Feinstein comment on U.S. drones likely to embarrass Pakistan

February 15, 2009
The Predator planes that launch missile strikes against militants are based in Pakistan, the senator says. That suggests a much deeper relationship with the U.S. than Islamabad would like to admit.
By Greg Miller | Los Angels Times
February 13, 2009
Reporting from Washington — A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan’s northwestern border.

“As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad, the capital, and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The CIA declined to comment, but former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein’s account was accurate.

Philip J. LaVelle, a spokesman for Feinstein, said her comment was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad.

“We strongly object to Sen. Feinstein’s remarks being characterized as anything other than a reference” to an article that appeared last March in the Washington Post, LaVelle said. Feinstein did not refer to newspaper accounts during the hearing.

Many counter-terrorism experts have assumed that the aircraft take off from U.S. military installations in Afghanistan and are remotely piloted from locations in the United States. Experts said the disclosure could create political problems for the government in Islamabad, which is considered relatively weak.

The attacks are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, in part because of the high number of civilian casualties inflicted in dozens of strikes.

The use of Predators armed with Hellfire antitank missiles has emerged as perhaps the most important tool of the U.S. in its effort to attack Al Qaeda in its sanctuaries along the Pakistani-Afghan border. A New Year’s Day strike killed two senior Al Qaeda operatives who were suspected of involvement in the bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel.

They were among at least eight senior Al Qaeda figures reportedly killed in Predator strikes over the last seven months as part of a stepped-up missile campaign.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said Feinstein’s comments put Pakistan’s government on the spot.

“If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known,” he said. “It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations.”

As chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein is privy to classified details of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. The CIA does not publicly acknowledge a campaign against Pakistan-based extremists using remotely piloted planes, making Feinstein’s comment all the more unusual.

Feinstein’s disclosure came during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair on the nation’s security threats. Blair did not respond directly to Feinstein’s remark, except to say that Pakistan was “sorting out” its cooperation with the United States.

Pakistani officials have long denied that they have even granted the U.S. permission to fly the Predator planes over Pakistani territory, let alone to operate the aircraft from within the country.

The civilian leadership that took over from an unpopular former general, Pervez Musharraf, last year, has gone to significant lengths to distance itself from the Predator strikes.

The Pakistani government regularly lodges diplomatic protests against the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, and officials said the subject was raised with Richard C. Holbrooke, a newly appointed U.S. envoy to the region, who completed his first visit to the country Thursday.

But a former CIA official familiar with the Predator operations said Pakistan’s government secretly approves of the flights because of the growing militant threat.

Feinstein prefaced her comment about the Predator basing Thursday by noting that Holbrooke “ran into considerable concern about the use of the Predator strikes in the FATA areas,” a reference to what Pakistan calls its Federally Administered Tribal Area along the border with Afghanistan.

Many Pakistanis believe that the civilian leadership, despite public anger, has continued Musharraf’s policy of giving the United States tacit permission to carry out the strikes.

The CIA has been working to step up its presence in Pakistan in recent years. It has deployed as many as 200 people to the country, one of its largest overseas operations besides Iraq, current and former agency officials have estimated. That contingent works alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites.

In his prepared testimony Thursday, Blair said that Al Qaeda had “lost significant parts of its command structure since 2008.”

greg.miller@latimes.com

Times staff writer Laura King in Istanbul, Turkey, contributed to this report.

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Apartheid in my name

February 15, 2009

Kyle Matzpen (not his real name) describes what it was like to be in Israel during the slaughter of Gaza.

Socialist  Worker, February 15, 2009

Palestinians wait behind barbed wire at the checkpoint at Rafah

JUDAISM EQUALS Zionism–so I have been taught since my early days in Hebrew school. To be against one is to be against both, so if you disagree with the tenets of Zionism or the actions of Israel in the slightest, then you’re an anti-Semite–or in my case, a self-hating Jew.

But underneath this name-calling by Zionists lies a demand for unquestioning conformity from Jews in support of Israel in perpetuity, despite whatever that means for others. Otherwise, you’re not a Jew.

At least that’s what my family told me after they found out my “Free Palestine” political beliefs. I wouldn’t say what happened next was necessarily “forced” on me–“coerced” is probably a closer term–but before I knew it, I was signed up to Taglit-Birthright Israel to connect to my “people’s roots,” and maybe get some sense knocked into me.

To give a fuller idea what Birthright is exactly, I’ll quote one of its founders, a South African and current president of Hillel (a national college-level Jewish youth group), Avraham Infeld, who spoke to a crowd of us Birthrighteers on my last night in Israel. He said he had aimed through Birthright to “create a world where every Jewish child is born with a ticket to Israel tied to his umbilical cord.”

Despite the fact that I’ve never been there, and have no immediate family in Israel, I get a free 10-day, all-expenses-paid trip there, and could even emigrate there with little fuss if I so wished. All because I am Jewish. At the same time, Palestinians whose families up to 1947 had hundreds of years of roots in this land are forever barred from returning. This sense of racial nationalism and entitlement highlighted just about everything I saw and heard in Israel.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

BEFORE THE in-flight movies started on the flight from JFK to Tel Aviv, they played a 30-minute video intro to Israeli tourist attractions. It was a roaring epic of music and montage shots of deserts, wildlife, mountains. And, overall, the theme of the land, the importance of the land, who should get the land, making the land bloom.

A shot of Jerusalem cuts to a clip of two Ibexes fighting over a chunk of cliff rock, then a cut to a pan-shot of acres of irrigated farm. The subliminal symbolism was unnerving.

We landed in Tel-Aviv on January 2. On January 3, our bus of about 40 college kids was on its way for some sightseeing in Jerusalem when a person next to me asked one of the American tour guides about the chances of the ground invasion of Gaza happening while we were in Israel. The tour guide smiled and said, “I think the chances are pretty good.” He sounded pumped.

That night, we came to a place in East Jerusalem called Ammunition Hill. Ammunition Hill is the site of a major battle in what is called by the tour guides the “Reunification of Jerusalem”–in other words, when Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, liberating the land from its inhabitants.

Today, it’s a memorial with the Jordanian trench works from the battle fully restored. This came in handy, as one of the Israeli tour guides had us reenact in the trenches, step by step, the entire battle of Ammunition Hill.

This is where you came under heavy fire from a Jordanian pillbox. Three of us played dead. This is where you throw your grenades into the Jordanian pillbox.

When we arrived back at our hotel that night, we learned that while we were playing Israel Defense Forces (IDF) make-believe and shooting at invisible Jordanians, the ground invasion in the slaughter of Gaza had begun.

Suffice it to say, we were purposely kept out of the loop about what was happening at every step of the way. News about the IDF attacking UN-run shelters and food aid hubs, or the widespread use of the white phosphorus chemical weapons, I only heard after coming back. But information about Israeli casualties–they made sure that sunk in.

On the day after the ground invasion began, they took us for a tour of the Israel Defense Forces national cemetery, proving once again that the trip organizers had a morbid sense of irony. The constant noise of F-16s going supersonic and Blackhawk helicopters flying low overhead made an oddly poignant background noise as we viewed the graves of the likes of Levi Eshkol and Theodore Herzl.

I looked at the rows upon rows of graves of children my age, and thought about what life was like for them. They pump these children up to their eyes with nationalism, religious pride and a contrived Israeli-origin history, written by the victors, and they send them off to kill Muslims.

And if, God forbid, they die in battle against other children, they will be buried in a cemetery among heroes and prime ministers, so that even smaller children can come here on class field trips, put stones on their graves and think of how glorious it must be to die in battle. And if for some reason an Israeli child wants no part of this cycle, there must be something wrong with them.

The mandatory draft has created an Israeli society that is entirely militarized. Newspapers had full-page articles just on the type of gear that the Special Ops were using in Gaza. Everywhere, there were IDF T-shirts, T-shirts proclaiming that “Masada Will Never Fall Again” and Israeli flags. People seemed naturally more aggressive on every level. Just imagine it’s like living in the movie 300, minus the slow motion, and with an uber-emphasis on the “stronghold of civilization against the dirty barbarian hordes” concept.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE AMOUNT of racism I heard on the trip, from both my fellow Birthrighteers and the actual American and Israeli tour guides, was mind-boggling.

For example, a tour guide informed us as our bus was driving on a Jewish-only access highway through the West Bank that Palestinians “went to the bathroom in the street and bred like rabbits.”

One afternoon, they took us to the Israeli-Lebanese border to get a better view of “the enemy.” From our vantage point next to a rather plush Israeli suburban town–which wouldn’t look out of place in Orange County–we were assured by our tour guide that somewhere in those bombed-out buildings in Lebanon, Hezbollah was waiting to kill us. The tour guide then taught us about the dangers of Islam. He said, “To me, ‘radical Islam’ is a misnomer since 80 percent of imams preach Jihad. Just saying.”

I would find out after returning that, oddly enough, at the same time that this lecture was happening, a UN-controlled school in Gaza that was being used to distribute aid was being shelled, killing 40 civilians.

The next day, they took us on a lovely Jeep tour through the Golan Heights to learn about its strategic importance for Israel. Over here are bombed-out Syrian pillboxes, bunkers and rusted-out Syrian tanks. Here is an abandoned Syrian town, now in Israeli territory, and right over there, just over the border and less than a mile away, is the new Syrian town, so the people there can actually see every day where they used to live.

As the slaughter in Gaza was intensifying, and bits of information began floating in to us by rumor, the trip organizers found it necessary to intensify our propaganda education with “structured discussions” and a lecture from an IDF lieutenant colonel. We were told candidly that the siege was not, at its core, a response to the rocket attacks, but was an attempt to wipe out Hamas–to “squash out the cockroaches.”

To quote the lieutenant colonel, “We gave them [the Gazans] democracy, and the land, and opened up the borders to goods and services, and what do they do to repay us? They voted for Hamas. They failed our test…I don’t understand what they mean by ‘innocent bystanders’ in Gaza, because they all voted for Hamas.”

On the charge that the 100-to-1 Palestinian-Israeli casualty ratio in the Gazan slaughter might be ever-so-slightly asymmetric, the lieutenant colonel gave what was possibly the most interesting statement of the entire trip. He reversed the David and Goliath analogy, saying:

Look at Goliath, he’s well trained, well armored, huge, nothing can beat him, you’d think. But then along comes this tiny religious fanatic, David, with a slingshot. Goliath thinks nothing of him, so all David has to do is stay just out of Goliath’s reach and hit him in his weak spot, and Goliath comes tumbling down.

This is a lesson for Israel–no matter how better armed we may think we are, we must never underestimate out foes and never let them out of our reach, or else we’ll go the way of Goliath.

Indeed.

While we were bobbing in the Dead Sea, a fellow Birthrighteer told me–in the language of racism, accentuated by curses–that Palestinians and Muslims in general would “kill me twice, once for being Jewish, a second time for being an American.”

Which was kind of weird since not a week earlier, I was at a protest in New York City against the bombing of Gaza among 2,000 people, 80 percent of them Muslim or Arab, holding up a sign saying “Jew for a Free Palestine”–and nobody stabbed me. In fact, I was well welcomed. Go figure.

While I was climbing Masada and touring Tel Aviv, protests all over the world were erupting against Israel’s barbarism in Gaza. I was privileged to witness one particular news broadcast while in Tiberius. I couldn’t understand a word that was said, but it was clearly a protest of the attack on Gaza put on by maybe 30 Israeli college kids.

They were being heckled, pushed and spat upon by passersby, and I realized two things: Firstly, that if they were in college, that would mean they were all veterans of the IDF, and secondly, that they had every ounce of my respect.

Zionism attempts to portray itself as the sole political representative of the Jewish people, for it is only then that it can whitewash the genocidal crimes of Israel by saying they are what’s required to protect all Jews everywhere. This claim of hegemony is a lie.

Though still a minority, the numbers of fellow Jewish Anti-Zionists are growing. They are people who wish to epitomize the best in Jewish history, and stay on the side of the oppressed. They deny the racist concept that the life of an Israeli is somehow more precious than the life of a Palestinian.

Israel is a sort of utopia–modern towns defended by young men and women with Uzis, all held together by a strong sense of community. I can understand why it is tempting to some Jews. But it is a utopia for some, not for all, built on the oppression of others, and those groups are defined in purely racial terms. Israel is the world’s largest and most aggressive gated community.

When speaking to the socialists of the Jewish Bund, the Russian revolutionary Lenin said that is was wrong to “legitimize Jewish isolation by propagating the idea of a Jewish ‘nation.'” The task was “not to segregate nations, but unite the workers of all nations. Our banner does not carry the slogan ‘national culture,’ but ‘international culture.'”

Peace is simply impossible as long as Israel defines itself at its core as a Jewish exclusive state, and the chauvinistic and racist tenets of Zionism remain its guiding philosophy. Only one state–one secular state, with equal rights for all and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees–can solve this. Nothing more, nothing less.

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International Criminal Court Faces Big Test With Israel

February 15, 2009
By Amitabh Pal | The Progressive,  February 12, 2009

The International Criminal Court soon faces a big test—a test that could reveal whether it is truly an independent institution.

The Palestinian Authority has asked the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to examine if Israel was guilty of war crimes during its recent Gaza operation. Moreno-Ocampo should take a look into the allegations, not the least to refute the assertion that the court is an instrument of the West.

I have been a big supporter of the court and have written in its favor for a decade now, ever since it was being formed. But an article a few months ago in The Nation by Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University gave me pause. Mamdani insists that the International Criminal Court can be seen as the legacy of a tradition of Western paternalism toward the rest of the world, in some sense displaying a continuity with colonialism. While Mamdani overreaches in his argument and downplays the Bush Administration’s opposition to the court (for more on that see my January 2007 piece in The Progressive), he does make some interesting points.

“The fact of mutual accommodation between the world’s only superpower and an international institution struggling to find its feet on the ground is clear if we take into account the four countries where the ICC has launched its investigations: Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic and Congo,” Mamdani writes. “All are places where the United States has no major objection to the course chartered by ICC investigations. Its name notwithstanding, the ICC is rapidly turning into a Western court to try African crimes against humanity. It has targeted governments that are U.S. adversaries and ignored actions the United States doesn’t oppose, like those of Uganda and Rwanda in eastern Congo, effectively conferring impunity on them.”

Mamdani limits his analysis to Africa, not delving into the obvious issue as to whether the International Criminal Court should have considered a case against the Bush Administration for its illegal invasion of Iraq. (In fact, Roger Cohen points out in a New York Times column that Moreno-Ocampo rejected pleas to try British forces in Iraq.)

Mamdani exposes a basic structural flaw with the International Criminal Court: The U.N. Security Council can refer cases to the court (even regarding a non-signatory) or, conversely, block any such attempts. This gives an inordinate amount of clout to the five permanent members, including the three Western powers. This explains to a large extent the hesitance of the court’s chief prosecutor to take on the West or its allies.

In the case of Israel, Moreno-Ocampo faces a number of legal and procedural hurdles. Israel is not a signatory to the court. And the very legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority is in question, especially after Hamas’s takeover of Gaza. Nevertheless, Moreno-Ocampo has indicated—after initially declining the case—that he is considering whether to go ahead, possibly including a review of any war crimes that Hamas may have committed.

The Obama Administration has already signaled its approval of the International Criminal Court. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice two weeks ago called the court “an important and credible instrument,” indicating that the United States is moving from confrontation toward co-optation.

Now is the time for the International Criminal Court to assert its independence. Opening a case against Israel would be a good start.

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Why Darwin was right

February 14, 2009

worldismycountry.org, 12th February, 2009

Posted by Jeeves

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin, author of the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and commonly ascribed as the father of evolutionary thought. Evolutionary ideas had been alluded to by several philosophers and early biologists including Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus Darwin. A paper containing a similar theory of natural selection by a contemporary biologist Alfred Russell Wallace convinced him to publish his seminal work. But, the comprehensive nature of the argument accompanied by detailed observations meant that, despite the modest competition, the theory of evolution by natural selection laid out by Darwin in The Origin of Species has gone down as ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’.

Charles Darwin born in 1809

Charles Darwin born in 1809

The beauty of Darwin’s theory of evolution is the elemental simplicity that describes the seemingly infinite complexity of the history of life on earth. Over hundreds of millions of years life transformed from the simple combination of a protozoan and a bacterium into the whole cornucopia of life that inhabits almost every conceivable part of our planet today, via the existence of everything that ever lived, ever.  Its genius is that all that can be explained by a simple process of selection of minute genetic differences which increase the survival chances of that gene in a world of scarce resources and fearsome competition. Over many generations the combination of many small changes and their impact on the survivability of the host and therefore its genes leads to the emergence of new traits, new behaviours and eventually new species.

As a scientific concept Darwinian evolution has received universal acceptance and has underpinned the whole study of evolutionary biology and is a unifying principle in the biological sciences, much like Newtonian laws of gravity underpin the physical sciences.

Darwin as the founder of evolutionary biology had the misfortune of knowing less than all subsequent evolutionary biologists. There remains much legitimate debate concerning the actual processes and patterns of evolution. But subsequent discoveries of molecular genetics and numerous examples from the fossil record have shown the emergence of new species, transitional forms between known species and animal groups all occurring in exactly the way and by the exact method Darwin described. Fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s theory (and in the year of his 100th anniversary) there was still considerable doubt as to its legitimacy. But, as concurrent theories such as Lamarckian inheritance have been debunked, a further 100 years later we can now say that the evidence is overwhelming and there is no conceivable scientific alternative.

Unfortunately this scientific acceptance of Darwin has not been matched by public acceptance. The original publication of Darwin’s theory caused a huge outcry from the contemporary scientific and religious establishment. As scientific knowledge of biology has progressed legitimate scientific criticism has faded away.  But, Darwinian evolution is still the target of religious attacks based on ardent belief, flawed and evasive arguments and misrepresented or bad science.

Natural selection creates a perfectly comprehensible and effectively simple explanation for the whole evolution of life with no need for external intervention by supernatural forces, omnipotent creators and intelligent designers. Evolution’s implicit threat to religion is that it demystifies the apparent miracle of life to a process of random chance driven by ruthless selection often caused by acts of remarkable violence. Evolution does not disprove the existence of gods but it really demarcates their area of operation. This threat has inspired an ongoing campaign which has created the allure of controversy and debate where there is none, and prevented Darwin from gaining the universal acceptance that he should. In recent years this religious assault has tried to assume a quasi-scientific cover with the theory of intelligent design.

I commented earlier that their is no conceivable alternative theory to describe the complexity of life. Intelligent design fails due to its adherence to supernatural forces in the action between designer and designed (or should that be creator and created). Some ID advocates have said that the exclusion of ID from the scientific lexicon on this basis is evidence of some convoluted arrogance and sinister atheisitic scientism. It is actually as a result of scientific method requiring hypothesis, experimentation, reproduction and then acceptance. ID by definition has only one being capable of experimentation. However, there is no clear consensus around many of ID’s arguments and no unifying theory to describe its processes. Most ID argumentsare flawed and misrepresented criticisms of evolution and rather than explaining these alleged flaws with an alternative scientific explanation they use them as proof of a supernatural intervention.

Much of the evidence to support Evolution (but by no means all) comes from the fossil record. At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species that record was a fraction of the size it is today and corresponding theories of geology were similarly underdeveloped meaning it was very unclear how old it actually was. We now know that this fossil record covers hundreds of millions of years. This record is also not a complete record of all life on earth. Only a tiny fraction of living organisms will die in the exact conditions that will favour preservation as fossils and only a tiny fraction of them will be discovered. Hard structures like bones, teeth and claws lend themselves much better to fossilisation than less robust structures like scales, skin and feathers.

The fossil record has alwasy been used as the stick to beat evolution and in Darwin’s day these accusations were far more credible. This record is now far more expansive and exclusively supports that theory. The apparent sudden appearance of complex forms in the Cambrian era has been shown to have happened over 35 million years and the hard and bony creatures that evolved at that time are much more likely to fossilise than the soft bodied creatures that preceded them. We now see extensive evidenceof complex life in the Pre-Cambrian seas in the fossil record. It is rarer because it is inevitably older and deeper and made up of species not conducive to fossilisation but it is there.

An absence of transitional forms in the fossil record caused Darwin much soul searching in his own lifetime. Now the fossil record is littered with transitional forms between species. The evolution of horses has over thirty transitional formsto link modern Equus to its earlier mammalian ancestors. Indeed some arguments state that transitional forms are seen in the higher taxa but not in more primitive forms, it is unclear why the designer would have designed some species to evolve and others to remain stable. Fossils like Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik are clear evidence of special emergence between great animal kingdom groups and proponents of design have had to resort to clumsy reclassification into one group or another or making accusations of elaborate hoaxes.

The continuation of this argument is that the fossil record shows species in a stable state for millions of years. This is an inevitable result of evolution by natural selection. Increased mortality driven by changing circumstances, and concurrent scarcity of resources and competition for them, is the prime driver to the emergence of new forms. If a species inhabits an environment to which it is well suited with little competition for resources it will propogate and survive. With more offspring there will be a greater impact on the fossil record. The fossils we find are much more likely to show evolutions winners.

ID advocates also point to so called ‘living fossils’ or organisms alive today which appear in the fossil record in an apparently identical form hundreds of millions of years ago. Whilst this clearly demonstrates ancestry in many cases the fossilised specimen is not the same species. These are merely two closely related species with a highly successful collection of genes wll adapted to their environments and robust enough to weather the ravages of geological time. The many species of Crocodiles today are not the same as the first species of Crocodylidae to appear in the fossil record 200 million years ago.

Advocates of intelligent design make their trade by misrepresentation of scientific method and avoidance of scientific fact. They state that they merely wish to debate the controversy where none exists and then try and use that as a controversy that needs to be debated. They see evolution as having to prove itself every step of the way, explain every anomoly, justify every feature observed in taxonomy (which it does surprisingly well) and offer only a devotional faith in an ethereal puppet master as an alternative. They ascribe design to every living organism and see no need to explain by what process it was designed or, for what purpose. Their view of the world is that it is too complicated to be understood and therefore god did it. Luckily 200 years ago someone was born who didn’t accept such an elementary view of life.

Happy birthday Charles, and thanks for the single best idea anyone has ever had.

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Radical writer Dr George Barnsby at 90

February 14, 2009

Nasir Khan

The famous anti-racist, anti-war activist, a historian of the working class movement and revolutionary politics Dr George Barnsby turned 90 on January 29, 2009. To celebrate the occasion the Barnsby family organised a memorable birthday party in which more than one hundred guests took part.

The site of the event was Wolverhampton, now a thriving multicultural and ethnically diverse city in the Midlands, where once, in 1968, British Tory leader Enoch Powell had made his well-known apocalyptic ‘rivers of blood’ speech, in which he had warned the danger Britain faced because of the coming into Britain of non-white immigrants from the former British colonies. But the subsequent history of race relations in Wolverhampton has shown that the alarmist forebodings of the prophet of doom and racist reactionary politician were false.

The main reason for rejecting what Enoch Powell stood for that also had certain amount of backing in some sections of the white population was due to the incessant work of local politicians and workers, both from the white and non-white communities for creating a positive attitude towards the race issue and to cultivate a better understanding between the people of different ethnic backgrounds. As a result, we see that Wolverhampton emerged as a multicultural city we can all be proud of. Among those who contributed much to such a positive development the work of George Barnsby has a special significance. He was also able to mobilize support for his work with the assistance of many non-racist people and organizations.

From Norway, I had the honour to participate in the celebrations of my close comrade and friend. It was my first face-to-face meeting with him. The comradely affection and esteem he extended towards me on the occasion was something of an overwhelming experience for me. Our comradeship was very deep. Ever since our incidental contact that started about four years ago, I realised that ideologically and politically both of us were working on the same lines having a common world-outlook. In our own ways, both of us have been busy offering our views and showing our concerns through our websites.

Dr Barnsby consistently exposed the role of President Bush and his British ‘poodle’ Tony Blair in starting the genocidal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan as well their active support to the Zionist rulers of Israel to crush and destroy the people of Palestine. His expertise in understanding the international affairs as a class conscious writer and his revolutionary zeal in advancing the cause of peace and human rights earn him a special place of distinction among radical writers. I feel greatly honoured to have seen and talked to him and wish him many happy and active years in the future. His website (The Barnsby Blog: <http://gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk/blog/>) provides us with a necessary corrective to what the main stream media offer and I recommend it to our readers.

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Beyond the Veil of Israel’s Publicity Campaign

February 14, 2009

By Christina Jung

6wounded_in_gaza_dadson_afp.jpg
‘Israel advises civilians to flee, but where can they go?’ (AFP/file)

uruknet.info, Feb 13, 2009

Israel’s offensive against Gaza has been just as much about a war of words as it has been about a war of military assault. With an aggressive public relations campaign, Israel has gone to considerable lengths no matter what the cost to create a falsified image of victimization by convincing the world of its right to protect its citizens from the daily terror of Hamas rockets.As representatives of world public opinion, we must not complacently accept Israel’s claims at face value in order to turn a blind eye to the untold suffering of the Gazans and the complicity of major powers in this unbridled carnage. We have an obligation to engage in the truth and to urge our leaders to act in accordance with reality.

A truce was forged on Jan. 18, but without further action from world leaders, a reversion to another bloody conflict appears increasingly likely. Decisive action, however, requires a fundamental acknowledgement that Israeli rhetoric often has little bearing on reality.

One of the most common justifications for military action in Gaza concerns Israel’s right to defend its people. Implicit in this assertion is the notion that Israel is under grave threat from Hamas and that Israeli citizens must be protected from this threat.

Simple numbers tell us otherwise: According to B’Tselem, an Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, 388 Palestinians were killed by IDF in Gaza in the seven months before the July 2008 ceasefire, as opposed to 18 Israelis killed by Palestinians (over the course of several years). This disparity is magnified when the death toll includes fatalities from 2000 onwards, including the most recent conflict. While Israel may tout the dangers of Hamas, it is responsible for a disproportionate number of deaths arising from conflicts in Gaza, revealing its duplicity.

By this logic, we can only expect Hamas to assert its right to use violence to demand better conditions for its people who have been stripped of their land, their basic rights and their means of self-sustenance by Israel.

The point here is that, within the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Israel claiming its right to defense is meaningless and self-defeating, only paving the way for perpetual conflict. Appealing to a “right to defend” as justification for slaughter would bestow Hamas just as much right to exact retribution for more than 1,300 Palestinian deaths resulting from the 23-day war.

Another common claim made by the Israeli propaganda machine holds that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be deterred. Loosely defined, terrorism refers to the targeting of civilians for political gain. Again, Israel applies a double standard in accusing Hamas of something of which it is itself guilty.

The reckless killing of civilians during Israel’s recent offensive and beyond is just one aspect of Israel’s hypocrisy. The blockade on Gaza a collective punishment on the Gazans for being so audacious as to exercise their democratic rights in voting for Hamas is evidence enough of Israel’s conviction that violence and repression is terror, only when it is directed against its own people.

Owing to the Bush administration’s war on terror, we live in a world where evoking terrorism offers a free pass that justifies what should be unjustifiable acts of brutality.

The most egregious aspect of Israel’s deception, however, is the assertion that the IDF does not target innocents or civilians.

With the Gaza-based Palestinian Center For Human Rights estimating civilian deaths at around 70 percent of total fatalities, and with growing calls for an investigation of Israel’s human rights abuses, it is difficult to give credence to Israel’s claim that the IDF exercises utmost caution when firing targets, especially in light of Israel’s highly advanced targeting capacity.

Whether deliberate or due to overt carelessness, the IDF’s killing of Gazan civilians increasingly seems like a sadistic attempt at cajoling the population into squeezing the Hamas leadership.

Israel advises civilians to flee, but where can they go? Trapped in an open-air prison, the Gazans, already refugees of national dispossession, have nowhere to escape to, either inside or outside of Gaza. The Israeli shelling of U.N. buildings filled with displaced civilians is but one reminder of the constant danger faced by Gazan civilians during war, no matter where they go.

As representatives of world public opinion, we must see beyond the veil of Israel’s publicity campaign and recognize its military action as a vain attempt to further tear down the spirit of Gazans from rightly demanding what is theirs.

– Christina Jung is an Editor, who is based in Seoul, Korea. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact the author at: jung.christina@gmail.com

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Gaza: Death’s Laboratory

February 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy In Focus, February 11, 2009

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war.”It was as if they had stepped on a mine,” he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. “But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.”

Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. “focused lethality” weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?

DIMEd to Death

The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13–foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn’t react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.

Within the weapon’s range, however, it’s inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and “very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns.” Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. “Initially, everything seems in order…but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs,” says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles…that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.” According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.

If by some miracle victims resist those conditions, they are almost certain to develop rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a particularly deadly cancer that deeply embeds itself into tissue and is almost impossible to treat. A 2005 U.S. Department of health study found that tungsten stimulated RMS cancers even in very low doses. All of the 92 rats tested developed the cancer.

While DIMEs were originally designed to avoid “collateral” damage generated by standard high-explosive bombs, the weapon’s lethality and profound long-term toxicity hardly seem like an improvement.

It appears DIME weapons may have been used in the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but not enough to alarm medical workers. But in Gaza, the ordinance was widely used. Al-Shifta alone has seen 100 to 150 victims of these attacks.

Gaza as Test

Dr. Gilbert told the Oslo Gardermoen, “there is a strong suspicion…that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.”

DIME is a U.S. invention. Did the Israelis get the weapons from the United States, or did they design similar ones themselves? Given the close relations between the two militaries, it isn’t unlikely that the U.S. Air Force supplied the weapons or, at least, the specifications on how to construct them. And since the United States has yet to use the device in a war, it would certainly benefit from seeing how these new “focused lethality” weapons worked under battlefield conditions.

Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch’s senior military advisor, says “it remains to be seen how Israel has acquired the technology, whether they purchased weapons from the United States under some agreement, or if they in fact licensed or developed their own type of munitions.”

DIME weapons aren’t banned under the Geneva Conventions because they have never been officially tested. However, any weapon capable of inflicting such horrendous damage is normally barred from use, particularly in one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

For one thing, no one knows how long the tungsten remains in the environment or how it could affect people who return to homes attacked by a DIME. University of Arizona cancer researcher Dr. Mark Witten, who investigates links between tungsten and leukemia, says that in his opinion “there needs to be much more research on the health effects of tungsten before the military increases its usage.”

Beyond DIMEs

DIMEs weren’t the only controversial weapons used in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also made generous use of white phosphorus, a chemical that burns with intense heat and inflicts terrible burns on victims. In its vapor form it also damages breathing passages. International law prohibits the weapon’s use near population areas and requires that “all reasonable precautions” be taken to avoid civilians.

Israel initially denied using the chemical. “The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus,” said Israel’s Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on January 13.

But eyewitness accounts in Gaza and Israel soon forced the IDF to admit that they were, indeed, using the substance. On January 20, the IDF confessed to using phosphorus artillery shells as smokescreens, as well as 200 U.S.-made M825A1 phosphorus mortar shells on “Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.”

Three of those shells hit the UN Works and Relief Agency compound on January 15, igniting a fire that destroyed hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. The Israelis say there were Hamas fighters near the two targets, a charge that witnesses adamantly deny.

Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said: “Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely-populated residential neighborhoods…and its toll on civilians is a war crime.”

Israel is also accused of using depleted uranium ammunition (DUA), which a UN sub-commission in 2002 found in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention, and the Hague Conventions against the use of poison weapons.

DUA isn’t highly radioactive, but after exploding, some of it turns into a gas that can easily be inhaled. The dense shrapnel that survives also tends to bury itself deeply, leaching low-level radioactivity into water-tables.

War Crimes?

Other human-rights groups, including B’Tselem, Gisha, and Physicians for Human Rights, charge that the IDF intentionally targeted medical personal, killing over a dozen, including paramedics and ambulance drivers.

The International Federation for Human Rights called on the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes.

Although the Israelis dismiss the war-crimes charges, the fact that the Israeli cabinet held a special meeting on January 25 to discuss the issue suggests they’re concerned about being charged with “disproportionate” use of force. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to at “all times” distinguish between combatants and civilians and to avoid “disproportionate force” in seeking military gains.

Hamas’s use of unguided missiles fired at Israel would also be a war crime under the Conventions.

“The one-sidedness of casualty figures is one measure of disproportion,” says Richard Falk, the UN’s human rights envoy for the occupied territories. A total of 14 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, three of them civilians killed by rockets, 11 of them soldiers, four of the latter by “friendly fire.” Some 50 IDF soldiers were also wounded.

In contrast, 1,330 Palestinians have died and 5,450 were injured, the overwhelming bulk of them civilians.

“This kind of fighting constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare, which we ask to be investigated by the Commission of War Crimes,” a coalition of Israeli human rights groups and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. “The responsibility of the state of Israel is beyond doubt.”

Enter the Hague?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann would coordinate the defense of any soldier or commander charged with a war crime. In any case, the United States would veto any effort by the UN Security Council to refer Israelis to the International Court at The Hague.

But, as the Financial Times points out, “all countries have an obligation to search out those accused of ‘grave’ breaches of the rules of war and to put them on trial or extradite them to a country that will.”

That was the basis under which the British police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

“We’re in a seismic shift in international law,” Amnesty International legal advisor Christopher Hall told the Financial Times, who says Israel’s foreign ministry is already examining the risk to Israelis who travel abroad.

“It’s like walking across the street against a red light,” he says. “The risk may be low, but you’re going to think twice before committing a crime or traveling if you have committed one.”

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

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The Israeli destruction of Gaza and international silence

February 14, 2009

Published on Friday, February 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Ann Wright

I travelled to Gaza last week with Medea Benjamin and Tighe Berry of Codepink: Women for Peace. We were allowed by the Egyptian government to enter Gaza for only 48 hours.I knew that 1026 of the 1330 who were killed in the Israeli attacks on Gaza were civilians. Of the 1026 civilians, 282 were children, 111 women, 168 civilian policemen and 501 civilian men died in Israeli bombings. 274 have been classified as combatant deaths.

I knew that the estimates for the cost of reconstruction to the destruction done by Israeli bombing is over $2 billion. After seeing the destruction in Gaza City, I thought I would be prepared for North Gaza. I had heard the damage done by F-16s and tanks was substantial, but I was stunned by the large number of apartment buildings and industries that had been blown up and destroyed by the Israeli military in the northern Gaza border region with Israel.

The Israeli military destroyed virtually everything in a corridor along the border in Jabalia and forced the evacuation of Gazans back into the center part of Gaza, a tiny area 45 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide. Homes and factories were leveled and tens of thousands of citizens were left homeless. We saw five tent camps that had been set up by relief organizations. Living conditions are spartan.

Nahed, a project manager for Palestine Medical Relief Society, guided us through the wreckage of North Gaza. We visited one of the four primary health care facilities PMRS operates, with an overworked staff trying to cope with the medical and emotional challenges of those who have returned to their bombed out homes with family members dead or injured.

37 Members of One Family Killed as Israeli Military Orders 150 into a Building then Bombs it

In the Al Zaiton area in northern Gaza, we met with the remaining members of the al Samouni family. The large extended family lived in many houses and some family members operated a poultry farm in the area. After the Israeli army invaded, Army personnel ordered 150 members of the family into one large home and then bombed the home as well as all the numerous homes and buildings of the family. 37 members of the family were killed and many were injured. The Israeli government said the military had made a mistake.
The al Samouni family set up several large tents for the numerous visitors who come by the area to pay respects. One tent had eight women inside. All had family members killed and wounded in the attacks. We spoke with Ibtessana al Samouni who had two children killed and her husband and daughter seriously injured and are being treated in Saudi Arabia. One of her sons was also injured and is in a military hospital in Cairo. She and her remaining 5 children are living with other relatives in Gaza City. Ibtessana had a glazed stare and kept repeating that no one in her family had done anything to the Israelis. We saw in her eyes the disbelief that some of her children were dead and that she would not see her husband and other children for months. The emotional health of the al Samouni extended family considering the large number of deaths and injuries in the family seemed precarious.

The family area, a section of land about ½ mile by ½ mile was completely bombed. It looked like a huge tornado or hurricane had wiped out the area. The poultry farm was totally destroyed and bulldozers were pushing the rotting chicken carcasses into a pit while we were there.

Life Without Your Home

Dressed in her black abaya, Izbet Abed Rabu told us she and her family of five children and her husband now live in a tent provided by the United Nations after her home was destroyed in Jabalia, northern Gaza. She showed us her two story concrete block home that was flattened into rubble. Her eyes teared over as she said she was lucky. No one in her family had been killed in the Israeli naval shelling and rocket attacks, but her neighbors had been hit hard. Two neighboring families each had three family members killed.

Izbet pointed to the white tent provided by the United Nations and said that after two weeks they still have only blankets, but no cots or any “furniture” inside the tents. With the night desert temperatures falling into the low 40 degrees, she said her four children are cold. The children are not yet in school.

Industries Systematically Destroyed

There are few industries left in northern Gaza and the Israeli military destroyed 10-15 of those remaining industries including two cement companies, a dairy, gas station, an aluminum recycling company and a health products company. The production capacity of Gaza has been severely impacted by the Israeli warplanes.

Agricultural Lands Purposefully Destroyed

We walked in the agricultural lands mangled by Israeli tanks that had been positioned in the fields near the medical clinic. The fruit trees in one field had been completed knocked down and bulldozed over. Olive orchards throughout Gaza were systematically destroyed by Israeli tanks.

Schools Destroyed

Close by was Khalil al Noubany High School that had been used by Israeli soldiers. To secure the building they blew holes in it setting part of it on fire. The remaining part was occupied and used to fire on any one remaining in the area. The Israeli soldiers trashed the school. They left h military trash everywhere. School books and supplies had been thrown on the floor and walked on in virtually all the classrooms. It was quite obvious that they soldier had intentionally damaged the insides of the classrooms and purposefully destroyed books and educational materials. The headmaster of the school, who arrived as we were looking at the school, said that the school had served 550 girl students in the morning and 530 male students in the afternoon. She told us that the school is so severely damaged that it cannot reopen this year and students are having to travel to the few remaining schools that are open in Gaza.

Later in the day while he was serving double duty as a Gaza government official at the Rafah, Gaza border crossing, Mr. Ahmed Ayes Alnajjar of the Ministry of Education told us that 7 schools in Gaza were totally destroyed and 135 schools were substantially damaged.

The Prison Called Gaza

We left northern Gaza and headed for the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. We had to be across the border into Egypt by 5pm as the Egyptian government was closing the border. If we did not exit Gaza by 5pm we too would be imprisoned in Gaza until the border crossing reopened-which might be months. So after only 48 hours in Gaza, we were forced to depart.

On the way to the Gaza border, we stopped to see a few of the 1500 tunnels that Palestinians have dug since the borders of Gaza were closed and the siege began. Palestinians have been locked into the prison called Gaza for the past sixteen months.

Bombing Tunnels With a Blind Eye

The tunnel area is in plain sight next to the Egyptian border. It is a surreal scene. Buildings behind the tunnel area have been bombed and are destroyed. Trucks and cars are parked under the remaining roofs of a large bombed out fresh air market– ready to move goods from the tunnel area.

Mounds of fresh sand are everywhere indicating that tunnels are still being dug. Generators hum providing air into the tunnels and powering the cables that pull loads of every imaginable type of goods from vegetables, canned goods, bags of rice and sugar, merchandise for hardware stores, etc. through the tunnels to the surface on the Gaza side.

Every tunnel is surrounded by barriers made of light fencing covered with large plastic bags. Young men are busy hauling up goods that have been brought through the tunnel from Egypt.

The tunnel “managers” we spoke with were surprisingly open in allowing us to come into the areas and talk with them. They said that about 900 tunnels have been destroyed or partially damaged by Israeli bombs. Most are being rebuilt, despite the almost daily bombing by Israeli war planes. The tunnels we saw had openings about 4 feet across. The entry holes were from 50 to 65 feet deep and the tunnels were 500 to 1,000 feet long. One tunnel opening was built with concrete blocks and another opening was built with wood.

The tunnel manager said that to rebuild a tunnel that has been blown up takes about half the time to reopen and digging a new tunnel. The tunnel areas are little cities with electricity, water, food and coffee at each tunnel entrance.

Tunnel digging is about the only employment for young men in Gaza. They earn 100 shekels ($25) per day for digging in the tunnels. One manager said many tunnel diggers had died when the reinforced sand tunnels collapsed during construction. But young men continue to risk the dangers as tunnel construction is one of the few jobs available to them.

While we did not see the other end of the tunnel operation on the Rafah, Egypt side of the border, it is inconceivable that Egyptian authorities do not know where the tunnel openings are. All they have to do is to follow the parade of trucks loaded with merchandise that come into Rafah, Egypt.

After coming through the border we stopped in Rafah, Egypt to see what the smuggling town was like. The police presence was tremendous. We had barely gotten our bags out of the taxi when a policeman was at our side asking why we were in Rafah. We replied that we were hungry and wanted to get something to eat. We stopped at a small falafel stand and for the next hour were watched by police. As one of us would go to explore the main street, police would follow in the distance. They definitely did not want us straying off the main road and back into the houses and businesses where the tunnel entrances are.

It is remarkable that all the tunnels haven’t been bombed. With the sophisticated satellite views, cameras from drones, tethered radar and surveillance balloon and the $32 million tunnel detection equipment provided by the U.S. government, the Israeli, Egyptian and United States’ governments know exactly where the tunnels are.

But, closing the border provides Egyptian and Israeli businessmen a tremendous opportunity to sell goods to people in Gaza at very high prices. No doubt, Egyptian and Israeli government officials are paid to turn a blind eye to the tunneling and “smuggling.” Determining who profits economically from the occupations and sieges is fascinating. A new Israeli website http://www.whoprofits.org tracks who profits financially from the occupation and no doubt profits from the blockade and will profit from the rebuilding of destroyed Gaza.

Israeli bombing of tunnels is, of course, only on the Gaza side. No one is bombing the entrances to the tunnels on the Egyptian side of the border.

The tunnel economy means that for the ordinary citizens of Gaza, where there is a 70% unemployment rate and where over 900,000 of the 1.5 million in Gaza are on United Nations rations, closing the border and forcing commerce through the tunnels they pay exorbitant fees for every item brought through the tunnels.

SILENCE from the International Community

The sights we saw in Gaza were tragic-a goliath Israel pounding a small Gaza David with international silence and complicity in the 22 day military attack on Gaza and on the 16 month siege of Gaza. 1330 Palestinians have died, 5400 have been wounded and hundreds of thousands with memories of the bombings and invasion and occupation. Over $2 billion will be spent on rebuilding destroyed homes, businesses and factories. And there is SILENCE!!

Smashing of Gaza is a War Crime

I deplore the use of rockets against Israeli towns by Hamas and other groups in Gaza which have killed approximately 20 Israelis.

But, as a military officer who taught the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare in US military schools, I fully believe the disproportionate response by the Israeli government and military in the smashing of Gaza is a violation of international law and a war crime.

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.  She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia.  In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.  She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”  (www.voicesofconscience.com)

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‘US drone’ in fatal Pakistan raid

February 14, 2009
Al Jazeera, Feb 14, 2009

Pakistan has expressed its anger over a
series of US drone attacks [Reuters]

At least 25 people have been killed in a missile attack by an unmanned US drone in a tribal district of Pakistan, Pakistani officials have told Al Jazeera.

The raid destroyed a house in the northwestern town of Ladha, a base for Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader accused of plotting the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan, an official said.

“Around 50 to 60 mujahideen [fighters] have been living [at the site of the attack] for about a week. All of them were Uzbeks,” a Taliban official said.

Pakistan intelligence agents are investigating the attack on the house in the South Waziristan region on Saturday.

Taliban fighters sealed off the site of the attack, preventing people from getting access, residents said.

Pakistan angered

The US has launched more than 30 missile attacks on Pakistani soil in recent months, ostensibly against al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked fighters.

More than 220 people were killed in the raids, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.

Pakistan has been angered by the attacks, saying that innocent civilians have been killed and that Pakistani sovereignty has been infringed.

Barack Obama, the US president, said this week that he has no doubt that Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked fighters are based in Pakistan’s tribal region and the US wants the support of Islamabad in tackling the armed groups.

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Tamil conflict ‘killing 40 civilians a day’

February 14, 2009

Morning Star Online

(Friday 13 February 2009)

A SRI Lankan health official said on Friday that fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels was killing around 40 civilians a day.

Aid groups have estimated that more than 200,000 civilians are trapped in a tiny strip of land still controlled by the rebels along the north-eastern coast.

Mullaittivu district health officer Dr Thurairajah Varatharajah said that artillery barrages were routinely hitting civilian areas in the region.

He added that the makeshift hospital that he was running in a school in the coastal town of Putumattalan was overwhelmed by casualties.

Dr Varatharajah said that the facility was badly understaffed since most of the doctors and nurses had either fled the war zone or had stopped coming to work and that the hospital was running out of some essential antibiotics and anaesthetics.

He added that civilians in the area had been suffering heavy casualties for three to four weeks as the military pushed the Tamil Tigers into the area, estimating that more than 100 wounded civilians were coming to the hospital every day, most of them with injuries from artillery shells.

Patients and medical staff were forced to evacuate the hospital in the town of Puthukkudiyiruppu last week after it came under heavy shelling for days. The staff, with the help of the Red Cross, set up a makeshift hospital in Putumattalan.

Dr Varatharajah claimed that the area around the hospital had been shelled on Monday, killing 22 people.

The artillery fire appeared to have stopped on Friday after the government declared a 7.5-mile coastal strip that included the hospital a “safe zone” and pledged not to attack it, he said.

The Tamil Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for an independent state for minority Tamils. More than 70,000 people have been killed.

The Sri Lankan government rejected Britain’s decision to appoint a special envoy to address the deteriorating humanitarian situation and help resolve the country’s ethnic conflict.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown named former defence secretary Des Browne as his special envoy for Sri Lanka on Thursday, but President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his cabinet called the unilateral decision by Sri Lanka’s former colonial ruler “unhelpful,” noting that London had failed to consult with Colombo before announcing Mr Browne’s appointment.

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