Haiti’s poor remembered the anniversary of the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994 in small solemn ceremonies at his grave site in Port au Prince and the small town of Jean Rabel in northwest Haiti where he founded a peasant rights organization Tet Kole Ti Peyizan. They remembered him for challenging Haiti’s wealthy elite by starting literacy projects and planning an alternative bank dedicated to the poor. They remembered his courage and the beatings he took at the hands of dictators for his incessant call that Haiti’s dispossessed had every right to take control of the destiny of the nation. While members of Haiti’s moneyed class looked down upon the poor illiterate souls they ruled through corruption and violence, Vincent made it clear that the poor were not victims and they harbored a strength and wisdom that the rich would never allow themselves to understand. Vincent once said, “While the rich are concerned with going to heaven the poor are concerned with feeding themselves. We must tend to the needs of the poor to feed themselves before we can talk about the spiritual salvation of those who can already eat.”

In the other Haiti, the anniversary of Vincent’s assassination was overshadowed by all the hoopla of rehabilitating Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory in the form of bringing Haiti back into the camp of the neoliberal-sweatshop development model. The media-hype of a “new Haiti” being born from the promise of new sweatshops and a recent attempt to raise the minimum wage to a paltry $3.73 per day from a scandalous $1.75 per day, once again served to hide the simmering reality of the poor lurking beneath the surface in this island nation of 9 million inhabitants.

Father Jean-Marie Vincent fought against what has now become the reality of the US/UN sweatshop development model being imposed upon Haiti today. This solution to Haiti’s economic woes rewards the predatory and monopolistic wealthy elite at the expense of the masses of the poor in Haiti and has long been referred to as the “Plan Lanmò” or the Death Plan. Father Jean-Marie Vincent opposed this development model when Ronald Reagan first foisted it upon the Haitian masses in the 80s when it was called the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) and he would have certainly been vocal in opposing its recycling today. Pretending that 70% of Haiti’s population are not still considered peasants who live in the countryside and that attracting them to low paid jobs in the capital would not exacerbate the already meager human resources in Port au Prince was a major factor of his opposition to the sweatshop development model.

Fifteen years ago, Father Jean-Marie Vincent was felled in a hail of bullets in front of his rectory at Montfortain in the Port au Prince neighborhood of Christ-Roi. Witnesses described two vehicles carrying members of Haiti’s dreaded Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army who opened fire on his vehicle. He was reportedly still alive as the Haitian army purposely led the ambulance slowly to the hospital allowing him to bleed to death before he could reach doctors. His death was slow and torturous only fitting to the profile of the accused such as Capt. Jackson Joanis, Lt. Youri Latortue, and Sgt. Jodel Chamblain all leading members of the Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army at the time of his assassination in 1994.

Joanis and Chamblain were judged guilty in absentia in 1995 for the assassination of Antoine Izmery, an Aristide supporter and businessman condemned by his own class as a traitor. Izmery and Vincent were counted among the victims of the Cedras regime that the US State Department once described as “one of the world’s worst human rights violators.” Joanis and Chamblain were ultimately released under the Latortue regime installed by the Bush administration in 2004 after a sham trial that Amnesty International called an “insult to justice.” They were also absolved in the murder of Father Jean-Marie Vincent.

Youri Latortue, a blood relative and security chief for the US-installed Prime Minister Gerard Latortue in 2004, is now the powerful head of the Haitian parliament’s Justice and Security Commission. He was also accused of complicity in Vincent’s assassination. According to a report released by a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in 2004, “A former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerriere…claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izmery. From 1991 to 1993, Latortue was an officer in FADH’s [Haitian army] Anti-Gang Unit, the army’s most notorious unit for human rights violations.”

The administration of former president Bill Clinton, who current serves as UN Special Envoy to Haiti while former First Lady Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State for the Obama administration, instructed the CIA and the State Department to conduct an independent investigation into the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent and supporters of president Aristide in 1994. Leon Panetta, who currently heads the CIA was Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the time the investigation was commissioned by the Office of the President. Their spokesman at the time, Roger Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs referred to their conclusions in a press conference on Sept. 13, 1994 when he stated unequivocally, “The gunman who killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent, an Aristide ally, on August 28 was connected to the [Cedras] regime.” Yet none of the details of the investigation have ever been made public to this day.

In the end, what is clear is that UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA chief Leon Panetta now hold the power under the Obama administration to provide the truth behind the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They are now in a position to demand that the files of the CIA and the State Department be re-opened. Unfortunately, whether they have the political will to do so may be like much everything else going on in Haiti today. Justice is inconvenient in their “new Haiti” if it gets in the way of “the country moving forward.” Unfortunately for them, history has proven that it is a foundation of sand to build a new future based on lies and impunity in a country like Haiti whose people have shown time and time again they have a long memory.

While providing the truth about Vincent’s assassination may be inconvenient for those who believe they currently hold the destiny of Haiti in their hands, they should understand more than others that the poor will never forget the legacy of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They will always remember his selfless example of courage and expressions of love for them because he lived, worked and died in their Haiti.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr. Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

The campaign against Dr. Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities could be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.

Until 1999, when Israel’s Supreme Court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.

During that period Dr. Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.

Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.

Last week, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.

The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.

According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.

Ishai Menuchin, the head of the Public Committee, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, Ticking Bombs, in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.

The Public Committee highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent”.

In June last year, Physicians for Human Rights drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.

Anat Litvin of Physicians for Human Rights told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net — take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”

The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.

In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.

Prof. Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.

“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr. Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.

“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”

This month, Defense for Children International issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”

The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated.”

Campaigners against Dr. Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.

Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr. Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”

Dr. Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous”, saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.

The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during the Second World War.

In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.

By covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident, the rewritten public version of report succeeded in avoiding media stories on the contradiction between the report and the previous arguments made by the U.S. command.

The declassified “executive summary” of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the “Taliban” — the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces — for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes.

The report reasserted the previous claim by the U.S. command that only about 26 civilians had been killed in the U.S. bombing on that day, despite well-documented reports by the government and by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission that between 97 and 147 people were killed.

The report gave no explanation for continuing to assert such a figure, and virtually admitted that it is not a serious claim by also suggesting that the actual number of civilian deaths in the incident “may never be known”.

The report also claimed that “at least 78 Taliban fighters” were killed. The independent human rights organization had said in its May 26 report that at most 25 to 30 insurgents had been killed, though not necessarily in the airstrike.

A closer reading of the paragraph in the report on Taliban casualties reveals, however, that the number does not actually refer to deaths from the airstrike at all. The paragraph refers twice to “the engagement” as well as to “the fighting” and “the firefight”, indicating that the vast majority of the Taliban who died were all killed in ground fighting, not by the U.S. airstrike.

An analysis of the report’s detailed descriptions of the three separate airstrikes also shows that the details in question could not have been omitted except by a deliberate decision to cover up the most damaging facts about the incident.

The “executive summary” states that the decision to call in all three airstrikes in Balabolook district on May 4 was based on two pieces of “intelligence” available to the ground commander, an unidentified commander of a special operations forces unit from the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC).

One piece of intelligence is said to have been an intercepted statement by a Taliban commander to his fighters to “mass to maneuver and re-attack” the Afghan and U.S. forces on the scene. The other was visual sighting of the movement of groups of adults moving at intervals in the dark away from the scene of the firefight with U.S. forces.

A number of insurgents were said by the report to have been killed in a mosque that was targeted in the first of the three strikes. The “absence of local efforts to attempt to recover bodies from the rubble in a timely manner”, the following morning, according to the report, indicates that the bodies were all insurgent fighters, not civilians.

But the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the “second B1-B strike” and the “third B-1B strike” caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes.

It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a “second large group” — again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian — indicated that they were “enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces” and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved.

The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well.

In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the “destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties”. Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike — thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians.

The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was “another Taliban element.” A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby.

Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any “Taliban” killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike.

By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes that killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning — that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximized.

As recently as Jun. 3, the spokesperson for the U.S. command in Afghanistan, Lt. Commander Christine Sidenstricker, was still telling the website Danger Room that “civilians were killed because the Taliban deliberately caused it to happen” and that the “Taliban” had “forced civilians to remain in places they were attacking from.”

The central contradiction between the report and the U.S. military’s “human shields” argument was allowed to pass unnoticed in the extremely low-key news media coverage of the report.

News coverage of the report has focused either on the official estimate of only 26 civilian deaths and the much larger number of Taliban casualties or on the absence of blame on the part of U.S. military personnel found by the investigators.

The Associated Press reported that the United States had “accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing.”

The New York Times led with the fact that the investigation had called for “additional training” of U.S. air crews and ground forces but did hold any personnel “culpable” for failing to follow the existing rules of engagement.

None of the news media reporting on the highly expurgated version of the investigation pointed out that it had confirmed, in effect, the version of the event that had been put forward by residents of the bombed villages.

As reported by The New York Times on May 6, one of the residents interviewed by phone said six houses had been completely destroyed and that the victims of the bombing “were rushing to go to their relative’s houses where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way.”

As if that weren’t enough, I’m reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

The first strike killed several suspected Taliban. Later, a second drone fired three missiles into a crowd of funeral mourners.

One of the wounded commented: “If the Taliban are bombing the mosques and America is bombing the funerals, what is the difference between them? We are stuck between Taliban and US attacks and when we are killed, not only no one cries for us, but also we are dubbed militants.”

Since August 2008, over 40 US drone strikes have killed at least 410 people. US troops in neighboring Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region.

The use of armed drones is a particularly cowardly form of warfare. These lethal “assets” are computer-controlled from the comfort and safety of an armchair a hundred miles away and guided by dodgy “intelligence”. Or, if the truth be known, no intelligence at all. The Israelis use them extensively in Gaza to unleash death and destruction on civilian targets by remote control. Engines for Israeli drones are believed to be supplied by a British manufacturer, although the government here pretends not to know the truth of the matter.

This trend in ’sofa slaughter’ has many variations. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up huge cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. Eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the robotic guns and some by snipers.

The US and its allies are just as callous in their treatment of civilian prisoners. The British authorities deal with their casual killings by offering £4,500 in compensation, showing how cheaply we value the life of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. And when it comes to prisoner abuse the Israelis, whose every cruel excess the West defends, don’t even spare children, according to various reports.

Something very chilling can take hold of uniformed thugs — I won’t call them soldiers because what many of them do is not proper soldiering — in a war zone; and in the days before high-tech weaponry like drones and robotic machine guns they happily indulged their blood-lust by murdering civilians at close quarters. If you haven’t heard of the My Lai massacre, brace yourself.

In 1968, 150 men of Charlie Company, a US infantry unit, were sent on a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later more than 500 civilians — unarmed women, children and old men — were dead. Charlie Company hadn’t encountered a single Viet Cong. Nevertheless the unit, led by Lt. William Calley, rounded up villagers and machine-gunned them until the dead lay five-deep.

When Calley spotted a baby crawling away, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire again.

Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, flying over the area, was so sickened by what he saw that he landed his machine to shield villagers from the troops and began rescuing survivors. He ordered his gunner to open up on any American soldiers who continued to shoot civilians.

Some of the dead were mutilated by having “C Company” carved into their chests; some were disemboweled.

Official reports said the My Lai operation was a stunning combat victory, and General Westmoreland congratulated the men on their bravery.

The American people didn’t learn the truth until 18 months later . . . and then only because a Vietnam veteran, after hearing about the incident from friends who had served in Charlie Company, wrote a letter to his congressman and other prominent officials, including President Nixon.

An army photographer produced pictures of the carnage. Then freelance reporter Seymour Hersh managed to interview Calley and splashed the story over the front pages of American newspapers.

26 members of C Company were charged with criminal behavior but not convicted. Calley himself was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving just three days he was moved to a comfortable apartment under house arrest, on Nixon’s orders. He was paroled three years later.

Hersh said that many in Charlie Company “had given in to an easy pattern of violence” and were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

My Lai was one of many atrocities committed in Korea and Vietnam. Military training in those days set out to dehumanize not only the enemy but the local civilian population as well. Army culture encouraged its so-called soldiers to think they could treat them like garbage.

Has anything changed? The conduct of the Americans and their close buddies the Israelis is remarkably similar. They are the pacesetters (though not the only practitioners) in savagery and the casual art of killing Johnny Foreigner. It is now done at arm’s length — by remote video control or at the end of a sniper’s scope-sight or by DU tank shell, or from 35,000 feet. No need to personally check the situation on the ground, or look your unarmed victim in the eye, or get your hands dirty. No need to count the bodies afterwards or clear up the shredded and vaporized remains.

Apparently these high-tech killers, their commanders and their political masters have convinced themselves that everyone they don’t like is sub-human.

I’m reminded of a blistering attack by a church minister in Oklahoma after the shock-and-awe onslaught on Iraq, the point at which he discovered that his faith had been hijacked by fundamentalists who claimed to speak for Jesus but whose actions were anything but Christian.

“When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral,” he said.

”When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head, you are doing something immoral.

”When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

”When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral.

“We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

We continued this way for I don’t know how many meters, and soon I couldn’t hear anyone behind me, only a murmur that might have been distant voices ahead. Each point of light held the promise of hot sun and desert air, but each time I arrived to find only more tunnel, and a hand imploring me to follow deeper.

Soon my legs were burning with wanting to stand. It became so dark in the long lapses between electric lights that my guide had to take my hand as we felt our way along. So many times I said “Khalas” — I have seen enough. But at each light he would signal that it was just a little further.

Finally, I was finished. I could not remember why I had followed, and why I had continued to follow. I’d lost track of how many lights we’d passed, and had no idea how far the journey back would be. My guide pointed to a light maybe 8 meters ahead, and this light was different. Brighter, and more yellow. I knew this time we’d almost reached our destination, perhaps the end of the tunnel and the relative freedom of Egyptian sun and sand, but I couldn’t continue. “Khalas,” I said, and this time he knew I meant it. I turned and began to feel my way back.

Soon I was tearing through the tunnel, tripping over the uneven floor and scratching my fingers on the packed dirt and sand of the walls. Craggy sections of the ceiling tore at my hijab but I would not slow. My guide grabbed my hips to steady me and force a more even pace, and so I dragged him with me. Finally he pulled me to my knees inside one of the occasional wooden box frames supporting the more than 20 feet of packed sand and dirt above us. He sat down next to me and pushed his open palms up through the air in front of his chest and then down, showing me how to breathe. “Shway,” he said, “slow.”

Nearly everyone I’ve talked to in Gaza has told me that the effects of the siege and the massacre have been worst for women and children and I believe them, but seven meters below the rubble of Rafah and the rumbling of the tractors that push this endless sand away from the mouth of each new tunnel, my thoughts turn to Gaza’s men.

The guide kneeling beside me, and thousands like him, cheat death every day in these tunnels as they journey back and forth between Rafah, Egypt and Rafah, Gaza, one city divided by a border and a cruel siege. And nearly every day, at least one of these men loses his gamble and does not come home. The siege has kept out everything but a painfully short list of humanitarian items. Building materials, a wide variety of foodstuffs, ink and paper, and so many other necessities are not permitted to enter Gaza. If the people of Gaza are to have anything close to a life, to bathe and eat and rebuild and learn, they must purchase this contraband illegally, and someone must illegally import it.

The Israeli government claims that the tunnels must be bombed because they are used to smuggle weapons, but in reality the tunnels are almost always used for anything but. After the massacre the tunnels brought lions and tigers to replace the ones loosed by the attack on Gaza’s largest zoo (Can you imagine? Amid all the bombing and chaos, wild animals running through the streets of Gaza!) Many people have told me the next big project is to smuggle in cars, a necessity in a place where virtually every vehicle is subject to regular breakdowns.

The tunnels provide a necessary lifeline for the people of Gaza, but as my guide patiently awaited the end of my panic attack, I began to realize that they are born out of another necessity: The tunnels offer an opportunity for men to reclaim their place as protectors and providers in a society where occupation and siege make those roles virtually impossible.

A few days earlier, Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj told me of a game he plays with his young nephew called “Arab and Jew.” In the game, his nephew would play a Palestinian, chasing Dr. Sarraj around the yard and pretending to throw rocks at him. Not long ago, they played the game again, but this time his nephew insisted on playing the Israeli. Shortly into the game the small boy leapt onto his uncle’s back and began to beat him as hard as he could. Once Dr. Sarraj was able to escape his nephew’s brutal attack, he immediately asked his sister about the change in her son’s behavior. She told him that the child had recently witnessed his father humiliated and severely beaten by Israeli soldiers. Dr. Sarraj tells this anecdote to illustrate a growing trend he’s seen in young Palestinians: As parents, especially fathers, are humiliated, beaten, arrested, and otherwise disempowered in front of their children by Israeli soldiers, they lose their status as protectors in their children’s eyes. Desperate for signs of strength in terrifyingly unstable and dangerous times, young Palestinians find a new role model: the Israeli soldier.

Dr. Sarraj finds the origin of this trend in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when Israelis began ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. Since 1948, the trauma of losing agency over one’s life and living conditions has become, in the words of Dr. Sarraj, “a part of the Palestinian psyche.” This trauma, which has grown with every violent incursion into Palestinian communities, strongly intensified with the first Intifada in 1987, when Israeli soldiers mercilessly beat children armed only with rocks, and also beat and arrested their parents. The psychiatrist notes that many of these children grew up to embrace more violent weapons in the second Intifada in 2000, a response to the brutal abuse and humiliation they’d witnessed. More than 45% of Palestinian children have watched Israeli soldiers beat and/or arrest their fathers, and the trend Dr. Sarraj describes has grown exponentially since the December/January massacre. Since the attacks, more than 75% of the youth of Gaza do not believe their parents can protect them from Israeli soldiers. Surrounded by the rubble of schools, hospitals, and whole neighborhoods, and with virtually no hope of employment upon graduation (the siege-induced unemployment rate is 80%), it is hard for the youth of Gaza to envision much of a future. And it is virtually impossible for their parents, highly educated but lacking agency and employment, to give them hope.

The trauma that is now part of the Palestinian psyche, that forces Palestinian youth to seek the new role model of the Israeli soldier, can be seen at its worst when these children grow up. Dr. Sarraj tells another story from a brief detention in a Palestinian prison. In the cell next to his, he heard a Palestinian guard interrogating a prisoner. The guard’s voice became louder and more frantic as his anger grew, until he began screaming at the prisoner in Hebrew. Dr. Sarraj later learned that the guard had been severely tortured in an Israeli prison. In this moment of uncontrollable anger, the guard became his tormentor.

Stories like these are all too frequent in Gaza, where weddings and graduations are celebrated with a soundtrack of constant Israeli bombing and shelling. My own such story came on a beautiful afternoon on the beach, while eating lunch with a large family. One of the older sons, maybe in his late teens, asked me to follow him to a small tent tucked behind the rows of family tents facing the Mediterranean. The son sat me down at a cheap metal table that had been transformed into a desk, decorated with a poster of young men murdered by Israelis, a couple of notebooks, and a mug holding some pens and a small Hamas flag. The man seated behind the desk and surrounded by young boys anxiously awaiting their next task made it clear that he would interrogate me, and sent one of the boys to find an interpreter on the beach. The son who had brought me beamed at my side, occasionally picking up the Coke my interrogator had presented me, encouraging me to drink more. After about ten minutes my interpreter arrived, another boy in his late teens. My interrogator spoke in a serious voice, but his questions were the same as those I’d received from students and families, curious about my country, a source of so much fascination and suffering for the people of Gaza. “What do Americans think of Palestinians? Who do Americans blame for the ‘war’ in December and January? What does American media say about the people of Gaza, and about Palestinians? What do Americans think of Bush? What will Obama do differently?” Throughout my “interrogation” I could not distract myself from the image of this authority figure, digging his toes into the sand, surrounded by a volunteer staff of young boys, protecting the beach by investigating a camera-toting foreigner from behind his make-shift desk and small Hamas flag.

This story is not representative of my experiences with Hamas. I do not know my interrogator’s official role within the government, if he actually has one, and I expect that the members of Hamas who were tasked with protecting and providing for our delegation would have been angered to learn of my unauthorized interrogation, an inconvenience they would have spared me. But this story stays with me because of the trauma Dr. Sarraj describes, which was palpable long before he described it to me. In detaining and interrogating a foreigner whose American passport can take her anywhere in the world and could have rescued her from the December/January massacre, this man momentarily seized his agency. In front of his young, eager audience, he claimed his place as their protector.

The phenomenon Dr. Sarraj illustrates is not only visible in individuals. One need only look at the devastated building of the Hamas-led Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to see the Israelis’ humiliation and abuse on a governmental scale. Of all of the destroyed buildings I’ve seen in Gaza, in some ways this one haunts me most. These walls housed a democratically elected government that has endured a vicious siege since 2006, fought off an attempted coup, and has struggled with great patience and flexibility to be seen as legitimate by the global community. All of these pressures combined are enough to destroy a government, but they are magnified exponentially by the horrific massacre that stole the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians and forced the PLC to meet in a tent behind their largely collapsed building. I think often of the meetings held in this vulnerable tent: I wonder if sometimes the pressures bearing down on these legislators simply become too much, and they are unable to breathe, to force their words out into the hot air of a Gaza parking lot.

Just as the task of protecting and providing for one’s children in Gaza is nearly impossible, the task of Hamas to fulfill the role of protector and provider for 1.5 million people is truly Herculean. Every day the leaders of this government wake up to regular attacks from one of the best-funded militaries in the world and a global misrepresentation as a terrorist organization that took power by force. Because of the horrific Israeli siege Hamas cannot provide rebuilding materials to the people of Gaza, or even feed the people who voted them into power based on the party’s history of providing necessary social services to the Gaza community. The vast majority of food aid that reaches Gaza comes from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), tasked with caring for Gaza’s refugees (80% of the population). While UNRWA supplies vital necessities to the slowly starving people of Gaza, their presence is a constant reminder of what Hamas cannot provide. It would be a lie to say that Hamas is loved by everyone in Gaza. But every action for which Hamas is condemned by western media must be understood in the context of the inhuman Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, which have become so commonplace and expected we sometimes forget they exist. With the siege, their complicity in the attempted coup, and the December/January massacre, the Israeli government has stolen the agency of the government the people of Gaza chose.

While Dr. Sarraj’s explanation of the societal effects of trauma explains so much about my interactions in Gaza, about the youth who only want to be photographed pretending to shoot guns at my camera and the gaming centers whose violent advertisements are omnipresent on Gaza’s city streets, the brilliant professor and one-state activist Haidar Eid makes an important counterpoint to Dr. Sarraj’s theory. While Dr. Eid agrees with much of what the psychiatrist describes, he insists that by attributing every action Palestinians take to Israeli-induced trauma, one steals the last ounce of agency Palestinians have. When Palestinians take up arms against their occupiers, or smuggle food and tigers through tunnels, they resist the inhuman Israeli occupation and reclaim some of their agency. As a Palestinian soldier told a delegation member, “What else are we supposed to do? We cannot sit by when they come to kill our families. We have to protect them.”

It has been more than 12 hours since I left the tunnel, and I still can’t catch my breath. Dusty walls of packed earth occupy my eyelids, and whenever I near sleep the walls begin to crumble. When we finally neared the tunnel entrance and I could see real, natural light maybe 15 meters away, we heard a distant rumble. Bombs dropped from Israeli planes perhaps, or a partial tunnel collapse somewhere, or more mechanical digging. All of these things happen almost every day in Rafah, and then there are the near-daily silent threats, like the poisonous gas the Egyptian military releases into tunnel entrances before permanently sealing them. As I scrambled out of the narrow tunnel passage and into the loop of rope that would pull me up to the surface and back to a reality where my American passport and some patience guarantee my safe passage across the Rafah border, I watched my guide shrink below me, before ducking back into the bend of the tunnel and resuming his daily routine.

The findings by Defense for Children International (DCI) come in the wake of revelations from Israeli soldiers and senior commanders that it is “normal procedure” in the West Bank to terrorise Palestinian civilians, including children.

Col Itai Virob, commander of the Kfir Brigade, disclosed last month that to accomplish a mission, “aggressiveness towards every one of the residents in the village is common.” Questioning included slaps, beatings and kickings, he said.

As a result, Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the armed services, was forced to appear before the Israeli parliament to disavow the behavior of his soldiers. Beatings were “absolutely prohibited”, he told legislators.

Col Virob made his remarks during court testimony in defense of two soldiers, including his deputy commander, who are accused of beating Palestinians in the village of Qaddum, close to Nablus. One told the court that, “soldiers are educated towards aggression in the IDF [army].”

Col Virob appeared to confirm his observation, saying it was policy to “disturb the balance” of village life during missions and that the vast majority of assaults were “against uninvolved people.”

Last week, further disclosures of ill-treatment of Palestinians, some as young as 14, were aired on Israeli TV, using material collected by dissident soldiers as part of the Breaking the Silence project, which highlights army brutality.

Two soldiers serving in the Harub battalion said they had witnessed beatings at a school in the West Bank village of Hares, south-west of Nablus, in an operation in March to stop stone-throwing. Many of those held were not involved, the soldiers said.

During a 12-hour operation that began at 3am, 150 detainees were blindfolded and handcuffed from behind, with the nylon restraints so tight their hands turned blue. The worst beatings, the soldiers said, occurred in the school toilets.

According to one soldier’s testimony, a boy of about 15 was given “a slap that brought him to the ground.” He added that many of his comrades “just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up”.

The picture from serving soldiers confirms the findings of DCI, which noted that many children were picked up in general sweeps after disturbances or during late-night raids of their homes.

Its report includes a selection of testimonies from children it represented in 2008 in which they describe Israeli soldiers beating them or being tortured by interrogators.

One 10-year-old boy, identified as Ezzat H, described an army search of his family home for a gun. He said a soldier slapped and punched him repeatedly during two hours of questioning, before another soldier pointed a rifle at him: “The rifle barrel was a few centimeters away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me.”

Another boy, Shadi H, aged 15, said he and his friend were forced to undress by soldiers in an orange grove near Tulkarm while the soldiers threw stones at them. They were then beaten with rifle butts.

Jameel K, aged 14, described being taken to a military camp where he was assaulted and then had a rope tightened around his neck in a mock execution.

Yehuda Shaul, of Breaking the Silence, said soldiers treated any Palestinian older than 12 or 13 as an adult.

“For the first time a high-ranking soldier [Col Virob] has joined us in raising the issue — even if not intentionally — that the use of physical violence against Palestinians is not exceptional but policy. A few years ago no senior officer would have had the guts to say this,” he said.

The DCI report also highlights the systematic use of torture by interrogators from the army and the secret police, the Shin Bet, in an attempt to extract confessions from children, often in cases involving stone throwing.

Islam M, aged 12, said he was threatened with having boiling water poured on his face if he did not admit throwing stones and was then pushed into a thorn bush. Another boy, Abed S, aged 16, said his hands and feet were tied to the wall of an interrogation room in the shape of a cross for a day and then put in solitary confinement for 15 days.

Last month, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, a panel of independent experts, expressed “deep concern” at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian minors.

According to the DCI report, some 700 children are convicted in Israel’s military courts each year, with children older than 12 denied access to lawyers in interrogation.

It adds that interrogators routinely blindfold and handcuff child detainees during questioning and use techniques including slaps and kicks, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, threats to the child and his family, and tying the child up for long periods.

Such practices were banned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1999 but are still widely documented by Israeli human rights groups.

DCI says it has been disturbed by reports from several children of a special tiny cell, referred to as No 36, at a detention centre near Haifa. The cell has no windows or ventilation, its walls are dark and a dim light is kept on 24 hours a day.

In 95 per cent of cases, children are convicted on the basis of signed confessions written in Hebrew, a language few of them understand.

Once sentenced, the children are held in violation of international law in prisons in Israel where most are denied visits from family and receive little or no education.

DCI also criticizes “a culture of impunity” among the Shin Bet, noting that not one of 600 complaints of torture filed against its interrogators during the second intifada has led to a criminal investigation.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported in November that soldiers too rarely face disciplinary action over illegal behavior.

Army data from 2000 to the end of 2007 revealed that the military police had indicted soldiers in only 78 of 1,268 investigations. Most soldiers received minor sentences.

Academic studies suggest that Israeli soldiers have been routinely using violence against Palestinian civilians, including children, for many years.

In late 2007 Israelis were shocked by the testimonies collected by clinical psychologist Nufar Yishai-Karin from 21 soldiers with whom she shared her military service during the early 1990s.

The soldiers told her of incidents in which bystanders were shot or assaulted. In one of the most disturbing testimonies, a soldier said he had witnessed his commander attacking a four-year-old boy playing in the sand in Gaza.

“He broke his hand here at the wrist. Broke his hand at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left . . . The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

Such revelations have grown in number since the Breaking the Silence began drawing attention to the army’s mistreatment of Palestinians in 2004.

* A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But t hat isn’t the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That’s why Palestine doesn’t need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That’s why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had — from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn’t be dislodged from their homes as easily. This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel’s violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings — Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!
Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one’s own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.

That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity. That Israel rain death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It’s a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.

I’m sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I’m advocating pushing Israelis “into the sea” or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.

There is an intense desire here to rebuild. There is no shortage of skilled labor. Billions of dollars of aid from countries around the world, including the US, has been pledged. But scarcely a single house has been rebuilt. From the Rafah border in the south to the town of Beit Hanoun in the north, people are still living in tents, or with family members, or in shelters.

The range of destruction is breathtaking. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in 22 days, the vast majority civilians, including more than 300 children. Schools, health clinics, houses, and, most importantly, the basic infrastructure of both public services and government has been destroyed. Rubble is everywhere. Basic government structures, such as the building that houses the Palestinian parliament are all destroyed.

Two days ago, a delegation 66 activists, scholars, journalists and human rights workers, mostly from the US, visited the Parliament building. The visit was organized by the peace group Code Pink, which has led several delegations attempting to break the blockade. The group was surprised to find the building housing the legislature reduced partly to rubble, and Parliament members forced to meet in a tent outside. Having no building to meet in is just one of the many problems facing the elected government of the Palestinian people. “Not only are more than 11,000 prisoners in Israeli jails,” explained Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the acting speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, and part of the Hamas political party. “Forty members of the legislative council are imprisoned, including the head of the legislature. Can you imagine if the head of the legislature, of anywhere else in the world, were held in prison by a foreign government?” Dr. Bahar appealed to the US activists assembled for help in breaking the siege. “They don’t allow basic construction material to enter,” he said. “Cement, glass, wood, steel.”

Gaza is among the most densely populated places on earth. One and a half million people live in 139 square miles, and it has been described as the world’s largest prison. Traveling across this very small area, you meet people everywhere who just want to live a normal life, but are being prevented by a cruel blockade from going anywhere or doing anything.

“The biggest lie that has been told is that Gaza is a hostile entity,” declares John Ging, the head of the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip. “It’s populated by well educated, decent people. They’re not spitting hatred. They’re asking for help, they’re asking for justice, they’re asking for the rule of law.” An Irish former soldier with a staff of 10,000, Ging is a UN bureaucrat, not an activist, but his respect for the international law has made him a passionate spokesperson for a rebuilding of Gaza.

Under the current siege, explains, Ging, “There’s no cement, even if its to repair a hospital or school or health center. So people are being kept alive, nothing more.” Its been said in the US media that the situation in Gaza is complicated, that the siege is part of a defense against terrorism, but Ging denies these claims. “When it comes down to it, its rather simple what’s needed,” he says. “What we now need to focus on is creating a life for people here. We need to see the depoliticization of assistance. What we have here in Gaza is a failure to uphold those basic human rights.”

Gaza is currently hosting several delegations of international human rights observers and activists from the US and Europe. With each month, more people come here, and see the painful reality of the situation here. And with each new arrival, the siege perhaps moves a step closer to ending.

President Obama is scheduled to be in Cairo tomorrow, and members of Code Pink plan to ask him to visit Gaza. Tens of thousands of people from the US have signed a petition asking him to see the devastation. Across Gaza, people are looking for some sign that the new president will stand up for human rights in Palestine. “We ask Obama not to close his eyes to the Palestinian catastrophe,” says Dr. Bahar. “We are running out of time,” says John Ging. “We need to move from keeping people alive to giving them a life.”

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

– Eugene V. Debs¹

Two hundred forty souls reside now inside the American prison at Guantanamo. Most were kidnapped and taken there by U.S. government employees. None has been charged with any crime. None has enjoyed anything resembling due process of law. Some of these 240 men were boys when they arrived – four, five, six or seven years ago. Most of them have been tortured by “trained professionals,” trained and paid by the U.S. government, by us, you and me.

These prisoners sit – abused and untried – in defiance of many rules and values on which American society prides itself. Our Constitution celebrates and protects the rights of individuals. Millions have fought and died in the past two centuries or so to preserve those precious values. But as long as the Guantanamo prisoners are denied the rights and protections enshrined in our Constitution, America is not and cannot be a free society. As Debs knew, we cannot predicate our own freedom on the oppression of others, whoever they may be. That is not true liberty.

The former vice president, Dick Cheney, argues that without the ability to kidnap people at will, to torture them without restraint and to jail them indefinitely, our country will be at greater risk of terrorist attack. He is wrong about that, as even he must know. His daughter has said that Cheney is now speaking out – after hiding out during much of his tenure in office – because he is afraid he may be prosecuted for war crimes. Cheney should be, both afraid and prosecuted. No one knows better than he does, after his many decades in power in Washington, how far outside the laws and values of our country his policies deviated.

As president, George W. Bush allowed these abuses of American values. But it was the bullyboys he set up in power – Cheney and Rumsfeld and their legal hired guns – who pushed far beyond the limits of law and decency. They did so out of fear. Bullies are cowards who hide their fears with bluster and meanness. Cheney and Rumsfeld, full of bluster, talked tough while quaking in their boots. Remember when Cheney threw out a baseball at a major league game wearing a bullet-proof vest? Who was he afraid of? Better to ask, of whom is he not afraid?

Tough-guy, sadistic cowards are familiar characters in our history and our culture. They represent one part – shameful but all too real – of human nature. It is easy in times of stress and uncertainty to give way to their shameful impulses. But acting out of fear – as bullies do – is no way to live or to run a country. Better to heed the words of the brave men, like Debs, who had the courage to go to jail for his beliefs. Or the real warriors who fight for our country, the top generals who have testified that America will be safer with Guantanamo closed and torture stopped once and for all.

In the anger, fear and panic that followed the attacks on the United States in September 2001, we allowed these bullies to command the vacuum of grief and disbelief with their long-mulled plans for U.S. military supremacy in the Middle East. They told whatever lies they thought would procure backing from the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. They ran roughshod over American values, in the name of upholding them. It is time to disavow these violations and clean up the mess they left to us. Of what are we afraid?

We voted for Barack Obama to break with this lawless regime and restore the values our Constitution honors. Mr. President, you must hold firm to your commitment to close Guantanamo. There is no prisoner there so “dangerous for America” that he does not deserve the due process of law that our society holds dear. If we cannot offer these protections, even to our avowed enemies, then there is little to choose between their values and our own. You have already articulated these beliefs. Please do not be swayed by the menacing cowardice of Cheney and his ilk, or the NIMBY legislators of your own party who would rather pander to their poll standings than do the right thing, which is to bring Guantanamo prisoners into our own prison system and try them, or to let them go. We must not be hostage to our own paranoia, our own weakest nature.

We voted for you, Mr. President, because you promised to act out of conscience, not fear. We are trusting you to abjure the brutal, fearful policies of the recent past, and restore the Constitutional values which made our country great. In you reside our hopes for the American promise that brought you to this office, that you may restore our faith in our own destiny, and the faith of our brothers and sisters around the world.

1. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), American labor leader and five-time presidential candidate, was the only person to run for the presidency while in prison.

Nigeria’s environmental degradation is a by-product of the moral and political rot that flows from neocolonialism. It is the physical manifestation of the total surrender of national sovereignty to foreigners — like Shell oil — by those native classes that rule the land for the benefit of foreigners. To put one’s country’s resources at the disposal of foreigners is the ultimate corruption — which leads to every other conceivable crime.

It is a false dichotomy to separate the corruption of Nigeria’s governments — military or civilian — from the predatory presence of Big Oil. The two are locked in the deepest embrace. The foreign corporations pay the regime to maintain peace — and the regime reciprocates by imposing on the people a “peace of the dead.” There are other sources of corruption in the developing world, other contradictions between people and their governments, but the dominance of economic resources by foreigners exacerbates every other division in society. The competition to get into the foreigners’ money flow becomes the Great Game of national political life. The bigger the money flow, the greater the imperative to keep the people in check. The police and army serve as paid thugs for the foreigners’ protection. The national debasement is total. Nigeria’s most important city, Lagos, is also one of the most expensive in the world — yet 70 percent of Nigerians subsist on a dollar or less a day. There is no greater corruption imaginable.

In court, Shell oil will seek to present itself as an innocent party — even a victim of African brutality and corruption. Shell is more properly compared to a businessman who hires a hit man to kill a union organizer. The businessman and the hit man are both guilty of capital murder. The greater onus is on the businessman, whose money made the crime possible.

In the Niger Delta, Ogoni rebels have cut Nigeria’s oil production in half, putting the squeeze on US-based Chevron Oil (where, incidentally, Condoleezza Rice used to work). According to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the fighting. The Nigerian government has declared the entire delta a military zone. No doubt, great crimes are being committed at the behest of Big Oil. Before he was put to death, Ken Saro-Wiwa predicted it would come to this.

* This article was a Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Such were the astounding comments made by the Pope’s spokesman in Israel, Wadie Abunasser, prior to Pope Benedict XVI visiting Palestine and Israel.

As if there was no massacre in Gaza, no families entirely slaughtered, no human rights violated to match the record of the most grisly of crimes in modern history. As if Gaza were a mere irritant in the annals of human suffering. More, as if there were no Catholic flock in Gaza. To clarify, there are actually nearly 2,000 Catholics in Gaza, apparently not important enough for the ‘cut’.

Now, there are a lot of important religious sites to see around the Holy Land, lots of old churches, stones, ruins and the like…sites of much more significance, such as the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulcher and so on… far more important than visiting the site of a fresh massacre, where the stench of rotting bodies — laid to rest beneath a tomb consisting of the rubble of their own homes — has just faded. Such sites are apparently of little import to the Holy See. Rather, there are memorials to victims of greater standing, in shrines of superior grandeur, such as Yad Vashem . . . now, that’s something to see.

On a trip that was apparently dedicated to promoting “reconciliation”, it is baffling that Pope Benedict made little mention of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as a source of discord. Imagine that. But what he did say was, “Allow me to make this appeal to all the peoples of these lands: No more bloodshed! No more fighting! No more terrorism! No more war! Instead let us break the viscous circle of violence.”

As if he was imploring two nations with common grievances, with mutually strong armies and nuclear arsenals. As if he were exhorting two peoples, both of whom have access to clean water, both of which are properly nourished and educated. Or to put it another way, as if both peoples face the daily threat of their house being toppled while they are held up inside by an occupying army, as if both peoples face the daily threat of arrest, extra-judicial execution, the humiliation of curfews and checkpoints.

The Vatican needs some serious introspection. It ought to replace its highly politicized and, frankly, questionable apologies, with an earnest apology to oppressed people, who might have little political worth. The Pope should apologize to Palestinians and to Gazans in particular for failing to appreciate the seriousness of their plight, for cozying up to the very Israeli leaders who champion the suffering in Gaza, and fail to console the very victim of their onslaught.

More, as an institution that has garnered the reputation of advocating social justice throughout the world in recent years, the Catholic Church must abandon its current course, cowering before Israeli leaders, its Holy Father imparting such smug condescension on a nation that has endured a slow and gradual process of genocide for the past six decades.

Wishy-washy is the term that comes to mind. While he never wavered from condemning the “godless nation” that carried out the Holocaust, his references to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine were so indistinct, that it was difficult to make any clear separation between the aggressor and the victim. As he witnessed with his own eyes the monstrosity of the Apartheid Wall, his comments were painfully elusive, “How earnestly we pray for an end to the hostilities that have caused this wall to be built.” Oh really? Is this all the Holy Father has to say? Never mind occupation. Never mind hunger. Never mind randomly closing schools for months on end and denying an entire nation the right to education. But now we are talking about illegal weapons being used on civilian populations in Gaza. Now we are talking about a wall that has been declared “illegal” by the International Court of Justice. There is simply no time or place here for indecisiveness and moral flexibility.

And it is completely unacceptable for anyone to have the ‘audacity’ to urge Palestinian youth not to allow, as the Holy Father stated, “the loss of life and the destruction you have witnessed to arouse bitterness or resentment in your hearts”. More, when making a stop at Aida Refugee Camp, he blamed the plight of the displaced population on “the turmoil that has afflicted this land for decades.” It would have been far more favorable for him to stay home and not insult these sites of misery at all.

But in the end, the Pope finally was able to muster up some courage and took one truly audacious stand: When at the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s chief Islamic judge, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, declared that Israelis had killed innocent women and children in Gaza, the Pope stood up and in an act of defiance, walked out. Now that’s courage.

The Palestinians, and millions of people around the world, expected more from a person who should be advocating the New Testament teaching: “let justice flow like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

But the Pope has proven fallible, after all.

Naturally, volumes have been written about John Brown, his life, dreams, anti-slavery escapades and the culmination of it all–the raid on Harper’s Ferry, his trial and execution for treason. From WEB DuBois’ biography to the fictionalized tome titled Cloudsplitter by US author Russel Banks, the number of words written about Brown rival those written about the man that history knighted to carry the war against slavery to its ultimate end, Abraham Lincoln. One of the best of these works is the recently republished The Old Man: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry by Truman Nelson. First published in 1973, when elements in the New Left had taken on Brown’s mantle in their attempt to end US imperialism and racism by setting off bombs in buildings and black liberation fighters were being hunted down by the federal government and its allied forces, Nelson’s work focuses solely on the raid in Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath.

It is a riveting story told in a captivating narrative that takes the reader into that small town in the West Virginia mountains. The physical details are here–the planning, recruiting, purchase and smuggling of arms, and the training. So is a discussion of the political philosophy behind Brown’s endeavor. It is a simple philosophy and one still worth striving for–a nation without slavery and with equal opportunity and choice for all. The Old Man describes a nation splitting apart. Anti-slavery legislators attacked in Congress by men whose very lives are bound to the practice of the bondage of other humans. Men who would never consider breaking a law tired of waiting for the political system to end slavery deciding to fund Brown’s insurrection. The Christian churches split between those who would use the Bible to justify slavery and those whose interpretation forces them to conclude that enslaving other humans is the work of Satan. Financial interests looking after their own interests who care little about the morals of slavery but only about the money that can be made by supporting it or ridding the nation of it.

Through it all, John Brown’s terrible swift sword remained true. He saw slavery as the abomination it was and understood the northern capitalists who did not align themselves with the abolitionists to be the opportunists they were. His vision of a post-slavery United States did not see the black man or woman as a lesser being but as a genuine equal. This was something that was even beyond the thought process of many abolitionists. Yet, it mattered not to Brown. Some called this madness, yet it was merely the single mindedness of a man with a just mission. Compromise rarely extended to Brown’s approach and never to his principles. Nelson tells us that he was not unreasonable, just certain of his reason for being on earth.

The raid on Harper’s Ferry was to be the first salvo in the fight to free the slaves. Indeed, in a harbinger of the coming War Between the States, it was future Confederate General Robert E. Lee whose unit was sent to quell the Harper’s Ferry insurrection. Despite the arrest of Brown and most of his co-conspirators and their hanging, that raid served its purpose. The foul institution of slavery was wiped from the United States. We continue to deal with its legacy. As the recent refusal by a federal appeals court in Georgia to commute Troy Davis’ death sentence and the ongoing mockery of justice known as the trial of the San Francisco 8 continues in California make clear, the bonds of slavery have been removed, but the forces that represent the slavers’ legacy have not disappeared. As for the meaning of John Brown’s armed attempt to free slaves in Harper’s Ferry, it continues to prove its meaning to the oppressed in the United States.

I was lying in a hospital bed in England, thinking how many Palestinians suffer a similar illness but are cruelly denied treatment.

Not because there aren’t the surgical skills – Gaza’s health professionals are very talented, I hear – but because the Zionist thugs whom our sick-minded political leaders call friends and allies have systematically blockaded medical supplies and equipment, especially these last 2 years, wiping out proper healthcare in the Strip and sentencing innocent men, women and children to death. Those they can’t vaporize or blow to bits with high explosives and phosphor they destroy slowly by starvation and untreated disease.

The news this week that three British medics are on hunger strike in Egypt makes the cruelty point clear enough to those who have so far been blind and deaf to it. They are protesting against being refused entry into Gaza for a humanitarian mission to set up a cardiac surgery unit at the al-Shifa hospital and help train medical students and junior doctors there. But the team have been denied access through Rafah by Egypt since 4 May. “We are on hunger strike until they let us through,” says Omar Mangoush, a cardiac surgeon from London. “There are loads of people with heart disease in Gaza. They can’t get out to Egypt and they can’t get out through Israel.”

He took a month’s holiday from work to go on this charity-based mission.

So who are the mental retards responsible for this outrage? This time it’s the Eqyptians, whose strings are pulled by the Israelis and their equally sadistic buddies in the American administration. The do-nothing whimps in the British foreign office, apparently, were told by the Egyptian foreign ministry that the medics’ request for access to Gaza had been “postponed”.

While in my hospital bed I also had to endure TV footage and press reports of the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land.

From the very start Vatican chiefs committed public relations suicide by meekly bowing to the criminal regime’s instruction not to visit Gaza. Here was an opportunity for the Pope to wait at the gates of the Erez crossing, under the glare of the international media, until allowed through – or until a full-scale international incident was provoked.

Alternatively he could have sailed with a flotilla of boats and landed peacefully on Gaza’s beach… Israel’s choice whether or not to make an unseemly issue of it.

Then he was banned from making a speech with the world’s news cameras showing Israel’s apartheid wall in the background. The Aida camp near Bethlehem wanted to welcome the Pope on a specially built stage in front of the ugly and offensive barrier with which the ugly and offensive state of Israel has surrounded and imprisoned the birthplace of Christ. The Israeli authorities ordered work on the stage stopped. Couldn’t the Vatican have responded by saying something like: “If you Israelis don’t want the world to see your wretched Wall why don’t you remove it, as required by the International Court of Justice?”

The Vatican then put up another ‘black’ by arranging for the Pope to visit the family of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Such concern for one Israeli soldier while 11,000 Palestinians lie rotting in Israeli jails calls for the global sick-bag to be handed round.

And while this overdressed “representative of God on Earth” was diligently sticking to illegal occupier rules, the said occupier continued to withhold cement and other necessary materials for Gaza’s reconstruction and humanitarian revival.

What is the point of a pope who’s not prepared to stick his neck out to help liberate the Holy Land from long and brutal occupation by a breed of racist fanatics who hold to the ludicrous belief that they are inheritors of all the real estate in the Holy Land and beyond, and are superior to the rest of the human race? Indeed, this latest papal tour has illustrated, if it hadn’t been obvious before, that a pope needs to be a hard-nosed politician of special calibre as well as a holy man.

His Holiness said Palestinians should have a homeland so that “both peoples may live in peace in a homeland of their own, within secure and internationally recognised borders”.

He should get out more. The Palestinians already have a homeland. It was occupied in 1948 in a move that launched the Zionists’ master-plan to steal the entire territory and expel the Arabs, Christians included. And there are already internationally recognised borders. The Vatican and the rest of the international community choose to forget.

At the Yad Vashem memorial the Pope’s address (as reported on the Vatican website) included the following passage: “One can rob a neighbour of possessions, opportunity or freedom. One can weave an insidious web of lies to convince others that certain groups are undeserving of respect. Yet, try as one might, one can never take away the name of a fellow human being.” I applaud the words. Presumably they were intended to refer to the Jews killed in the Shoah; but the irony is that they equally apply to the slaughter and suffering of the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing.

The Pope’s visit, whatever the truth behind the scenes, had the appearance of a cack-handed conspiracy designed to make Israel look good by providing an abundance of PR images of the pontiff glad-handing the regime’s leading gangsters and thus legitimizing humanity’s dark side. Getting him to pass by the Gazans (Christians as well as Muslims) “on the other side of the road” was a propaganda master-stroke.

No genuine “God on Earth” would have fallen for that.

But take heart, all you right-minded people out there. In Britain, the parliamentary worm has suddenly turned and decided it will tolerate no longer the greedy and the self-serving in its own ranks. Sleaze has been uncovered by the bucket-full and the shamed Speaker of the House of Commons has been forced from office for the first time in 300 years thanks to the courage of a few good men. Many tried to block the truth but ultimately failed, and we are seeing the start of a new era of zero tolerance when it comes to greed, lies and corruption.

The public are the key. They know what is right and wrong even if their politicians don’t, and they are venting their extreme displeasure at ministers and MPs who are having a laugh at public expense. Ordinary people would happily see the culprits dangling from the lamp-posts of Whitehall or their heads on pikes decorating London Bridge.

So when will world leaders show zero tolerance against the cruel racists who foul and vandalise the Holy Land? What place do they and their sympathisers have in a civilized community of nations?

All it takes – maybe – is a few good men, and the general public…

Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense. Venezuela’s president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any favors from someone so principled, lest his house of cards come tumbling down.

As for the tribunals, Obama faces two deadlines: his 120-day review of the tribunals has now ended, and on 27 May the trial of Ahmed Al-Darbi, a Saudi accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, was scheduled to begin, and it appears it now will, but under slightly improved conditions, including restricting hearsay evidence. The tribunals now must move quickly in a race against the clock before Guantanamo is scheduled to be closed next January. If the prison is indeed closed and the trials are still going on then, the detainees will have to be brought to the US, where they will receive greater legal rights.

About 20 of the 241 detainees currently at Guantanamo will now be tried by military tribunals along with 13 already in the works. The rest of the detainees must either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian prosecutors in US federal courts. It’s also possible that some could continue to be held indefinitely without trial as prisoners of war, though government officials insist they will now receive full Geneva Conventions protections.

The decision to persist with the tribunals was immediately attacked by critics. “It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be tried in the regular federal courts system.”

How did this sorry state of affairs come about so soon after all the fanfare?

Obama stressed to families of victims of the USS Cole attack when he met them in February that he would not free “potential jihadists”, but when Binyam Mohamed, suspected in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the US, was repatriated to Britain and released, this was greeted by a hysterical outcry in the US, ignoring the fact that Mohamed was determined to be innocent by the world’s oldest upholder of due process. The pressures on Obama to hold the Bush course are immense, with former vice president Richard Cheney brazenly attacking him as a wimp on US television.

Then there’s Obama’s decision to block the court-ordered release of more torture photos. He was for the pictures being released before deciding last week he was against it, apparently convinced by military officials the photos would increase danger for US troops.

Dawdling, of course, just confirms the view of the rest of the world, especially among Muslims, that Obama is not the principled liberal they were led to expect, that he is afraid to make a clean breast of the past atrocities, that he is merely a politically correct Bush lite. The irony being that, contrary to Cheney’s ravings, it is his very indecisiveness that increases the danger for US troops.

The legal intricacies of Guantanamo vs. US incarceration and jurisdiction are less sensational than the torture pictures. But the likelihood of many Muslims actually seeing the latest shots of US troops in Iraq sodomizing those who resist them is remote. In any case, the pictures were originally intended for possible publication by the torturers themselves. This startling revelation was made by Seymour Hersh in 2004 when he exposed the logic behind the officially-condoned US strategy of sexual torture. The idea was to use blackmail to encourage victims to work for the occupiers as spies, threatening to publish the photos unless the victims agreed to collaborate with the occupiers. A government consultant revealed to Hersh, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.”

The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, and the photos — old and new — are being consumed primarily by jingoistic Americans reveling in such scenes of violence inflicted on the “enemy”, inured to the monstrosity of this by their regular diet of media violence and Islamophobia. Already the “blocked” photos are being leaked all over the net, making Obama’s last minute efforts a fool’s errand.

How such unconscionable behavior became official US policy is fascinating. American pilots were trained during the “first” Gulf War by watching pornographic films, according to the Washington Post at the time. In order to better subjugate Arab Iraq, according to Joseph Massad, “American imperial military culture super-masculinizes not only its own male soldiers, but also its female soldiers who can partake of the feminization of Iraqi men.” The pornographic pictures are merely the logical outcome of this strategy to subdue the so-called enemy, constructed by diabolical Pentagon strategists. The 2003 invasion updated this strategy, though with unintended consequences, as new technology allowed simple soldiers to produce their own DVDs of their sadistic frolics.

This stark reality is inverted in Washington, as interpreted by Obama’s envoy of peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US media efforts in Pakistan: “Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war. We are losing that war.” Rather than acknowledging past sins, however, he advocates even more TV and radio propaganda supporting the US wars. Holbrooke is referring to the $100 million propaganda campaign launched by the Bush regime in Iraq in 2005 by a Washington-based PR firm to plant administration propaganda in the Iraqi news media and to pay Iraqi journalists to write favorable stories about the occupation.

So it appears withholding the Abu Ghraib photos is really part of the US government media war, just as the question mark over Guantanamo is really part of the military plans to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come hell or high water. And that these policies are not up for discussion. The reversal of Obama’s key policies after only a few months does not bode well for him or the US.

Perhaps withholding the photos is also connected with the appointment of Stanley McChrystal as head of the military in Afghanistan, which should brace itself for more Abu Ghraib-style action. McChrystal cut his teeth in Iraq, where he directed the Joint Special Operations Command’s special operation teams, which carry out assassinations and terrorize local populations opposed to the occupation. McChrystal was a favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney. He was a direct participant in overseeing torture, according to a report by Esquire and Human Rights Watch in 2006.

Just about everyone but the US officials conducting their war on terrorism realize by now that it is this very policy that is producing more and more jihadists, and will continue to produce them until Obama, or some future less timid president, declares an end to this campaign of terror being conducted by the US itself, with its allies dragged kicking and screaming behind it.

This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. Guantanamo must be closed and remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. If that’s a problem, he can always take up Chavez’s offer. And patch up relations with him and Castro in the process. Hell, why not give back Guantanamo to Cuba as a peace offering while he’s at it? The important thing is not to blink while he’s doing what’s right, or else the jackals of war will chew him to shreds.

The latest fear among Democrats is that the gulf between them and the Republicans is widening, even as Democratic policies are gaining support among the people. Huh? They should take a leaf from FDR’s book, to fear nothing but fear alone. Let the Republicans march into the wilderness. Take control of US politics for the next two decades by following truly popular, socially just policies. Americans are not imperialists at heart. They will follow you. And be sure to close Guantanamo.

Earlier this month, the UN announced the results of an inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza. It concluded that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were:

“[I]nvolved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” (Donald Macintyre, “UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report,” Independent, May 6, 2009)

Incidents for which Israel was held responsible by the UN inquiry included:

* The deaths of three young men killed by a single IDF missile strike at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Asma school in Gaza City.

* The firing of heavy mortar rounds into the UNRWA Jabalia school, injuring seven people sheltering in the school, killing up to 40 people in the immediate vicinity and injuring a further 50.

* Aerial bombing of the UNRWA Bureij health center on the same day, causing the death of a patient, serious injuries to two other patients and injuries to nine of the health center’s employees.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA field office compound in Gaza city, combined with the use of white phosphorus, causing injuries and considerable damage to it and the surrounding buildings, and leading to the disruption of the UN’s humanitarian operations in Gaza.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA Beit Lahia school, again with the use of white phosphorus, causing the deaths of two children, aged 5 and 7, and injuries to 13 others.

Contrary to Israeli claims, the UN inquiry found no evidence that “Hamas militants” had used UN property to attack Israel or Israeli forces. Indeed, the report demanded that the UN urge Israel to retract its allegations to that effect.

The inquiry’s narrow remit was restricted to UN property and personnel; a key recommendation was that $11m compensation should be sought from Israel for damage to UN property in Gaza. But the final recommendation was that +all+ killings, injuries and damages in Gaza “should be investigated as part of an impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law.” (Julian Borger, “UN chief rejects further inquiry,” Guardian, May 6, 2009)

Shamefully, however, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the inquiry results, he rejected its authors’ call for such an investigation. He even decided not to release the full 184-page report. According to a brief item on the BBC Arabic news website, the BBC was informed by “a diplomatic source” that the United States “informed Ban’s office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks.” (Cited in Hasan Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” The Electronic Intifada, May 6, 2009.)

The sophistry of these words — “the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks” — is newspeak for “dangerous truths that would further damage the reputations of Israel and the United States.”

Ban, no doubt aware of these dangers, conveniently produced his own 27-page summary. Inter Press Service reported that the original report was thus “meticulously stripped down . . . mostly due to [alleged] political sensitivities and on security grounds.” (Thalif Deen, “UN chief defends ‘watered down’ Gaza report,” Inter Press Service, May 5, 2009) The report supposedly contained “secret information supplied by Israel” about its attacks on Gaza. (Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” op. cit.)

Ban then issued this summary together with a covering letter to the UN Security Council. In the letter, Ban said he was “carefully considering” what actions, “if any”, to take on the 11 recommendations by his own inquiry team. But he had already appeased both Israel and its powerful backers in the UN Security Council, notably the United States, by stating that he “did not plan any further inquiry.”

True to form, the Israelis had called the report “tendentious, patently biased” even before the summary was published. (”UN rejects UN probe under Israeli pressure,” Palestine Chronicle, May 6, 2009) Ban took his cue adroitly. While noting the Israeli government’s “significant reservations and objections”, he bent over backwards to praise them for their cooperation. He also spoke out, reportedly urged by Israeli ministers and officials, against “continued and indiscriminate” attacks by Hamas.

Of Circus Dogs And Whips

In effect, then, the UN Secretary General rejected his own inquiry which had been lead by Ian Martin, a former head of Amnesty International. Moreover, Ban’s effective suppression of the full report was doubtless an attempt to draw a line under the inquiry, minimizing damage to Israel and the United States.

Noam Chomsky commented on the possible role of US-Israeli “diplomacy” in the Secretary-General’s decision not to publish the full report or to proceed with a wide-ranging inquiry:

“[A]s far as I know there’s no direct evidence about what happened [behind the scenes], though it’s not hard to guess. Ban knows as well as any other Sec’y-General that criticism of the US (hence its offshoots [such as Israel]) will undermine what little there is of a UN.” (E-mail to Media Lens, May 13, 2009)

In other words, direct pressure is not always required. Indeed, it is often more efficient to have an amenable person in place who will do the master’s bidding without being told what to do. As George Orwell once observed:

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.” (Orwell, ‘As I Please,’ Tribune, 1944)

Ban Ki-moon has already demonstrated his gymnastic prowess. When he visited Gaza in January 2009, he was justifiably “appalled” at Israel’s “outrageous and totally unacceptable attack.” But his critical remarks were restricted to the attack on UN installations and personnel, not Gaza as a whole.

Hasan Abu Nimah, Jordan’s former UN ambassador, noted astutely that Ban’s “courage only went so far”:

“[His] flash of anger was limited however only to UN facilities. He spoke as if the rest of Gaza — where more than 7,000 people lay dead or injured, and thousands of homes, schools, mosques, universities, police stations and government buildings were destroyed — did not exist, or were not of UN concern.” (Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” op. cit.)

He continued:

“Whisked around in his convoy, he did not bother to stop and talk to any of Israel’s victims — the families who had just dug the remains of their loved ones from the rubble or those with horrific injuries in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals. These are the very people, the Palestinian refugees, that the UN is in Gaza to help, but there was it seems no time for them.”

Ban did condemn “the excessive use of force” by the Israelis in its massive assault on Gaza. As Abu Nimah noted, presumably the UN Secretary-General “found Israel’s attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes.” While correctly condemning Hamas rocket attacks on Israel as “violations of basic humanitarian law,” Ban neglected to say the same of Israel’s ongoing massive violations.

Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said Ban’s response to the new UN report was “disappointing”. He was clear that the inquiry had produced a “very serious and very scrupulously argued report that’s based on very careful analysis of the available evidence.” (Al Jazeera, May 5, 2009)

Yvonne Terlingen, Amnesty International representative at the United Nations, also expressed her concern at Ban Ki-moon’s stance. She told Inter Press Service [IPS]: “We are very disappointed with the Secretary-General’s reaction to what we have come to know [from the report].”

Terlingen called for a broader inquiry into the Israeli attacks by the 15-member UN Security Council. But one unnamed Arab diplomat told IPS he did not expect any investigation by the Security Council because three of the permanent members, the US, Britain and France, are “far too protective” of Israel. The secretary-general, he said, “will not pursue a broader inquiry because he is under pressure and beholden to the big powers in the Security Council.”

“It’s a lost cause,” he added, pointing out that, “Israel knows that it can get away with murder.” (Deen, “UN chief defends ‘watered down’ Gaza report,” op. cit.)

Although the UN Secretary General refused to launch a full, wide-ranging investigation under his direct mandate, Israel’s leaders have not entirely evaded scrutiny. A four-person team lead by Justice Richard Goldstone has already been appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged breaches of international law, and possible war crimes, in Gaza. But this will not have the same stamp of authority as a full-ranging, impartial investigation carried out by direct authority of the UN Secretary-General himself.

Moreover, the Goldstone investigation is likely to be severely hobbled by Israel’s refusal to cooperate and the time that has already elapsed since the assault on Gaza. Falk believes Israel is taking an obstructive stance “because it knows deep down that it made serious human rights violations.” He refutes Israel’s assertions that efforts to establish the truth are “one-sided attempts to demonize Israel” and “tarnish its reputation”:

“The real reason [for Israel’s non-cooperation] is that the facts overwhelmingly support allegations that Israel is understandably concerned that any objective inquiry would indeed confirm the allegations and create a situation in which the international community would be obliged to seek some kind of procedure for accountability.” (Press TV, “Falk tells why Israel stonewalls Gaza probe,” April 30, 2009)

The Media’s Shrug Of Indifference

While some elements of the above account could be pieced together from a handful of media reports in the corporate press, the coverage was largely fragmented, often confusing and the tone muted. Significantly, we could not find a single editorial in the British press expressing outrage, or even discomfort, at the subversion of the UN, and the evident contempt for the organization, by Israel and the US.

The most extensive coverage was in the Guardian with two articles totaling under 1,200 words. (Rory McCarthy and Ed Pilkington, “UN report accuses Israel military of negligence and urges reparations for Gaza deaths”; Julian Borger, “UN chief rejects further inquiry,” both on May 6, 2009)

An Independent article devoted just 654 words to the report and Ban Ki-moon’s rejection of it. (Donald Macintyre, “UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report,” Independent, May 6, 2009)

Meanwhile, the Times exerted itself by expending all of 99 words on the story. (James Bone, “UN condemns Israel over phosphorus,” Times, May 6, 2009)

And nobody could accuse the Daily Telegraph of avoiding the matter. It granted the story two lines — a total of 47 words. (Alex Spillius, Daily Telegraph, “You must accept the goal of a Palestinian state, Biden tells Israel,” May 6, 2009)

In the days since Ban Ki-moon came to the defense of Israel and its powerful backers in the UN Security Council, the British news media has shrugged off any disquiet it might have had.

While there have been UN investigations of war crimes committed in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, somehow war crimes committed in Gaza do not deserve the same scrutiny and accountability. The omission is not unique, of course. There has never been a UN inquiry into war crimes committed by the United States in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The UN would surely be destroyed if such a move were ever seriously contemplated.

For the corporate media, then, there is no need for forensic analysis of this latest cynical sidelining of the UN, a body set up to promote world peace after all. There has been no rottweiler unearthing of this UN capitulation which, once again, effectively covers up major atrocities committed by Israel with heavy backing from its allies in the UN Security Council. But then, they are ‘our’ allies and, by definition, ‘the good guys.’ The media instinctively know this is the script they must follow.

The meeting at the White House on 6 May was fashioned to give the impression that the new US administration is both “serious” and “committed” about resolving the crises plaguing Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are imprudently reduced to that of a Taliban resurgence in the former, and a Taliban- inspired militant encroachment in the latter. Obama declared the meeting “extraordinarily productive” as the three nations, he said, are joined by the common goal to “defeat Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

The skewed reading of reality didn’t cease there. “I am pleased that these two men, elected leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat that we face and have reaffirmed their commitment to confronting it,” Obama said. Both leaders listened solemnly as to reflect the level of their “seriousness”.

For a fleeting moment one did in fact hope that Obama would bring with him more than a new language; rather, an entirely new take on US foreign policy. That hope is already in tatters.

“Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The meeting at the White House reflected the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan. Indeed, nests of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other extremists sheltering on the Pakistani side of the border have become a grave threat to Pakistan itself,” opined a Boston Globe editorial. But the Globe also counseled: “As recent events suggest, US military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably provoke anger and indignation among civilians.”

This is as much as most US media — and of course, the US administration — are willing to concede as far as US responsibility in lethal wars, civil strife and militancy in both countries is concerned. In fact, if one is to delineate a major difference in the Bush and Obama administrations regarding Afghanistan, it’s the fact that Obama apologizes when the number of innocent civilians killed by US air strikes is too harrowing to ignore. Another notable difference is that he has committed 17,000 additional troops to the already war-devastated country, promising more bloodshed.

“I wish to express my personal regret and certainly the sympathy of our administration on the loss of civilian life in Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in her public apology to the killing of over 100 civilians in two Afghan villages 4 May. The apology, however, was obliquely qualified by the US military in comments made by Tech Sergeant Chuck Marsh on 9 May: “Reports also indicate that Taliban fighters deliberately forced villagers into houses from which they then attacked ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and Coalition forces,” he said.

So, somehow, the US is still not responsible.

Now the war is flaring up in Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani families have fled the area, and the main town of Migora has been virtually emptied of its inhabitants. Reuters reported that, “Pakistani forces attacked Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley with artillery and helicopters after the United States called on the government to show its commitment to fighting militancy.” One has to wonder who is giving the orders in this foolish war, anyway? Moreover, does Obama genuinely think that the Pakistani “Taliban” can be defeated using the exact approach that failed against the Taliban of Afghanistan?

The escalation in Pakistan is not entirely surprising, however, as US officials and media pundits have been adamant in advising the new administration that it was not Afghanistan that posed the greater threat to US interests, but Pakistan. It was similar to the attitude of neoconservatives in the Bush administration after its failure in Iraq. It was not Iraq that the US should have attacked, but Iran, they tirelessly parroted, hoping to generate yet another war.

What we are not told, however, is that unremitting US bombings of the utterly poor and neglected northern provinces of Pakistan have garnered untold animosity towards the US and its central government allies. It provoked, in some areas, total chaos and lawlessness, which in turn gave rise to the Pakistani “Taliban”. History is repeating itself, but the US administration is taking no notice of the obvious pattern.

A Pakistan writer, Abd Al-Ghafar Aziz, wrote for Al-Jazeera’s Arabic website: “Since the US attack on Afghanistan, the province [of Balochistan] has been accused of supporting terrorism and harboring the leaders of Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Since then, US planes, especially drones, have been striking what it calls ‘precious targets’, resulting in the death of over 15,000 people.” Aziz described the people of that region “like orphans without shelter, and without protection.” Naturally, tribe leaders, militant groups and others moved to fill the gap.

If there is one outstanding similarity between the Afghanistan and Pakistan cases it is the fact the US is using the same flawed logic that responds to most delicate conflicts with bullets, whether those of its own or its allies. If the new administration is keenly interested in reversing the misfortunes of that region, it has to understand the uniqueness of every country and appreciate the untold harm inflicted on civilians by the US and other militaries. Only dialogue and truly respecting the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Pakistan can begin to stabilize the fractious situation.

There are an estimated one million Pakistanis already on the run in the northern and eastern parts of the country. They are threatened by fighting, hunger and all sorts of predators, including US drones circling overhead.

In so doing, Obama has embraced a new version the old Adolf Eichmann defense of following orders — “my lawyer said I could do it.” Do not try this at home. According to our current president, only Justice Department lawyers can secretly authorize the commission of crimes.

Thus, in an August 2002 memo, Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee clinically described a long string of cruelties that the CIA planned to inflict on Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda terrorist. Then they calmly explained why these cruelties would not, alone or in combination, constitute torture. No “reasonable man,” the lawyers advised, would expect to experience “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” — of the sort that would “shock the contemporary conscience” — from anything the CIA planned to do, with the possible exception of waterboarding. But even that would not be illegal, so long as the CIA did not really intend to drown the fellow. As proof of the agency’s good intentions, Justice Department lawyer Steven G. Bradbury cited plans to have a doctor standing by to perform a tracheotomy, if necessary, to open a victim’s windpipe before he choked to death.

The officials who planned these war crimes and the agents and doctors who carried them out knew exactly what they were doing. With Eichmann-like efficiency, they specified every step, while Justice Department lawyers and White House officials conspired to pardon them in advance. All the conspirators knew these practices were war crimes, but President Obama has now instructed his Justice Department not to prosecute those who carried out the CIA’s interrogation protocols. That is not a case-by-case exercise of prosecutorial discretion by an independent Justice Department; this is a wholesale obstruction of justice by the White House.

During August 2002, CIA agents waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times. In March 2003 they waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, contradicting an earlier claim, now recanted, that once had been enough. But in 2005, a year after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Steven Bradbury secretly ruled that repeated waterboarding, even on this scale, does not constitute torture. It is not even cruel, he wrote, because being held down and nearly drowned does not cause “severe” pain. Nor is “prolonged” psychological harm likely to result from being nearly drowned 183 times.

After reviewing these depravities, Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director, tried mightily to keep them secret. When that failed, he persuaded the president that the agents were just doing their “duty.” He did not explain how the CIA’s torturers differed from the young soldiers who went to jail for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or why CIA interrogators should escape punishment for doing what their Communist counterparts did to American captives during the Korean War.

By choosing not to prosecute the agents, the Obama administration has endorsed the Nixon-Bush-Cheney principle that law is optional whenever national security is alleged to be at stake. Yes, the president says, torture is bad policy, but it need not be criminal, so long as Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., takes care not to enforce the laws against it. Holder’s lawyers even oppose allowing former prisoners to sue their torturers, because government torturers work for the “sovereign,” and the sovereign cannot be sued without his consent.

We know why the Democrats are adopting Republican tactics. When push comes to shove, there is nothing that career politicians of either party won’t trade away for short-term political advantage. At the moment, Senate Republicans are blocking confirmation of Obama’s appointees until he promises not to prosecute Bush & Co. for their war crimes. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have an expensive agenda to enact, so they are willing to trade away what’s left of our constitutional government to get their program passed.

One has to wonder if these compromising politicians ever pause long enough to ask themselves: “What will my children think of me when they read about this decision in their history books?”

This war without independent witness in itself is a crime against humanity.

It so happens, the civilians who are caught in this conflict don’t seem to have any real “no-fire” zones to run for safety. Over 50,000 civilians are said to be trapped with the Tigers, in a 4 square kilometer pocket of coast-land, surrounded by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces.

More than 100 children had been killed in weekend shelling which the United Nations called a civilian “bloodbath.”

The UN Security Council must not treat this as a side issue, but for the sake of humanity, the Tamil civilian matter ought to be at the top of the agenda. All of them have suffered more than enough. It is so sad, that these innocent human beings, are being used as mere political tools.

The Western Governments and the UN must set an ethical example to the world. To be seen to send a strong message by action, that the value of human beings cannot be degraded for selfish and temporal reasons.

All human life without regard to race, creed, or color is precious. Tamil civilians must be saved, each one of them: women, children and men. Tomorrow is too late.

Although the text is occasionally uneven, with most of the testimony coming out of Iraq, Israel and Palestine, there is a consistency to the stories here. Some mothers express an inconsolable anger while others seem to have opted for an almost zen-like acceptance of their children’s deaths in the world’s battles. The consistency referred to is not in how they deal with their children’s deaths, but in their common desire that no other mothers suffer like they have. The most evocative stories come from Iraq and Palestine, in part because Galleymore spent the most time in those two broken nations, but perhaps also because the perpetrators of the death in those places are so close to Galleymore’s own life story. Indeed, her son served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This fact was not only the motivation for Galleymore’s visit to Iraq and other nations in the Middle East, but was also a motivation to write this book. It is part of her attempt to understand not only what her nation and its ally Israel have done to their chosen enemies that spurred this project but also to understand what compelled her son to join the US military.

Galleymore addresses this very issue in the book’s section on the United States. To be honest, this part of the text drew the least sympathy from this reader. Much of what is written here is difficult to sympathize with. We read the letters of a soldier describing his unit’s interactions with the Iraqi people–indiscriminate killing and fear accompanied by a growing hatred of the mission and the people he was told he was sent to liberate. More stories of poorly equipped US troops going into battles they should never have fought because they should never have been in Iraq. Underlying it all is a failure to understand that there is no lasting glory in their mission beyond the individual acts performed on that battlefield where they don’t belong. After these tales of the hardships of the occupiers, Galleymore asks the question she was asked by some of her interviewees in those nations under the US (or its ally Israel) military’s boot. How can American mothers allow their children to join in this endeavor of conquering and occupation? Why don’t the mothers of US children considering the military just tell them “no?”

In response, Galleymore considers the cultural assumptions that create the dynamic whereby young Americans join the military despite their mothers’ objections. In the United States, writes Galleymore, 18-year-olds can “make legally binding choices independent of parents and family, including the choice to enlist in the military.” Many parents go along with this choice, believing that the military will somehow teach their child discipline. It may very well do that, writes Galleymore, but it also teaches those children to kill. This is what most Americans refuse to openly acknowledge: that they have allowed their child to learn how to kill other humans. In more collectivist cultures like many of those in the Middle East and Central Asia, argues the author, where family, clan, and parental respect are paramount, it is extremely unlikely that a son would enlist without permission from the head of the family.

Then again, here in the United States, the military is everywhere–schools, television, video games. Our culture is permeated with the military’s presence. Boys and girls as young as eleven go to summer camps sponsored by the US Army. Recruiters roam the halls of many high schools and shopping malls looking for future soldiers and marines. Malls lend shop space to military recruiters for a weekend geared toward elementary and middle school age children that includes all the free video games kids want to play. All they need to provide the recruiters on site is their name and social security number. A few months later the phone calls, text messages and emails began coming, encouraging the youngster to consider joining the military. If these recruiters were working for a gang besides the military, they would be chased out of town and condemned for the predators they are.

The United States has the mother of two young girls living in the White House now. From all appearances Michelle Obama seems to be a wonderful mom. One wonders what she would tell a military recruiter if they called her home looking for Malia or sent her oldest daughter an email extolling the virtues of enlisting in the military. Hopefully, she would be appalled at the sheer audacity of a recruiter attempting to influence a child. Yet, this is what the military does. Without shame. Of course, if the United States was not so insistent on maintaining and expanding its reach via the sword, then perhaps the military wouldn’t feel compelled to kidnap the minds of middle-schoolers. One way to change (and perhaps the only way) the drive for empire Washington and Wall Street have locked this nation into is by resisting that drive. A good place to start is by making the mothers of those children who fight Washington’s wars aware of the consequences of their inaction is. A good place to start this awareness is at the top. So, let me suggest that when you finish reading Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War & Terror you mail your copy to Michelle Obama at the White House. Perhaps she’ll take the time to read it.

In the early hours of May 1st, Sabino Augusto Montanaro, the Interior Minister in Paraguay during the repressive Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), returned to his country after 20 years in Honduras. Doctors say 86-year-old Montanaro is suffering from senility and Parkinson’s disease. Montanaro’s lawyer Luis Troche said his client returned to the country not to apologize for his crimes or face justice, but because, “according to Paraguayan law, he is too old to go to jail.”

Montanaro served as a minister under Stroessner from 1966 to the end of the dictatorship, and played a key role in the regime’s repression, directing the abduction, torture and murder of political opponents of Stroessner. Now, upon his return to Paraguay, he faces various criminal charges, and thousands of angry citizens, many of whom greeted his return to the country with protests, and calls for the ex-minister’s imprisonment.

Martin Almada, a human rights lawyer and former political prisoner, discovered documents which prove that Montanaro played a key role in Operation Condor, a unified, cross-border network of repression coordinated by military dictatorships in the region throughout the 1970 and ‘80s.

In 2006, Stroessner died at age 93 in Brasilia without facing justice for the repression that took place under his watch, including the disappearance of some 400 people and the torture of 18,000, according to a Truth and Justice Commission.

Paraguayan Bishop Mario Melanio Medina told the ABC Color newspaper that Montanaro was Stroessner’s “right hand man” and “number one [in command] after Stroessner.”

Rubber Bullets and Memory

Around noon at the May 1st rally, some 1,000 protesters began marching toward the private hospital where Montaro was a patient. While pounding drums and yelling political chants, the marchers paraded down the middle of many streets that were empty due to the holiday. The chants and drumming increased in volume when the marchers passed the red headquarters of the Colorado Party, Stroessner’s party, which lost its 60-year long grip on the country with the 2008 election of Fernando Lugo.

The march reached a climax upon arriving at the hospital. Dozens of riot cops surrounded the building, protecting the ex-minister by creating a wall with their thick metal shields, while hundreds of victims, and family members of victims of Montanaro’s repression, rallied in the streets outside, demanding justice.

When the majority of the marchers arrived at the hospital, one group charged the front door, trying to break through the police line and get to Montanaro. The police responded with brutal force that left one man bloody and stunned.

As the numbers of protesters outside the hospital increased, news spread that a judge ordered Montanaro’s transfer from the private hospital to a police hospital. Protesters responded by gathering around the side of the hospital where ambulances leave and arrive. Police formed another wall in this section of the hospital to protect Montanaro’s ambulance and allow for his safe transferal.

When the gates opened, and the ambulance transporting Montanaro began to leave, police pushed protesters back, crashing night sticks and shields on the bodies of the marchers, who responded by throwing stones at the police and ambulance. Protesters managed to get to the ambulance, breaking its windows with rocks as the police repression increased and the ambulance sped off. Police dispersed the crowd with a barrage of rubber bullets that injured a number of protesters.

Later, a vigil including hundreds of people gathered in front of the police hospital. “We, the relatives of the victims, are going to mount a special vigilance so this criminal has no space nor privilege in which to hide, or to argue that he’s insane to escape justice,” said Rolando Goiburu, the son of Dr. Agustin Goiburu who was disappeared under Stroessner, according to EFE.

Earlier in the day President Lugo arrived to echo the protesters sentiments. He spoke of Montanaro’s return: “I promise that there will be justice, the same mistakes that previous governments made will not be repeated, and there won’t be any privileges for anyone.” He told protesters outside the hospital that this is a “good opportunity to recuperate historical memory.”

Judith Rolón, a daughter of Martín Rolón who was disappeared during the Stroessner dictatorship, said Montanaro “will not have peace until he says where the disappeared are.”