
But, perhaps as a result of an appeal by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Ahmadinejad dropped those provocations at the last minute. What in fact triggered the walkout of European Union ambassadors was his reference to Israel as a “totally racist regime”, established by the western powers who had made an “entire nation Israel homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering” and “in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe”.
The rhetoric was certainly crude and inflammatory. Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband called it “hate-filled”. But the truth is that throughout the Arab, Muslim and wider developing worlds, the idea that Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial. The day after Ahmadinejad’s appearance, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, echoed the charge in the conference hall, describing Israeli occupation as “the ugliest face of racism”. It’s really not good enough for Britain’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham – who led the Ahmadinejad walkout – to say of the charge of Israel’s racism, “we all know it when we see it and it’s not that”.
This is a state, after all, created by European colonists, built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, whose founding legal principles guarantee the right of citizenship to any Jewish migrant from anywhere in the world, while denying that same right to Palestinians born there along with their descendants. Of course, Israel is much else besides, and the Jewish cultural and historical link with Palestine is a profound one.
But even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens face what the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert last year called “deliberate and insufferable” discrimination by a state which defines itself by ethnicity. For Palestinians in the occupied territories, ruled by Israel for most of the state’s existence, where ethnic segregation and extreme inequality is ruthlessly enforced, the situation is far worse – even without the relentless military assaults and killings. And Israel now has a far-right government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said 90% of Israel’s Arab citizens have “no place” in the country, should be forcibly “transferred”, and only be allowed citizenship in exchange for an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Zionist Jewish state.
But if Lieberman had turned up to speak at the Geneva anti-racism conference, who believes that western delegates and ambassadors would have staged a walkout? Of course, there’s a perfectly reasonable argument to be had about the nature of Israel’s racism and whether it should be compared to apartheid, for example. But for western governments to hold up their hands in horror when Israel is described as a racist state has no global credibility whatever.
Israel’s supporters often complain that, whatever its faults, it is singled out for attack while the crimes of other states and conflicts are ignored. To the extent that that’s true in forums such as the UN, it’s partly because Israel is seen as the unfinished business of European colonialism, along with the Middle East conflict’s other special mix of multiple toxins. The Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind Israel’s carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own racism – and their continuing role in the tragedy of the Middle East.
Nobel Laureate Accuses Israel of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’
April 22, 2009Khaleej Times Online, April 23, 2009
AFP
JERUSALEM – Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire on Tuesday accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” policies in annexed east Jerusalem, where the municipality plans to tear down almost 90 Arab homes.
“I believe the Israeli government is carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians here in east Jerusalem,” said Maguire, who won the 1976 Nobel prize for her efforts at reaching a peaceful solution to the violence in Northern Ireland.
“I believe the Israeli government policies are against international law, against human rights, against the dignity of the Palestinian people,” she said at a news conference.
It was held in a protest tent erected by residents of east Jerusalem’s Silwan neighbourhood where 88 Arab homes are under demolition orders.
The Israeli authorities say the houses were built or extended without the necessary construction permits. Palestinians say the planned demolitions aim at forcing them out of east Jerusalem.
If the demolition orders are carried out 1,500 people would be left homeless in one of the largest forced evictions since Israel occupied mostly Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later annexed it.
Israel considers Jerusalem to be its eternal and undivided capital, while Palestinians want to make east Jerusalem the capital of their future state.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says that since 2004 the Israeli authorities have torn down more than 400 homes in east Jerusalem.
ISRAEL: ‘If You Don’t Know, It Didn’t Happen’
April 21, 2009Analysis by Daan Bauwens | Inter Press Service News
TEL AVIV, Apr 20 (IPS) – Even though atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers have surfaced and the appointment of a right-wing government diminishes the chances for peace in the Middle East, no left-wing Israeli is taking to the streets.
During the war in Gaza, modest peace manifestations brought together a few thousand protesters at a time. After the war and the elections, the voice of the left is completely muted.
“Where is the left in this country?” says Alina Charny, a yoga teacher from the Pardes Hanna district of Haifa. “There is a growing feeling that people from the left have lost all belief there can be a change. We have been in this war for too long now, but the voice of peace has never been in such a bad condition.”
All is still on the left side of the Israeli political spectrum. “We were left with all the guilt and no votes,” says Ido Gideon, an Israeli film producer and former spokesperson of Israel’s largest left-wing party Meretz.
In spite of confessions of atrocities by Israeli soldiers and growing evidence that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) deliberately committed war crimes, no political force aside from Israeli human rights organisations is pushing for an independent investigation into what the army’s internal investigation later dismissed as “rumours”.
“We’re in no position to push for anything right now,” says Gideon. “I am indifferent, I don’t care any more, a lot of people I know have become indifferent. For the moment, we are trying not to get too much affected by things. Too many bad things happened at once.”
“When you don’t know, it never happened,” says teacher Alina Charny. “People don’t want to feel guilty, so they don’t want to hear about destruction or death. At the same time, everyone does want to know what happened, but in a perverted way: they read and talk in aggressive slogans, without taking into consideration what was happening on the ground. The Israeli public has detached itself from feeling, from any emotions.”
Yossi Wolfson has worked over 20 years as a human rights lawyer in the occupied Palestinian territories, focusing on conscientious objectors in the Israeli army. “The public prefers not to acknowledge what its power-addicted discourses mean on the ground,” he says. “They said the time had come for revenge, but didn’t want to think about children losing their limbs and being attacked while being taken to an ambulance. Now they don’t want to think about their neighbour’s son having shot a family drinking tea while sitting down, or having given orders to a drone. You just don’t want to think about that, so nobody talks about it. Even newspapers, except for Haaretz, don’t want to publish what really happened.”
Israel lives with too many contradictions, Wolfson tells IPS. “We have been living in a dream for too long. You cannot be with the occupation for the sake of the survival of Israel, but against it for the sake of the Palestinians. You cannot go to the army because you are obliged, but convince yourself you can change it from within. You cannot have a democratic but strictly Jewish state.”
Israelis now seem to be changing their very conception of peace. “The mainstream discourse has always been: we want peace,” says Wolfson. “But in fact, nobody wanted peace with all the implications of it. Now the popular discourse is: we don’t want the peace process to die.”
“When you go to war, you shoot to kill, not to play games,” Haim Gordon, senior lecturer at the department of education at the Ben Gurion University in the Negev desert tells IPS. “Have you ever heard of a war where civilians were not killed? It’s good that we did what we did. The people in Gaza are big boys now, they’re responsible for their own lives now we’re not there anymore. Today the oppressors are Hamas, and the people from Gaza accept the oppression, they even support it.”
Gordon, formerly a human rights activist in Gaza, adds: “Not only should the Israeli public not protest, they should go to war when others shoot on us. The Israelis are not indifferent; on the contrary, they are very determined not to let Hamas change the rules of the game.”
UN Race Conference Undermined by Western Withdrawals
April 20, 2009US, Other Governments Cannot Take ‘Yes’ for an Answer
(Geneva) – The announcement by the US government that it would not participate in the upcoming UN Review Conference on Racism, followed by the decision of the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia to pull out and Germany to attend as an observer, strikes a blow at UN efforts to fight racism, Human Rights Watch said today. There is no justification for the decision because the draft declaration to be adopted at the conference on April 20-24, 2009, fully incorporates the legitimate concerns of EU and other Western governments.
“The sad truth is that countries professing to want to avoid a reprise of the contentious 2001 racism conference are now the ones triggering the collapse of a global consensus on the fight against racism,” said Juliette de Rivero, Geneva advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “As these Western governments demanded, the negotiated text for the review conference upholds freedom of expression and avoids singling out Israel. But these governments couldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer and are boycotting the conference anyway.”
The draft document, adopted after preparatory negotiations, contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, could be defamed or have their rights violated. It also reaffirms the singular tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism. In addition, it fully protects the right to freedom of expression as defined under international law, affirms and strengthens the call for the protection of migrants’ rights, and acknowledges multiple and aggravated forms of discrimination.
Some governments have argued against the document because it reaffirms the 2001 Declaration and Program of Action. However, with the exception of the US, the Western governments now planning to boycott the conference endorsed the prior declaration in 2001. Although the US government boycotted the 2001 conference, and had concerns about language in the proposed text regarding incitement, its concerns could easily have been met through reservations or parallel statements rather than a wholesale boycott of the conference and its important race agenda.
“Governments boycotting the conference have decided to put the concerns of victims last,” de Rivero said. “Instead of isolating radical voices, governments have capitulated to them.”
The review conference taking place in Geneva represented a chance to move beyond the controversy that surrounded the race conference in 2001. The 2009 review should set a positive and constructive vision for the fight against racism. Instead, the boycott decisions took place despite US officials’ acknowledgement that the vast majority of their “red lines” had not been crossed. The Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany, and Australia pulled out of the conference a day before it is due to begin, although the final text produced on April 18 met the remaining demands of the EU states on protecting freedom of expression.
“The boycott plays into the hands of those who want the conference to fail,” de Rivero said. “The only ones celebrating will be those who want to undermine efforts to defeat racism and protect rights.”
Four CIA chiefs said ‘don’t reveal torture memos’
April 20, 2009Agency’s ex-directors objected to interrogation techniques being revealed. But Barack Obama went ahead anyway.
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Former CIA directors General Michael Hayden (above), Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch fought the White House over release of embarrassing documents
enlargeFour former CIA directors opposed the release of classified Bush-era interrogation memos, officials say, describing objections that went all the way to the White House and slowed disclosure of the records. Former CIA chiefs Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch all called the White House in March warning that release of the so-called “torture memos” would compromise intelligence operations, current and former officials say.
President Barack Obama ultimately overruled the objections after internal discussions that intensified in the weeks that followed the former directors’ intervention. The memos were released on Thursday.
Mr Obama’s involvement grew as the decision neared, and he even led a National Security Council session on the matter, four senior administration officials said. White House adviser David Axelrod, who said he also talked to Mr Obama about the pending release of the memos in recent weeks, said the ex-directors’ opposition was considered seriously but did not impede the decision-making process. “The CIA directors weighed in and it slowed things down,” Mr Axelrod said on Friday.
The memos detailed the legal rationales that senior Bush administration lawyers drew up authorising the CIA to use simulated drowning and other harsh techniques on terror suspects. They described how prisoners were naked, shackled and hooded at the start of interrogation sessions. When the CIA interrogator removed the hood, the questioning began. When a prisoner resisted, the documents outlined techniques the CIA could use to bring him back in line:
* Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for co-operation.
* Slapping prisoners on the face or abdomen was allowed. So was grabbing them forcefully by the collar or slamming them into a false wall, a technique called “walling” intended to induce fear rather than pain.
* Water hoses were used to douse the prisoners for minutes at a time. The hoses were turned on and off as the interrogation continued.
* Prisoners were put into one of three “stress positions”, such as sitting on the floor with legs out straight and arms raised in the air.
* At night, the detainees were shackled, standing naked or wearing a nappy. The length of sleep deprivation varied but was authorised for up to 180 hours, or seven and a half days. Interrogation sessions ranged from 30 minutes to several hours and could be repeated as necessary, and as approved by psychological and medical teams.
The Bush administration approved the use of waterboarding, a technique in which a suspect was strapped to a board, his feet raised above his head, and his face covered with a wet cloth as interrogators poured water over it. The body responds as if it is drowning, over and over as the process is repeated. “We find that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. “From the vantage point of any reasonable person undergoing this procedure in such circumstances, he would feel as if he is drowning at the very moment of the procedure due to the uncontrollable physiological sensation he is experiencing.”
But attorneys decided that waterboarding caused “no pain or actual harm whatsoever” and so did not meet the “severe pain and suffering” standard to be considered torture.
President Obama has ended the CIA’s interrogation programme. CIA interrogators are now required to follow army guidelines, under which waterboarding and many of the techniques listed above are prohibited.
The President gave the question of these documents’ release “the appropriate reflection”, Mr Axelrod said. He said Mr Obama’s deliberations revolved around “the issue of national security versus the rule of law”, and amounted to “one of the most profound issues the President of the United States has to deal with”.
On 18 March, the Justice Department told the Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, as he was leaving for a foreign trip, that it would be recommending that the White House release the memos almost completely uncensored, officials said. Mr Panetta told the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, and officials in the White House that the administration needed to discuss the possibility that the memos’ release might expose CIA officers to lawsuits on allegations of torture and abuse. Mr Panetta also pushed for more censorship of the memos, officials said. The Justice Department informed other senior CIA leaders of the decision to release the memos and, as a courtesy, told former agency directors.
Senior CIA officials objected, arguing that the release would damage the agency’s ability to interrogate prisoners. They also said the move would tarnish CIA officers who had acted on the Bush officials’ legal guidance. And they warned that the action would erode foreign intelligence services’ trust in the CIA’s ability to protect national security secrets. The four former directors immediately protested to the White House, officials said. The enhanced interrogation procedures outlined in the memos had been approved on Mr Tenet’s watch during the Bush administration.
On 19 March, the Justice Department requested a two-week delay in responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that asked for release of the memos. Justice officials told the court dealing with that lawsuit that it was considering releasing the memos voluntarily. Two weeks later, Justice Department lawyers told the court the memos would come out on or before 16 April.
Inside the White House, according to aides, Mr Obama expressed concerns that releasing the memos could threaten current intelligence operations as well as US officials. He also echoed the CIA chiefs’ worries about US relationships with always-skittish foreign intelligence services. The Justice Department argued that the ACLU lawsuit would in the end force the administration to release the documents anyway, officials said.
Mr Obama eventually agreed. The administration decided it would be better to make the release voluntarily, so as not to be seen as being forced to do so, the officials said. The only items blacked out included names of US employees or foreign services or items related to techniques still in use. Still, CIA officials needed reassurance about the decision, the officials said.
Mr Obama took the unusual step of accompanying his decision with a personal letter to CIA employees. He also devoted a big share of his public statement to saying and repeating that he believed strongly in keeping intelligence operations secret, and operations about them classified. He said he would not apologise for doing so in the future
What the memos reveal
The Bush administration memos describe the interrogation methods used against 28 terror suspects, the fullest government account of the techniques to date. They range from waterboarding – or simulated drowning – to using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls. The treatment of two suspects in particular are described:
Abu Zubaydah In 2002, the Justice Department authorised CIA interrogators to step up the pressure even further on the suspected terrorist. Justice Department lawyers said the CIA could place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box. Because Zubaydah appeared afraid of insects, they also authorised interrogators to place him in a box filled with caterpillars (though the tactic was not in fact used). Finally, the Justice Department authorised interrogators to take a step into what the United States now considers torture: waterboarding. Zubaydah was strapped to a board, his feet raised above his head. His face was covered with a wet cloth as interrogators poured water over it.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed A memo dated 30 May 2005 says that before the harsher methods were used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top al-Qa’ida detainee, he refused to answer questions about pending plots against the US. “Soon, you will know,” he said, according to the memo. It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot called the “second wave”, using East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner in Los Angeles. Plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a “dirty bomb”, spreading radioactive materials by means of explosives.
American Jewish groups must speak up over Gaza
April 20, 2009It is a sensitive subject, but the movement for Gaza accountability needs full Jewish participation
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 April 2009 09.00 BS
When Israeli forces left Gaza in January, they left behind 1,400 Palestinian dead, 4,000 homes destroyed, universities and government buildings flattened, and tens of thousands homeless. The Israeli and world press documented IDF atrocities including the indiscriminate use of white phosphorus in densely populated urban areas, the assault on United Nations humanitarian facilities, the shelling of civilian homes, and the shooting in cold blood of unarmed civilians.
Israeli human rights groups have called for war crimes investigations of IDF actions. In the last few weeks, on-the-ground reports supported by eyewitness testimony have become available. They paint an even more damning picture. The attacks on UN facilities spurred the Palestinian Authority to call for a security council investigation. Officials announced they are investigating whether the international body has jurisdiction, but it seems likely that US opposition will doom such an avenue of redress.
The UN human rights council has just appointed a distinguished jurist, Richard Goldstone, to head an investigation of both IDF and Palestinian actions in Gaza. The council made a wise choice in Goldstone, who served as chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda: he has an impeccable record in his field and can be expected to issue a fair, balanced and thorough report.
Last week, Judge Balthazar Garzon announced the investigation of six Bush-era officials for devising a scheme that justified torture of terror suspects. With this development, it became clear there was a new method to hold violators accountable for their alleged crimes, and I am certain activists are already preparing dossiers for submission. Earlier this month, an international assemblage of individuals announced the formation of the Russell tribunal on Palestine. Modelled on the Russell tribunal on war crimes in Vietnam, and named after philosopher and peace campaigner Bertrand Russell, it aims to bring to bear international law as a force for adjudicating and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The tribunal will hear a legal case prepared by volunteer experts from around the world. A jury of respected individuals will hear evidence from both sides and announce its finding of guilt or innocence to the world.
There is one important consideration that should encourage Israel to participate. If it truly believes Palestinian rocket attacks constitute war crimes, then it should vigorously make this point. The tribunal has already taken pains to point out that this is a part of its mandate: “Do the means of resistance used by the Palestinians violate international law?” However, I would imagine that Israel will not participate.
While Israel’s savage assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon during the 2006 war generated an uproar, one wonders whether the massacres that occurred in Gaza crossed a moral threshhold. Can an effort to end Israeli impunity have real impact, both in terms of influencing world opinion and of impacting on Israeli behaviour? Israel has become an expert at wearing down its opponents, honing such skills during 40 years of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The question is: what, if anything, can the peace community do differently this time?
Each time the world witnesses another humanitarian tragedy resulting from Israeli military action, the outcry is louder. For example, the UN has never before entertained the possibility of investigating Israeli war crimes. The EU has informally made known that it intends to freeze a planned upgrade in relations with Israel and cancel of visit of Israel’s prime minister as an indirect result. American universities such as Hampshire College and church denominations such as the Presbyterians contemplate ever more seriously the issue of divestment. Gaza crossed a red line. Now, new methods of protest and new means of ensuring accountability must be devised.
Horrors such as the Gaza war also breathe new life into movements like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions initiative. Recently, Naomi Klein and Rabbi Arthur Waskow engaged in a provocative debate at In These Times about BDS. The Gaza war made Klein a believer. Recently, Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote words that many in the American Jewish community might find heretical, that BDS could be a legitimate expression “of a weaker, dispossessed, disempowered people”.
There can be no doubt that horrors such as Gaza serve as moral ice-breakers in the psyche of diaspora Jews. Ideas that hitherto might have been taboo or “anti-Israel” become suddenly legitimate. As Israel drifts farther to the right, American Jews are challenged to respond morally. In this context, the forbidden becomes acceptable. Boycotts, divestment, sactions and war crimes investigations now appear tools through which to try to draw Israel back from the brink.
No major American-Jewish peace group has called for a Gaza war crimes investigation. It is a sensitive subject among diaspora Jews. But if Israeli human rights organisations can make such a call, there is no reason why Americans should be afraid to do so. The movement for Gaza accountability needs full Jewish participation.
My motivation in writing this is not to avenge the deaths of innocent Palestinians. Nor is it for pure justice. It is rather to bring Israel back from the brink. Like one of the slogans of the Israeli military during the Gaza war – “baal habayit hishtageya” (“the boss has lost it”) – Israel’s policy has verged on madness. Nor has it achieved its objective of pacifying Gaza or toppling Hamas. And isn’t one of the definitions of madness to repeat a behaviour even after it has failed, with the conviction that it will succeed the next time? When you see a loved one or family member descending into self-destruction, you reach out and help. My goal is to turn Israel away from the path of madness.
Mr. President, War Crimes Must Be Investigated
April 19, 2009by Ruth Rosen | CommonDreams.org, April 18, 2009
The memos about torture released by the Obama administration are horrifying to read. Nothing new, here, but they are like a punch in the stomach all over again. This is my country? This is the nation that stands for freedom and decency?
I understand why President Obama doesn’t want to prosecute those who believed they were acting under laws written by the Justice Department. But that is not the only policy he and other Democrats can pursue.
First, the men who wrote those memos should be investigated for disbarment. They acted in ways that are unconscionable and unprofessional, to put it mildly.
Second, neither the President nor Congress should investigate these crimes. They must be pursued by a special independent investigator who has no political ax to grind. Now you may well ask, who approves of torture? Well, hardly anyone, except those in the Bush administration who justified or directed these war crimes.
Third, how can we allow a sitting federal judge to remain on the bench–for life– when he provided legal justification for torture? I speak here, of course, of Stephen L. Bybee, who should resign or be impeached.
Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because the country I care so much about has breached some of the most important international conventions in modern history and yet no major leaders have been held accountable. If the investigation goes straight to Vice-President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, then so be it.
Remember the date over whether President Ford should have pardoned President Nixon for his violations of the constitution? The best argument for that pardon was that Nixon HAD been held accountable and had to resign his office. He had, in short, received a serious punishment.
President Obama’s instincts are right to avoid a drawn-out partisan conflict over the past. But if we are truly a nation of laws, committed to the decency and morality we embrace, we cannot let people who justify or commit torture and other war crimes to escape prosecution. Those who agree should make their voices loud, joining Amnesty International, the ACLU and many thousands of other Americans who will allow war crimes to be committee in their name.
Peace and Justice Post 
Torturers Should Be Punished
April 23, 2009By Amy Goodman | Truthdig, April 22, 2009
Spokane, Wash. – George W. Bush insisted that the U.S. did not use torture.
But the four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos released last week by the Obama administration’s Justice Department paint a starkly different picture. The declassified memos provided legal authorization for “harsh interrogation techniques” used by the Bush administration in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. They authorized (as listed in the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) “walling … facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the OLC under Bush “became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law.”
The memos authorize what the International Committee of the Red Cross called, in a leaked report, “treatment and interrogation techniques … that amounted to torture.”
These torture techniques were developed by two psychologists based in Spokane, Wash.: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Their company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, provided specialized training to members of the U.S. military to deal with capture by enemy forces. The training is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Mitchell and Jessen, both psychologists, were contracted by the U.S. government to train interrogators with techniques they claimed would break prisoners.
They reverse-engineered the SERE training, originally developed to help people withstand and survive torture, to train a new generation of torturers.
The memos provide gruesome details of the torture. Waterboarding was used hundreds of times on a number of prisoners. The Bybee memo includes this Kafkaesque authorization: “You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him.”
After President Barack Obama said there should be no prosecutions, he was received with great fanfare at the CIA this week. Mark Benjamin, the reporter who originally broke the Mitchell and Jessen story, said when I questioned him about Obama’s position: “If you look at the president’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Eric Holder, the attorney general … you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal-even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t-none of those people will ever face charges. The attorney general has announced that … the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys … they have been given this blanket immunity … in return for nothing.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein asked Obama to hold off on ruling out prosecutions until her panel finishes an investigation during the next six months. Though Obama promises to let the torturers go, others are pursuing them. Bybee is now a federal judge. A grass-roots movement, including Common Cause and the Center for Constitutional Rights, is calling on Congress to impeach Bybee. In Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzon, who got Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet indicted for crimes against humanity, has named Bybee and five others as targets of a prosecution.
For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2009 Amy Goodman
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Tags:Abu Zubaydah, George W. Bush, insect, Jay Bybee, Judge Baltasar Garzon, memos, Obama administration, torture techniques
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