Compassion? You could say compassion is needed. You could more accurately say a commitment by so-called civilized governments to address these crimes against humanity – which actually does include women – should be a top priority for their world agenda. But how can protecting women and children in Congo be taken seriously when not only do they have no oil, but it would mean having to stand up to our own allies when they commit war crimes?  It would mean having to take responsibility for our own war crimes.

As usual, when investigated by the United Nations for offenses as serious as they come – using the horrific and illegal chemical weapon white phosphorous against civilians in bombing campaigns in Gaza one year ago, firing guns into the faces of children, bombing safe-houses and other non-military targets full of civilians – Israel decided to brazen it out with full denials of any wrongdoing, dismissing all charges in the name of its own ’self-defense’.  (As if there are no international laws regarding what is justifiable and what is not – hence the UN investigation.) Though it was found that “A report…commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, described how UN staff that day called Israeli authorities at least seven times asking them to stop the shelling of the compound…three high-explosive shells and seven white phosphorus artillery shells, probably from a 155mm howitzer, had hit the compound. It concluded that the Israeli military violated customary international law” – yet, “So far only one Israeli soldier has been prosecuted over the war – for stealing a credit card from a Palestinian house” – an exception which seems intended to mock the thousands of dead and homeless.

These crimes have been documented by the UN investigators, and hundreds of eye-witnesses, as well as photographs and video footage, have testified to the rabid excesses Israeli soldiers committed in their attacks on Gaza. And this also is a zone that has seen decades of unpunished abuse, which some have credibly cited as being the original cause of sentiment in the Islamic world uniting against America and its allies, the progenitor of desperate acts like suicide bombing and ‘jihad’. And yet, aside from a handful of officers being “disciplined” – and what form this will take has not been released – it seems that once again there will be no redress for aggrieved Palestinians.

So yes, how is it that a natural disaster can bring the world to a poor island’s doorstep, arms laden with aid, supplies and hope, while the wretched of Congo must live the daily nightmare of rape with sticks and bayonets, without hope of safety for decades, and the victims of Israel’s illegal expansion suffer horrendously disproportional military attacks, which reduce civilian areas to dust and rubble?

Or to put it more simply, how is it possible to continually claim the moral high ground when mired in moral quicksand? Extending a lifeline to Haiti is the least the richest, freest countries in the world can do.  It is not enough to be better than the worst countries on earth, and then throw some charity around to create a benign image (and that goes for the too-rich and too-powerful corporations manipulating the world financial scene as well).

(Read more by The Poliskeptic: http://www.lepanoptique.com/category/formats/blogues/nikilambros/)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/travesty-if-the-world-can_b_424995.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31kristof.html?scp=2&sq=nicholas%20d.%20kristoff&st=cse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/01/israeli-soldiers-disciplined-un-attack-gaza

UN SECURITY COUNCIL FULL REPORT: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/5ba47a5c6cef541b802563e000493b8c/3800655e522591fd852575cb004ca773?OpenDocument

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/17/gaza-israel-invasion-children-traumatised

President Obama extends war in Afghanistan to include relentless drone-bomber strikes on Pakistan, receives Nobel Peace Prize!

Supreme Court credits Corporations with ‘personhood’, human beings credited with colluding in ending Constitutional government and rule of law.

After Democrats FAIL to get their bill through Congress, the GOP plans to take credit for passing a [stripped down, worthless] healthcare bill!

Osama Bin Laden is taking ‘credit’ for the Nigerian Underwear (FAILED) Bomber!

Pat Robertson gives Satan credit for earthquake in Haiti! (The Devil’s power is awesome! God, not so much.)

Nude Cosmo Boy Scott Brown takes credit for winning Massachusetts Senate Seat!

But credit where credit is due. President Obama and his administration could have prevented the rewrite of history, where Moron-In-Chief George W. Bush evades responsibility for the misdirected trillion-dollar war in Iraq and the world-crippling financial crisis, where Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney walk away from the abominations of CIA-directed Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram torture prisons, where being in power means never having to say you’re sorry. Had there been any sense of the urgency, of the dire need to restore the ‘reality-based universe’ and vanquish the lords of misrule that had so completely taken over the United States government, the Obama administration could have been the ones to do it – that’s over now.

President Obama will not even get to return to square one. Squandering his political credibility in one short year, he and his party will be fighting an uphill battle against such ridiculous opponents as the Teapartiers, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck, while their puppetmasters – sinister old pros like Gingrich and Kristol, cynical strategists like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, looking exactly like hypocrite televangelists, and their pawns, like the hapless Michael Steele and ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats like Bart Stupak – are working non-stop to destroy America so they can save it – for themselves. Rallying what they call the “real” America, the backwards-looking America of racism and sexism, the America in thrall to would-be terrorists who’s most powerful threat is as a tool in the hands of a ruthless GOP that wants back in to power at whatever cost, these political predators have all but ended the era of freedom and liberty. These are the elements, the dregs of American society, who are now saying “Yes We Can”, and selling “hope” to an angry, stupid mob. They are claiming the political credit that President Obama needlessly wasted on the self-indulgent folly of “bipartisanship”, thwarting the will of the people who elected him with a huge majority. It didn’t have to be this way, but unless Obama leaves his ivory tower and does some history making of his own, it’s only going to get worse.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/bailout_plan/index.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/new-dem-worry-gop-taking_n_432271.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/24/bin-laden-claims-responsi_n_434536.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/pat-robertson-haiti-curse_n_422099.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/us/politics/24union.html?hp

The infamous memo of August 6, 2001, presented at President George W. Bush’s Daily Briefing, was actually titled, “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States”. Multiple reports detailed suspicions of an imminent al Qaeda plot to hijack planes and fly them like suicide bombs into skyscrapers. All the operatives were known to various intelligence agencies, even that they were attending flight schools on false passports, and had ties to extremist groups. And yet…

In November of last year, a Senate report was released stating that the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld deliberately let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, Afghanistan into Pakistan. The Taliban, mostly defeated after NATO forces dispersed them in 2001, have now rallied to rule most of rural Pakistan and continue to directly influence the Karzai puppet government.

No sooner did President Barack Obama commit fully to war in Afghanistan, which he identified during his campaign as the war the U.S. should have been fighting all along, when Pakistan became the new front. The President, following the advice of his generals, has chosen to step up the use of unmanned drones, perhaps thinking this strategy will be more acceptable to allies who have declined to supply soldiers for a prolonged conflict. This has increased the amount of attacks in the region, and multiplied civilian casualties exponentially, enraging Islamist militants in Muslim countries around the world.

Iraq is all but forgotten, except by those hoping to cash in on rebuilding contracts and private security operations. And now a new “intelligence” failure has led the U.S. back to the original site of Bin Laden’s first major act of terrorism in October 2000, the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. At that time, future Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was National Security Advisor. “According to Dr. Rice, the decision not to respond militarily to the Cole bombing was President Bush’s. She said he ‘made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was ‘tired of swatting flies.’ »

So back to Yemen we go. Though the technique the Yemeni-al Qaeda-trained Nigerian bomber used to smuggle explosives on board, thwarting airport security measures, was detailed to a White House advisor last October, and though the bomber’s own father alerted U.S. Embassy officials to his son’s involvement with extremist groups, a man who was refused a U.K. visa and on a No-Fly list, who bought a one-way ticket to Detroit, for $3000 in cash, with no luggage – “intelligence failures” were casually blamed and then explained away by everyone from the President down to the lowly TSA who ought to have prevented him from boarding.

As Jon Stewart quipped, “[we don’t expect security to] catch everything, but we do expect you to catch the EXACT same thing. »  (Referring to the attempt to blow up a plane using smuggled explosives by the so-called « Shoe Bomber » of December, 2001.)

Is the fact that “intelligence” that could and should have prevented attacks by al Qaeda was all but totally ignored, the reason why « 9/11 Truthers” believe our own government is allowing terrorists to attack? Because they can’t believe it was just pure stupidity, the bungling of incompetent Inspector Clouseaus, or a “failure to communicate” between international security agencies?  Or is it the fact that billions and billions of U.S. tax dollars are going to fund military operations in these misbegotten war zones, while Wall Street gets ready to hand out billions in bonuses sheltered by the Obama Administration’s Financial Sector cronies?  Is it that they see a direct correlation between the cover-up of an out-of-control CIA and a failing economy that forces the majority of Americans concentrate on their own troubles while allowing any and everything to be gotten away with in the name of « fighting terror »?

And should we maybe stop calling it “intelligence”, when today’s New York Times front page headline declares, “Military Is Deluged In Intelligence From Drones”:

“Imagine you are tuning into a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive as Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

You don’t know what the score is. In military jargon, the state of U.S. intelligence is: SNAFU.

____________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/19/terrorism.september11

http://www.usasurvival.org/ck6902.shtml

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/osama-bin-laden-senate-report

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012304189.html

.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing – cite_note-911Commission040408-25

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/01/02/white-house-advisor-briefed-in-october-on-underwear-bomb-technique.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?hp

‘“We will decrease the role of international forces,” Mr. Karzai said at a midday ceremony held at the presidential palace in Kabul. “We want our security within five years to be entirely within the hands of the Afghan government and led by Afghans.”’

Wouldn’t we all. The thing is, for almost a decade, people have been making money off of this war, and the war in Iraq. Big, huge money, and they hope to continue making money: if not from the weapons themselves, or the private military ‘contractors’, or even the massive heroin profits, then from “rebuilding”, and investment in the country’s ‘future’.

Mere cynicism? In fact, the reason Afghanistan has been a killing field for any troops unfortunate enough to be deployed there, whether by Britain or Russia or the U.S. and it’s ‘allies’, is because it is the perfect spot for endless war. The borders of Afghanistan, like Pakistan, were created on paper maps, rather than by a realistic understanding of tribal loyalties which run far deeper than any sense of “national identity” as it is thought of elsewhere.

‘ »We welcome those who are not affiliated with any terrorist organisations and whose hands are not red with Afghans’ blood, » [Karzai] said.’  Ya think he means us?

Farcically, desperately, “Dignitaries from more than 40 countries, including the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, attended the ceremony in Kabul.”

Meanwhile, ‘ »It’s more of the same, » Abdullah [Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival] said. « He has spoken in these terms – in terms of bringing changes and reform, and fighting corruption, and bringing security and reconciliation – for the last eight years, and the situation has worsened. »’

‘Basher Dost, a candidate who came in third in the first round of the presidential election, has said Mr. Karzai’s lifelong orientation is toward his tribe and family, and those loyalties render him unable to make the deep changes needed in his government. “He believes his power is his warlords, it’s the chiefs of tribes,” he said recently. “It’s not important what is true; what is important is the interest of your family. It’s why he cannot fight the warlords and cannot fight the corruption,” Mr. Dost said.’

So it was with Saddam Hussein, so it is with the Taliban, and so it will continue to be with the Karzai regime, until one of two things happen: foreign troops really do just leave, lock, stock and smoking barrels, allowing the country to sink back into the 15th century while doing “business” through the usual channels of corruption and mafias, or Western leaders and forces will get honest about why they are in these areas to begin with – to control their oil – and try an approach whereby the billions of dollars sent to aid the civilian population and rebuild infrastructure and a viable, international business marketplace for legal goods and services, actually accomplish these goals with visible, convincing results.

Don’t hold your breath. « People should know that only the votes of the people can legitimise the government, » Karzai said. « I am the servant of all the people of Afghanistan, from every ethnicity, every tribe, from every place, from every province from every age, whether they are small children whether they are old people, women, I invite all the presidential candidates to come and help in serving this nation. »

Emptier words have seldom been spoken; but when they were, it’s likely it happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Pakistan of the 21st century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-inauguration-speech

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/karzai-sworn-in-as-afghan-leader-1823419.html

Any “news” that can be trusted is damn scarce. We have heard about the car-bombings that have killed over 300 people. We have heard that two military helicopters collided killing 9 U.S. soldiers. And that President Hamid Karzai’s brother – Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected to oversee the largest Afghan heroin trafficking ring – has been on the C.I.A. payroll for the last eight years.

We learn that Predator drones, warfare by unmanned stealth bombers inspired by the likes of Israel, make up the foremost military strategy for overcoming terrorism in Afghanistan, a tactic that has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and which has been deployed by President Obama more times since he’s taken office than in the last three years of the Bush Administration. Sold as a revolution in tactical warfare, “drones are the technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on…endless war.” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the use of drones, saying, “there’s a war going on.” Really? Looks like a different military term would sum it up more clearly: FUBAR. The U.N. announced last week that the U.S. drone policy may violate international law.

And assassination – which was outlawed in 1976 by Pres. Ford – is now standard practice for fighting terrorists, as terrorism went from being a criminal act to an act of war. The suspension of all laws concerning terrorism has become the norm in countries that used to pride themselves on the rule of law. “The things we were complaining about from Israel a few years ago we now embrace”.

Posing as the Voice of Reason, Thomas Friedman’s latest NYTimes editorial advises pulling out of Afghanistan as soon as the last soldier can be put on a plane for home. It is clear that any mention or thought of ethical considerations in Afghanistan are off the table. While the Taliban increases its fighting power every day – thanks in part to the endless millions, coming in part from Karzai’s CIA-protected drug empire, along with the millions ‘gone astray’ in U.S. government programs and the thousands of weapons successfully stolen or diverted to Taliban forces in Pakistan – the Obama Administration is listening to the cooing of doves and chicken-hawks, who now want out of this disgraceful debacle for all the wrong reasons, while being besieged by his generals to increase troops and “win”, whatever that can possibly mean at this stage.

What I understand from all these ‘facts’ is that everything we are being told about the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan – including the circumstances under which Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire – is suspect. That’s not exactly news, of course; with the kidnapping and killing of reporters who try to remain within eye-witness range of events, and even U.N. workers being ruthlessly bombed in their sleep, as happened last week in Kabul , can anyone confirm what “government reports”, with their own twisted agendas, are telling us to be true?

Now, Hamid Karzai, puppet of the Bush regime, has been handed a second presidential term though his election was a fraud. As with the suspicious appointment of the man himself, this is just another indication that this is still Bush’s war, doomed to the criminal ineptitude of that administration.

________________________________________________
Mayer, Jane, “The Predator War”, The New Yorker, 26 October, 2009, pp.36-45.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/world/asia/30clinton.html?ref=asia

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/asia/02assess.html?ref=asia

http://www.defencetalk.com/un-questions-legality-of-us-use-of-drones-22781/

ibid, p. 40.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/world/asia/29afghan.html?ref=asia

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/01/abdullah-withdrawal-afghanistan-election-clinton

In no way does it matter if it is true, or even if the rumor is true; it is now on the Internet, on the Huffington Post, no less.  A live-blog of the mayhem, complete with video footage I wouldn’t let the kiddies near.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html

12:26 PM ET — Mousavi martyrdom. A message on Mousavi’s official Facebook page « confirms he is on the streets and has ‘washed in readiness to be martyred,’ » a Persian speaker emails.

Mousavi is talking about martyrdom.  Thank God he’s a progressive.  He can probably make that work for Obama, right?  I honestly do not know how people can not suspect neo-con forces from the Bush Administration of some kind of collusion at the very least.  It does not matter whether it is true or not – now that the suggestion is out there, whatever President Obama does will be potentially disastrous.  Are the only ones thinking that Dick Cheney, who was said by the Director of the CIA to “wish for another attack” – a remark unconvincingly retracted later – are wearing tinfoil hats if they believe he would be encouraged by the possibility of retribution against the United States?  To seize a chance to discredit Mr Obama?  Get more no-bid contracts for Halliburton?  He would deny it.

‘CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism almost suggests « he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. »

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney « smells some blood in the water » on the issue of national security.’

All but calling him a cold, dead-eyed shark.  Fox News followed up immediately with a veiled threat from Cheney in their headline: « I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted, » Cheney said, in a written statement to FOX News. « The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years. »

The policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years. Friends, if he has the balls to say that now, you’d better believe he could be up to something.  Of the former CEO of Halliburton CBS reported:  “In 2002, Cheney’s total assets were valued at between $19.1 million and $86.4 million.”  Er, there’s near $70million in between there, and his present worth is said to be just under $100million.  This guy has been at this his whole life.  He will not stop now, even if he causes the U.S. to remain the #1 target for terrorists.

______________________________________________________________________________

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=7837128

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/politics/main575356.shtml

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/15/cheney-hopes-panetta-misquoted-claiming-vp-wishes-attack/

Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, called by the AP, as if it were an established fact, the “reform candidate”?  The Independent’s Robert Fisk explains:

“Mr Ahmadinejad, the first non-clerical president in more than 25 years, basks in the support of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on Iranians to vote for an anti-Western candidate. The Ayatollah ultimately calls the shots in Iran, where the president can only influence policy, not decide it.

“Life for President Barack Obama would be a great deal easier if Mir Hossein Mousavi had won Iran’s election. The man who was prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s says he would seek detente with the West, ask Mr Obama to debate at the UN with him, and floated the idea of an international consortium overseeing uranium enrichment in Iran.”

Meanwhile, in the New York Times today, a breathless Thomas Friedman confided, “I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!”

Aside from the grotesque naivety of his theory of believable change in Iran, the notion that true, un-western (insert initials) interference has not played a part in the escalation of violence against protesters – and its subsequent non-stop coverage on 24-hour media – is a product of a grass-roots, Obama-like movement among your average Iranians, is, well, grotesquely naïve and recklessly misleading.  President Ahmadinijad will do what we all know he will do in these circumstances:  suppress a popular uprising by any means necessary.  That the media is cheering the “revolutionaries” on with such appalling gusto, as if their attempt at “democracy” carries a truly revolutionary chance for success, looks to me like manipulation by the very invisible, far-away internet forces Friedman lauds to the skies in his absurd editorial.  Watch some videos of the Iranian Army beating protesters – do they look like they fear serious reprisals? People are already being detained: (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/world/middleeast/15iran.html?hp)  Let’s face it:  if a thug like Mugabe could so easily get away with a « majority » in Zimbabwe’s « elections », who is going to school Iran?  Just sayin.

Here’s Fisk again, another journalist with an old mentor on the inside, but with a lot more seasoning and not so underdone:

“An interval here for lunch with a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me…He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he said. ‘The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad.’”

This is the media saying, “see, the Axis of Evil!”  And yet President Obama, of the United States, is going to have to negotiate with Ahmadinijad, and he’s going to have to prevail. One can see dark agendas in the continuing sabotage of U.S. foreign policy, just to keep the power/billion$ gravytrain on track.  For those behind escalating the war-machine, to let go is to risk real exposure.

I hope Mr. Obama will not listen to the Henry Kissengers; the time is now to ignore the howls of domestic fundamentalist know-nothings, expose the corruption of the Bush past, and continue with the real work of international diplomacy.

“And from Oceania, that’s the news about Eurasia.  On to Eastasia, where another Menace is celebrating a country-wide Day of Plutonium…”
_____________________________________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14friedman.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-iran-erupts-as-voters-back-the-democrator-1704810.html

]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/can-ingsoc-prevail-in-iran-or-ahmadinijad-eurasian-menace/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/another-day-another-travesty-of-international-justice-things-you-wont-learn-from-sri-lanka/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/another-day-another-travesty-of-international-justice-things-you-wont-learn-from-sri-lanka/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 22:46:31 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2191 Well, well, well.

Since my last post, I have been trying to write something meaningful about Sri Lanka, but something told me I would have to wait to find the correct angle from which to view that mess and find something true in it.

Unfortunately, unless you want to go read the 30-year history of the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers, there’s nothing I can say that won’t sound like the typical generalizations that are made in a we-did-this/but-they-did-that conflict, though the levels of brutal violence are staggering.

And like many other long wars of this sort, the terrorist-style violence occurred on both sides.  So when earlier this month, after the Sri Lankan Army literally backed the Tamils up against the sea and massacred them wholesale, killing their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, (whose body, like Saddam Hussein’s, was displayed by the Sri Lankan Army like a war trophy) – while all I could read about in every international paper was the “victory” and “triumph” of the Sri Lankan Army – I knew I’d have to wait.

I waited another week.  And naturally, the U.N. finally brought up the human rights violations that everyone who was paying any attention at all already knew about – committed by the Army as well as the Tamil rebels.  And as I knew would also happen, today they are rescinding their allegations and dropping the investigation.

This is, in the most cynical way, called a news cycle for a conflict the West cannot interfere in, let alone solve.

We have seen it again and again and again:  a former colony is given sovereignty, its borders drawn according to the arbitrary conveniences of western alliances, in total denial of the existence of native peoples and their societies.  The minority group – which until that time had co-existed – is now forced to fight for its human right to exist, and are immediately branded guerillas, rebels, insurgents, et cetera.  The state-backed soldiers, however, in order to fight the increasingly strategic enemy, resort to the same terrorist tactics until the Army and those they are fighting have committed so many atrocities against each other, they are barely distinguishable.

While this fighting is going on, the U.N. sleeps.  No one wants to bear witness to what “our SOBs” are doing, and the media is shut out.  Until after the decisive “victory”, proclaimed when the killing that should never have been allowed to happen has instead been allowed to run its bloody course.

Amesty International calls for an “investigation” by the U.N., which is subsequently settled in favor of the establishment.  Remaining ‘rebels’ are now reviled refugees, or stuck in the country to live haunted, devastated lives.  Things aren’t so great on the other side, either, but hey, it’s “settled”.

“Sri Lanka last night scored a major propaganda coup when the UN human rights council praised its victory over the Tamil Tigers and refused calls to investigate allegations of war crimes by both sides in the final chapter of a bloody 25-year conflict.  In a shock move, which dismayed western nations critical of Sri Lanka’s approach, the island’s diplomats succeeded in lobbying enough of its south Asian allies to pass a resolution describing the conflict as a ‘domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference’.”

Far from being “shocked”, I have seen this pattern so often, I simply knew if I waited a few weeks, it would play out like clockwork, and it has.  They pay the usual lip-service by calling it a “propaganda coup”, but think about it:  in the last four years alone we have seen this happen over and over, in Iraq, in Pakistan, and most devastatingly in the recent raids by Israel against Lebanon and Gaza.  These countries are all propped up by the U.S. and their allies, while the civilian populations are made to endure every indignity and hardship, and any effort to resist their own subjugation to injustice is deemed illegal and therefore subject to the harshest retaliation.

The U.N. then does an “investigation” and finds the government-backed perpetrators of atrocities “not guilty”.  What’s worse, they stand back while it’s happening and then claim shock and horror, but time and time again the pattern is not only repeated but reinforced.  (see my Feb/March, Nov 08 archives)

Why do the newspapers now consent to call Burma, “Myanmar”?  A coup d’etat by a military junta in a former colony is left almost unmolested to commit untold thousands of murders and detentions, and we are recognizing that as a “government”?  The Chinese in Tibet, ethnic cleansing in Eritria, unspeakable acts by the Army in Congo – and choosing sides means backing the western-approved “government”, no matter how loosely committed to « democracy » they are, arming them to the teeth and then sitting back and waiting for “triumph” over the “rebels”, i.e. the civilians who have been systematically brutalized into organizing a resistance.

I saw it coming – the cynical cycle of the ramped up arming of an uncontrollable state-backed Army against a ruthless but desperate group of civilian guerillas, followed by a “victorious triumph”, a spurious “investigation”, and the announcing of all charges dropped – in Sri Lanka; if you care to take notice of it in other similar conflicts, you will too.

__________________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/asia/20lanka.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090518/wl_afp/srilankaunrest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/tamil-tigers-killed-sri-lanka

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tamil-leaders-killed-as-they-tried-to-surrender-1687790.html

http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article31205

http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=2313

http://alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LQ944700.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/28/sri-lanka-un-war-crimes-investigation

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]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/another-day-another-travesty-of-international-justice-things-you-wont-learn-from-sri-lanka/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/pakistans-post-partition-depression/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/pakistans-post-partition-depression/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 22:47:28 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2193 “We have met the enemy and they is us.” – Pogo

What the hell is going on in Afghanistan?  Business as usual.  What about Pakistan?  They’re all hotted up, killing “hundreds”** of Taliban fighters near the Swat valley.  Where was all this energy when the Bush Administration was handing over $100m checks with zero accountability for the money?  But never mind all that, right Mr Obama?  It’s a new day, after all.

“The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the US war raging on the Afghan border. US policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations – the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?”

“It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The ‘Durand Line’ is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border.  And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan.”

Let’s take this moment to reflect on the West’s partitioning of so many, many places in the world, their peoples thrown into dire internal conflict, because at some point, it was expedient for western rulers to divide countries as they saw fit, from the most egregious example of unconsidered consequences – Palestine turned into ‘Israel’ – to the latest example, a plan to partition Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd states.  The days are long gone when native peoples will endure this kind of western interference.  And it is clear they will chose their own brand of chaos over Western ‘control’, and that they have gained the weapons and ‘tactics’ (learned from the C.I.A.) to do it.

“The Pakistani army is composed mostly of Punjabis. The Taliban is entirely Pashtun. For centuries, Pashtuns living in the mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought to keep out invading Punjabi plainsmen. So sending Punjabi soldiers into Pashtun territory to fight jihadists pushes the country ever closer to an ethnically defined civil war, strengthening Pashtun sentiment for an independent « Pashtunistan » that would embrace 41 million people in big chunks of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Let their own governments handle it?  But we’re in it now, up to – I’d say our balls, but do we still have the guts to face the mess we’ve created?  Do we have any commitment to the women and girls being grotesquely abused in that primitive region?  What about the children growing up with a worldview of hatred towards “infidels”, and all their “science”?  The allies in the “war on terror” had better figure out not only whom they are fighting, but what they are defending.  Losses have been tremendous, on all sides.  In Iraq, hundreds of thousands have been killed, wounded, or made homeless or refugees, in Pakistan thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands made homeless or refugees.  In the U.S., besides our own loss of thousands of troops, the entire Bush Administration is openly seen as lawless war criminals, hypocrites of the most abhorrent stamp.

No, greed is not good.

Meanwhile, has anyone been keeping track of what’s happening in Sri Lanka?  I didn’t think so.  I’ll have something on that when there’s more actual news released than the staggering daily death-tolls.

** “…there is guarded support from the common man, but questions are beginning to be asked – where are all these dead Taliban for one?”
“Why is artillery being used to attack the Taliban rather than infantry who can then hold the position they have just taken? What is the physical state of the centre of towns like Mingora and why can’t we have a couple of ‘embedded’ correspondents who can write a pooled dispatch for the English and Urdu press every day?” the editorial wondered.
“We know surprisingly little – in fact beyond official daily briefings almost nothing – about the war with the Taliban,” it said.

_________________________________________________________________________
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/751-taliban-killed-heliborne- troops-land-in-swat-lead_100191540.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901142.html

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2009051037557

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/10/AR2009051001959.html

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]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/pakistans-post-partition-depression/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/givin-it-up-for-the-taliban/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/givin-it-up-for-the-taliban/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 22:48:48 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2195 “President Obama has correctly refocused American attention on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real front in the war on terror. But the recent surge in bombings is an alarming reminder of all of the unfinished business from President Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq.”

Unfinished business, eh?  The entire NY Times editorial from which this is quoted sounds like an excuse wrapped up in a subterfuge.

“The problem isn’t Mr. Obama’s order to end America’s longest-running war. It is the failure of Iraq’s Shiite-led government to make the political changes that are the only chance for holding the country together.”

But no one is going to hold Iraq together. It goes on to suggest that there may be a Shiite-Sunni-Kurd Coalition government in the works.  Just who are you kidding? Fortunately, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  That much we know.
However, there are plenty floating around Pakistan, and this is the reason why Mr Obama has “correctly refocused” the military there.  (And weren’t we not saying “war on terror” anymore?)

“President Obama said last week that he remained confident that keeping the country’s nuclear infrastructure secure was the top priority of Pakistan’s armed forces.… the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s nuclear sites are located, and its concerns have intensified in the last two weeks since the Taliban entered Buner, a district 60 miles from the capital. The spread of the insurgency has left American officials less willing to accept blanket assurances from Pakistan that the weapons are safe.

“But Pakistani officials have continued to deflect American requests for more details about the location and security of the country’s nuclear sites, the officials said. Some of the Pakistani reluctance, they said, stemmed from longstanding concern that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites.”

The latest president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari, widowed husband of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated last December, has almost no control over the Taliban, and not much more over their army.   “…there have been only limited, poorly-coordinated attempts to re-engage with communities devastated by armed operations against the Taliban. As a result the Army and government authorities have sheepishly ended up signing peace deals with the Taliban over the past four years. They have all consistently broken down, the Taliban using the lull in hostilities to regroup and rearm.  The most recent peace deal, over the Swat valley, is on the verge of collapse owing to continued Taliban operations in neighbouring areas.”  “Mr. Zardari heads the country’s National Command Authority, the mix of political, military and intelligence leaders responsible for its arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear weapons. But in reality, his command and control over the weapons are considered tenuous at best…”

What will be done?  The disgraceful abdication of Iraq to the forces of chaos gives me a pretty good idea of what would happen if it weren’t for the one thing needful, chasing down the nukes.  The Pakistani people – most especially those women Laura Bush was supposedly so concerned about – are only the latest victims of 9/11.

It is not enough to “correctly refocus” on the indigenous militaries that remain in Afghanistan and Pakistan (or a shambolic “government” in Iraq).  Whether it was the fault of the wretched Dubya or is the responsibility of Mr Obama, treating the people of these countries like collateral damage in the war-for-oil is why the U.S. is estranged and powerless against an enemy of well-armed and committed mass-murderers.

__________________________________________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/opinion/04mon1.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/world/asia/04nuke.html?hp

http://www.hrw.org/en/node/10527/section/3

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/03/pakistan-taliban-military-swat

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]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/givin-it-up-for-the-taliban/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/torture-torture-everywhere/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/torture-torture-everywhere/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:49:36 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2197

A lie told often enough becomes the truth. – Lenin

With the GOP in bizarro-Washington, however, it’s the truth repeated over and over again that Dick Cheney wants to turn into a lie.  The truth is, the United States DID torture, waterboarding IS torture, and he is guilty of authorizing torture.  Donald Rumsfeld mandated torture.  Condoleeza Rice signed on, Alberto Gonzalez, David Addington and John Yoo provided illegal loopholes for the CIA to jump through, and I have a hard time doubting that George W. Bush didn’t know all about it.

Last year in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Addington and Yoo just avoided perjuring themselves by not actually answering any questions. “Yoo, at one point, was asked several times by Cmte. Chairman John Conyers whether or not the President had the authority to bury a detainee alive. Yoo was unable to offer an answer.”

And they were allowed to get away with this.  Which is why today, when the memos they were originally able to suppress under the Bush Administration have now come to light, proving that as early as 2002 the Administration had intended to use torture techniques against unconvicted detainees, there must be not only prosecutions but a full housecleaning at the Justice Department as well as at the CIA.

As of yesterday, what did President Obama have to say?

“…President Obama told Congressional leaders that he did not want a special inquiry, which he said would potentially steal time and energy from his ambitious policy priorities, and could mushroom into a wider distraction by looking back at other aspects of the Bush years.”

A “wider distraction”?  Mr President, there is no spectacle like the repeated, systematic torture of human beings, to rivet the eyes of the world on Washington.  We were distracted by images of a mushroom by Ms Rice, and are finding out piece by piece how the entire war was a neocon construct devised to make them rich beyond dreams of avarice.  It is not your choice, Mr Obama, it’s the law:  listen to Speaker Pelosi and allow an independent panel to indict whomever broke it.  We know – there is undisputable evidence – that the US tortured.  Do.Not.FAIL.

In Iraq this week, there has been a huge spike in suicide bombing deaths, the current situation resembling pure chaos.  In Pakistan, the loss of control to Taliban extremists has so far exceeded the ability of any Western forces to stop its expansion; “…it was another indication of the gathering strength of the insurgency and it raised new alarm about the ability of the government to fend off an unrelenting Taliban advance toward the heart of Pakistan.”

“The takeover of Buner [a strategically important district just 70 miles from the capital]… is particularly significant because the people there have tried in the past year to stand up to the Taliban by establishing small private armies to fight the militants… But with a beachhead in neighboring Swat [a formerly westernized area recently lost to extremists], and a number of training camps for fresh recruits, the Taliban were able to carry out what amounted to an invasion of Buner.
“The training camps will provide waves of men coming into Buner,” the senior law enforcement official said.

What is filling those training camps with waves of fresh recruits, while subjecting more innocent people to the hopeless oppression of fundamentalist Taliban guerillas?  Could it be that they don’t see change they can believe in?  Though President Obama is making a brilliant attempt to lead the world out of the financial crisis that has engulfed us, he cannot return the US to being a world-leader until those responsible are prosecuted and punished.  Today he said « he could support a congressional investigation into the Bush-era terrorist detainee program, but only under certain conditions, such as if it were done on a bipartisan basis. »

I submit that the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, is not worth the candle. This dithering over some mythical bipartisanship must stop if Mr Obama wants to lead the nation out of the torture-quagmire.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/26/john-yoo-david-addington_n_109479.html

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/senate-leaders-opposes-interrogation-inquiry-panel/?hp

http://www.truthout.org/042109R

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/world/middleeast/25iraq.html?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/world/asia/23buner.html

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]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/torture-torture-everywhere/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/wiretaps-and-waterboarding-the-ol%e2%80%99-bait-and-switch/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/wiretaps-and-waterboarding-the-ol%e2%80%99-bait-and-switch/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:50:47 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2199 « What I have said is that my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, and that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process, as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. »       —President Obama, Feb 2009, First White House Press Conference

I don’t want to see Americans spied on, profiled, listed, sorted into McCarthy Era file numbers, nor do I want executive surveillance powers to increase.  But I’ll be damned if I’ll settle for prosecution of the NSA “exceeding its authority” in exchange for letting Bush Administration torturers off the hook.

« …the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that ‘The Obama administration is leaning toward keeping secret some graphic details of tactics allowed in Central Intelligence Agency interrogations, despite a push by some top officials to make the information public.’ »

By holding back facts that could lead to legitimate prosecutions for war crimes or human rights abuses, the United States will cede much of its credibility as a civilized power, as in addition to having the largest military force on the planet, it acts with other nations on matters of international justice and policy.  If it does not prosecute those who have unscrupulously undermined its own laws, both domestic and in cooperation with world treaty partners, it is entirely possible that others will.  Worse, by harboring those criminally responsible for violating human rights as well as the Geneva Conventions, who flouted the Constitution and deceived the nation into a war for profit, the Obama Administration is severely maiming what has been a brilliant initial effort to repair the reputation of the U.S. as a trustworthy and capable global leader.

“Saying that it is a ‘time for reflection, not retribution,’ Mr Obama reiterated his opposition to a extensive investigation of controversial counterterrorism programs. The interrogation methods were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and today’s release will be the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the interrogation program that some senior Obama administration officials have said used illegal torture.

“The documents are expected to include Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 authorizing the C.I.A. to employ a number of aggressive techniques- including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and ‘waterboarding’ the near-drowning technique.”

How can these things be ignored?  And are we to believe it goes no further than these documents?  Meanwhile on the Hill, the “Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that the panel would investigate reports that the National Security Agency improperly tapped into the domestic communications of American citizens.

“The Justice Department confirmed Wednesday that it had reined in the NSA’s wiretapping activities in the United States after learning that the agency had improperly accessed American phone calls and e-mails while eavesdropping on foreign communications.

“Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, said the committee will hold a hearing within a month to look at the NSA’s surveillance activities. ‘We will make sure we get the facts,’ she said.”

Yes, make sure you do.  But we want ALL the facts, Ms Feinstein.  Choosing not to release information that is proven to exist – otherwise known as evidence – is not an option for a new and changed America.  As difficult as it may be to accept, “reflecting” on the fact that people (some of whom may be innocent of any terrorist connections) have been systematically tortured, is not an acceptable response.  Retribution is urgently needed if we are to be able to demand guarantees of women’s rights in Afghanistan.  Who will feel the need to honor their agreements, after accepting billions of dollars to train “good” Taliban?  Must we have more of the same clandestine CIA interference in Afghanistan, like the kind that trained Osama bin Laden in the first place?  The kind that always leaves dirty hands?

Mr Obama, did you say change, or didn’t you?

________________________________________________________________

http://www.cfr.org/publication/18510/president_obamas_first_white_house_press_conference_february_2009.htmlhttp://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/secret-interrogation-memos-to-be-released/?hp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/will-obama-block-release_b_187245.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/16/senate-panel-to-investiga_n_187796.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/17nsa.html?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/13/september11.usa19

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“Mr. Mugabe’s generals and politicians have organized campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in power. But now that the opposition has a place in the nation’s new government, these strongmen worry that they are suddenly vulnerable to prosecution, especially for crimes committed during last year’s election campaign as the world watched.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/world/africa/10zimbabwe.html?hp

Meanwhile, back in the bizarro-America wept over by Glen Beck:

“…the Obama DOJ filed the government’s first response to EFF’s lawsuit, the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush’s NSA program.  But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the « state secrets » privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new « sovereign immunity » claim of breathtaking scope — never before advanced even by the Bush administration — that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is « willful disclosure » of the illegally intercepted communications.”

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/8/717729/-Olbermann-Smacks-Down-Obamas-Loss-of-Credibility

Which was the subject of Keith Olbermann’s stern reality check to the President and Justice Department officials on his show Countdown last Monday.  This was considered newsworthy because Olbermann has, to this point, never significantly criticized the President for anything, and staunchly defended his financial and foreign policies over the last 10 weeks of the new administration.  Some liberals are (ludicrously) angry that KO hasn’t given the President immunity.

But nothing says “failed Third World dictatorship” like immunity for top-level criminals.  With Dick Cheney wearing his war crimes like a badge of honor, defending Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo, the systematized torture policy of Donald Rumsfeld, the admission of known fraudulent evidence to gain support for the war in Iraq as well as war profiteers like his ‘no-bid contract’ multibillion dollar scamming corporation Halliburton, and the rest of what now may never be known, the Obama administration must restore the Justice Department to the level where it can begin again to administer the rule of law and prosecute the guilty.

“Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants, part of an inner circle called the Joint Operations Command, know that their 85-year-old leader may not be around much longer to shield them, and they fear losing not just their power and ill-gotten wealth, but also their freedom, officials in the party said.”

We know about our ‘inner circles’ now.  Olbermann said the President asserted he will keep his promise to withdraw from Iraq, “But given what was done today here, in his name, defending invasion of privacy and domestic spying, he will have to forgive us if we invest less in his assurances and listen less closely to his words and instead attend more closely to the possible sound of other shoes dropping.”

Yes, indeed.  What is it, Mr Obama?  Are you saying the truth is worse than anyone can even imagine, and prosecutions would endanger people you’d ‘agreed’ to ‘protect’?  That’s what Mugabe is saying.  Are you saying you have a reason to fear for your security from those « strongmen » who « worry that they are suddenly vulnerable to prosecution »?  I hope I’m hearing you wrong.

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And what can be said about Israel’s indictment by both the Red Cross and Amnesty International, and their demand to the United Nations that Israel be held to account for the following war crimes:

• Using powerful shells in civilian areas which the army knew would cause large numbers of innocent casualties;
• Using banned weapons such as phosphorus bombs;
• Holding Palestinian families as human shields;
• Attacking medical facilities, including the killing of 12 ambulance men in marked vehicles;
• Killing large numbers of police who had no military role.

“Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty investigator in Israel, has also collected evidence that the Israeli army holds Palestinian families prisoner in their own homes as human shields. ‘It’s standard practice for Israeli soldiers to go into a house, lock up the family in a room on the ground floor and use the rest of the house as a military base, as a sniper’s position. That is the absolute textbook case of human shields.  ‘It has been practised by the Israeli army for many years and they are doing it again in Gaza now,’ she said.”

But here is the really extraordinary thing:  with all the talk of bailouts, bailing out Israel is not a priority in Washington.  The right-wing has taken over the Israeli government, breathing fire and threatening a second rampage in Gaza, but President Obama (and even Bush, last January when every paper reported a plot for an imminent operation) pledged them no support for pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons facilities, a pet campaign promise of this election’s victors.

Israel now finds itself being devoured from within, by factions trying to outdo eachother in hard-line politics, sometimes outright brutality, who are opposed by moderate and even peace-seeking factions who believe in a two-state solution and an end to settler expansion and the occupation of Palestinian lands.

Meanwhile, we are hearing everywhere that radical rabbis are inciting soldiers to nothing less than a jihad on Palestinians, civilian or Hamas.
“Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land.”

“The investigation was ordered by the military’s advocate general Avichai Mandleblit on Thursday after the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz published extracts from the transcript describing incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed and property wantonly damaged.  In the fuller version of the transcript published yesterday, the soldier, a unit commander from the Givati brigade, says: « This was the main message and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. »

While the West worries about dollars turning into yuan, Israel is deciding it’s fate, on the edge of a cliff.  Will they turn back, without the U.S. military behind them?  Policy or no policy, the truth is there’s very little U.S. military to spare these days.  They’re off to fight the greatly strengthened Taliban/Pakistani forces, as soon as President Obama’s special team has properly assessed the situation (bye bye, Swat Valley, it was nice ta know ya.)

________________________________________

Re:  Oliphant cartoon.  « Will someone please explain this cartoon to me? It looks to be a headless jackbooted muscle-man with a sword pushing a Star of David-shaped shark unicycle? Or am I missing something? »

– Jeffrey Goldberg, http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/03/the_brave_pat_oliphant_and_his.php

« You are missing the third thing in the cartoon:  Gaza – represented by an old woman with a child on her back – is given the choice of jumping/falling off a cliff, or being eaten by that shark unicycle.  That is the point, how could you miss it?
It is clearly anti- ISRAELI POLITICS, and not anti-Semitic; it’s saying that Israel is now a country without a proper head, just a nationalist war-machine, primitive but effective – the sword of war held by an unthinking Goliath against a tiny enemy with death as its only choice.
So now I’ve explained it to you – are you going to retract your embarassing bemusement? »

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLF572446

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/13/gaza-israel-war-crimes

http://www.slate.com/id/2214440/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelis-told-to-fight-holy-war-in-gaza-1650616.html

With Mr Obama promising to ‘cure cancer in our lifetimes’, the limits of my ability to ‘believe’ are indeed strained.

With the many current crises pressing in like starving lions on a Christian, President Obama has promised to make the United States a global leader again, in every field:  education, science, climate change prevention, as well as creating a health care system for ‘every American’.

Somehow, we are being asked to ‘believe’ that all this is not only possible but imminent, in the face of all that economists are telling us about the world economy and its failures to stabilize, due to the sheer scale of corruption that has overtaken it.  Asked to believe that after 8 years of war in Iraq, the time is now to cut losses there and concentrate on Afghanistan (and recently, Pakistan), while simultaneously acknowledging that withdrawal from Iraq may not be possible for several years – does this mean anything beyond changing the personnel of companies who will receive fat defense contracts in the future?  It seems paranoid to imagine it all really does come down to money, but in the absence of real benefit to staying in Iraq for any other purpose than overseeing the rebuilding of the destroyed state, it seems reasonable to see Mr Obama as ‘trapped’ there for some time (and who knows how long that will be?)

But believe it we must; for we understand the alternative is to leave ‘business as usual’ to people who have proven themselves so unscrupulous as to beggar belief, while literally beggaring the entire world with policies of unmitigated greed.  The GOP has been running a pathetic campaign of fear and racism, not so subtly attempting to provoke factions into violent confrontation.  The billions of dollars that have gone awol – from the contracts for the Iraq war to the initial Wall Street bank bailouts – have gone to rich conservatives of ‘beliefs’ that would even subvert the Constitution in order to protect their wealth and privilege (ironically championed by pseudo-workin’ man Rush Limbaugh and the Lady Macbeth of hockey moms, Sarah Palin).  President Obama seems to have chosen to see these ‘folks’ as beneath his contempt, but in fact he has allowed billions to return to the criminals who stole them in the first place.

In the last 8 years, religious ideologies have been allowed to become too powerful, the latest case in point:  the newly proposed ‘anti-blasphemy’ law at the United Nations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_YpdanJ3aI

Yes, my old friend Christopher Hitchens, doing what he now does best.  But these are such things as dreams are destroyed by.  While Mr Obama asks us to believe in a new America, we must also realize that there are real situations that have already been put into motion, forces which are irrationally, cruelly and powerfully against the ‘vision’ offered by the Obama administration.
I want to believe, I want to say, yes, we can!  But when I saw Bobby Jindal’s absurd/pathetic post-Obama speech, and the evil Newt Gingrich on the cover of the Sunday NYTimes Magazine, I know the GOP is as deluded as it has ever been.  There is much too much ‘belief’ out there.

As much as a hero seems necessary – and to some, even destined to arise – people of reason must not hope in a savior.  The only thing that will bring our civilization back from the brink of destruction is the steadfast preservation of human rights, which includes ending war-for-profit, starvation, disease, homelessness, and climate change disaster, and assures rights for women – which will be more universally welcome and beneficial than even a cure for cancer.  The U.N. imposing blasphemy laws spells the beginning of the end of freedom of speech, education and the Press.  President Obama must deliver more than hope in his future plans; he must actively oppose those who seek to sabotage his vision of delivering humane and peaceful policies, starting with those who act solely in the ‘interests’ of the Republican party.  Otherwise, Obama’s hope may prove to be either sadly naive, or too late in coming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/politics/24obama-text.html?pagewanted=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/02/generals-seek-to-reverse_n_163070.html

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=9b8e3a6d-795d-440f-a5de-6ff6e78c78d5

http://jonathanturley.org/2008/11/18/the-international-blasphemy-law-un-general-assembly-president-and-nicaraguan-priest-descoto-calls-for-world-ban-on-defaming-religion/

]]> http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/from-the-ashes-of-a-burned-bush-a-phoenix/feed/ 0 http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/disingenuous-liaisons-christopher-hitchens-the-iraq-war/ http://www.lepanoptique.com/formats/blogues/disingenuous-liaisons-christopher-hitchens-the-iraq-war/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:55:02 +0000 Niki Lambros http://www.lepanoptique.com/?p=2207

In a video interview which took place on February 7, 2009, on France 24 English, Christopher Hitchens made the following, astonishing, statement when explaining how he came to support Bush’s Iraq war:

“If you look at the drapeau, the flag in my lapel, which is that of the Iraqi Kurds, almost all of my Iraqi Kurdish friends are old leftists, old strugglers against facism.  The Iraqi left, non-Kurdish, Arab Iraqi left, likewise, long struggle against Saddam Hussein.  My solidarity with la gauche in Iraq is the main reason I took the position that I did.  After all, it was Clinton and Gore who said, ‘we will have to take out Saddam Hussein’.  It was the British Labour party that first said, ‘there will have to be a confrontation with him’, under Tony Blair, in 1999, long before Bush was elected.”

That’s as may be, and one wonders how many Iraqi Kurdish friends make up “almost all”.  (And since when does he take his lead from Clinton, Gore and Blair?!)  But what is anyone to make of that famous photo of Donald Rumsfeld, in Bagdhad, 1983, shaking hands amiably after a 90-minute meeting?  By ’99, it was agreed in the West that someone had to ‘take him out’, after creating him a decade and a half earlier.  But who was it that had him as their man, but Rumsfeld and his cohorts of an earlier age, who arrived 20 years later for the Bush administration to mastermind the Iraq war from bin Laden’s aircraft attacks.  How can Hitchens be so tone-deaf to the chessplaying mentality of the neo-cons, a man for whom language is heard in terms of its ‘subtle registers’?  He commits a fault of which he accuses only his basest opponents, sins of omission.  Rather than seeing that he, as an ideologue, is historically prone to ignoring the underlying causes of any wars – namely money and power over resources – he has subjugated the fact that the neo-cons had plans to invade Iraq for oil and used 9/11 as their excuse, to his belief in a world-saving revolution of ‘democritization’ in “terrorist-breeding” countries.

The fact that he has written a book on Thomas Paine would prepare one to think he knew better.  There was revolution in the United States, revolution in France, but his cast-off nation, Britain, had no such freedom from monarchy.  One can at times think the bitterness left over from this and his thwarted Trotskyist hopes have cause him to view the US and their CIA-led military industrial complex – not to mention the Cheney-led Halliburton, as well as Blackwater and Lockheed – with rose-coloured glasses.  Not to mention that by the end of the interview he sees fit to claim America for a wayward colony once again, as though all that’s best in America is actually English, and then pronounces on the Pope’s « mistake » in “preferring unity” with some deposed bishop of a pre-Vatican II sect, against the sanctity of his state-relations with the Jews, who pretend to feel threatened by this ineffectual codger’s disbelief in gas-chambers.  They created this “crisis”, and now Hitchens must run a news-cycle, sullying his reputation as a champion of scoffing atheists, in defending the Jewish position – why?  because, he has suddenly taken his remote “Jewish” heritage for an identity?  He is too little to too many.  After withholding his condemnation of Mugabe until he could rationalize deposing him as having become the head of a “rogue state”, by focusing on the argument that ignoring cholera in Zimbabwe may be “germ warfare” against surrounding countries, I thought he couldn’t get more off track.  I was wrong.

We don’t want selective amnesia in people whose pages we expect to be a forum for the cutting edge of truth and reason.  If Hitchens must justify his support for Iraq, many years later and many hundreds of thousands of deaths later, by claiming that the fall of Saddam Hussein and his support for ‘la gauche’ was the deciding factor, I can only believe that he has fallen victim to the plague that infects all those who begin with ideologies and end with the tragedy of misplaced trust, and must view his opinions from now on with a suitably jaundiced eye.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bu1pUk5tyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er4pOfoFceg&feature=related

http://www.slate.com/id/2210830/

Yesterday, hidden in the Saturday NY Times, we read of a new and even more brutal attack – the Lord’s Resistance Army had made its way into Congo, ‘hiding out’ in a national park.

“The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on [the] notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians…But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.”

“The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. …[Senior US Military Officials] described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.”

“The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads….American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.  ‘We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. ‘In the end, it was not our operation.’”

IS ANYONE SERIOUSLY TRYING TO DEFEND THESE PEOPLE?  The buck-passing is so shameless, the efforts so lame and useless, I cannot believe the object of any US or UN troops in Africa is to defend the people themselves.  So what is their purpose?

“The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony [the rebel leader] out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.”
Refused to sign, did he?  Well, you can’t force the man after all, he did ‘insist’ the charges be dropped, and they had ‘tried coaxing’ him.

This looks to me like a situation I have seen more than once over the last ten years.  I have seen it in Israel, I have seen it in Tora Bora, I have seen it on the Pakistan border, and other places where it is in somebody’s interest to have people being massacred without consequences, the ‘small wars’ of the type conspiracy theorists everywhere consider business as usual for the CIA.  What is really going on here?  Is it as simple as it looks, that this is being ‘allowed’ to happen?

“Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.”

We have read this story too many times before, as in the weeks after Sept 2001 for one example.  But not in today’s papers: except for this one article in the NYTimes (which I almost couldn’t find again today, buried in the archives already as it was), I saw no reporting on this incident in any of the major international news sources.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world/africa/11congo.html?ref=africa

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=africa

“A visibly furious Ban Ki-moon condemned as ‘outrageous, shocking and alarming’ the destruction he had seen while touring Gaza, and described as ‘excessive use’ of force the violence wrought by both Israel and Hamas rockets. »  Wait, you’re serious?  He saw excessive, outrageous, shocking and alarming destruction that was « wrought by…Hamas rockets »?
‘These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today, » he said, standing against a backdrop of still-smoking food aid in a UN warehouse destroyed by Israeli gunfire last Thursday.
‘Demanding a proper judicial inquiry and guarantees that UN buildings would not be attacked again, Ban said: ‘I am just appalled. I am not able to describe how I am feeling, having seen this site of the bombing of the United Nations compound. This was an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations.’”

I see.  So he’s worried about the UN buildings, and attacks against the UN.  You could be excused for thinking the UN is the real victim in Gaza.

“An aide to Ban said he had come to Gaza to express solidarity with the Palestinians who had suffered during the 22-day Israeli assault.”  Solidarity?

“Financial estimates of the full cost of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza reflect the scale of the destruction: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics put total property damage at $1.9bn.”

“More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed” – including 400 children – “in Israel’s attacks, which Israel said were intended to halt cross-border rocket attacks and destroy Hamas’s military infrastructure….Israel put its dead at 10 soldiers and said three civilians were killed in rocket attacks.”

« It has been especially troubling and heartbreaking for me as secretary-general that I couldn’t end this faster, » [Ban] said.

“Ban is not expected to meet Hamas officials during this visit….Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 which were internationally recognised as being both fair and free.”

“Medical officials have confirmed that 700 Palestinian civilians were killed, and that figure is likely to rise as survivors return to search through the rubble of their shattered homes. As many as 400,000 Gazans have been left without running water.”

What will be done to prevent Israel from murdering more Palestinians, committing more war crimes?  Will Mr Ban do something further than express his ‘outrage’? Meanwhile, yesterday German Chancellor Andrea Merkel has demanded that the Pope insist one of his bishops publicly assert that he believes Jews were killed in gas-chambers, as though the idiotic statements of some obscure old cleric were a threat to the world which must be decisively dealt with.  “In what amounted to a blistering condemnation of the Pope’s handling of the crisis, she added: ‘In my view, these issues have not yet been satisfactorily clarified.’ »

They called it a “crisis”.  No wonder nothing is being done about Gaza.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/20/gaza-israel-ban-ki-moon

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ban-kimoon-lsquoappalledrsquo-by-gaza-destruction-1451889.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/200912013138315261.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/merkel-attacks-pope-for-holocaustdeniers-pardon-1545008.html

In June, federal police Inspector Igor Labastida was gunned down with his bodyguard.  By August, it was reported that over 500 police officers had been killed, “including dozens of commanders and soldiers”, with local police being hit the hardest.  By December, the NY Times reported “over 5000 dead” in 2008, in cartel related violence, “Hit men pursuing rivals into intensive care units and emergency rooms. Shootouts in lobbies and corridors.”

What kind of money are we talking about here, that can take over the infrastructure of an entire country’s law enforcement, leaving those left on the force to cooperate or be murdered?  “The U.S. government estimates that the cartels smuggle $15 billion to $20 billion in drug money across the border each year”, and if that is the official number, it’s probably safe to assume it’s the low-end figure.  How many billions are produced each year by the narcotics trade through Mexico is probably incalculable, seemingly limitless.

To describe the misery, the fear, the terror, these cartels inflict on a daily basis, as oppressive as the Taliban in their own country, is beyond my ability.  What I want to know is how, if the U.S. DEA is giving Mexico hundreds of millions of dollars (Operation Clean House), and making U.S. troops available to them – not thousands of miles away in Iraq, but on their very borders – how violence continues to escalate exponentially with more police and civilian deaths being racked up almost daily. « We’ve been working with the Mexican government for decades at the DEA, » said Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. « Obviously, we ensure that the individuals we work with are vetted. »

Obviously. But the fact remains that “loss of the drug business would shrink Mexico’s economy by 63 percent.”  As in Afghanistan, narcotics fuel the Taliban’s ability to buy weapons and intimidate police and civilians, all the time collecting billions in U.S. counter-narcotics aid, as does Columbia, another narco-economy close to the financial interests of the United States.

The War on Drugs and the War on Terror:  so many years, so many lives, so many billions of dollars later, why are things only getting worse?  I can only conclude that somewhere, on the top levels of North and South American government, it is considered expedient and necessary to allow the narcotics trade to continue, or enough people are being paid off that it is impossible to contain – or both. When you follow the money involved – and consider the considerable cruelty required to allow the horror caused by unchecked drug-violence to continue – there can be no other plausible reasons.
_________________________________________________________________________

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/08/AR2008050803242.html

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/05/27/mexico.police/index.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25401865/

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/international/Aug-08/Wave-of-Police-Officers-Killed-in-Mexico-s-Ongoing-Drug-War.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/americas/05mexico.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/01/24/ap5960566.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN2519110920080626

It beggars the imagination, but it’s true:  white phosphorus, used not only against Gazan civilians – excuse me, ‘Hamas’ – but also against the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. « We do not want such incidents to take place” said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “and I am sorry for it but I don’t know if you know, but Hamas fired from the UNRWA site. This is a sad incident and I apologise for it. »   (A “sad incident”.  Like Bush calling the Iraq War a “disappointment”.)  Over 1100 Palestinians have been killed in this “operation”, as Israel calls it, but their deaths will never quiet Gaza, even if every actual member of Hamas had been killed.

In a recent video message directed at anyone who will listen, Osama bin Laden has urged the targeting of “Zionists anywhere in the world” and called for renewed jihad against Israel.  When civilians – Jews living in France or Rome – are confounded with Israeli militants and targeted for violence, will Israel understand why you can’t go around murdering people because you have decided to call them ‘Hamas’?

The U.S. response to this new video was to dismiss it and bin Laden as “irrelevant”, but what is obvious to anyone is that western attempts to broker ‘peace’ in the area are not only irrelevant but impossible.  As long as Israel exists, in its present, barbaric form, its victims will seek retribution for their enforced suffering and the violent deaths of so many non-combatants.

Witness the reaction to an article in today’s Guardian, titled, “It is not Israel’s action, but the vitriolic reaction to it that has been disproportionate. There’s only one explanation: antisemitism”.  It is only 10:30am, and yet there are 1000 comments, almost unanimously rejecting the notion that anti-semitism is the cause of the world’s reaction.  It is Israel, not Jewishness, that is the problem, and people are speaking out because they feel the jihadi reaction to those white-hot phosphorus fires threatening their own countries – their civilians – like never before.

But the U.S. has perpetrated its own war crimes.  And Mr Obama had better recant his childlike notions about ‘moving forward’ and proceed with the very serious business of prosecuting those who have taken away America’s power to speak out against torture, against illegal military actions, against reckless civilian deaths, mass incarcerations and the rest. As hospitals, women and children sheltering in schools, are being bombed, we are now informed that it is “up to Egypt” to arrange a cease-fire in the region.

“’There will be discussions tomorrow morning, and it looks like a cabinet meeting will take place tomorrow night. Everyone is very upbeat,’ Olmert said.  Meanwhile, Israeli tank fire killed two boys at a United Nations-run school on Saturday in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya.”

Upbeat?  Olmert and Bush appear to hear the same different – delusional –  drummer.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5521925.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/16/elizabeth-wurtzel-antisemitism-israel-gaza

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/world/middleeast/17mideast.html?hp