MDE 15/038/2007
4 June 2007MDE 15/038/2007, 4 June 2007

Israel/OPT: Forty years of occupation – no security without basic rights

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Amnesty International today called on the Israeli authorities to end the land-grabbing, blockades and other violations of international law carried out under the occupation. These have resulted in widespread human rights abuses and have also failed to bring security to the Israeli and Palestinian civilian populations.

A 45-page report published today, Enduring Occupation: Palestinian under siege in the West Bank, illustrates the devastating impact of four decades of Israeli military occupation. The report documents the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements on occupied land that deprives the Palestinian population of crucial resources and documents a plethora of measures that confine Palestinians to fragmented enclaves and hinder their access to work, health and education facilities. These measures include a 700km fence/wall, more than 500 checkpoints and blockades, and a complicated system of permits.

“Palestinians living in the West Bank are blocked at every turn. This is not simply an inconvenience — it can be a matter of life or death. It is unacceptable that women in labour, sick children, or victims of accidents on their way to hospital should be forced to take long detours and face delays which can cost them their lives,” said Malcolm Smart, Director for Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“International action is urgently needed to address the widespread human rights abuses being committed under the occupation, and which are fuelling resentment and despair among a predominantly young and increasingly radicalized Palestinian population,” said Malcolm Smart. “For forty years, the international community has failed adequately to address the Israeli-Palestinian problem; it cannot, must not, wait another forty years to do so.”

Amnesty International is calling for the urgent deployment of an effective international human rights monitoring mechanism to monitor compliance by both parties, Israeli and Palestinian, with their obligations under international law. This must be backed up with a commitment to investigate and prosecute, through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, those who commit war crimes or other crimes under international law.

“We do not underestimate the difficulties of establishing such an independent monitoring system, whether by the UN or another appropriate body, but it is vital that the international community should become more engaged in finding a solution, and in holding the parties to their obligations under international law,” said Malcolm Smart.

In its report, Amnesty International acknowledges Israel’s legitimate security concerns and the government’s obligation to protect the population within its borders, but says this does not justify blatant violations of international law, such as construction of much of the fence/wall inside the West Bank on Palestinian land.

“If the intention was simply to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel, the barrier would be located on the Green Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank,” said Malcolm Smart. “Yet, the reality is that most of it is being built on Palestinian land, in defiance of the International Court of Justice, and is separating Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank.”

In addition to the fence/wall, the movement of Palestinians is several constrained by a host of other restrictions, including over 500 checkpoints and blockades, and a network of roads for Israeli settlers to use and off-limits to Palestinians. The barrier, together with these roads and roadblocks, benefit continuously expanding but unlawful Israeli settlements and make them territorially contiguous with Israel.

“Harsh Israeli restrictions have caused the virtual collapse of the Palestinian economy and are exacerbating the increasingly fragile conditions in which Palestinians live and work — resulting in levels of despair, poverty and food insecurity never before seen in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” said Malcolm Smart.

“Most Palestinians are now relying on aid for subsistence, with families reducing the quality and quantity of the food they consume and selling assets essential for their livelihoods.”

Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli authorities to:

• lift the regime of blockades and restrictions on Palestinians in the OPT, which constitute collective punishment, and ensure that restrictions imposed in response to specific security threats only target the individuals concerned — not entire communities.
• halt the construction of the fence/wall inside the West Bank, and remove the sections already built there;
• cease the construction or expansion of Israeli settlements and related infrastructure in the OPT as a first step towards removing Israeli settlements and “outposts”;
• cancel all demolition orders on homes in the OPT, and provide reparation to Palestinians whose homes and properties have already been destroyed.

The organization is also reiterating its call on Palestinian armed groups to end immediately attacks on civilians and on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to take effective action to stop and prevent such attacks and bring to justice those responsible.

To see a full copy of the report, please go to http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde150332007

For further information, please contact:

John Tackaberry,
Media Relations
(613)744-7667 #236

Source: AlterNet

Israel’s 40 Years of Occupation: From Democratic State to Violent Oppressor

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted June 5, 2007

Israel captured and occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank 40 years ago this week. The victory was celebrated as a great triumph, at once tripling the size of the land under Israeli control, including East Jerusalem. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory.

As the occupation stretched over the decades, it transformed and deformed Israeli society. It led Israel to abandon the norms and practices of a democratic society until, in the name of national security, it began to routinely accept the brutal violence of occupation and open discrimination and abuse of Palestinians, including the torture of prisoners and collective reprisals for Palestinians attacks. Palestinian neighborhoods, olive groves and villages were, in the name of national security, bulldozed into the ground.

Israel’s image has shifted from that of a heroic, open society set amid a sea of despotic regimes to that of an international pariah. Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, built ostensibly to keep out Palestinian bombers, has also been used to swallow huge tracts of the West Bank into Israel. Palestinian towns are ringed by Israeli checkpoints. Major roads in the West Bank are reserved for Israeli settlers.

The U.N. estimates that about half the West Bank is now off-limits to Palestinians. And every week there are new reports of Palestinian produce that is held up until it rots, pregnant women giving birth in cars because they cannot get to hospitals, and even senseless and avoidable deaths, such as one young woman who died recently when she couldn’t get through a checkpoint to her kidney dialysis treatment.

“We are raising commanders who are policemen,” former Israeli General Amiram Levine told the newspaper Maariv. “We ask them to excel at the checkpoint. What does it means to excel at the checkpoint? It means being enough of a bastard to delay a pregnant woman from getting to the hospital.”

The occupation was benign at the beginning. Israelis crossed into Palestinian territory to buy cheap vegetables, eat at local restaurants, spend the weekend in the desert oasis of Jericho and get their cars fixed. The Palestinians were a pool of cheap labor and by the mid-1980s, 40 percent of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel.

The Palestinians flowed over the border to the shops and beaches of Tel Aviv. But the second-class status of Palestinians, growing repression by Israeli authorities in the West Bank and Gaza and festering poverty saw Palestinians, most of them too young to remember the moment of occupation, rise up in December 1987 to launch six years of street protests. The uprising eventually led to a peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat. Arafat, who had spent most of his life in exile, returned in triumph to Gaza.

The Oslo Accords that followed momentarily heralded a new era, a moment of hope. I was in Gaza when they were signed. The Gaza Strip was awash in a giddy optimism. Palestinian businessmen who had made their fortunes abroad returned to help build the new Palestinian state. The radical Islamists seemed to shrink away. Palestinian women threw off their head scarves and beauty salons sprouted on city streets. There was a brief and shining sense that life could be normal, free from strife and violence, that finally Palestinians had a future.

But it all swiftly turned sour. The 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, coupled with mounting draconian restrictions on Palestinians to prevent them from entering Israel and keep them in submission, led to another uprising in 2000. This one, which I also covered for The New York Times, was far more violent.

This latest uprising has led to the deaths of more than 4,300 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis. It ushered in an Israeli policy that saw Jewish settlers relocated from Gaza. Gaza was then sealed off like a vast prison. Israel also began to build a security barrier — at a cost of about $ 1 million per mile — in the West Bank. When it is done, the barrier is expected to incorporate 40 percent of Palestinian land into the Israeli state.

Israeli air strikes have, over the past year, decimated the infrastructure in Gaza, destroying bridges, power stations and civilian administration buildings. The breakdown in law and order, coupled with the growing desperation in Gaza, has triggered an internecine conflict between Hamas and Fatah. There are some 200 Palestinians who have died in clashes and street fighting between the two factions during the past year — more than one-third of those killed by Israel during the same period.

The Israeli abuses have been well documented, not only by international human rights organizations, but Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem. On June 4, 2007, Amnesty International released a new 45-page report called “Enduring Occupation: Palestinians Under Siege in the West Bank,” which again illustrates the devastating impact of four decades of Israeli military occupation.

The report documents the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements on occupied land. It details the ways Israel has seized or denied crucial resources, such as water, to Palestinians under occupation. It documents a plethora of measures that confine Palestinians to fragmented enclaves and hinder their access to work, health and education facilities. These measures include the 700-kilometer barrier or wall, more than 500 checkpoints and blockades, and a complicated system of permits to heavily restrict movement.

“Palestinians living in the West Bank are blocked at every turn. This is not simply an inconvenience — it can be a matter of life or death. It is unacceptable that women in labor, sick children, or victims of accidents on their way to hospital should be forced to take long detours and face delays which can cost them their lives,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

“International action is urgently needed to address the widespread human rights abuses being committed under the occupation, and which are fueling resentment and despair among a predominantly young and increasingly radicalized Palestinian population,” said Smart. “For 40 years, the international community has failed to adequately address the Israeli-Palestinian problem; it cannot, must not, wait another 40 years to do so.”

Of Gaza’s 1.4 million residents, a staggering 1.1 million now depend on outside food assistance. The World Food Program has identified Gaza as one of the world’s hunger global hot spots. The WFP is a principal food aid provider to Palestinians, providing assistance to 640,000 Palestinians, more than a third of them in Gaza.

The desperation — with young men unable to find work, travel outside the Gaza Strip or West Bank and forced to sleep 10 to a room in concrete hovels without running water — has empowered the Islamic radicals. The desperation has led the Palestinian population, once one of the most secular in the Middle East, to turn to radical fundamentalism. The more pressure and violence Israel employs, the more these radicals are empowered.

The Israeli lobby in the United States is captive to the far right of Israeli politics. It exerts influence not on behalf of the Jewish state but an ideological strain within Israel that believes it can crush Palestinian aspirations through force.

The self-defeating policies of the Bush administration are mirrored in the self-defeating policies championed by the hard-right administration of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem. Israel flouts international law and dismisses Security Council resolutions to respect the integrity of Palestinian territory. It has instead trapped Palestinians in squalid, barricaded ghettos where they barely survive.

It is not in Israel’s interest — or our own — to continue to fuel increased Palestinian strife and rising militancy. Economic sanctions against Israel are our last hope. These were the tools that toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa. And it was, after all, the sanctions imposed by the first President Bush — he suspended $10 billion of loan guarantees for resettling Russian immigrants in Israel — that prodded right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to attend peace talks in Madrid.

A trade embargo — even if imposed only by European states — would be a start. It is outside pressure that can alone halt the inexorable slide into a conflict that could become regional. And a new regional conflict with Israel could spell the end of the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. It may be quixotic, perhaps even impossible, but it is the last measure left to save Israel from itself.

Chris Hedges is a veteran journalist and former Mideast bureau chief for The New York Times. His most recent book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.”

 

 

Counterbias.com, May 29 2007
Bush’s Actions Recall History’s Tyrants

By Sherwood Ross

As public sentiment begins to build for impeachment, it might be illuminating to examine the many ways President Bush operates in a manner reminiscent of history’s tyrants.

That Bush should act as a tyrant is not surprising given his appreciation for Christian Dominionism. Remember the Christian books were and are written about the poor, the meek, those deserving compassion and aide. Hence the Geneva Bible used the word tyrant over 400 times in talking about mythical and historic rulers. In contrast, the subsequent translation commissioned by the English King James I, eliminates “tyrant” and replaces it with the word “king.” According to scholar Adam Nicholson, the King James Bible and modern editions equate the notion of King and God, which by definition makes Imperial Christianity at odds with commonsense notions of equality, justice, and democracy. To say that Bush sees his role as Christian, and Imperial King as chosen by God are not illogical ramblings, but convenient for a racist-elitist who has no time to alleviate suffering of people in New Orleans, Afghanistan, Gambia, Mexico, etc.

Though we might generate an extensive list of his abuses and crimes, here is a list of ten areas that come readily to mind to compare G. W. Bush and his regime to other tyrannies.

First, tyrants tend to see themselves, as Hitler did, at the head of some kind of “master race.” President Bush and his backers would deny it, but their drive for a “New American Century” betrays them. They seek to be world-beaters, and won’t sign the global warming treaty or any other cooperative document. Republicans, at their last national convention, jeered the very mention of the words “United Nations.” Those among them or outside their clique who see it differently get slandered. Recall how Bush’s hatchet men impugned Senator Kerry’s Vietnam War record. This was reminiscent of Nazi claims Germany’s Jewish veterans of the Great War did not deserve their medals. Another manifestation is that neo-cons and pseudo-Christians (what Christopher Hedges calls Dominionists) from Rumsfeld and Dobson to Robertson and Haggard, would reduce American citizens who identify as homosexuals or bisexual to second-class citizenship status. Bush’s backers are convinced of their superiority at home and globally.

Second, tyrants tend to be congenital, brazen liars. Bush lied about Iraq’s threat to America just as Hitler lied when he claimed Poland attacked Germany first in 1939. The UN told Bush there was no WMD in Iraq, yet Bush said there was and made war. He knew better. As many as 600,000 Iraqi civilians are dead, two million have fled, and a nation is being destroyed before our eyes.

Third, tyrants engage in outright suppression or manipulation of the news – and pursue a preeminent position for state-propaganda. The Bush Administration has paid off newsmen to plug its achievements, sent out video press releases disguised as news stories, banned photographs of coffins returned from Iraq, and even planted a phony journalist (who was actually an ex-Marine and full-time gay escort) in White House press conferences. Now their move toward censorship leads them to spend millions to bribe Iraqi journalists and encourages the puppet government in Baghdad to limit press freedom too. (Call it “Freedom’s Power.”)

Fourth, tyrants will use a “crisis” to grab total power. After the massacre of 9/11, President Bush’s henchmen pushed through the unread and underappreciated Patriot Act (warrantless wiretaps, fiat appointments, and all). Recall 1933, when Hitler declared a “state of national emergency” after the Reichstag fire, which likely was set by the Nazis. In conjunction with his signing statements, and philosophy of an unaccountable, Supreme Executive, the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act purportedly gives Bush the power to arrest any American citizen on his say-so and he has allowed his intelligence agencies to spy illegally on American citizens without a court order.

Fifth, tyrants torture. Relying on an absolute subordinate and protector, Bush picked Alberto Gonzalez for the top legal position in the nation. Recall, Gonzalez was the very man who rationalized the torture of captives – yet advised Bush to order it done in Gitmo or anywhere else outside the 50 U.S. states, lest Bush be subject to impeachment for violating American law and the Constitution. Bush also lavishes billions on dictatorships such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose own Gestapo-like police obligingly torture individuals whom the CIA kidnaps and delivers. Bush has turned back the clock of history to the Spanish Inquisition – with equally beneficial results.

Sixth, tyrants tend to make serial wars. Soviet Russia’s Stalin attacked Finland, Poland, and Hungary. Imperial Japan struck Korea, Manchuria, China, America, and UK. One war is never enough for a tyrant. Recall Napoleon invaded nations to liberate them from kings, only to put his relatives on their thrones. Having invaded Afghanistan and setting Iraq ablaze, Bush now threatens Iran — all three countries being oil-rich or geographically sited for oil transmission lines, or both.

Seventh, tyrants are notorious for their closed-mindedness. They ignore their critics. Japan walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer for its conduct. Bush doesn’t listen to critics, either. The Pope denounced America’s war on Iraq as immoral. The UN Secretary-General called it “illegal.” Millions the world over protested it. And a majority of Americans call it wrong but Bush ignores them. Polls show 70% of the Iraqi people want the U.S. to get out but Bush refuses.

Eighth, tyrants spend lavishly on the military. In the Thirties, Germany, Japan and Soviet Russia devoted a high percentage of their gross national product to their war machines. Today, America spends more on armaments than all other nations combined. And under Bush, America is the Number One arms merchant in the world.

Ninth, tyrants don’t respect the sovereignty of other nations. Bush rationalized his attack on Iraq as “preventive war” — a euphemism for the supreme war crime, “a war of aggression.” According to reporter Seymour Hersh and former Marine/UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, the Pentagon has already dropped troops into Iran, armed and trained dissident Iranian groups to engage in Contra-style terrorism and sabotage against a legally elected government. The Pentagon operates over 700 military bases in 130 countries and refuses to leave Iraq, Okinawa, Italy, and Greenland despite protests from their citizens.

Tenth, tyrants have double standards. Bush declares he’s for “freedom” but forges alliances with the heads of Saudi Arabia, and former Soviet Asian republics like the slavocracy of Uzbekistan where citizens have zero rights and protesters are boiled alive. Bush warns Iran against making a nuclear bomb while he sells nuclear technology and weapons to Pakistan and India, and scraps non-proliferation treaties to make America’s nuclear arsenal more lethal. Bush threatens Iran, which spends $4-billion a year on arms, while he authorizes over $500-billion on arms including missile bases in Eastern Europe and killer satellites. Bush tells us to worry that Iran might make one nuclear bomb while he has over 10,000 that he can launch at anytime. Bush accused Saddam Hussein of germ warfare capability while W. has overseen the building of the greatest germ-warfare capability of any nation in history since the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Are these reasons grounds for impeachment? Not if you believe this is the New American Century. Not if you believe Americans are the Master Race. Not if you believe people in the American government and her military should rule the world.

==

This article was originally published at Virtual Citizens.

Sherwood Ross is an American who writes on political and military subjects for national magazines and the Internet. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

 

 

Source: Capitol Hill Blue, June 5, 2007

 

 

A case of wretched excess in Baghdad
By DALE McFEATTERS

In September, the world’s largest, most expensive and most heavily fortified embassy will open. It is ours and it is in Baghdad.

The embassy compound occupies 104 acres of primo real estate along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. If the embassy were in Washington, it would take up most of the National Mall.

For security reasons, the embassy will be out of sight and off-limits to most Iraqis, just as Baghdad outside the blast walls is out of sight and off-limits to the people at the embassy.

Instead, they will live in their own self-contained world with its own power, water and wastewater-treatment plants, amenities we have so far been unable to operate elsewhere in Baghdad on any regular basis.

The embassy will cost $592 million, although Congress is mulling a $50 million request for additional housing. The compound will contain 21 buildings, in addition to the embassy itself, residences for the ambassador and deputy, housing for 380 families, a PX, commissary, theater, schools, restaurants and a firehouse.

The Associated Press notes: “The embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.” Apparently the concept of modesty and restraint never entered into it’s planning, and if the war continues in its current direction, it will stand as a monument to American hubris and overreaching under the Bush administration.

Technicality applies to all 385 inmates, colonel rules
· Canadian and Bin Laden’s driver see cases dismissed

The Guardian, Tuesday June 5, 2007

By Suzanne Goldberg

File photo of Omar Khadr, taken before he was detained at Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: AP

The Bush administration’s plans to bring detainees at Guantánamo Bay to trial were thrown into chaos yesterday when military judges threw out all charges against a detainee held there since he was 15 and dismissed charges against another detainee who chauffeured Osama bin Laden.In back-to-back arraignments for the Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national, the US military’s cases against the alleged al-Qaida figures were dismissed because, the judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction.

Yesterday’s decision by Colonel Peter Brownback to dismiss all charges against Mr Khadr on technical grounds has broad implications for the Bush administration’s system of military tribunals because the technicality appears to apply to all 385 prisoners held at Guantánamo.The dismissal of the case also undermines the administration’s efforts to show that the military tribunals are based on sound legal practice and can provide detainees with a fair hearing, detainee lawyers said.

In his decision yesterday, Col Brownback said the Pentagon had merely designated Mr Khadr, a Canadian citizen facing charges of murder and terrorism, as an “enemy combatant”, not an “unlawful enemy combatant”, the term used by Congress last year in authorising the tribunals.

The Pentagon’s lapse meant the tribunal did not have proper jurisdiction to try Mr Khadr. “A person has a right to be tried only by a court that has jurisdiction over him,” Col Brownback told the court.

Mr Hamdan is accused of being Bin Laden’s chauffeur and bodyguard. In his case, US Navy captain Keith Allred yesterday said Mr Hamdan is “not subject to this commission” under legislation passed by Congress and signed by President George Bush last year.

The new Military Commissions Act, written to establish military trials after the US supreme court last year rejected the previous system, is full of problems, defence attorneys argued.

Mr Hamdan last year won a US supreme court challenge that led to the scrapping of the first Guantánamo tribunal system.

Yesterday’s rulings also suggest that none of the 385 other detainees at Guantánamo, held for more than five years without charge, can be brought to trial before the tribunals because they too have been designated merely as “enemy combatants”, lawyers said yesterday.

“The system right now should just stop,” Marine Corps Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the lead military defence lawyer, said. “The commission is an experiment that failed and we don’t need any more evidence that it is a failure.”

Mr Khadr’s defence team was equally scathing. “This is a shambles,” said Kristine Huskey, who had been on Mr Khadr’s defence team until last week when he sacked all of his American lawyers. “It’s another example of how everything has been so ad hoc. The Military Commissions Act was just not done thoughtfully.” Yesterday’s ruling does not bring Mr Khadr any closer to freedom. Col Brownback threw out the charges “without prejudice”, which means the Pentagon could issue new charges against him.

However, it exposes the hastiness with which Congress moved in October to bring in legislation authorising the tribunals after the supreme court threw out the earlier version.

Now, once again barely a year later, the tribunals have been thrown into legal limbo at their first outing. In April, the first Guantánamo detainee to be charged, David Hicks, reached a plea bargain deal, thus avoiding trial.

Ms Huskey said that amid the confusion, one thing appeared clear. The detainees, held without charge since 2002, were likely to face further delays before having their day in court. “What it does mean for Omar and all the detainees is that they are going to have a whole new process so that everyone can be charged,” she said.

Source: Counterpunch, June 5, 2007

By Robert Fantina

“I have real doubts about the value of engagement with a regime that is anti-democratic, and that appears to me to be trying to arrange a transition from one anti-democratic regime to another anti-democratic regime.” So said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her first official visit to Spain. She and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos discussed Cuba, among other topics, and apparently ‘agreed to disagree’ about that Caribbean island nation.

Ms. Rice also had doubts about the value of any engagement with Iran, but the U.S. eventually saw some potential there, and has begun low-level discussions. One wonders what makes so-called ‘anti-democratic’ Cuba a bigger bugaboo that anti-democratic Iran. A skeptic might say that perhaps the difference is the Cuban-American voting block in Florida.

But regardless of the reasons, Ms. Rice seemed miffed that Mr. Moratinos had not met with Cuban dissidents when he visited Cuba in April. She felt that this might have sent them the wrong message, when she wants them to know ” that the free world stands with them and is not prepared to tolerate an anti-democratic transition in Cuba.” She must have borrowed President Bush’s saber in order to rattle it in Madrid.

The response of Mr. Moratinos was telling, and should certainly have left Ms. Rice speechless; said he: the “government (of Spain) has no problem in talking to the dissidents. I would ask you, ‘Who has seen more of the dissidents?'” Spain, unlike the U.S., has diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The United States has maintained its bizarre non-relationship with Cuba for nearly fifty years. The apparent intent of this unusual estrangement is to force that nation to accept democratic principles. One might think that after nearly five decades, someone would decide that it wasn’t working.

It is interesting that Ms. Rice said that the world “is not prepared to tolerate an anti-democratic transition in Cuba.” When referring to the ‘world,’ did she actually mean the United States? Is the United States then prepared to intervene in Cuba as it has in Iraq when it determined the necessity for ‘regime change’ there? If Cuba, with the eventual death of the seemingly immortal Fidel Castro, does indeed transition to another ‘anti-democratic’ (as deemed by the U.S.) government, should the citizens of that nation prepare to experience the same brand of horrific terrorism that America unleashed on Iraq four years ago? Can the world look for the same degree of success in democratic nation-building in Cuba that the U.S. has had in Iraq?

The U.S. State Department’s official website describes Cuba in great detail. A few of the statements contained therein seem to accuse Cuba of offenses of which the U.S. itself is guilty. In describing that nation as a police state, it says that the Cuban government engages in “intense physical and electronic surveillance of Cubans.” Is not the U.S. government engaging in intense electronic surveillance of Americans through Mr. Bush’s illegal wiretapping program? Any telephone calls between the United States and any other country are subject to this scrutiny. Perhaps, as with so many other things, ‘intense electronic surveillance’ of the citizens is not wrong when the U.S. does it.

The website goes on to state that “Castro pursued close relations with the Soviet Union and worked in concert with the geopolitical goals of Soviet communism, funding and fomenting violent subversive and insurrectional activities, as well as military adventurism.” This does not seem dissimilar to the record of the United States, which has used covert and overt means to destabilize and destroy governments throughout the world with which it disagrees. Chile, Indonesia and El Salvador quickly come to mind. And can America’s latest imperial misadventure in Iraq be termed anything if not ‘military adventurism?’ Perhaps again, murder, government overthrow and civilian repression is not wrong when done in the name of America’s lofty ideals of peace and freedom.

“The government (of Cuba) incarcerates people for their peaceful political beliefs or activities.”

Again, we need not look far for U.S. parallels. As recently as November 2006, activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested in Washington, D.C. and charged with “interfering with a government function.” Ms. Sheehan and about fifty others wanted to deliver to the president a petition with 80,000 signatures opposing an invasion of Iran. She and the others tossed the petition over the White House fence and were arrested.

During the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, hundreds of protesters were arrested on a wide variety of charges. Four who were arrested for climbing the front of a hotel and hanging a banner were also charged with assaulting a police officer, because during their arrest the officer stepped on a skylight, broke it and hurt himself. Others who were arrested atop a trailer were charged with endangering a police officer, because he had to climb on the trailer to arrest them. Other protesters were kept blocks away from the convention, being denied their right of peaceful protest.

Ms. Rice’s comments about Cuba may be nothing more than the continued American rhetoric that many people have not tired of hearing, although it has played like a broken record for nearly fifty years. But with Mr. Castro now ill, and his brother Raul having been in command for nearly a year, perhaps that country will soon see a change in leadership. That potentiality necessitates the need to take Mr. Rice’s comments a little more seriously than the political posturing of past Secretaries of State and presidents. Mr. Bush may relish the possibility of forcing a government to his liking in Cuba, if for no other reason than to deflect attention from his continuing disaster in Iraq, and thus give some credence to his discredited attempts to force his brand of democracy down the throats of unwilling Iraqis. While the world focuses on Iraq and Mr. Bush’s increasing harsh words towards Iran, Cuba must not be ignored during this critical time. However, based on fifty years of spineless rhetoric on the topic, and Congress’s recent demonstration of cowardice in the face of one presidential veto, one must not expect that Mr. Bush will be thwarted in whatever plan he may have for Cuba. The result, if history tells us anything, will be simply more innocent victims of U.S. imperialism, and all the blood, death and sorrow that that always brings.

Robert Fantina is author of ‘Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776–2006.‘

“I lost my son in a war I oppose. We were both doing our duty.” By Andrew J. Bacevich

Washington Post, June 03, 2007

EMail Article to a Friend

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the “the-surge-is-already-working” school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. “The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others — teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks — to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier — brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His son died May 13 after a suicide bomb explosion in Salah al-Din province (Iraq).

Source: salon.com , June 4, 2007

Little-noticed details in declassified U.S. documents indicate that Israel’s Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity.

By Sandy Tolan

At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser’s entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War — in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser’s fearsome war machine that had closed the Strait of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state’s border with 100,000 troops. “The morning of 5 June 1967,” wrote Israel’s warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, “found Israel’s armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers.” Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

Or was it? Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration — including Johnson’s most pro-Israeli Cabinet members — did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that Nasser, for all his saber-rattling, tried to avoid until the moment his air force went up in smoke. In particular, the diplomatic role of Nasser’s vice president, who was poised to travel to Washington in an effort to resolve the crisis, has received little attention from historians. The documents sharpen a recurring theme in the history of the Israeli-Arab wars, and especially of their telling in the West: From the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths.

“You will whip the hell out of them,” Lyndon Johnson told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban during a visit to the White House on May 26, 1967. The president’s conclusions were based on multiple intelligence reports, including a CIA assessment that Israel “can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold any of three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth.” As Nicholas Katzenbach, U.S. undersecretary of state at the time, recalled: “The intelligence was absolutely flat on the fact that the Israelis … could wipe out the Arabs in no time at all.”

A key discrepancy lay between U.S. and British intelligence reports and those conveyed to the administration by the Israelis. On May 26, the same day Eban met with Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, relayed a message from Israel indicating “that an Egyptian and Syrian attack is imminent.” In a memo to the president, Rusk wrote: “Our intelligence does not confirm this Israeli estimate.” Indeed, this contradicted all U.S. intelligence, which had characterized Nasser’s troops in the Sinai as “defensive in nature” and only half (50,000) of the Israeli estimates. Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, called Israeli estimates of 100,000 Egyptian troops “highly disturbing,” and the CIA labeled them “a political gambit” for the United States to stand firm with Israelis, sell them more military hardware, and “put more pressure on Nasser.”

As for the Egyptian president, there was a huge difference between his public and private signals. He had threatened Israelis with “annihilation,” causing fear bordering on paralysis for a population devastated by the Holocaust. He had closed the Strait of Tiran, a source of less than 10 percent of Israel’s shipping, but nevertheless a casus belli as far as Israel was concerned. He had expelled the U.N. peacekeepers from Sinai, further raising fears of war. (Israel, however, refused to accept those same peacekeepers — a move that would have diminished the chance of war.) And, as the leader of the “Arab nation,” Nasser was under great pressure from other Arabs to cut short Israel’s nuclear ambitions and deliver the Palestinians back to the homes they had fled and been driven out of in the war of 1948.

But privately Nasser was sending strong signals he would not go to war. On May 31, he met with an American emissary, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, assuring him that Egypt would not “begin any fight.” Two days later, Nasser told a British M.P., Christopher Mayhew, that Egypt had “no intention of attacking Israel.” The same day he met again with Anderson, agreeing to dispatch his vice president, Zakariya Mohieddin, to Washington, in an apparent last-ditch attempt to avoid war. (Anderson and Johnson had also spoken of a visit to Cairo by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.)

Rostow decided that Israel should know about the secret visit. In a June 2 note to the president, the national security advisor urged that the United States inform Israel of Mohieddin’s impending trip to the White House: “My guess is that their intelligence will pick it up.” The same day, Nasser sent a telegram to the American president indicating that Egypt would not attack Israel, but that “we shall resist any aggression launched against us or against any Arab state.”

The archives for the 1967 war, as with the documentary evidence from other Arab-Israeli wars, thus reveal a history far more complex, and far more interesting, than the inflated portrayal of Arabs poised to crush Israel. “One against 40,” declared David Ben-Gurion in describing the odds facing Israel in the war of 1948, ignoring the fact that comparisons of total populations meant little. The records show that the key Arab and Jewish forces — a much more crucial benchmark — were about the same, and that after a June 1948 cease-fire, a rearmed Israel had a decided advantage, which it parlayed into victory. Fifty-nine years later, in today’s conflict in Gaza, the tragic, well-publicized deaths of Israelis in Sderot from crudely built Qassam missiles — nine in the last six years — are dwarfed by the deaths of 650 Palestinians last year (more than half unarmed civilians, according to Amnesty International) from attacks by Israel, one of the most potent and sophisticated military powers in the world, armed with nuclear weapons.

Yet the David vs. Goliath narrative persists, obscuring a more nuanced view of the balance of power in the region. Much of this has to do with Americans’ familiarity with the story of Israel as a safe haven for Jews ravaged by the Holocaust. By contrast, Arabs, especially Palestinians, have long been seen as a vaguely menacing Other, as depicted in Leon Uris’ hugely influential best-seller, “Exodus.” The “Exodus” history, in which Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, holds no room for a more layered narrative of the struggle between Arabs in Jews, in which someone like Gamal Abdel Nasser, blustering for the Arab street, may have been privately seeking a way out of war.

Did Nasser truly want peace? We may never know. On June 3, 1967, after Secretary of State Rusk had informed Israel of the pending visit from Egyptian Vice President Mohieddin, Rusk relayed a message from the president to Nasser. “In view of the urgency of the situation,” Rusk wrote, “we hope it will be possible for him to come without delay.” That same day, however, at a Pentagon meeting between Mossad director Meir Amit and McNamara, the prospects for war seemed closer than ever. Amit told McNamara bluntly that he was “going to recommend that our government strike.” This time, the Americans did not object; indeed, the CIA had grown sympathetic to Israel’s war aims, in which Nasser, seen as too close to the Soviets, would be defanged. When McNamara asked Amit how long a war would last, the Mossad director replied: “Seven days.” And so the meeting between the White House and Mohieddin, scheduled for June 7, never took place. By that time, it was already Day 3 of the Six-Day War, and Israel was already in control of Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza and the skies over much of the Middle East.

The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2007

Israeli Chief Rabbi Advocates Carpet Bombing Gaza

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

By Matthew Wagner

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides’ commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu’s son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. “I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them.”

Eliyahu wrote that “This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses.”

Source: GlobalResearch  Was Iraq Invaded to boost Oil Prices  Value of Exxon Reserves rose by 666 Billion  by Sherwood Ross

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Saddam Hussein may have been deposed in order to limit Iraq’s oil production and thus keep world oil prices artificially high. This could be the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American forces and their allies. According to Greg Palast’s new book, “Armed Madhouse”(Plume), “When OPEC raises the price of crude, Big Oil makes out big time.” Palast makes the point Iraq’s output in the 2003-05 period following the invasion saw a decline in oil production. In fact, it dropped to below the level of the 1995-2003 Oil-for-Food arrangement that allowed Iraq to sell two million barrels per day to raise cash for humanitarian purposes. “Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in (Iraqi) output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002,” Palast writes. He points out the oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production but have reserves of their own which rise in tandem with oil prices. “The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the (Iraq) war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone by just over $666-billion,” Palast wrote. What’s more, Chevron Oil, “where (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value.” Another big winner in the Iraq war is Saudi Arabia. The war-stoked jump in oil prices, Palast writes, put $120 billion in Saudi Arabia’s treasury in 2004, triple its normal take. Among the big losers have been American motorists, now paying about $3.30 for a gallon of gas. What’s more, the oil price spike has punished U.S. industry, costing America an estimated 1.2-million jobs. “Higher borrowing costs for business since the beginning of the Iraq war are bleeding manufacturing investment,” Palast adds. Rising oil prices are an anomaly. The world’s petroleum reserves have doubled from 648 billion to !.2 trillion barrels in the past 25 years, Palast reports. According to free market laws of supply and demand, discovery of these immense new pools should cause prices to drop. Big Oil’s interest is in “suppressing production,” Palast writes, stating “An international industry policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since 1927.” Iraq has 74 known oil fields but only 15 are in production and 526 known pools of oil of which only 125 have been drilled. In 2005, Iraq exported only 1.4 million barrels of oil daily, less than under Hussein, less than half its old OPEC quota, and less than a fourth of its ultimate capacity, Palast reports. “Though technically owned by the Iraqis through their state oil company, we can expect the (Iraqi) crude to be gathered and controlled downstream by the same old hands, British Petroleum, Chevron and other IOC’s (international oil companies) that first drew that nation’s borders, politely fulfilling Iraq’s quota assigned by the Saudis, no more, maybe less,” Palast writes. In addition to clapping a lid on Iraqi production, Palast charges the U.S. “promoted sabotage of oil piping, loading and refining systems in Venezuela” to limit that country’s production. Palast reminds that Venezuela, once the top exporter to the U.S., broke the back of the 1973 Arab oil embargo by replacing the oil withdrawn by Saudi Arabia. “(Hugo) Chavez, despised by Bush, was not likely to save Bush’s bacon by busting another embargo. Therefore, Chavez had to go immediately,” Palast writes. Palast says that OPEC is a front for the IOC’s. “If oil companies had created this cartel to fix prices, that would have made it a criminal conspiracy—cartels are illegal. But when governments conspire for the same purpose, the illegal conspiracy turns into a legitimate ‘alliance’ of sovereign states. OPEC’s government cover makes the price fixing perfectly legal, and Big Oil reaps the rewards.” What’s more, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations take Americans’ money at the pump, and in their heating and electric bills, and use it to buy up U.S. government notes. In 2005, Palast said, $243 billion in petro-dollars was collected from Americans by OPEC. Foreigners then bought up $311 billion in U.S. government debts. “All the goodies, from nuclear subs to tax cuts to war in Mesopotamia appear to be ‘free’ to the taxpayer,” Palast writes. “It’s all just put on the tab, the national debt, including the interest on it. The actual cash needed to pay for these budget busters is first collected from U.S. consumers via the hidden oil tax for which Mr. Bush takes no blame.” Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who covers political and military subjects.