Israel is a parliamentary democracy represented by a very large number of parties, with universal suffrage for all citizens, regardless of race, religion or sex …

— CIA World Fact Book, 2011

This week a sobering and highly informative closed door seminar was held on the plight of Palestinian Prisoners in the elegant surroundings of London’s Westminster Central Hall, a stone’s throw away from the Houses of Parliament and the 11th century Westminster Abbey, the all affirmation of stability and continuity — in starkest contrast to testimony at the proceedings of the meeting.

The seminar, hosted by Middle East Monitor, had been planned and organized at the height of the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike. Although most prisoners are reported to have ended their desperation-driven fasts following a deal with the Israeli authorities, the issues surrounding their shocking treatment and imprisonment are unchanged.

Sabah al Mukhtar, President of the Arab Lawyers Association, who chaired the gathering, opened by reminding that, “A basic right of a people under occupation is to resist.”

Further, that the Fourth Geneva Convention is specific as to the treatment of prisoners, with absolute outlawing of abuse and stipulation of legal conditions which must include humane treatment, being regarded as innocent until proven guilty and speedy access to legal representation — a far cry from the conditions for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Lord Alf Dubs, who serves on the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, talked of a visit to the West Bank last year. Unable to visit a prison, he did attend an Israeli Military Court and was shocked at what he witnessed.

Remarking on security so tight that not even business cards were allowed in, he was struck by the age of the prisoners. Many were children, including one of fourteen. A fifteen year old was in tears in the dock, a sight Lord Dubs found profoundly disturbing.

The majority of children, he learned, were picked up in the early hours of the morning and incarcerated with no access by parents, no lawyer until they were in the dock, thus no explanation of procedures, discussion of case and, above all, semblance of reassurance. Handcuffs were taken off as they came through the door of the Court, but all were in shackles in the dock. Most defendants were: “just throwing stones.” The Court had no cctv; thus, no record of any miscarriage of justice.

Parents are often denied access to detained children for at least two months. Article 77 of the Geneva Convention states that: “Children shall be the object of special respect (and provided) with the care and aid they require.” The reality, concluded His Lordship, was “a stain” on the Israeli establishment.

Chairman of the UK-based charity, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Tareq Shrourou, stated that at every stage childrens’ rights are abused “from detention to incarceration, to release.” Sixteen and seventeen year olds are still treated as adults in detention. In the West Bank it is not the police, but the army who conduct arrests, whether of children or adults.

Children, as are adults, are blindfolded, in addition to being handcuffed and shackled. Blindfolding is also in defiance of the Geneva Convention.

“That the military might of Israel is threatened by children throwing stones is laughable”, commented al Mukhtar, adding that the whole concept of Military Children’s Courts were legally “outlandish.”

“In the past eleven years alone, around seven thousand five hundred children, some as young as twelve years, are estimated to have been detained, interrogated, and imprisoned …”¹

It should be noted that a Palestinian detainee can be interrogated for a period of one hundred and eighty days, during which he or she can be denied a lawyer for ninety days. During interrogation a detainee can be subject to varying levels of torture, physical and/or psychological.

This was graphically described by an urbane, quietly spoken man (name withheld by request) who described the reality of being detained for the first time at fifteen years old.

“I was imprisoned in 1987, 1988, 1990 and 1992 then deported to South Lebanon.”

In 1987, as a student, he had been one of a number who were taken from their school by the authorities, to a detention centre. He was, he said, punched, interrogated, beaten for two months, then released for lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

In 1988, he stated, in the night, his home “was stormed.” Soldiers rushed to his bedroom pointing guns at him as he awoke and struggled up. He was taken, blindfolded, his hands tied with plastic cuffs.

In prison he was “put in a yard. There were eight rooms on one side and cells on the other. In each room there was a different torture. I visited all eight.”

His head, he said, was banged hard against the wall, on the table as he sat; he was near choked by extreme pressure on his throat; a ruler was banged hard on his nose “in a way that makes you lose control of your head.” Eventually he lost consciousness.

Made to raise his head, stunning blows under the chin resulted.

He described a “breaking chair fall” after which “you are punched whichever way you move.”  And, he recounted, “female soldiers practice sex in front of you. Even as a child I knew how to keep a blind eye.” Shades of Abu Ghraib.

Failure to confess resulted in threats of death, “But I had nothing to tell.” He was finally released after sixty-four days due to no evidence.

He was arrested and released without charge again in 1990. In 1992 he was deported to Lebanon.

He was just twenty years old, with a life’s horrors already lived and childhood’s chrysalis years of discovery and approaching adulthood lost to Israeli jail’s nightmares.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory, is specific:

In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.

Article 37(b) of the Convention adds:

The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child… shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.²

The anomaly of the uniqueness of the military court system in Israel was addressed in detail as “an exception under all laws. A military court must deal with military people, not civilians, not minors.” A further anomaly is that there is no legal appeal system. An appeal is “an administrative decision, made usually not by a judge, or even a lawyer.”

Khaled Almudallal, representing Ufree, the European network to support the rights of Palestinian Prisoners, reminded that, incredibly, there are twenty-seven Palestinian parliamentarians of the Palestinian Legislative Council and two Ministers being held in detention.

A near forgotten tragedy has an equally forgotten background:

As candidates prepared for elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in 2006, the Israeli authorities began a campaign of detention and imprisonment  … The 2006 Palestinian elections were overseen by international observers who declared them to be free and fair (thus) Hamas (became) the democratically elected Palestinian government.

Wrong kind of democracy, thus the democratically elected remain illegally detained by representatives of a people who, ironically, were given by James Arthur Balfour, a “national home” within “Palestine.” The famed letter has no mention of a “State”.  This “home”, it specifies, is conditional on:

 … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …

The injustices of historic enormity, legal and territorial, in violation of human rights under a swathe of international legislation, continue unabated – to be met by “the silence of the world”, commented al Mukhtar, adding, regarding the prisoners: “As far as I know, Middle East Peace Envoy Tony Blair, has been equally silent.”

However, the international community is not silent. The Boycott movement gains massive strength. Coincidentally, on the day of the Seminar, the Israeli Ambassador to South Africa had been due to address the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The event was cancelled by the University’s Deputy Vice Chancellor, Joseph Ayee, at twenty-four hour’s notice, due to the “likely reputational damage” it would bring the university.³

Politics Professor, Lubna Nadvi, said the university’s decision represented the general sentiment among students and staff. “Israel is fast becoming a pariah state, like Apartheid South Africa did, that no one really wants to be associated with, including academics and students,” the Professor is quoted as saying.

Yet destruction of Palestinian lives and history, sacred to all nations, is ongoing and six thousand prisoners remain in jail, and in beyond anything that would be recognized as a justice system in a functioning democracy.

In spite of the hunger strike agreement, there is so little progress from Israel, that there are fears that the only negotiating tool those held have – their lives – may be again put on the line.

Organizations represented at the Seminar are working closely with those involved in the Northern Ireland hunger strike to devise a way forward for both sides.

One suggestion, from British MP Jeremy Corbyn, is forming an international friendship network with prisoners, especially corresponding.

At a “Special Session on Children” at the United Nations on May 9. 2002, the Israeli Minister of Justice stated, in a lengthy address, Israel’s commitment to:

Extending the hope and promise of childhood to the millions of children that continue to suffer, even in an era of unprecedented global prosperity, means reducing poverty, protecting children from the scourge of war and violence … providing all children with adequate healthcare, clean water, basic education, and a nurturing and protective environment in which they can grow and thrive.

The yawning chasm between fine aspirational statements and reality on the ground could hardly be starker. For every child taken into custody, childhood dies at that moment.

For every parent arbitrarily held, they know not when they will see their children and family again. Some have shared none of their children’s formative years at all.

“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children”, wrote Ireland’s Bobby Sands, who died on the 66th day of his protest hunger strike, on May 5. 1981, four days short of his birthday. When there is nothing left to lose to achieve justice, those deprived will eventually sacrifice the last tragic bargaining tool in humanity’s creative box to achieve it.

Since the guests became occupiers, Palestine’s children and their parents have now waited sixty-four years to laugh freely.

1. Graham Peebles, “Confined cruelty: Israeli treatment of Palestinian minors“, Middle East Monitor, March 26, 2012
2. Shazia Arshad, “Child Prisoners“, Middle East Monitor, November 9, 2011
3. Raphael Ahren, “Jerusalem slams Pretoria’s ‘unbelievable ignorance’”, The Times of Israel, May 21, 2012

Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran’s nuclear activities, and (3) a permanent agreement that verifiably assures that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Supports: (1) the universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and (2) U.S. policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Rejects any U.S. policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat. (emphasis mine)

The resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt.

The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability of said manufacturing. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were.

Further, examining the House’s reasoning for denouncing Iran as a repressive regime highlights severe hypocrisy:

Whereas, on December 26, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution denouncing the serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran, including torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’, as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’

Switch in that paragraph “the United States” for “Iran” and you might think we should be sanctioning ourselves. Regarding the first several accusations, consider this: the United States tortures foreign adversaries by proxy, abuses accused whistle-blowers in prison before trial, detains more prisoners than any country on Earth, and continues to pass state laws assaulting women’s rights. Perhaps the most hypocritical, though, is the accusation of the repression of peaceful assembly. Just two days after the House passed this resolution, Chicago riot police beat protesters with nightsticks, hit others with CPD vehicles, and used sound canons to disrupt peaceful demonstrators against the NATO summit. So the idea that the U.S. deems Iran a barbaric nation that represses political speech is extremely two-faced at best.

The worst part about the bill, though, is not what policies it specifically introduces or accusations it announces but rather what it signifies more broadly: the U.S. is taking the next step in the war on Iran that has already begun.

For one thing, Israel has already teamed up with a U.S.-backed terror group within Iran to assassinate nuclear scientists, serving both the temporary, practical purpose of inhibiting Iran’s nuclear progress and the long-term, psychological purpose of instilling fear within Iran and its fledgling nuclear program.

More insidiously, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on Iran that most describe as “crippling” and that all should describe as acts of war. Just today, the Senate voted unanimously to escalate those very sanctions. While President Obama may say that sanctions are intended to isolate Iran’s leaders in their nuclear position, it is citizens who bear the burden of these economic moves. Look to Iraq for the devastating effects, where a senior U.N. official estimated that U.N.-imposed sanctions in the 1990s killed a staggering 500,000 children under the age of 5. They don’t call ‘em “crippling” for nothing.

We should also look to Iraq to understand how this bipartisan process of escalation works, from sanctions to bombing to occupation. Arguing against sanctions on Iran in April 2010, Rep. Ron Paul recalled how sanctions on Iraq led inevitably to war:

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

The Iraq war did not begin with the 2003 invasion – it began with the 1990s embargo. Sanctions on Iraq not only killed hundreds of thousands, but they structured the narrative on Iraq to winnow out peaceful options on the path to war. And the same is true of Iran. Now debates on Iran focus on whether Ahmadinejad will relent in his pursuit of weapons, whether sanctions are “working” sufficiently, or where the U.S. and Israel should draw “red lines” for attack.

President Obama called last month’s “negotiations” with Iran that country’s “last chance,” effectively threatening to escalate sanctions or initiate an attack if Iran didn’t cease and desist its nuclear enrichment program entirely. How are those “negotiations”? How is that “diplomacy”? Threatening Iran to completely submit to the U.S.’s will to get nothing in return is not a discussion – it’s bullying.

What would Iran have to gain in that situation? Iran is seeking to defend itself from nuclear-armed bullies surrounding it constantly. Passively complying would only speed up the U.S. plan to replace the Iranian regime with one even more compliant.

But the United States will not relent on Iran – just as it did not relent on Iraq. Examine again the House resolution’s first principle:

…it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening.

Compare that with President Bill Clinton’s 1998 remarks on Iraq:

One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.

This is how American bipartisanship – or more accurately, duopoly – works. Both parties want war with Iran, the way both parties wanted war with Iraq. It is in both of their interests – appeasing Israel and its chief lobby, AIPAC, and posturing for their respective bases. Republicans take the hard line on our “enemies,” using blatantly aggressive language, refusing to “apologize for America” and reducing our victims to less than human. Democrats take the more “pragmatic” approach, adopting “national security” rhetoric based in protecting Americans that disguises the exact same policies. The Senate vote to go to war with Iraq, after all, didn’t barely squeak through on Republican support: it passed 96-4. (Now, 9/11 catalyzed the whole process in Iraq and made dissent even less popular, but the biggest antiwar protest in recorded history couldn’t sway more than four measly votes in the Senate.)

This endless posturing is how President Obama can be accused of being “soft on terror” and simultaneously escalate sanctions on Iran and massive drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

This is why, in the interest of war, sanctions by one party is a huge gift to the other. If Mitt Romney is elected this year, he’ll likely announce that Obama’s sanctions were insufficient and encourage an Israeli attack on Iran behind closed doors. If Obama is re-elected, he’ll continue on the path he’s currently on: allowing Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists, officially recognizing the terror group seeking regime change in Iran, and escalating sanctions that cripple the Iranian people and isolate its leaders.

Citing Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent on liberal support for Obama’s escalated drone strikes, here’s Stephen Walt on ‘Why Hawks Should Vote for Obama’:

Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It’s the flipside of the old “Nixon Goes to China” meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don’t have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government’s permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.

So if you vote for Barack Obama because you think that Mitt Romney would put troops on the ground, you’ll only be doing it to make yourself feel better. You’ll be playing right into the partisan posturing that seeks to fabricate a meaningful difference between the two major parties, both with long histories of support for wars of aggression. You’ll be fundamentally misunderstanding how American duopoly works: both parties decry each other for tactically approaching the same policies differently in the interest of electing their own representatives to power. Both parties want war – they just want to play it to their respective bases properly.

If you think Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, that Ralph Nader ruined the antiwar movement and George Bush is all to blame, point me to where Gore opposed Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq when he was Vice President. In the meantime, read how Gore argued for regime change in Iraq a few short months before Bush invaded: “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

If you think Bush’s war was a terrible mistake that warranted John Kerry’s election in 2004, read Kerry on Iraq two months before the invasion:

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…

Find more quotes from Democrats leading up to and supportive of Bush’s 2003 invasion here.

Liberals criticize President Obama for escalating drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, aggressively persecuting Bradley Manning, illegally invading Libya, offering cuts to Social Security, and immunizing the war crimes and torture of the Bush administration – but many same liberals say that despite all of these transgressions, the ostensible likelihood of Mitt Romney attacking Iran makes them feel they have to re-elect the president.

If this were true, wouldn’t these liberals be criticizing Obama’s sanctions on Iran? Wouldn’t they have abandoned Clinton, Gore, and Kerry after their comments on Iraq? More to the point, if these liberals despise war so much, why aren’t Obama’s surge in Afghanistan or expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen deal-breakers for re-election?

If you actually don’t want war with Iran, you have to help end duopoly. You can’t support either of the two establishment parties who feed the military-industrial complex and fear-monger voters into submission. We must make it known that the people want peace – meaning no sanctions, no assassinations, no threats of war.

We must make war making and fear mongering unacceptable. Come Election Day, we can vote third party, or boycott the election, or protest to shut down military recruitment centers or drone bases. But we can’t fund or vote for the war parties – our victims can’t afford it. No votes for empire, no money for war. No exceptions.

The prosecutors of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had not done their homework, though their argument here is that it was a “clerical error”.  While it is not clear at this stage, it seems that between 2 million to 8 million pages of case files and witness statements were not disclosed to the defence team.  These altogether amount to 40 thousand documents relevant to the first 24 witnesses that would have been called between the end of this month and July (Telegraph, May 17).

How that disclosure did not take place is itself a reflection about what legal proceedings have become – a matter of downloading, uploading and retrieving documents from a database.  It so happened that those documents were never ‘uploaded’.  “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience”, wrote the prosecutors to Mladic’s lawyer.

What this seemingly bungling prosecution hopes to show is that former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic issued instructions to Mladic to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica”.  Mladic himself, on hearing  of Karadzic’s document ‘Six Strategic Goals of Serbian People in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ presented on May 12, 1992, made no secret of the awe and bloody terror that was being proposed.  “Do you think you just move people like that, as if they were a set of keys?  What you are asking me to do, gentlemen, is called genocide”.

The statement has not been taken to be a mitigating one.  Journalist Refik Hodzic saw it less an appeal to the kinder side of humanity than a means “to ensure everyone was on the same page” (Al Jazeera, May 17). Commissioned to undertake the task, Mladic did proclaim after the fall of the not so protected enclave of Srebrenica that, “The time has finally come for revenge against Turks [Bosnian Muslims] who live in the area.”

Even with this apparent gold mine of documentary evidence, the prosecutors fudged it, showing how history can be made by seemingly small errors.  Judge Alphons Orie could only describe this failing as an “unpleasant surprise” while Mladic’s defence lawyer was crowing when describing the oversight as “unprecedented in the history of the tribunal”.

Till that surprise, the prosecutors had been setting the scene – the role Mladic is said to have played behind the killing of 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.  He was portrayed as casual before massacre, a brute who proved happy to attend a wedding even as his Vojska Republike Srpske forces perpetrated their deeds.  “The VRS”, advanced UN prosecutor Peter McCloskey, “was a professional army which carried out orders with incredible discipline, organisation and military efficiency.  Capturing, transporting, murdering and burying over 7000 men and boys, at first in total secrecy from the outside world, was a truly amazing feat of utter brutality.”

The trial has already been pencilled in for two years, though court officialdom tends to be rather lax in matters of case management.  Such laxity can be fatal in the lessons of history, showing how court rooms are often inadequate venues of moral instruction.  They do, in some cases, become the forums for revisionist martyrs.  It certainly will have no constructive effect on individuals such as the president of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik, who is on record as claiming that Sarajevo was never besieged.  To suggest otherwise, Dodik claims, is itself an act forecasting the cleansing of Serbs from the city.

Amnesty International, in its damning report of the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia: Dismantling Dissent (DDE),states that from March to November 2011 “at least 108 opposition party members and six journalists have been arrested for alleged involvement with various proscribed terrorist groups.” By November they were all charged with crimes under the internationally criticised Anti Terrorist Proclamation. In addition, Amnesty continues, “six journalists, two opposition party members and one human rights defender, all living in exile, were charged in absentia.”

The ‘T’ word, as former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan called terrorism, is the umbrella term used by the Ethiopian government (amongst others) to justify the unjust, the dishonest and the criminal. If there is a terrorist organisation flourishing in Ethiopia, committing crimes against humanity and violating the human rights of the people, it is State terrorism delivered by the EPRDF government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as this UN definition of terrorism makes clear:

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable.

Fear of the government, fear of reprisal, of violence and [false] imprisonment casts a deep shadow across the people of Ethiopia, whose human rights are being ignored by the Meles regime that seized power twenty years ago and has brutalised and systematically restricted the people’s freedom and human rights ever since.

Lawless Lawmakers

In 2009 the Ethiopian government passed legislation on the highly controversial Anti Terrorism Proclamation. Human Rights Watch (HRW) that year looked closely at what was then the proposed law and amongst other recommendations, stated:

If implemented this law could provide the Ethiopian government with a potent instrument to crack down on political dissent, including peaceful political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy and … it would permit long-term imprisonment and even the death penalty for “crimes” that bear no resemblance, under any credible definition, to terrorism. It would in certain cases deprive defendants of the right to be presumed innocent, and of protections against use of evidence obtained through torture.

Needless to say, the law was passed almost entirely as drafted, duly implemented and has since been used solely to silence dissent. Amnesty International, in its report, found that:

The prolonged series of arrests and prosecutions indicates a systematic use of the law and the pretext of counter-terrorism by the Ethiopian government to silence people who criticise or question their actions and policies, especially opposition politicians and the independent media.

It is the utilisation and enforcement of this law that is enabling the Ethiopian government to quash opposition and free speech within the country and intimidate those voices for fairness and justice abroad. The legislation allows the government to ban free association and to arrest and imprison anyone who has the courage to speak out against the government and their many human rights violations. The police, who were already commonly acting outside of the law, with little or no knowledge of human rights, were given new powers. HRW, in its analysis, reported:

The draft Proclamation grants the police the power to make arrests without a warrant, so long as the officer reasonably suspects that the person is committing or has committed a terrorist act. The Ethiopian constitution requires that a person taken into custody must be brought before a court within 48 hours and informed of the reasons for their arrest — a protection that is already systematically violated.

This constitutional requirement is dutifully ignored. Arrested under the Anti Terrorist Proclamation, individuals are held in confinement for weeks, sometimes months, without charge and denied legal support. Even before this draconian legislation was enforced, according to HRW,  “Ethiopian police routinely detain people without charge for months, and sometimes ignore judicial orders for release.”

Five From Many

In January five more people were convicted in the Ethiopian Federal High Court of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, and money laundering. Evidence against the three journalists, an opposition leader, and a woman, Hirut Kifle Woldeyesus, was made up primarily of online criticism of the government and plans to stage peaceful political protest, none of which constitute acts of terrorism. This is common as Amnesty found in the 114 cases they investigated in their detailed report:

Much of the evidence against those charged involves items that do not appear to amount to terrorism or criminal wrongdoing. Rather many items of evidence cited appear to be illustrations of individuals exercising their right to freedom of expression, acting peacefully and legitimately.

Two of the journalists tried in January were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment while Elias Kifle (tried in absentia), editor of the web-based journal Ethiopian Review, received his second life sentence [emphasis mine]. These cases are simply the most recent in a long line of miscarriages of justice, where the government has exercised an abuse of power and in the name of justice imprisoned the innocent. A further 24 journalists and opposition party members are awaiting trial, many of whom could face the death penalty, for trumped up charges which amount to nothing more than journalists exercising their constitutional and moral right to freedom of speech.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, stated in a meeting of UN human rights investigators in February:

Journalists, bloggers and others advocating for increased respect for human rights should not be subject to pressure for the mere fact that their views are not in alignment with those of the Government.

Journalists must be free to speak out against the government, to criticise policies of persecution, to highlight the suffering of the people and to draw attention to the multiple human rights abuses taking place within Ethiopia. UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, declared:

Journalists play a crucial role in promoting accountability of public officials by investigating and informing the public about human rights violations, they should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished.

However,  all those speaking out against the EPRDF’s criminality and repression are subject not simply to “pressure”, or “criminal proceedings”, but violent arrest, torture and false imprisonment or, indeed, death.

Free the Innocent

These five men and women, who were mistreated in custody, falsely imprisoned and like others, including the celebrated writer Eskinder Nega (imprisoned for life in September for writing an on-line blog), denied their liberty, must be released immediately and an independent enquiry instigated to investigate their cases, their treatment whilst in jail and their hollow convictions. During their three-month imprisonment at the Maikelawi detention center before the trial and in violation of Ethiopian and international law, the defendants were denied access to legal counsel and family members, and claim they were beaten and tortured. This is the experience of a great many whilst held in Maikelawi as Amnesty reveals in its report:

Many of the [114] detainees were forced to sign confessions and to acknowledge ownership or association by signing items of seemingly incriminating evidence.

The Ethiopian courts have not investigated any of these claims.  They are, it seems, nothing more than servants of the Government, and are as HRW states “complicit in this political witch hunt.”

This collusion of the courts contravenes the Ethiopian constitution that states in Article 78/1: “An independent judiciary is established by this Constitution.” Article 79/1: “Judicial Powers, both at Federal and State levels, are vested in the courts.”

Furthermore, 3: “Judges shall exercise their functions in full independence and shall be directed solely by the law.” The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, “deplored the reported failure to ensure the defendants’ right to a fair trial,” reports the UN News Centre.

Amnesty International, in its report, calls “on the representatives of the international community in Addis Ababa to take up the role of monitoring trials.” This would be an important initial act in placing the EPRDF under international scrutiny and accountability. It is time the international community, acting through the UN, undertook its responsibility and role as advocate for justice, self-determination, “the suppression of acts of aggression” (Article 1) and freedom for the people of the world, in accordance with its Charter.

A Blind Eye to Torture

In addition to the suppression of free speech, the use of the death penalty and withdrawing the legal right of presumption of innocence, torture is allowed under the Anti Terrorism Proclamation and information gathered whilst under such duress is admissible in court. HRW reports that::

The draft Proclamation deems confessions admissible without a restriction on the use of statements made under torture.

This is illegal under international law, The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does not allow the use of any statements made in a court of law, that were elicited under torture. The use of such information is also prohibited under the Ethiopian Constitution. Article 19 states:

Persons arrested shall not be compelled to make confessions or admissions which could be used in evidence against them. Any evidence obtained under coercion shall not be admissible.

The much-trumpeted constitution  means little or nothing to the people and even less to the EPRDF who ignore its charter.

Known Unknowables

It is an acknowledged fact within the corridors of the UN and Ethiopia’s donor countries that human rights abuses are occurring daily within the country under Prime Minister Meles and his ministerial menagerie. How do we as a world community, responsible and alert to the needs of our brothers and sisters, respond to such men, to such injustice and tyranny? Fight fire with fire many would advocate and in the face of such cruelty many of us would perhaps gladly fuel a furnace.  However, as Mahatma Ghandi said, “I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can teach you not to bow your heads before anyone even at the cost of your life.”

To be silent in the sight of injustice and persecution is to allow tyrants like Meles to maintain their stranglehold over the innocent. It is time intense political pressure from those providing and delivering the much-needed financial and developmental aid, was applied to put an end to the current regime’s human rights violations and abuse of the people, including freezing of personal assets and targeted sanctions.

The British government gives £315 million a year to Ethiopia, a spokesperson from The Department for International Development (DFID) told the Guardian (3/02/2012):

The prime minister, the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for international development have all raised concerns with Prime Minister Meles over the recent arrests of opposition leaders and journalists.

“Concern” is all well and good, but all too easy for the arrogant to shrug off, outrage and horror a more apt response from Westminster and more in keeping with the offences being committed. Criticism alone, however, will not bring change within the abysmal regime and justice to the long-suffering people.

Repeal and Release

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi presides over a dictatorship that restricts all freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media in Ethiopia. Peaceful dissent is met with violence and false imprisonment. Intimidation and fear are the key tools in such repression.  This must end, and we, the international community, must ensure it is so.

The Anti-Terrorist Proclamation is an unjust piece of legislation designed and implemented by a corrupt and violent regime who is in breach of international law and their own constitution. It must be repealed immediately, the many innocent good men and women falsely imprisoned released and those supporting Ethiopia through development aid should insist on the implementation of these legitimate and morally right demands. Sit not in silent appeasement, but raise your bowed heads and act.

I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying — of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.

— Colin Powell

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you?  I mean, to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall! What an insult to the entire world that would be!

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which, of course, they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won’t happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing.

I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they’ve been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?

Well, it’s a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. “Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind.”

But how would he explain this:

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:

They’re inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.

Yes.

For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?

Yes.

And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.

The incriminating phrases “clean all of the areas” and “Make sure there is nothing there” do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:

Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes?

Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.

Colonel: Yes.

Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.

Colonel: Yes.

Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here’s what Bob Woodward said about this in his book Plan of Attack.

[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of ‘forbidden ammo,’ Powell took the interpretation further: ‘Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.’ None of this was in the intercept.

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn’t inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.

Powell told the UN and the world:

We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes.

The January 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell’s draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (“INR”) flagged this claim as “WEAK”.

Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said:

Key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.

The January 31, 2003 INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added “Plausibility open to question.”

A February 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s remarks noted:

Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.

That didn’t stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn’t tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said:

We know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK”:

WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads.

This claim was again flagged in the February 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s presentation:

Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials.

That didn’t stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying

Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:

The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added:

We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses… Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event.

Powell’s own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was “a signature item…a decontamination vehicle.” The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.

He just kept piling it on: “UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons,” he said.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as “WEAK” and added: “the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK.”

In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.

Powell kept going, announcing:

In mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “not credible” and “open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates.”

His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.

To Powell that was no matter.

Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN:

On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and called it “Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)”

And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was “not implausible.” That was the best they could come up with. In other words: “They might buy this one, Sir, but don’t count on it.”

Powell, however, wasn’t satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations:

A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “Highly questionable.” This one didn’t even merit a “Not implausible.”

Powell also said:

In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home.

Powell’s staff called this “WEAK,” with “Plausibility open to question.”

All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the U.N. inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.

We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.

Yet, repeatedly, Powell’s staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.

The examples of Powell’s lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

On April 24, an Israeli ministerial committee approved three settlement outposts – Bruchin and Rechelim in the northern part of the West Bank, and Sansana in the south. Although all settlement activities in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal by international law, Israeli law differentiates between sanctioned settlements and ‘illegal’ ones. This distinction has actually proved to be no more than a disingenuous attempt at conflating international law, which is applicable to occupied lands, and Israeli law, which is in no way relevant.

Since 1967, Israel placed occupied Palestinian land, privately owned or otherwise, into various categories. One of these categories is ‘state-owned’, as in obtained by virtue of military occupation. For many years, the ‘state-owned’ occupied land was allotted to various purposes. Since 1990, however, the Israeli government refrained from establishing settlements, at least formally. Now, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group, Peace Now, “instead of going to peace the government is announcing the establishment of three new settlements…this announcement is against the Israeli interest of achieving peace and a two states solution”

Although the group argues that the four-man committee did not have the authority to make such a decision, it actually matters little. Every physical space in the occupied territories – whether privately owned or ‘state owned’, ‘legally’ obtained or ‘illegally’ obtained – is free game. The extremist Jewish settlers, whose tentacles are reaching far and wide, chasing out Palestinians at every corner, haven’t received such empowering news since the heyday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The move regarding settlements is not an isolated one. The Israeli government is now challenging the very decisions made by the Israeli Supreme Court, which has been used as a legitimization platform for many illegal settlements that drove Palestinians from their land.

On April 27, the Israeli government reportedly asked the high court to delay the demolition of an ‘unauthorized’ West Bank outpost in the Beit El settlement which was scheduled to take place on May 1st.. The land, even by Israeli legal standards, is considered private Palestinian land, and the Israeli government had committed to the court to take down the illegal outposts – again, per Israeli definition – on the specified date.

Now the right wing Netanyahu government is having another change of heart. In its request to the court, the government argued: “The evacuation of the buildings could carry social, political and operational ramifications for construction in Beit El and other settlements.” Such an argument, if applied in the larger context of the occupied territories, could easily justify why no outposts should be taken down. It could eradicate, once and for all, such politically inconvenient terms such as ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’.

“Previous Israeli governments have pledged to demolish the unauthorized settler outposts in the West Bank, but only a handful have been removed,” according to CNN online. In fact, that ‘handful’ are likely to be rebuilt, amongst many more new outposts, now that the new legal precedence is underway.

Michael Sfard, an attorney with Yesh Din, which reportedly advocates Palestinian rights, described the request as “an announcement of war by the Israeli government against the rule of law.” More specifically, “they said clearly that they have reached a decision not to evacuate illegal construction on private Palestinian property.”

Some analysts suggested that Netanyahu was bowing down to the more right wing elements in his cabinet – as if the man had, till now, been a peacemaker. The bottom line is that Israel has decided to embark on a new and dangerous phase, one that violates not only international law, but Israel’s own self-tailored laws that were designed to colonize the occupied territories. It appears that even those precarious ‘laws’ are no longer capable of meeting the colonial appetite of Israeli settlers and the ruling class.

Israeli settlements have been contextualized through Israeli legal and political references, as opposed to references commonly accepted in international law. The emphasis on differences between Israeli governments, political parties and religious/ultra-nationalist settlement movements is distracting and misleading; colonizing the rest of historic Palestine has been, and remains, a national Israeli project.

An article in the right wing Israeli Jerusalem Post agrees. “Support for settlement is not simply a program of right-of-center Likud. Its history has firm roots in Labor party activity during the periods of its governments, and activities by predecessors of the Labor party going back before the creation of the Israeli state” (April 27).

The only variable that might be worth examining is the purpose of the settlement, not the settlement itself. Following the war of 1967, the Allon plan sought to annex more than 30 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza for security purposes. It stipulated the establishment of a “security corridor” along the Jordan River, as well outside the “Green Line”, a one-sided Israeli demarcation of its borders with the West Bank. Then, there was no Likud party to demonize, for that was the Labor party’s vision for the newly occupied territories.

While the Israeli settlement drive since then has swallowed much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, populating them with over half a million Israelis, the international community’s response was as moot in 1967 as it is now in 2012. Responding to the latest sanctioning of illegal outposts, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared that he was “deeply troubled” by the news. Meanwhile, Russia was ‘deeply concerned’ and so was the EU’s Catherine Ashton. As for the US, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland insisted that the Israeli measure is not “helpful to the process.” What process?

While Israel has now showed all of its cards, and the international community declared its complacency or impotence, the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah continues to plan some kind of UN censure of the settlements. Even if a watered-down version of some UN draft managed to survive the US veto, what are the chances of Israel heeding the call of international community?

There is no doubt that Israel is plotting its version of the endgame in Palestine, which sees Palestinians continuing to subsist in physical fragmentation and permanent occupation. Unless a popular Palestinian uprising takes hold, no one is likely to challenge what is actually an Israeli declaration of war against the Palestinian people.

An all out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be in Sudan’s best interest. South Sudan’s saber-rattling is not an entirely independent initiative; its most recent territorial transgressions – which saw the occupation of Sudan’s largest oil field in Heglig on April 10, followed by a hasty retreat ten days later – might have been a calculated move aimed at drawing Sudan into a larger conflict.

Stunted by the capture of Heglig, which, according to some estimates, provides nearly half of the country’s oil production, Bashir promised victory over Juba. Speaking to large crowd in the capital of North Kordofan, El-Obeid, Bashir affectively declared war. “Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning,” he said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Bashir also declared a desire to ‘liberate’ the people of South Sudan from a government composed of ‘insects.’ Even when Heglig was declared a liberated region by Sudan’s defence minister, the humiliation of defeat was simply replaced by the fervor of victory. “They started the fighting and we will announce when it will end, and our advance will never stop,” Bashir announced on April 20.

Statements issued by the government of South Sudan are clearly more measured, with an international target audience in mind. Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, simply said that his forces departed the region following appeals made by the international community. This includes a statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which described the attack on Heglig as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Sudan and a clearly illegal act” (Reuters, April 19). A day before the hasty withdrawal, South Sudan government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin claimed there had been no conflict in the first place. His statement was both bewildering and patronizing. He considered Sudan, which was then rallying for war to recapture its oil-rich area, a neighbor and “friendly nation”, and claimed that “up to now we have not crossed even an inch into Sudan” (Associated Press, April 19).

The fact remains, however, that wherever there is oil political narratives cannot possibly be so simple. Sudan is caught in a multidimensional conflict involving weapons trade, internal instabilities, multiple civil wars and the reality of outside players with their own interests. None of this is enough to excuse the readiness for war on behalf of Khartoum and Juba, but it certainly presents serious obstacles to any attempt aimed at rectifying the situation.

With a single act of aggression, a whole set of conflicts are prone to flaring up. It is the nature of proxy politics, as many armed groups seek opportunities for territorial advances and financial gains. News reports already speak of a possible involvement of Uganda should the fledging war between Khartoum and Juba cross conventional boundaries. “As the possibility of a full-fledged war became unnervingly higher, General Aronda Nyakairima, chief of Uganda’s defense forces, said that his army might be compelled to intervene if Bashir did overthrow South Sudan’s regime,” reported Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker website (April 20). Both Sudans are fighting their own war against various rebel groups. Despite the lack of basic food in parts of the region, plenty of weapons effortlessly find inroads to wherever there is potential strife.

In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fueling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade.

US support of South Sudan is already well known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million-a-year in military assistance to the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army),” according to Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.

According to political author and columnist Reason Wafawarova, US interest in South Sudan is neither accidental nor motivated by humanitarian issues. He told RT, “It would not be surprising if the US is trying to capitalize on the vulnerability of South Sudan in its efforts to establish the AFRICOM base somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.” RT goes on to reference Sudan’s Al-Intibaha newspaper for its reports on Israeli weapon supplies to Juba.

US and Israeli military support of Juba is not a new phenomenon. Sudan’s civil war (1983-2005), which cost an estimated 2.5 million lives, could not have lasted as long as it did without steady sources of military funding. And while the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the January 9-15, 2011 referendum, and finally the independence of South Sudan in July were all meant to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, none actualized. Sudan’s territorial concessions proved most costly, and South Sudan, destroyed and landlocked, was ripe for outside exploitation.

Both countries are now caught in a deadly embrace. They can neither part ways completely, nor cooperate successfully without a risk of war at every turn. Bashir also knows he is running out of options. While Khartoum has already “lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after the secession,” according Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, “now it is poised to lose the rest.”

Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude cannot be resolved by empty gestures and reassuring statements. The conflict has been festering for decades, and war has been the only common language. Powerful countries, including the US, Russia, China, but also Israel and regional Arab and Africa players exploited the conflict to their advantage whenever possible. In a recent analysis, the International Crisis Group in Brussels advised that a “new strategy is needed to avert an even bigger crisis.” The crisis group recommends that the “UN Security Council must reassert itself to preserve international peace and security, including the implementation of border monitoring tasks as outlined by UN Interim Security Force in Abyei.”

Expecting the Security Council to act in political tandem seems a bit too optimistic, however. Considering that the US is arming and supporting South Sudan, and that Russia and China continue to support Khartoum, the rivalry in fact exists within the UN itself.

For a sustainable future peace arrangement, Sudan’s territorial integrity must be respected, and South Sudan must not be pushed to the brink of desperation. Rivalries between the US, China and Russia cannot continue at the expense of nations that teeter between starvation and civil wars. And whatever hidden hands that continue to exploit Sudan’s woes now need to be exposed and isolated.

Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone …

— Maya Angelou, 1928 – Present

If destabilization, duplicity, insurgency and mass murder could surprise yet again, with the blame of the victim adding to the “shock and awe”, after Libya, Syria would certainly be a case in point.

America’s decades long plan  for another puppet government and quasi client state status for the country is well underway. Any observer of the shenanigans within the US Embassy in Damascus would be forgiven for mistaking it for a covert operations centre rather that a seat of diplomacy.

Michel Chossudovsky gives graphic life to Ambassador Ford’s – surely coincidentally – eminently pertinent and relevant qualifications.

Of course, no plan for a country’s ruination is complete without the help of the UN. Think Libya and Resolution 1973, the green light for a “humanitarian” blizkrieg, regime change, razed towns, murder from air and ground on an industrial scale, including most of the country’s leading family, its small grandchildren, and the butchering of Colonel Gaddafi, the country’s sovereign leader, whose body is still unaccounted for.

Lynch-law ruled under UN mandate.

Who then, better to be appointed “Peace Envoy” to Syria than Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General (1997-2006) who silently acquiesced to the deaths on average of 6,000 children a month in Iraq from “embargo-related causes”, throughout the 119 months of his tenure, bowing to the US-UK driven UN embargo?

Inevitably, for his silence, the man who one diplomat described as “like Pontius Pilate, he washes his hands”, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, jointly with the UN for, amongst other delusional rubbish, his “emphasizing its obligations as with regard to human rights.”

Presumably this “emphasis” also applied to his deafening muteness as America and Britain illegally bombed Iraq for his entire tenure, often daily, routinely re-destroying vital infrastructure and erasing lives in uncounted numbers.

The UN’s Baghdad cabal, with its fine restaurant and barbecue parties, ensconced at the Canal Hotel at Iraq’s expense were in a perfect position to visit these sites, record and account. They never bothered.

That was yesterday. Apart from Annan, the UN has another weapon for Syria — UN diplomats’ wives.

The wives of the German and British Ambassadors to the UN, Frau Huberta Voss-Wittig and Lady Sheila Lyall Grant, have released a video appeal and an online petition to President Assad’s wife, Syria’s First Lady, Asma al Assad. A performance of skin crawling, patronizing, head patting, treacled trash, which reflects nothing but the UN’s duplicity and its representatives privileged, reality- removed lives in its ivory tower.

The “initiative”, the pampered pair stress, is entirely independent, theirs alone, and nothing to do with their husbands.

Of course, ladies.

Frau Voss-Wittig’s involvement, it might be surmised, lies in “The German ‘no’ to the US about Iraq”, in 2002.  “Historically this was the deepest ever division between the White House and any post-cold-war German Chancellor.”

Additionally, in August 2002, Germany and France agreed on the “Declaration of Schwerin”, named for the German town where their representatives had a working dinner, resolving that they “had to oppose the war … and that they had to do it in public and as forcefully as possible.” An overt collision course with the US and UK.

Only when Angela Merkel took office were links tentatively repaired formally, but “shock-waves” remained. Two wives have clearly taken delivery of bricks and tools and set about erecting bridges, never mind demolishing those of others.

Sheila Lyall Grant is the wife of Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former political Director General of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a post with wide responsibilities including for Iraq, 2007-2009, and also line manager of post-invasion UK Ambassadors to Iraq.

He was senior policy adviser to the Foreign Secretary on various strategic Foreign Office priorities regarding Iraq, in which capacity he attended major European, G8, UN, OSCE and NATO meetings.

Sir Mark clearly went through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s rigorous and scrupulous selection process as to suitability for key posts:  “I was not an Arabist. I haven’t been posted in the Middle East”, he told the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq on January 20, 2010.

However, he added,  “It naturally fell to the Foreign Office to look at where Britain’s long-term strategic interests were in Iraq and in the wider region …”

The Iraq priority for Sir Mark had been “a strong economy”.

Whilst an  “abidance of human rights and better social conditions, better social delivery to the people (were) highly desirable, I don’t say it is absolutely essential in the near future”, he told the Inquiry. (Emphasis mine.) “Let them rot” comes to mind.

Given that Nuri al Maliki’s Iraq is now firmly allied with Iran, and a disaster on every level, with economy, health, malnutrition and social conditions worse than the embargo years, it might be thought that the Foreign Office and Sir Mark would think twice before stepping aside, as his “independent” wife became another regional unguided missile.

The wives petition, which is pretty much the same as their toe-curling video reads, in part:

Dear Asma,

Some women care for style and some women care for their people. Some women struggle for their image and some women struggle for their survival. Some women have forgotten what they preached about peace and some women can only pray for their dead.

Hundreds of Syrian children have already been killed or injured. One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed. What will your answer be, Asma? That you, Asma had no choice?

Every single child had a name and a family. Their lives will never be the same again. Asma, when you kiss your own children goodnight, another mother will find the place next to her empty.

These children could all be your children. They are your children. Stand up for peace, Asma. Speak out now. Stop being a bystander. No one cares about your image. We care about your action. Right now.

Lady Lyall Grant, has been a diplomat since 1980. Her most recent post was Head of VIP Visits at the Protocol Directorate in the heart of government, Whitehall.

Clearly her induction course in protocol did not include instructions on how to address the wife of a Head of  State.

Incidentally, Sir Mark apparently cares as little about the UN as he did Iraq. Asked at the Inquiry about the current role of UN in Iraq, he replied that they were no longer there after the bombing of their building in, he hesitated, then said,“2005, was it?”

The bombing of the Canal Hotel, which killed seventeen, including the Head of Mission, Sergio de Mello, and injured scores, was on August 19, 2003.

Corrected by the Chairman, Sir Mark responded,  “2003, was it? I apologise”, apparently as sanguine about his colleagues being blown to bits as in assessing that basic provisions to sustain Iraqi lives were not “absolutely essential.”

Now, for Syria, in a  crisis so clearly manipulated from without, as Kofi Annan ratchets up the number of “UN Observers” from ten to three hundred – surely as with Iraq, many will be meddlers, spies and worse — Sheila Lyall Grant writes,  “One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed.”  Every child “had a family and a name.”

The child victims of Afghanistan, decimated by the invasion, also had names – but the Taliban was blamed. As did their small counterparts in Iraq since that illegal takeover, the 4.5 million orphans, 600.000 of whom live on the streets, are still somehow the fault of Saddam Hussein, and their traumatized little global siblings in Libya are still somehow the fault of Colonel Gaddafi, who brought the country the best welfare and highest living standard in Africa.

Perhaps the diplomatic duo have not noticed that Syria, generous host country to two million Iraqis fleeing their “liberation” now have their own nationals fleeing in fear over the border to Jordan; Syrians now joining the near similar number of Iraqis there, refugees themselves. Iraqis in Syria have nowhere to run.

The ladies have seemingly also missed the media coverage of senior, experienced Al Jazeera journalists, who have walked away from their livelihood in protest and disgust at the media distortion and manipulation of Syria’s plight, the portrayal, of course, that all blame lies with President al Assad.

Further, “Peace Envoy” Kofi Annan has already let slip that both he and the “truce monitors should help pave the way for much needed political process”.  Presumably he means with those insurgents with foreign passports. Read “regime change”.

And no planned destruction, overthrow, and general catastrophe would be complete without hidden weaponry and hardware with which the leader “oppresses his own people.” Syria, say – as ever – unnamed “activists” is hiding tanks and weapons in government compounds.

The media faithfully repeats the mantra. None seem to have mentioned that one of the “Peace Envoy’s” stipulations, to which Bashar al Assad agreed, was to take tanks and weapons off the streets. Where rebel violence is such that government troops are not forced to respond, they have been withdrawn — back to government compounds. Mr. Annan seemingly has not thought to point this out.

China’s Ambassador, Li Baodong, appears to be watching more closely than most. He expressed the hope that “the Supervision Mission will fully respect Syria’s sovereignty and dignity, act in strict accordance with the authorization of the Security Council, adhere to the principles of neutrality and impartiality …”   Quite!

If Lady Lyall Grant cares about children, which could equally be “her” children, she should ponder on, and tell her humanity-deficient husband of just one, which represents the trauma of every child, in every street, in every country targeted by an unholy Western alliance – and the UN.

It is an Iraqi boy of about five in an orphanage asleep. He has drawn a huge picture, depicting his mother on the floor, her arms outstretched. He is curled up on it. Every night he goes to sleep the same way — on the floor between her arms.

Well past time for the powerful to grow the hell up. Those children could be your children.

Libya

In his March 19, 2011 interview with Stephen Shalom (“Libyan Developments”) Achcar discusses what he says is the “composition of the opposition,” which he said was the case for “all the other revolts shaking the region.” They were “very heterogeneous,” and that in “all the disparate forces [there] is a rejection of the dictatorship and a longing for democracy and human rights.”¹

This was written and published nearly a month after numerous reports began coming in about vicious “rebel” attacks on black Africans. But for Achcar, who says nothing of the plight of black Africans, their tormentors long for “human rights.”

As for these “disparate forces” Achcar said “the Libyan opposition represents a mixture of forces, and the bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” But there were not, in places like Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia, former regime officials (with the likes of former Libyan justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil) leading the rebels in alliance with the West, nor the racist attacks on minorities. Egypt and Tunisia didn’t need several months of NATO bombings to overthrow their governments, nor did they need to carry out terrorist attacks, indiscriminately shelled civilians, torture, execute and deny humanitarian assistance. And unlike Benghazi, Egyptian and Tunisian didn’t fly Al Qaeda flags over their courts following their revolutions. Achcar’s “bottom line” is simply false. There was and still are plenty of reasons to have a different attitude towards what happened in Libya and what happened in Egypt and Tunisia.²

In Egypt and Tunisia the uprisings were actually greeted with popular support. In Libya it was the Gaddafi regime which retained the popular support, as witnessed by the massive pro-government rally³ in Tripoli in July of 2011, the “citizen volunteers”⁴ of Sirte, and the residents of Bani Walid⁵ who have reclaimed their town since the fall of the government. It’s worth remembering that Libyan “rebels” would never have been able to overthrow the government and unleash the nightmare that they did without the help of NATO. Or as Luis Rumbaut, a Cuban-American lawyer put it:

At its peak, the 26 of July Movement had some 300 fighters, ill fed and poorly armed, bitten by mosquitoes and accompanied by the rain. Against them, Gen. Fulgencio Batista mobilized an army, a navy, an air force, a coast guard, and the Rural Guard, aside from a network of spies and irregular bands of enforcers at his command.

How could the 26 of July Movement have achieved victory? The majority of the people were against Batista and for the 26 of July. There was also an active underground, and organized resistance among student, union, and political organizations. Batista fell because he had no support. Revolutions succeed when the system they replace can no longer survive.

Libya’s rebels are a different story …⁶

In the same interview with Shalom, Achcar spoke of “the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal,” by saying that “no one can reasonably oppose” UN Resolution 1973.

The problem that many on the left had was not so much the wording of the resolution—though it was pointed out how one-sided it was in that the resolution demanded “that the Libyan government comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, human rights and refugee law and take all measures to protect civilians and meet their basic needs, and to ensure the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance,” but said nothing of the legal obligations of the rebels—but that hardly anyone expected the US and NATO to actually protect civilians, de-escalate the conflict, or accept a cease fire (which the resolution made its first demand for). In fact, by the time the resolution was adopted, and Achcar’s interview was published, the Libyan government had already offered a cease fire which was rejected!

Here is a list of the numerous ceasefire offers. The source of the offers is revealing.⁷

February

25| Gaddafi’s Son Sees Negotiaton, Ceasefire in Libya

25| Gaddafi’s Son to Negotiate Ceasefire

March

18| Libya Calls Ceasefire in Response to UN Resolution

18| Pro-Gaddafi Forces to Observe Ceasefire

18| Libya Ceasefire Analysis

18| David Cameron Cautious over Libya Ceasefire Offer

18| Gaddafi’s Ceasefire May Split Coalition

18| Clinton Unimpressed by Libya’s Ceasefire Pledge

19| Libyan Minister Claims Gaddafi is Powerless and the Ceasefire is Solid

21| US-led Forces Reject Gaddafi Ceasefire

27| Turkey Offers to Broker Ceasefire Talks

April

1| Libyan Rebels Prepared to Accept Ceasefire if Gaddafi Lifts Sieges, Allows Protests

1| Libyan Rebels Seek Ceasefire as US Vows to Withdraw Jets

6| Gaddafi Accepts African Roadmap to End Libya Civil War Including Ceasefire

7| Gaddafi Writes to Obama, Urging End to Airstrikes

10| Libyan Rebels Spurn African Union Ceasefire Unless Gaddafi Gives Up Power

11| Ceasefire ‘Must Meet UN Conditions’ says Hague

11| Benghazi Rebels Reject African Union Truce Plan

13| Crucial Libya Talks as Rebels Again Reject Ceasefire

19| UN Appeals for Libya Ceasefire

30| Gaddafi Calls for Ceasefire as NATO Strikes Tripoli

30| Muammar Gaddafi Calls for Ceasefire in Libyan TV Address

30| Libyan Rebels Reject Gaddafi Offer

30| Libyan Opposition Rejects Gaddafi Truce Offer

30| Rebels and NATO dismiss Gaddafi Truce Offer

May

3| Turks Offer Libya Ceasefire Plan as Western, Arab Officials Meet in Rome

26| Libya Ready for Ceasefire, Demands End to NATO Strikes

26| Libyan Regime Makes Peace Offer that Sidelines Gaddafi

26| Libya’s Prime Minister Calls for Ceasefire

26| White House Says Libya Ceasefire Not Credible

26| Libya Ceasefire Offer Regarded Coldly by the West

26| Libya Approaches Spain for NATO Ceasefire

27| Comment: Why no mention of a Ceasefire for Libya, Obama?

27| US Rejects Libya Ceasefire, Vows War will Continue

28| Talks Under Way to End Libya Fighting

29| South Africa PM to Visit Gaddafi, Push for Ceasefire and Talks

31| Zuma Says Gaddafi Ready for Truce

31| Gaddafi Wants Truce in Libya, Says Zuma, but Terms Remain Unclear

June

2| Comment: NATO’s Strategy in Libya is Working – Talks with Gaddafi Won’t

10| Libya’s Gaddafi Writes to Congress for Ceasefire

11| Gaddafi Ceasefire Letter to USA

11| Gaddafi’s Letter to Congress Urges Ceasefire

21| Arab League Chief Calls for Ceasefire and Political Solution

22| Italy Asks NATO to Consider Ceasefire in Libya

22| Italy Ceasefire Call Exposes NATO Split on Libya

22| Italy Urges Suspension of Hostilities

22| Downing Street Rejects Allies’s Call for Libyan Ceasefire

22| France Rejects Italian Libya Ceasefire Call

23| Italian Minister Calls for Libyan Ceasefire

23| Italy Breaks Ranks to Call for Ceasefire in Libya so Aid can Get Through

26| Calls for Ceasefire in Libya Ring Louder

[Arab League has Second Thoughts About Air-Strike]

26| Gaddafi Vows Not to Put Pressure on AU Peace Talks

27| Comment: Libya is not Ready for a Political Solution

July

3| Libya Rebels Welcome African Union’s Gaddafi-Free Talks Offer

12| Nato Suggests Ramadan Libya Ceasefire

17| NATO Chief Cautious on Libya Ceasefire

20| France: Ceasefire Deal Could Include Gaddafi Remaining in Libya

21| France Says Gadaffi Can Stay in Libya if He Relinquishes Power

22| UN Peace Envoy Suggests a Ceasefire to be Declared

22| UN Plan Sees Unity Government in Post-Gaddafi Libya

26| Comment: Libya’s Stalemate Shows it is Time to Tempt Gaddafi Out, Not Blast Him Out

28| UN Official: Truce and Transitional Pact Key to Ending Libya Crisis

August

12| UN Calls for Ceasefire in Libya and Political Talks by Gaddafi and Rebels

15| UN Envoy Seeks Ceasefire to Break Impasse in Libya with Tunisia Meetings

18| Gaddafi Regime Urges Ceasefire as Libya Rebels Claim Control of Key Refinery

18| Casualties Mount in West Libya as Regime Urges Ceasefire

18| Libya Regime PM Calls for a Ceasefire

19| Libya Regime Calls for Ceasefire

24| Gaddafi’s Son Offers to Broker Ceasefire

September

1| NATO Keeps War Footing Until Gaddafi Regime is Smashed

4| The UN was Hijacked on Libya

28| Venezuela Calls for Libyan Ceasefire

Notice the date of the offers and those that preceded Achcar’s interview and his comment about “the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal.” And let’s not forget that President Obama responded to the African Union’s attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement by sending an envoy to the region to pressure them to stop their efforts.⁸

Which brings up another thing. Achcar wrote of “the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces.” Elsewhere in the interview Achcar also said, “The fact remains, nevertheless, that if Gaddafi were permitted to continue his military offensive and take Benghazi, there would be a major massacre,” and that “from an anti-imperialist perspective one cannot and should not oppose the no-fly zone, given that there is no plausible alternative for protecting the endangered population.”

Somehow it is anti-imperialist to go along with an imperialist intervention on the dubious grounds that it’s a “humanitarian intervention.” And like other pro-interventionsts at the time, Achcar says nothing about the validity of the claim itself. Had he bothered to look he would have found out that the claims were made by the rebels themselves, and there was no evidence to support the claim. Nearly three weeks before Achcar talks of “the urgency,” the Russian government said their satellite images revealed no truth to the claim.⁹

This kind of incident is not without an historical precedent. It was in August of 1990 when the US launched Operation Desert Shield for the claimed purpose of protecting Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion, which was said to be imminent as Iraqi troops were moving towards the border. Like the Benghazi claim, Russia furnished evidence to the contrary.

Even the person at the UN who spread the Benghazi claim, later admitted he had no evidence and was basing it on what the rebels told him. It was Dr. Sliman Bouchuiguir, the Secretary-General of the Libyan League for Human Rights, who went to the UN to make the claim without it ever being verified. It was accepted hook, line and sinker, and the rest is, as the saying goes, history.¹⁰

And it wasn’t just that many saw the UN resolution as an escalation of the conflict, rather than a de-escalation. Many also didn’t think the US/NATO would protect civilians. Again as noted, by the time the resolution was adopted it was already known that NATO’s racist rebels were already committing massacres of black Africans. And as time went on these massacres turned into a full-blown campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, all of which received no concern or interest from the NATO powers who were “protecting civilians” in Libya, and certainly not activists like Gilbert Achcar who saw the perpetrators as “longing for democracy and human rights.”

Worse, at one point Achcar actually had the nerve to write that he “won’t dwell on the unacceptable arguments of those who try to shed doubt on the nature of the uprising’s leadership.” For Achcar, anyone who dared to criticize them “are most often the same as those who believe Gaddafi is a progressive.” It was very troubling to read a leftist scholar like Achcar say that it is unacceptable to doubt leaders, and to claim that those who do are apologists for a dictator. This was the same argument the pro-war right-wingers used against anti-war activists in the rush to war with Iraq in 2003. If you opposed the war then you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein. This is an observation worth consideration, especially when Achcar’s pro-US war in Syria is being repeated.¹¹

Considering Achcar’s silence on the things mentioned above and his comment in the interview with Shalom that “one must maintain a very critical attitude toward what the Western powers might do,” it is hard to imagine he himself maintained such an attitude. Where was the critical attitude towards the rebel leadership, which he said it was “unacceptable” to have? Where was the critical attitude towards their claims?

It would be bad enough that he made the colossal mistake once, but now Achcar is making it again. This time in regards to Syria. The difference between his mistake on Libya is that he at least had some (though not much) protection of criticism since his comments preceded much of the nightmare that happened afterwards.

For example, the ceasefire offers by the Libyan government continued, while the rebels rejected them and carried out massive war crimes.

Earlier this year the UN released its Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya, where it too notes that there was no evidence of genocide by Gaddafi’s forces. While they did find excessive use of force against their political opponents, “the Commission has not found evidence that one particular group was targeted more than others.” However, they did find extensive evidence of the rebels targeting various communities, including Tawerghans. It also noted that “from the beginning of the uprising in February 2011, dark-skinned migrant workers were targeted – including being killed,” and that, “The Commission continues to receive reports of sub-Saharan Africans, some long-term residents of Libya, being arbitrarily arrested and beaten in detention.” It also noted that it is “deeply concerned that no independent investigations or prosecutions appear to have been instigated into killings committed by [the rebels].” Much of the documented crimes committed by the rebels amount to genocide, though of course considering the politicization of the UN it is not likely that their reasonable “recommendations” will ever be implemented, or that the UN will ever refer it to the ICC.¹²

The report also found no evidence of Gaddafi using mercenaries, or child soldiers. This is not surprising because there was never any proof of the “mercenaries.” Amnesty International was in Libya looking into this from late February to late May. After three months of looking this is what they had to say,

We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence. The rebels spread these rumors everywhere, which had terrible consequences for African guest workers: there was a systematic hunt for migrants, some were lynched and many arrested. Since then, even the rebels have admitted there were no mercenaries, almost all have been released and have returned to their countries of origin, as the investigations into them revealed nothing.¹³

That being said, Amnesty International could have identified foreign mercenaries operating in Libya … against the will of the population. And the whole world already knows the location of their headquarters. They are a composite of professional soldiers from different countries and belong to a single organization they call NATO, whose headquarters is located in Brussels, Belgium.

Back to the UN report. It said that while they “received reports of theft on a small scale perpetrated by Qadhafi forces during the conflict,” what they were able to establish was “widespread pillaging and destruction of public and private property across the country” by the rebels.

As far as sexual violence the report found that most of the claims against Gaddafi’s forces “cannot be relied upon” because they “believe that there is a strong possibility that the confessions were made under torture.”

Furthermore, the claim that Gaddafi attacked civilian institutions was confirmed, however in many instances the Commission either “could not determine without further investigation whether schools, hospitals and mosques and other civilian objects were hit deliberately,” or found that the civilian objects were being used by the rebels and therefore “could not consider them as purely civilian objects,” and “after these buildings could be said to have taken on a military character by encouraging or supporting combat operations [...] their targeting would not necessarily violate international law.”

In other words, the overall picture puts “the disparate forces” who long for “democracy and human rights” as the main perpetrators of the genocidal violence, not Gaddafi’s forces.

Syria

As noted, it is one thing that Achcar made such a mistake once, but twice?

In a recent interview on Syria, again features on ZNet, Achcar says that, “The Syrian National Council is a heterogeneous combination of people.”¹⁴

Déjà vu.

He also says that, “The SNC is held together by the pressure of various states intervening in the Syrian situation,” and that the SNC is staffed “with a number of figures linked to Western governments, the US or France in particular.” This may be the most truthful thing he says, though he downplays it by not specifying the “figures linked to Western governments,” and by stressing that, “The Syrian opposition within the country starts, of course, with the Local Coordination Committees (LCC),” who Achcar says is “the most authentic representation of the uprising in the sense that they are its principal organizers” of which he says “are networks of people, mostly young, coordinating the mobilization.”

As with Libya, it’s worth noting that Achcar steers away from the specifics. Those with links to the Western governments that are holding the SNC together, or the links off the LCC’s to the SNC and foreign governments, again, goes un-named. As is the quality of their claims. Though there is already plenty to draw from. Writers like Patrick Cockburn of The Independent UK and Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation have written on the propaganda of the Syrian activists.

Before continuing it should also be pointed out that Achcar, in his recent interview, continues to defend his pro-intervention position on Libya even after all that is now known. While he says that in Libya there was “no other group challenging [the TNC] as representing the Libyan opposition,” he fails to note how much more popular the regime was, or how it took a nearly eight-month long bombing campaign, coupled with rebels committing ethnic cleansing and indiscriminately bombing civilians and disrupting the delivery of humanitarian aid to overthrow the government, or how the rebels faced stiff resistance from “citizen volunteers” in places like Tripoli, Bani Walid, and Sirte.

And even after Achcar says that Libya is now “a chaotic country with the state being replaced by independent armed groups” he goes on to refer to what happened in Tripoli as “liberation,” with no mention of the well-documented tortures, massacres and executions that followed. And Achcar certainly doesn’t call what the residents of Bani Walid did when they took back their town a “liberation.” In fact, Achcar simply ignores them and their struggle, like that of black Africans or the people of Sirte where Achcar’s rebels said the people “chosen to die” by not siding with them.¹⁵

Achcar even points out that last August he was opposed to continued NATO bombing (note he doesn’t say he was opposed to it entirely, just “the continuation of the bombing by NATO”), though was “calling instead for arms deliveries to the insurgents.” But by August “the insurgents” were already well underway to committing massive war crimes, and crimes against humanity and Achcar continued to support arming them. In fact, Human Rights Watch (HRW)¹⁶ reported on rebel abuses and said that, “How the rebels behave in towns that have supported Gaddafi gives an indication of what they may do if they gain control in other areas, especially if they approach Tripoli.” And when they did approach Tripoli their indication proved all too true. In an article by Independent journalist Kim Sengupta in late August, titled “Rebels settle scores in Libya”, [17]

The killings were pitiless.

They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men.¹⁷ [emphasis added]

Back to Syria.

In “The United States Should Stay Out of Syria,” by The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, the writer wastes no time and gets to the point:

Lined up in support of regime change in Damascus are the Middle East’s major Sunni powers, led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Also backing regime change, though less publicly, is the international network known as the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni powerhouse that is providing much, if not most, of the increasingly militarized Syrian opposition forces, especially in Sunni strongholds such as Homs. And backing the Sunni-led regional forces for regime change is NATO, the United States and its allies, who are outraged, just outraged, that Russia and China would dare to veto a carefully crafted UN Security Council resolution targeting President Bashar al-Assad.¹⁸

Dreyfuss then goes on to quote Aisling Byrne of Asia Times as writing, “What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime ‘more compatible’ with US interests in the region.”

Yet the most explosive comment was when Dreyfuss wrote that,

The killings in Syria are ugly, but no doubt wildly exaggerated. Nearly all, repeat all, of the information about the violence in Syria is coming from a handful of exiled Syrian opposition groups backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and various Western powers. Did 200 people really die in Homs this past weekend, conveniently just on the eve of the UNSC debate? Who knows? The only source for the fishy information, though ubiquitously quoted in the New York Times, the wire services, the network news and elsewhere, are the suspect Syrian opposition groups, who have axes galore to grind.

It’s not just the Times, but even the BBC, and nearly all of the mainstream press.

As for the BBC, in their online article “Syria crisis: Shelling ‘kills dozens’ in restive Homs” we read about how, “The worst shelling has been in the Baba Amr district, where activists say 50 people were killed on Wednesday alone.”¹⁹ [emphasis added]

Who are these “activists”? Why “The Local Co-ordination Committees, a network of anti-government,” of course, or as Dreyfuss put it: “a handful of exiled Syrian opposition groups backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and various Western powers,” and getting considerable coverage from the dominant press.

Patrick Cockburn of The Independent has also written on the propaganda element that is facilitated by the Western media:

The Syrian opposition needs to give the impression that its insurrection is closer to success than it really is. The Syrian government has failed to crush the protesters, but they, in turn, are a long way from overthrowing it. The exiled leadership wants Western military intervention in its favour as happened in Libya, although conditions are very different.

The purpose of manipulating the media coverage is to persuade the West and its Arab allies that conditions in Syria are approaching the point when they can repeat their success in Libya. Hence the fog of disinformation pumped out through the internet.²⁰

Writing for al Akhbar in late February, Sharmaine Narwani wrote in her piece “Questioning the Syrian ‘Casualty List’” about Nir Rosen’s coverage within Syria. Narwani quoted Rosen as saying,

Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many of those reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden and they are described in reports as innocent civilians killed by security forces, as if they were all merely protesting or sitting in their homes.²¹

All of this, on the claims of the Syrian opposition, precede Achcar’s interview by months. It is amazing that in the nearly 3,500 words Achcar questions the validity of their claims.

And again there is absolutely nothing about the violence of the Syrian opposition. The torture, terrorist attacks, murder, using civilian institutions as military installations, and killing of foreign journalists doesn’t get any mention from Achcar.

While there was a lot of coverage in the mainstream press about the two Western journalists who were killed in Syria earlier this year, it is noteworthy that there was considerable less attention and outrage at a French journalist killed in Syria, especially after it was revealed the victim was killed by armed opposition forces. There is another aspect about the most recent killings of the two journalists that is (predictably) not being emphasized on: they were not only embedded with the Free Syrian Army, but the “media center” they were operating from was in an apartment building—a residential building.

According to Spiegel Online, “They had been in the back of the apartment serving as the “media center” when the first missile shook the room.” Later the article notes that, “Increasingly little word was coming from the surviving activists in the “media center,” which was moved from the third to the first floor of a residential building.”²²

Initially, articles were questioning whether or not the Syrian government was specifically targeting these journalists. Case in point, this recent article by the New York Times says that “citizen journalists in Homs have been killed recently in what activists interpret as part of a deliberate campaign to choke off news of the opposition.” The article also notes that “the two journalists died after shells hit the house in which they were staying…”²³

What is interesting about the coverage is that there is no questioning the FSA for using residential buildings for military operations even though that is a serious war crime. It is using the people as a human shield, and increases the civilian casualty rate. There was no condemnation from the US or other Western powers, and certainly not Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or even Gilbert Achcar.

So when the Times reports that, “The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé also said in a statement that he had called on the Syrian government to order an immediate halt to the attacks on Homs and to respect its ‘humanitarian obligations,’ ” it is strange how there is no mention of the “humanitarian obligations” of the Free Syrian Army, nor was any similar statement issued when Gilles Jacquier was killed at a pro-government rally last month by the resistance, along with Belgian journalist Steven Visner and seven civilians. Rather, Juppé called on the Syrian government “to ensure the security of international journalists on their territory, and to protect this fundamental liberty which is the freedom of information.” To be sure, for the recent incident, Juppé didn’t call on the FSA to provide similar protections.²⁴

This is all a part of the overall coverage, or lack of, that is coming out about Syria. Not only is their quite a bit of silence about the political, religious, and sectarian views of the “resistance,” and their support coming from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, but much of the relevant context is missing. All one is likely to find is a repetitive anti-al-Assad presentation. Al-Assad is evil incarnate, the “resistance” are glorious liberators battling a genocidal dictator. If you don’t support the rebellion then you are an apologist for the dictatorship. The truth is not nearly so black and white.

The Syrian government retains a lot of support, and has shown considerable constraint over the last year—much more than one would expect from the U.S. and other nations who are shedding crocodile tears. When the Arab League sent in an observer mission in December and January progress was made, but when the observer mission issued its report (which noted its success and warned that its discontinuation could lead to a worsening of situation), which was suppressed and the mission suspended the U.N. Security Council quickly tried to push through a resolution that only called for the Syrian government forces to cease fire and withdraw. With Syria facing a foreign-directed rebellion and no serious prospect of a fair settlement coming from either the Arab League or the UN, but rather a concerted effort for regime change, it’s not surprising that they moved in on the rebel stronghold. How indiscriminate the regime is being is hard to tell since the only information we have to go on is coming from the rebels, and even they admit they are operating from “residential buildings.”

So it is strange to read that while “The UN mediation has been accepted by all factions of the Syrian opposition,” according to Achcar, “most people are skeptical about the Syrian regime’s true willingness to implement Kofi Annan’s plan.” Achcar says that, “The regime knows too well that if it were to actually withdraw its armed forces from the cities and stop its bloody repression, the popular mobilization against it will immediately reach new heights — similar to the huge popular rallies that took place in Hama last summer when the regime’s forces refrained from attacking the demonstrations for a short while.”

Notice he talks about the regimes “bloody repression” but says nothing about that of the rebels, or how he mentions “huge popular rallies that took place in Hama last summer” but says nothing about the much larger pro-government rallies, or how one poll found that 55% of Syrians supported retaining al-Assad out of fear for their country (i.e. they fear what the rebels represent more than the tyranny of al-Assad).

As for the claim that “most people are skeptical about the Syrian regime’s true willingness to implement Kofi Annan’s plan,” we can look to the Arab League’s report from earlier this year to get an idea of how accurate that statement is.²⁵

For starters, here are some comments about the “opposition”:

In Homs and Dera‘a, the Mission observed armed groups committing acts of violence against Government forces, resulting in death and injury among their ranks. In certain situations, government forces responded to attacks against their personnel with force. The observers noted that some of the armed groups were using flares and armour-piercing projectiles.

[…]

In Homs, Idlib and Hama, the Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of those acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.

[…]

In Homs, a French journalist who worked for the France 2 channel was killed and a Belgian journalist was injured. The Government and opposition accused each other of being responsible for the incident, and both sides issued statements of condemnation. The Government formed an investigative committee in order to determine the cause of the incident. It should be noted that Mission reports from Homs indicate that the French journalist was killed by opposition mortar shells.

[…]

Recently, there have been incidents that could widen the gap and increase bitterness between the parties. These incidents can have grave consequences and lead to the loss of life and property. Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups.

While the opposition is blowing up buses, killing journalists, attacking government security forces and civilians, bombing trains and other acts of sabotage and terrorism, we read how, “In Latakia, thousands surrounded the Mission’s cars, chanting slogans in favour of the President.”

And while the “armed gangs” continue to carry out attacks, the report notes how,

Based on the reports of the field-team leaders and the meeting held on 17 January 2012 with all team leaders, the Mission confirmed that all military vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons had been withdrawn from cities and residential neighbourhoods. Although there are still some security measures in place in the form of earthen berms and barriers in front of important buildings and in squares, they do not affect citizens.

Furthermore, even after we are informed that the government has opened up to an observer mission, offered amnesty, released thousands of detainees, and “withdrawn from cities and residential neighbourhoods” we read of an “armed entity” roaming the streets and “attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence.” More on this in a moment via Wikileaks.

As for the Syrian governments behavior during the mission it is reported that, “The Mission noted that the Government strived to help it succeed in its task and remove any barriers that might stand in its way. The Government also facilitated meetings with all parties. No restrictions were placed on the movement of the Mission and its ability to interview Syrian citizens, both those who opposed the Government and those loyal to it.”

And ever mindful of what happened in Iraq and Libya, the report found that “the citizens believe the crisis should be resolved peacefully through Arab mediation alone, without international intervention.” Translation: We don’t want a NATO “humanitarian intervention,” thanks. No wonder Qatar, who has come out in support of an armed intervention and pretends to support “democracy,” has suppressed the report and went along with the suspension of the mission. Which is at odds with the report itself.²⁶

In the conclusions, it asked for “administrative and logistic support in order allow it to carry out its tasks.” The report said it must have “the media and political support required to create an appropriate environment that will enable it to fulfil its mandate in the required manner,” which includes a “political process [that] must be accelerated and a national dialogue [that] must be launched.” According to the report, “That dialogue should run in parallel with the Mission’s work in order to create an environment of confidence that would contributes to the Mission’s success and prevent a needless extension of its presence in Syria.” The report gave the following warning: “ending the Mission’s work after such a short period will reverse any progress, even if partial, that has thus far been made.” That was very likely the reason for ending the mission, silencing the report, and its ultimate leak. Some want war and regime change, regardless of what the mission observers, or the people of Syria want.

Afterwards one of the observers came out and said that,

The Arab League is entirely discredited by burying the report of its own observers’ mission and its appeal to the Security Council. It missed the opportunity to participate in the settlement of the Syrian affair. All it can offer in the future will be worthless.²⁷

This is at odds with Achcar’s statement about the willingness of the Syrian government to accept and honor a peaceful mediation.

Achcar finds no room for mentioning the violence of the opposition, or the Arab League report. And he certainly doesn’t mention that Wikileaks has already shown that the U.S. has been supporting the opposition forces since before Obama took office,²⁸ or how the U.S. has only been pushing for the Syrian government to cease fire while ignoring the violence and war crimes of the opposition forces. There is also no mention of the new Wikileaks release of Stratfor emails.²⁹

In an email written in December of 2011 it is stated that “SOF teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce missions and training opposition forces,” and that while the U.S. “distanced themselves” from a bombing campaign because “Syrian air defenses are a lot more robust and are much denser, esp around Damascus and on the borders with Israel” it was noted that the plan “is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.” This means, “There wouldn’t be a need for air cover, and they wouldn’t expect these Syrian rebels to be marching in columns anyway.”

The Stratfor emails makes another startling comment. “[U.S. forces] think the US would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn’t reach that very public stage.” If there can be “enough media attention on a massacre” then the U.S., who is “already on the ground . . . training opposition forces” would find it easier to carry out a bombing campaign like they did in Libya and “would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn’t reach that very public stage,” which with the current state of media subservience to the Western establishment is very likely. U.S. use of force is almost always treated as “constructive,” whereas so-called “enemies” use of force (i.e. Syria under al-Assad) is “nefarious.”

The last interesting revelation on the Stratfor email is the date: December 7, 2011. This is just over two weeks before the Arab League sent their observer mission.

Why is it that Achcar doesn’t mention the bogus propaganda of the opposition, or their violence, or the Arab League report, or how the Stratfor emails show that the US plan “is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns”?

It all comes to a disastrous end when Achcar ends his recent interview on Syria by saying that,

Anyone who is truly not a supporter of Bashar al-Assad and opposes hypothetic arms deliveries to the Syrian insurgents — in the name of an idealistic commitment to non-violence, for instance — should focus their opposition on the very real and massive Russian and Iranian arms deliveries to the Syrian regime in order to remain consistent.

Yet again we are told that unless you “focus [your] opposition on the very real and massive Russian and Iranian arms deliveries to the Syrian regime”—what Achcar calls remaining “consistent”—then you are a “supporter of Bashar al-Assad.”

There is no concern for consistency in regards to opposing the violence and politics of the armed rebels that are serving the American Empire’s interests. It is not even a concern for consistency to get the facts right. The “focus” should be on Iran and Russia arming the Syrian regime that is defending itself from a foreign-directed rebellion using civilian buildings as military installations for their terrorist and guerrilla attacks, assassinations, torture and more. Even Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the SNC late last month expressing their “concern about increasing evidence … of kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members.” Again, arousing no comment from Achcar.³⁰

What are readers to make of Achcar’s position on Libya and Syria? The one “consistent” theme I have found in Achcar’s position is he is selective in how he approaches and frames them. He ignores the violent and criminal aspect of the foreign-directed rebellions, and says anyone who doesn’t support them is a supporter of the dictatorship. He claims we must “focus” on the crimes and armaments of America’s enemies, and even attempts to describe this as an “anti-imperialist perspective.” This is a very odd position for a supposed anti-imperialist leftist to take. It is also radically juxtaposed to Noam Chomsky’s comments to the UN about the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, which the conflicts in Libya and Syria are intimately a part of:

The discussions about R2P, or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have been a few principles of international affairs that apply quite generally. One is the maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must. A corollary is what Ian Brownlie calls “the hegemonial approach to law-making”: the voice of the powerful sets precedents. Another principle derives from Adam Smith’s account of policy-making in England: the “principal architects” of policy — in his day the “merchants and manufacturers” — make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England – but far more so, those who were subjected to “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” particularly in conquered India, Smith’s own prime concern. A third principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters. Just to illustrate, in his scholarly study of “humanitarian intervention,” Sean Murphy cites only three examples between the Kellogg-Briand pact and the UN Charter: Japan’s attack on Manchuria, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler’s occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia, all accompanied by lofty rhetoric about the solemn responsibility to protect the suffering populations, and factual justifications. The basic pattern continues to the present.³¹

Achcar’s comments on Libya and Syria also stand in stark contrast with Chomsky’s classic work on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” where Chomsky wrote nearly fifty years ago that, “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments [and their media parrots], to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions,” and that, “Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.” In short, Chomsky argues persuasively that, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”³²

Rather than expose, analyze, seek, and speak the truth lying hidden behind the propaganda that has been filling the media, Achcar has apparently accepted and repeated much of it.

Opposing the rebellions doesn’t necessarily make one a supporter of Gaddafi or al-Assad, just as opposing the Iraq War didn’t make one an apologist for Saddam Hussein. It is sufficient to oppose the armed rebellions on the grounds that they are not popularly supported, and run the very real risk of making things worse, as Vietnam, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria can attest to. If one wants to “remain consistent” they would look at not only the crimes and injustices (or how much support they retain) of the various dictatorships, whether they are supported or opposed by the US, but that of the armed opposition as well. When it comes to Gilbert Achcar on Libya and Syria it is hard to imagine he did so, and come to the remarks and conclusions he draws.

1. Libyan Developments, Gilbert Achcar, Znet, March 19. 2011.
2. Flying proudly over the birthplace of Libya’s revolution, the flag of Al Qaeda, Daily Mail UK, November 2, 2011.
3. One Third of Libya Turns Out to Support Qaddafi in World’s Largest March Ever, Mathaba, July 7, 2011.
4. Fighters Enter Qaddafi Stronghold City as Toll Rises, NYT, September 26, 2011.
5. Libya: Libyan city of Bani Walid still run by Gadaffi loyalists, AllVoices, March 1, 2012.
6. NATO’s Rebel Forces, Luis Rumbaut, MR Zine, August 24, 2011.
7. [7]
8. US bids to break Gaddafi Regime, Financial Times, August 9, 2011.
9. “Airstrikes in Libya did not take place” – Russian military, RT, March 1, 2011.
10. Humanitarian War in Libya : There is no evidence !, Youtube, November 28, 2011.
11. Libya: a legitimate and necessary debate from an anti-imperialist perspective, Gilbert Achcar, ZNet, March 25, 2011.
12. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya, UN Human Rights Council, March 2, 2012.
13. “Es fand eine regelrechte Jagd auf Migranten statt“, derStandard, July 6, 2011.
14. ‘There’s a fear that the fall of Assad would lead to worse for Western interests and Israel…‘, Gilbert Achcar, ZNet, April 6, 2012.
15. Libya: exodus from Sirte as thousands flee rebel offensive, The Telegraph UK, September 28, 2011.
16. Libya: Contact Group Should Press Rebels to Protect Civilians, HRW, July 15, 2011.
17. Rebels settle scores in Libyan capital, Kim Sengupta, The Independent UK, August 27, 2011.
18. The United States Should Stay Out of Syria, Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, February 6, 2012.
19. Syria crisis: Shelling ‘kills dozens’ in restive Homs, BBC, February 9, 2012.
20. Whose hands are behind those dramatic YouTube pictures?, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK, January 15, 2012.
21. Questioning the Syrian “Casualty List”, Sharmine Narwani, Al-Akhbar, February 4, 2012.
22. Syria’s ‘Srebrenica: Situation Grows Increasingly Grim in Rebel Stronghold of Homs, Spiegel Online, February 23, 2012.
23. Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling, NYT, February 22, 2012.
24. French journalist, several others killed in Syria, MSNBC, January 11, 2012.
25. League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria, Global Research.
26. Syria Accuses Qatar of Arming Rebels, Defense News, January 18, 2012.
27. What you won’t read in the Western and Arab media, The Angry Arab News Service, February 8, 2012.
28. U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show, Washington Post, April 17, 2011.
29. INSIGHT – military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces, Wikileaks.
30. Open Letter to the Leaders of the Syrian Opposition, HRW, March 20, 2012.
31. Statement by Professor Noam Chomsky to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, July 23, 2009.
32. The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, Chomsky.info, February 23, 1967.

Hamas’s recent condemnation of the Assad regime is unlikely to endear it to the Syrian government, but, in fact, over the years Syria has treated the Palestinians relatively well, if one compares the way Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt have treated their Palestinian refugee communities. Moreover, unlike Israel, Syria has never threatened the UN Agency or plotted its demise, a move that could precipitate a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The most recent Israeli threats against UNRWA include an attack by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, that blamed the Agency for perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  In conjunction with a PR firm and the right-wing, US-based StandWithUs organization, Ayalon has created a series of videos on Youtube that attempt to promote Israel’s image and spin the history of the conflict.  His most recent video is on Palestinian refugees.  Ayalon proposes that UNRWA be dismantled and blames it for prolonging the refugee issue and the conflict.  Instead, he proposes that Palestinian refugees be placed under the UNHCR’s mandate.  In fact, however, the primary reason why UNRWA still exists is due to Israel’s consistent rejection of UN General Assembly resolution 194 (III) calling for the right of refugees to return and compensation.

There would be no need for UNRWA at all if the refugees were granted their right of return. Indeed, after the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993, which had not included any reference to resolution 194 (III), UNRWA began preparations for its own dissolution, creating anxiety among refugees – a process that was reversed due to Oslo’s utter failure.

Due to the political impasse, UNRWA continues to provide assistance and relief to the refugees. When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services (as the descendants of the original Palestine refugees are also eligible for registration.)

A peaceful solution has been made impossible by Israel’s continued expansion on Palestinian land and its illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, as well as its repeated bombardment of Gaza and unlawful blockade. Israel’s serpent-like Separation Wall swallows more land, hundreds of checkpoints restrict movement, and an expanding apparatus of laws and regulations make a “normal Palestinian everyday life” out of the question. This repressive apparatus increases the dependence of refugees on UNRWA’s meager aid, while at the same time creating even more refugees and internally displaced persons.

The Israeli Government has failed to make the Palestinians disappear, despite several plans and attempts that preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948 and continue to this day. It is now proposing that UNRWA should be dismantled, falsely claiming that it is the Agency that keeps the Palestinian struggle alive, not the Israeli military occupation and repression. Israel hoped UNRWA would help the refugees fade away into the Arab world. Instead, the Palestinians have continued to strive for justice, while the Agency has served as a constant reminder at the international level, and to the Palestinians, that an original sin and an injustice were committed in 1948.

UNRWA does face internal challenges and ambiguities resulting from its multi-faceted connections and conflicting interests; for example, those of its major donor the United States, which generally adopts the Israeli position in regards to the refugee issue, while Palestinian aspirations are to return to their homeland. Moreover, UNRWA, as a UN organization, is bound by UN resolutions, including 194(III), but depends on these donors to operate. Yet the Agency has co-existed with Palestinian refugees for over six decades, acting as a reservoir of memory and holding thousands of documents attesting to the Palestinian historical tragedy.

Israeli calls to withdraw funds to the Agency or even dismantle it should cause concern. Sadly, today the Palestinian leadership no longer has the unity and therefore the clout it had in earlier times, when it could both hold UNRWA accountable and defend it from external assaults. It is distracted by its diplomatic activities and the schism between Hamas and Fatah that shows no signs of abating.

What would the world do if Israel, or indeed any of the Arab countries, were to dismantle UNRWA? Refugees have come to regard it as the symbol of their rights; it is also a source of livelihood for many of the most impoverished among them. Palestinians should safeguard this legacy to ensure that the Agency, its identity and mission, will not be hijacked by those who caused their displacement.

Additionally and infamously, of course, whole wedding parties have been wiped out, by some detached and far-flung controller in the American Southwest or in Langley, VA. Is this what is meant by making war more and more “hospitable” and “sanitized”? I guess, in a sense, but not; of course, for those at the receiving end of the drone. Such questions, I think, force one to wonder about what Maddow thinks regarding the Constitution — vis a vis the war authorization for the US military conflict — in the so-called Afpak war zone.

Indeed, the aforementioned authorization for the war in Afghanistan, pertains to the US military’s actions in Afghanistan — and Afghanistan alone. [4] Thus, of course, there is no constitutional basis for any sort of military, or even drone activities in the sovereign nation of Pakistan (or any of the other nations where they have been used). And furthermore, one wonders what Maddow’s position on the two American citizens — executed under unconstitutional bureaucratic fiat is — considering that this was not addressed in the Howard Stern interview. These Americans were, according to the Obama administration, guilty until proven innocent, but; of course, never received anything like their inalienable right to a trial, or the long-hallowed and (previously) integrally American jury of their peers.

International law scholar Richard Falk does believe that drones have changed the idea of war/military conflict seriously, and that their advent should be regarded with grave interest/concern. According to Falk the drones clearly raise questions about national sovereignty, and the parameters about presently held notions — of what are the currently permissible forms of war. Falk likens legal “rationalities” for the usage of the deathly — and indeed death-dealing — military drone technology, as analogous to John Yoo style torture memo-esque scrawlings of the George Bush Jr. administration/cabal. So, if some more mature, rational, and informed legal bases/doctrines, don’t arise regarding present and impending drone technology; Falk envisions a dystopian future scenario of rampant proliferation that will be imposed upon the world, by a small number of select, drone-armed, and exceedingly powerful elite states.

Falk posits that in our Machiavellian world, where a handful of nuclear countries have been able to cajole a vast majority of the world’s nations, into the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that a similar regime could come forward — regarding these still fairly nascent military drones. Falk sees no impediment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, at present, and says that the same is essentially true of the drones. But the least evil (but still evil) route for the drones may; in fact, end similarly to nuclear armaments, in which the “great powers” — self-chosen — make elaborate and extensive use of their own specific unmanned aerial drones. And by that Falk means that some nations will use drones within their own territory, whilst more powerful international actors, will use them globally (and for attack purposes too).

Falk may be putting his realist hat on, and his spot-on theorizing may be of the Machiavellian reality/order of things, but the actually of the matter is that the drones are totally (and utterly) illegal and unfair. Like a child in a candy shop, the military-industrial complex’s eyes have bulged out, at the advent of this facile way of grievously and insufferably slaughtering people — and so Falk’s analysis is, positively, very sound in this sense. But truth, facts, and reason, I think, must be defended also, even if they are ridiculed as utopian and overly idealistic, by the egregious, sly, and unscrupulous actions — made by the technocrats, military, governmental and political elite officials — who rule our modern day Oceania-esque nation-state, and evermore integrated world.

One of the most prominent government officials of any position — or any stripe — to come out, and unequivocally attack the drones is Hina Rabbani Khar, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Khar has said that, “Drones are not only completely illegal and unlawful and have no authorization to be used — within the domains of international law, but even more importantly, they are counterproductive to your objective of getting this region rid of militancy and terrorism and extremism. Furthermore she has stated, “if one [drone] strike leads to getting you target number one, or target number three today; you are creating five more targets, or ten more targets — in the militancy that it breeds — in the fodder that it gives to the militants, to join their ranks.”

Earlier this year Amnesty International called upon the Obama administration to demonstrate the legal and factual basis of the lethal use of drones. Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific director — at the time — said that, “the US authorities must give a detailed explanation of how these strikes are lawful, and what is being done to monitor civilian casualties and ensure proper accountability. And the director moreover asked, “What are the rules of engagement? What proper legal justification exists for these attacks? While the President’s confirmation of the use of drones in Pakistan, is a welcome first step towards transparency, these and other questions need to be answered.”

Thin and paltry “justifications” for the drone attacks have, in the past, been offered by US officials, and are “grounded” upon the spurious legal basis of a US global war on terrorism with Al-Qaeda — a concept that is not accepted or recognized, by international humanitarian or human rights law. Truthfully, the ultimate question is what law — if any — recognizes, or gives any credence to the deplorable bombardments, by these egregious, brutish, feral, and essentially barbaric (and deeply) inhuman drones?

International law scholar Philip Alston has said about the drones, “I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe… this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”

Alston, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has proposed a summit by the “great” military powers to clarify the legal limits, and the boundaries on the extrajudicial attacks by the killer drones. If such a summit doesn’t take place, and define a fixed, immutable, firm, resolute, and unbending (drone) operational blueprint Alston says, “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense [used to attempt to legitimize the drone strikes] goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the [Charter of the UN].”

As made clear by Professor Richard Falk, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever, to continue on with these savage, mass slaying, and annihilating — and indeed, authentically diabolical killer drones. Like the opening of Pandora’s box, though, these horrid, reprehensible, and unconscionable technological creations may be with us for good. Professor Falk is a more learned man than I, so sadly, if the forces of peace and justice can’t effectively resist, and potentially put an end to these stealthful mass-murderers — run by cowards who have never even envisaged any battlefields — then they will continue to amass great civilian murder, death, heinousness, invidiousness, and inordinate barbarity too. This will more than likely be done by the nations, and regimes that trumpet human rights, democracy, liberty, transparency, openness, and unregulated; and unrestrained human thought, as articles that are necessary to their very basic foundational civic principles, and integral to their national essentia also.

Instead of backing the UN’s landmark report, which supports the tribes’ right to be left alone, Peru is allowing the country’s largest gas project to expand further into indigenous territories known to house numerous uncontacted Indigenous peoples.

The new UN guidance makes clear that uncontacted tribes’ land should be untouchable, and that ‘no rights should be granted that involve the use of natural resources’.

The expansion plan adds to existing controversies around Argentine gas giant Pluspetrol and its notorious Camisea project in southeast Peru.

Past oil and gas exploration in Peru has resulted in violent and disastrous contact with isolated Indigenous peoples.

In the early 1980s, Shell workers opened up paths into the uncontacted Nahua’s land. Diseases soon wiped out half the tribe.

One surviving Nahua who lives close to Camisea’s developments said, ‘The company should not be here. All the time we hear helicopters. Our animals have left, there are no fish. For this, I don’t want the company. No! No company.’

Despite an electoral campaign that promised to respect indigenous rights, Peru’s President Ollanta Humala has done little to guarantee the survival of Indigenous peoples.

The Camisea consortium includes US-based Hunt Oil and Spain’s Repsol. Both have been accused of violating tribal peoples’ rights

The plight of the Tamils is chronicled in Ron Ridenour’s book, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka (Chennai: New Century Bookhouse, 2011). The oppression and genocide experienced by the Tamils is not as well-known as the occupation, oppression, and genocide experienced by the Palestinians even though it is of much longer duration.

I had known that many Tamils lived in Canada having escaped persecution back home. However, in 1997, I became more intimately familiar with the civil war in Sri Lanka while working in Maldives. Many of the workers — and some of my colleagues — were from Sri Lanka. I heard complaints that Tamils were discriminated against because of their language and religion. Worse were the tales of bloodthirsty pogroms of Sinhalese against the Tamils, including torture, murder, rapes — all this committed by Buddhists, people supposedly seeking enlightenment.

Tamils are victims of Sinhalese, but one cannot escape the conclusion that they are also victims of themselves. This comes through in the details of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka, although the author leaves this mainly for the reader to piece together. The solidarity of the Tamil people is underwhelming.

Ridenour holds, “The Tamils have every right and need to exist in peace and equality, and this is possible only if they have their own state.” The first clause is axiomatic from any human rights-observing person; however, the second part is more open to dissension. There are plenty of examples of different ethnicities eventually coming to a more-or-less peaceful co-existence within the same state. Sometimes autonomus regions can grant the equal human rights desired by all humans. However, circumstances certainly indicate that the Sinhalese were disrespectful of the rights of Tamils and tried to impose — violently, if need be — their nationalism, language, and religion into every nook and cranny of Sri Lanka.

Tamils, of course, had every right to resist and agitate for their rights. Would partitioning the geography of Sri Lanka solve the situation, as Ridenour alludes? Or would it have served as a durable cause célèbre for Sinhalese to reunite the island? As Ridenour notes, the Tamils had a de facto state. What if they had more earnestly negotiated from the strength of their position of de facto statehood toward securing an autonomous Tamil region within a Sri Lanka nation (as an acceptable fallback position from separation)?

Very importantly, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka provides a historical backdrop to the Sinhalese-Tamil civil war, starting with the first humans in Sri Lanka and working forward. Ridenour writes that a Tamil presence dates back many centuries in Sri Lanka. Both the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils have India as their origin. The European invasions and colonization of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) began in the sixteenth century, and were enabled by the lack of solidarity between Sinhalese and Tamils. During their colonial rule, the British brought over Tamil coolies to work the plantations.

The Tamils did economically better under British administration than Sinhalese causing envy and friction. The majority Sinhalese sought to exert themselves through making their religion, Buddhism, the sole national religion and their language, Sinhala, the sole official language. “The Tamils history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination.” These chauvanistic moves were followed up with bloody violence wreaked on the Tamils, which Ridenour argues, fit the legal definition of genocide.

Eventually, Tamils formed resistance groups that defended Tamils and pressed for a Tamil state where they felt they could be free from Sinhalese discrimination and violence. The best known group was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) who were no stranger to using extreme violence and were declared terrorists by many, although Ridenour puts this label into perspective.

“Really, if I starve the Tamils, the Sinhala people will be happy.” President Junius Richard Jayewardene was quoted in the Daily Telegraph in 1983. Strangely enough, many so-called terrorists are victims of genocide.

Tamils did not just fight Sinhalese military. Tamil rebel factions fought each other; Tamils fought the Indian “peacekeepers.” The Tamils were adept at finding enemies to fight, but what allies did Tamils find?

Lack of Solidarity

Even the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuṇa (People’s Liberation Front) was opposed to a ceasefire with the Tamils, calling it “part of a western conspiracy to destabilize, divide and re-conquer” Sri Lanka. Yet, if the reasoning proffered by Ridenour for Marxist reluctance to lay down arms is correct, then it exposes a gaping contradiction among the Marxists: they preferred to fight a divisive civil war to avoid being divided.

In the end, the deep divisions among the Tamils would be their very undoing. The egos of LTTE “leader” Velupillai Prabhakaran and Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan (Colonel Karuna) in the East split the Tamils further. Karuna disobeyed orders for the transfer of his fighters, and Prabharakan expelled him from the LTTE. Karuna went over to the Sri Lankan government side.

Now the LTTE was forced to fight the government troops and three Tamil paramilitary groups. It was a losing proposition for Tamils.

Ridenour attempts to answer the question: Why the Tigers failed? The question also implies why the Tamil people failed?

Among the reasons, Ridenour points to Karuna’s defection, Prabharakan’s authoritarian leadership, his reliance on conventional warfare rather than guerrilla warfare, and Prabharakan’s brutality.

The Tigers defeat was ultimately a defeat for the Tamil people. They were a house divided. There was no unity between Sri-Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils, no unity between Tamils and Muslims, and, of course, what unity can one expect from within an ethnicity that has an oppressive caste system? There was even divisiveness among Tamil fighters; they had to defend against each other as well as Sinhalese fighters. This is hardly a successful strategy for liberation.

A whirlwind of genocidal ferocity engulfed the Tamil people. The western media reported little of it; after all, it did not directly involve western fighters. The Tamils have lost control of areas they held in the north and the east. Ridenour writes of “enforced disappearances” of Tamils, maybe into the human trafficking market that opened. Sinhalese subsequently were being “settled” into Tamil areas and homes.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder spoke of the children’s “unimagineable suffering,” now no longer recruited as fighters are instead coerced into prostitution, sex trafficking, and alcohol smuggling.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called the devastation “… the most appalling scene I have seen …”

The Sri Lankan defense ministry triumphed its ”humanitarian operation” victory as one with zero civilian casualties. Ridenour pointed to the videos that appeared on UK’s Channel 4 which belie that defense ministry claim.

Where now?

There is a substantial Tamil diaspora that has begun to organize internationally. A young Tamil socialist, Sharmini Lathan, seems to know the way out of the morass. He told Ridenour: “We need to combine all our forces and struggles: Tamils, Arabs, Latin Americans… We need to help each other, [sic] because we have common problems and goals.”

That the United Nations accomplished nothing to protect humans from the scourge of war in Sri Lanka was unsurprising. Of some surprise was the non-solidarity not just among the Sri Lankans; it was among Arab states, leftist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia who abandoned Tamils. It leads Ridenour to a sad conclusion that “we are heading for moral collapse, and then fascism throughout much of the world.”

Clearly, the Tamils were discriminated against; they were persecuted; and they were forced to resist violently. They resisted largely with minimal support of leftists, communists, and revolutionaries elsewhere. Ridenour found out what he could about the Tamil struggle; he held to to his moral and ideological principles. This single person did not turn his back on the Tamils on the other side of the globe, and he called his fellow leftists out on their lack of solidarity.

Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka gives the background information necessary for the reader to become informed of what led to the civil war and its still unfolding aftermath. Ridenour criticizes the lack of leftist solidarity with the Tamil struggle, but how much of the blame do the Tamils themselves share? One surely would not go so far as to blame any people for a genocide against them, but part of the Tamil struggle was internecine. Readers of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka will have a solid base to discuss, research further, and form their own conclusions.

1. Yes, even Arab nations unmindful of or insouciant to how that reflects on their Arab brethren in Palestine.

When the Egyptian people began to gather in Tahrir Square in January 2011, the embers of the immolation that consumed Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had already sparked the prairie fire that overthrew the dictatorial ruler Ben Ali. The protest in Tahrir Square was the first manifestation of that fire in Egypt but certainly not the last. As everyone must know by now, the fires of protest in Egypt tossed out their dictator less than two months after Mr. Ben Ali was deposed. The feat of that overthrow was not only momentous within the borders of Egypt itself; its repercussions were felt in the halls of Arabia, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome and on Wall Street, there was plenty of catching up to do. Neither the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency or the black ops mangers of the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the end of the Mubarak regime. Indeed, it wasn’t until the bitter end that the political powers in the aforementioned capitals began to side with (and subvert) the popular uprising in the streets of Egypt.

After Mubarak’s fall, the revolutionary fire spread like flames whipped by warm Santa Ana winds. Bahrain to Libya. Yemen to Syria. London and New York. Athens and Oakland. The insurrectionary wave was in motion and nowhere was it more powerful than in the Arab world. Also, nowhere was it met with more determined (and murderous) resistance from the powers that be, internally and externally. Underlying the insurrectionary tide were the economic facts of neoliberalism’s struggle to maintain its global dominance. When it became apparent that this goal could not always be accomplished by continuing to support the old regimes, the capitols of capitalism inserted their agents into the opposition and did their best to manipulate the rebellion into serving the agencies of those capitols. The IMF, World Bank and the rest of the usual suspects saw their moments in each instance and made their moves. As I write, the entire insurrectionary wave is at a stalemate between the forces of popular social justice and just another new face for western imperialism.

Naturally, very little has been written about this aspect of the revolutionary upsurge of 2011-2012 in the organs of neoliberalism. Instead, the fact of IMF arrangements with the post-Mubarak Egypt and the new Tunisia are interspersed with superficial analyses of the rebellions that would have the reader believe that it was social media that provoked them. Even more revealing of the mainstream media’s allegiance to the imperial regime in the insurrection is its lack of coverage of the continuing popular resistance in the Pentagon’s shipyard Bahrain. Instead, we are presented with an ongoing litany of unconfirmed atrocities committed by the Syrian military and a portrayal of the resistance there as essentially untainted by its affiliation with outside governments and militaries.

Fortunately, we have Vijay Prashad. His latest book, titled Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, attacks the western interpretation of the transitions in Egypt and Libya and explores the actual events from a perspective that explains the players in terms of their allegiances, holdings and politics. In Prashad’s work, the differences between the fighters on the ground and the suits on television are not only acknowledged, they are examined in terms of their meaning to the future. In discussing Egypt, Prashad describes the conflagration of Washington’s imperial needs, Tel Aviv’s paranoiac perception of its security, and the Mubarak clique’s desire to maintain power. He gives lie to the West’s claim that it was interested in democracy (a relatively simple task to be sure), explaining that in the western mindset democracy doesn’t mean democracy, it means a guarantee that the interests and holdings of capital will not be upset. The common term one hears, states Prashad, is stability.

Most of this book is about the battle for Libya. Prashad’s text provides the most detailed description of the events both on the ground and in the office suites. He exposes the humanitarian intervention by NATO for what it was. That is, a means for the western powers to regain unfettered access to Libyan oil and rid themselves of an at best erratic client—Muammar Gaddafi. Unlike many on the Left, Prashad does not take sides for or against the rebellion. Instead, he explains the uprising as a popular and positive thing that was manipulated by the forces of the G7 and NATO. Simultaneously, he discusses Gaddafi’s reign as one that began with many positive changes yet ultimately was a victim of its own excess and greed. If there are any good guys in his narrative, it would be the masses that risked their lives to overthrow the autocracy that had Gaddafi at its helm. Their opposite would be the men on both sides of the battle whose only real interest was in keeping their bank accounts plush while serving their masters in the stock exchanges of the neoliberal world.

Interesting, and as yet not very closely examined, is the role of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Jordan and Morocco. Prashad makes note of the fact that the western capitals have said very little about the harsh repression visited on the Bahraini uprising or the Saudi intervention there. He also explores the military role played by Qatar in Libya, its current role in Syria, and the inclusion of some GCC states in a NATO adjunct. Perhaps, writes Prashad, this adjunct of NATO will be able to stand in for NATO in future operations in the Arab world, thereby creating another shadow in the workings of modern imperialism.

Despite the (probably) millions of words written about the Libyan uprising and the NATO intervention, nothing written in English has come near the truth. After reading Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, it seems that when all is said and done, Prashad’s work will come the closest.

The resolution called upon Sri Lanka to implement its own findings and recommendations made in its report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), but extended that call to “initiate credible and independent actions to ensure justice, equity, accountability and reconciliation for all Sri Lankans.” (“Independent action” is not defined.)

Furthermore, the resolution with 24 in favor, 15 against, and 8 abstentions, “encourages” the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to offer the government “advice and technical assistance” in implementing the LLRC recommendations and to make a report on the provision at the 22nd HRC session, a year from now.

In an earlier draft, Sri Lanka would have had to provide a time table to show implementation was underway. To acquire India’s vote, perhaps, the final resolution was watered down. No mention of war crimes or crimes against humanity is included; instead, Sri Lanka is asked to investigate “allegations of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances.”¹

The resolution implies a lack of confidence in the Sri Lankan government to enact even its own mild investigation, while preventing any discussion of a more solid investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” called for last year when it recommended an independent international investigation.

Comparison with May 2009 resolution

The resolution that US allies backed in May 2009 (the US was not on the HR Council then) also called upon Sri Lanka to investigate itself for possible human rights abuse, while condemning only the LTTE for terrorism and war crimes and other human rights abuses. Even though this resolution only asked the police to investigate themselves, many governments took this as an affront to sovereignty. 29 countries voted to applaud Sri Lanka and condemn only the LTTE. Nothing was stated about the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians. This resolution was opposed by 12 votes and there were six abstentions. The pattern was clear then: nearly all the Non-Aligned Movement governments voted for Sri Lanka, and the West voted for a possible critique.

This time the geo-political voting pattern was broken, and, coincidently, disproved my prediction that Sri Lanka would come through without a slap on the face.

The changes in voting are interesting:

Latin American and Africa changed votes significantly.

In 2009, all of the African governments on the Council voted fully in favor of Sri Lanka with one abstention. This time the vote was split with five in favor of the possible criticism, three opposed and five abstentions.

In 2009, five of Latin American governments voted to fully support Sri Lanka, two voted for some critique (Chile and Mexico) and Argentine abstained. Today, six governments voted for the critique with only the two ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) governments voting against any critique (Cuba and Ecuador).

The Middle Eastern governments did not change. They all voted not to criticize with one abstention, the same pattern as in 2009.

Europe, west and east, voted the same way: slight critique.

Russia and China backed Sri Lanka fully.

The countries still on the Council since 2009, which changed their votes from support of Sri Lanka to critique are: Cameroon and Nigeria; India; Uruguay.

The most significant reversal is India, given its several decades-long relationship supporting the Island nation so close to it. Although India changed its vote, it balanced the change with sovereign state solidarity with Sri Lanka.

“While we subscribe to the broader message of this resolution and the objectives it promotes, we also underline that any assistance from the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights or visits of UN Special Procedures should be in consultation with and with the concurrence of the Sri Lankan Government,” read the Indian statement, as reported by Tamilnet.com.

“Observers in Tamil Nadu said that the Indian statement contradicted the demands put forward by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms. J. Jayalalithaa, who had demanded India to declare SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa complicit in genocide and war-crimes and to call for economic sanctions against Sri Lanka till the country ensured equal status to Tamils,” the website reported.

Uruguay’s change is also important. Its new president, José Mujica, was a left-wing guerrilla who spent 15 years in prison, two of it at the bottom of a well. He has placed poverty as the first order of business.

Peru was not on the Council in 2009, but its new government with Ollanta Humala as president voted to criticize Sri Lanka. He has also vowed to tackle poverty as his first priority.

The fact that two African governments have reversed their vote may indicate that international agitation has had an effect. More NAM governments abstained this time as well.

Why the difference?

Although it was the greatest terrorist state in the world that introduced the critical resolution, the United States is still a partner in the war crimes and in genocide against Tamils. It always backed Sinhalese chauvinism, discrimination against Tamils, and offered no aid to Tamil civilians. But it sees an opportunity here to polish its image as a “human rights supporter” while maintaining systematic human rights abuse in its many invasions and military interventions in the world.

The current US president is at war in seven countries, all circumscribing United Nations laws against invading countries that have not invaded the propagator of war: Afghanistan, Iraq (tens of thousands of US war mercenaries still occupy Iraq), Pakistan, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and Libya. Furthermore, without US backing the Palestinian people would have been liberated from Zionist Israel ages ago.

These are some factors in the change:

1. Indian Tamils in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka Tamils living in the Diaspora in many countries have, since the end of the war, conducted many protests and lobbied governments for justice. A few Tamils have even committed suicide in despair and in protest.

2. Channel 4 two-part Killing Field series. The second episode was shown during these sessions and clearly pointed an accusing finger at the Rajapaksa-family regime for standing behind horrendous murders, mutilations, rape; in short, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

3. Mainstream Tamil parties in parliament in Tamil Nadu, India, were a major influence in convincing the central government to change its vote from one of applauding Sri Lanka to this critical stance.

4. The US is making it clear to Sri Lanka’s government that it is dissatisfied with it even while approving a World Bank loan of $213 million for development in the capital city, Colombo, just a week ago. The US keeps its fingers in the economy while it shows its unhappiness because Rajapaksa is offering more economic concessions to China and Russia. The US has lost its long-hoped for port in Trincomalee harbor, which China will probably acquire.

It was China, as well as Russia, Israel, Iran, and Pakistan (not exactly blood brothers) that gave and sold more military hardware to Sri Lanka in the last two to three years of war to annihilate the LTTE. The US-UK and NATO offered far less in the latter period given that they were bogged down in the Middle East.

Conclusion

Perhaps nothing substantial for Tamils in Sri Lanka will come out of this Human Rights Geo-Political game, not simply in and of itself. But the game’s rules are changed, at least in this area of the world, when so many NAM members have not sided with a fellow member. I believe that this is the case, in large part, because the evidence of gross atrocities has come to the surface. No doubt, US machinations have had some effect. But we should not be fooled that these governments are interested in the human rights of any people. The current US president sees an opportunity to score points by pointing a finger at a real culprit, just as he sought to do in Libya under false pretenses, and as he is trying to do in Syria. He, like all capitalist presidents, seeks oil, profits, and domination. He can afford to point a finger at Sri Lanka’s government today because he has lost influence there and because he wants re-election votes from human rights-concerned citizens, albeit beguiled ones.

Cuba, which started the ALBA coalition with Venezuela in 2004, needs to reflect upon its foreign policy stance and especially in regards to Sri Lanka. It has politically backed Sri Lanka, in part, because they are both members of NAM, and Cuba often acts in a knee jerk manner when the US points its finger at other nations, especially third world countries—understandably.

Yet Cuba goes overboard in backing this most ruthless Sri Lankan regime responsible for scores of thousands of civilian deaths, incarcerating hundreds of thousands without due process, continuing to militarize traditional Tamil homeland in the North and East, taking over homes, businesses, places of worship, and building hotels upon Tamil graveyards.

Cuba has acted immorally and in contrast to its long-time solidarity with the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world.

The evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide, is much too irrefutably vivid due to testimonies of victims, satellite photos, and the excellent Channel 4 documentaries with photos and videos taken either by UN aid workers, some by victims or by Sri Lankan murdering soldiers which were then sold or otherwise released to the public.

If Tamils in India and in the Diaspora keep up the pressure, if left organizations, grassroots groups, representatives of other oppressed peoples seeking liberation (such as Palestinians, Kurds in Turkey, Basques, Irish, etc.) would join in united fronts for liberation for one and all, then we might be able to bring some real hope for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Do not be fooled: The US does not want true accountability or a Tamil Eelam homeland for the oppressed minority, but the spotlight is turned on and peoples’ power could stoke the light bringing, at least, relief to the down-trodden Tamil people.

1. See Tamilnet’s story with draft changes.

Together, politics and media combine to provide an astonishingly consistent form of reality management controlling public perception of conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Alastair Crooke, founder and director of Conflicts Forum, notes how the public is force-fed a “simplistic victims-and-aggressor meme, which demands only the toppling of the aggressor”.

The bias is spectacular, outrageous, but universal, and so appears simply to mirror reality. Ahmad Barqawi, a Jordanian freelance columnist and writer based in Amman, said it well:

I remember during the “Libyan Revolution”, the tally of casualties resulting from Gaddafi’s crackdown on protesters was being reported by the mainstream media with such a “dramatic” fervor that it hardly left the public with a moment to at least second-guess the ensuing avalanche of unverifiable information and erratic inflow of “eye witnesses” accounts.

Yet the minute NATO forces militarily intervened and started bombing the country into smithereens, the ceremonial practice of body count on our TV screens suddenly stopped; instead, reporting of Libyan casualties (of whom there were thousands thanks only to the now infamous UNSC resolution 1973) turned into a seemingly endless cycle of technical, daily updates of areas captured by NATO-backed “rebel forces”, then lost back to Gaddafi’s military, and again recaptured by the rebels in their creeping territorial advances towards Tripoli…

How is it that the media’s concern for human rights did not extend to the victims of NATO bombing campaigns in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Sirte? How come the international community’s drive to protect the lives of Libyan civilians in Benghazi lost steam the minute NATO stepped in and actually increased the number of casualties ten-fold?

It is a remarkable phenomenon — global media attention flitting instantaneously, like a flock of starlings, from one focus desired by state power to another focus also desired by state power.

But the bias goes far beyond even this example. The media’s basic stance in reporting events in Libya and Syria has been one of intense moral outrage. The level of political-media condemnation is such that media consumers are often persuaded to view rational, informed dissent as apologetics for mass murder. Crooke writes:

Those with the temerity to get in the way of “this narrative” by arguing that external intervention would be disastrous, are roundly condemned as complicit in President Assad’s crimes against humanity. They are confronted by the unanswerable riposte of dead babies — literally.

Monopolising The First Draft Of History

Just as the West has a near-monopoly on high-tech violence, so the Western media has a near-monopoly in creating the ‘first rough draft of history’. Consider this headline in The Times last month: “Moral Blindness; Russia and China acted for self-serving motives in vetoing the Security Council’s condemnation of the bloodshed in Syria.{¹

Times readers were assured that the violence – which, by curious coincidence, was said to have peaked just as the UN vote was taking place — was enormous: “Without warning, cause or compassion, the Syrian Army opened fire on the centre of Homs in the night, killing at least 200 people and leaving hundreds more maimed and wounded.”

As we discussed at the time, this was the “first rough draft of history” across the media. A second, sharply contradictory draft is already emerging, but only at the media margins. Jonathan Steele, formerly chief foreign correspondent at the Guardian, recently wrote of Russia and China in the London Review of Books:

The Western media have largely caricatured them as defenders of the regime thanks to their vetoes of the UN Security Council resolution on Syria. But in the days before the vote on 4 February diplomats in New York had been working with two separate drafts, trying to find a compromise text. Far from siding with Assad, the Russian draft differed little from the Moroccan one the West supported. It condemned the authorities’ “disproportionate use of force”. It called for an immediate ceasefire. The two substantive differences were that the Russian draft said the political process should start “without preconditions” while the Western-backed draft supported the Arab League’s call for Assad to transfer power to his vice-president before a dialogue could begin. In the event of non-compliance, the Western draft threatened “further measures”. The Russians had no such clause. For reasons that are still not clear, the West decided to ambush the Russians and Chinese and put the Moroccan draft to a sudden vote just before Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was due to visit Assad to conduct negotiations. The West knew that in its regime-changing form the Russians and Chinese would have no choice but to veto the resolution. If the Russians had been less diplomatic, they might have put their own draft to a sudden vote. We might then today be shouting at the West for vetoing a solution.

As for the Times’ and other media’s endlessly repeated, but unverified, claims of 200 dead in Homs, Steele cites a source who said he “started having doubts about the media coverage when al-Jazeera claimed two hundred people died on the day the UN Security Council resolution was debated. My friend in Homs said it was more like sixty”.

The influential risk analysis group, Stratfor, reports that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue”. Emails from Stratfor published by WikiLeaks argued that Syrian government massacres against civilians were unlikely because the “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds”.

Reuters recently profiled the key source for much mainstream reporting of casualties, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in an article titled, “‘Syrian shop-keeper wages lonely war from English city.”  The report notes of the lone warrior, Rami Abdulrahman:

Thousands of miles away from home, in a small rented house in Coventry, Abdulrahman runs Syria’s most prominent activist group which has become central to the way the uprising is being reported – and understood – in the world.

When Human Rights Watch recently reported “kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members”, the activist and filmmaker Gabriele Zamparini asked: “So, why weren’t we informed of this by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights? What are they observing?” (Email to Media Lens, March 20, 2012) Two more questions the media will doubtless not be asking.

It is not outrageous that Abdulrahman should be saying whatever he likes about the conflict. It is outrageous that the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times are presenting him as a primary source for hard evidence.

As discussed, media outrage has typically been communicated at a high pitch of damning condemnation. And yet casualties in Libya under Gaddafi and in Syria now are likely far below those caused by Nato’s war in Libya. They are certainly minor events compared to the searing holocaust inflicted by the West on Iraq over more than two decades at the cost of more than 2 million lives. Nevertheless, while moral outrage is turned on like a tap in response to the crimes of official enemies,”our” crimes – horrors for which we are morally accountable as democratic citizens – elicit only murmurs of mild concern. Once again, in an instant, the media flock alters direction in a way that just happens to favour state interests.

The groundwork persuading us to accept this bias is being laid on a daily basis. As Western demands for Syrian regime change reached a peak in early March, a Guardian photo spread was titled “Dictators’ Wives – Their husbands have run some of the most brutal regimes of the Arab world, but present and former first ladies presented a different image to the world”.

The first six of these photos, fully half of the dozen on display, focused on Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian official enemy du jour. If Guardian readers didn’t know that Assad was being portrayed by the US-UK governments as the latest Hitler, Saddam, Milosevic, and Gaddafi, they could have guessed from this piece. Notably absent from the remaining pictures were the dictators’ wives of surviving Western allies in countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and Yemen.

A week earlier, the Guardian had published: “The Arab world’s first ladies of oppression”. Again, the photo beneath the title featured “Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma”. An Independent article asked: “So, what do you think of your husband’s brutal crackdown, Mrs Assad?”

We accept that Assad is a ruthless dictator. And, of course, politicians, and arguably their spouses, should be subjected to serious challenge. But can we imagine anything comparable being directed at the wives of other men running two of ‘the most brutal regimes’ in the world – Barack Obama and David Cameron?

By contrast, the Guardian “Picture of the day” on January 25, included this comment: “The first lady shines in sapphire at the state of the union address, surrounded by a sea of dark suits.”

The piece added: “Michelle Obama doesn’t do trends. Instead she wears clothes that convey a message but never overpower her.”

A Guardian review of last week’s meeting between Obama and Cameron in Washington, observed:

Catwalk season might be over, but Washington has gallantly rushed in to fill the vacuum. This week, DC is playing host to a fascinating geopolitical fashion show featuring an all-star cast and headlined by Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron

Try imagining a British journalist asking: “So, what do you think of your husband’s brutal drone campaign, Mrs Obama?”

“We Are Not Investigative Reporters”

A foundation stone of structural journalistic bias is the assumption that it is the role of ‘balanced’ journalism to defend democracy by uncritically reporting the thoughts and deeds of elected leaders. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, then ITN political editor (now BBC political editor), Nick Robinson, wrote:

It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters.²

By contrast, challenging what “those in power” are doing or thinking is said to be the task of less high-profile news journalists. In reality, they also often merely echo officialdom.

Thus, two of the Guardian’s senior news reporters, Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger, recently reported David Cameron’s claim that “Iran is planning an inter-continental nuclear weapon” that “would threaten the west”. Wintour and Borger failed to offer a single fact or source to challenge this preposterous claim that so closely resembled the lies that preceded the war on Iraq in 2002-2003 (after complaints, the Guardian amended the article).

Or consider that Reuters reported:

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said on Thursday she was devastated by the destruction she saw in Baba Amr district of the Syrian city of Homs and she wants to know what happened to residents there as result of an assault by government forces.   “I was devastated by what I saw in Baba Amr yesterday,” Amos told Reuters TV after leaving a meeting with ministers in Damascus.  “The devastation there is significant, that part of Homs is completely destroyed and I am concerned to know what has happened to the people who live in that part of the city”.

Reuters did not mention that Valerie Amos is the same Baroness Amos who was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1997, and made a cabinet minister by him in 2003, replacing Clare Short after she resigned over the Iraq war. Amos said in May 2003:

It is absurd to suggest that we invented, exaggerated or distorted evidence for our own ends. There have been successive United Nations Security Council resolutions about Iraq’s WMD. We have evidence that Iraq used its WMD against its own people. These are the facts. ³

Amos insisted that the Government’s dossier on WMD in Iraq had been “thorough and accurate”.  She commented: “On the 45-minute claim, it is absolutely clear from reading the Hutton report that the Government did not dramatise the evidence>”⁴

In truth, it is left to a tiny handful of “crusading” journalists buried in the ‘quality’ press to offer a heavily compromised challenge to power.

Additionally, the fact that big media corporations are owned by wealthy individuals, or even larger corporations owned and run by wealthy people, means that high-profile journalists tend to be selected on the unspoken assumption that they will support elite versions of the world. Unsurprisingly, then, we find that the leading political correspondents of major broadcast and print media tend to be highly sympathetic to the official view. The investigative journalist I.F. Stone wrote:

The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department of the Pentagon for a wire service of a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3 a.m, the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp – private-off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson commented recently:

David Cameron will become the first world leader to be welcomed aboard Airforce One by President Obama so that both men can travel to the crucial swing state of Ohio. The pin up of the global left and the leader of the British right will add the latest image to the photo album of the Special Relationship.

He added: “Last week President Obama had the opportunity to look Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in the eye and judge how close he is to launching a war. David Cameron will want to know what he saw.”

This mythologising of leaders as virtual Hollywood heroes — and the depiction of policy as emerging from powerful individuals rather than powerful groups — urges the public to defer to leaders portrayed as far more than mere representatives of the people.

The undiscussed, system-supportive foundation of professional journalism adds a guaranteed second promotional layer reinforcing officialdom’s version of the world. Politicians can simply report the threat of a terrible impending massacre in Libya and the press will report them saying it — over and over again.

Compromised international organisations like the United Nations and even some well-intentioned but naïve human rights groups, can also be depended on to reinforce the official view. The UN, for example, is not, as presented, a divinely independent body free from the taint of realpolitik. It is subject to superpower control achieved through manipulation, threat, punishment and reward. If the UN reinforces the official view, the media can cite this as “independent” confirmation of what the United States and Britain are claiming. Right-wing think tanks and less high-profile “journalists of attachment” – some of them out and out state stooges – also add their shrieks to the swelling chorus insisting: “Something must be done!”

Perceiving an apparently rock solid consensus across the political, media and NGO spectra, the best compassionate instincts of many media consumers will prompt them to accept calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ to obstruct the crimes of official enemies.

The danger is clear, then – the “victims-and-aggressor meme” can become insulated against facts, against even discussion of the facts, by a kind of press-button, structural propaganda.

1. Leading article, The Times, February 6, 2012
2. Robinson, ‘Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor,” The Times, July 16, 2004
3. Paul Waugh, “Rumsfeld changes tack by insisting that WMD will be found”, Independent, May 31, 2003
4. Catherine Macleod, “War president Bush changes tack on WMD”.  Herald, February 9, 2004

Israeli intelligence were convinced that their strike… had ended Saddam’s program. Instead [it prompted] covert funding for a nuclear program code-named “PC3” involving 5,000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb…¹

In response to the attack, UN Security Council Resolution 487 was passed 15-0, on June 19, 1981, with no-one opposing and no-one abstaining — not even the United States. It is worth quoting the Resolution at some length:

Fully aware of the fact that Iraq has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since it came into force in 1970, that in accordance with that Treaty Iraq has accepted IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear activities, and that the Agency has testified that these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date,

Noting furthermore that Israel has not adhered to the non-proliferation Treaty…

Considering that, under the terms of Article 2, paragraph 4, of the Charter of the United Nations: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”,

1. Strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct;

2. Calls upon Israel to refrain in the future from any such acts or threats thereof;

3. Further considers that the said attack constitutes a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime which is the foundation of the non-proliferation Treaty;

4. Fully recognizes the inalienable sovereign right of Iraq, and all other States, especially the developing countries, to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation;

5. Calls upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards;

6. Considers that Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered, responsibility for which has been acknowledged by Israel…

Readers may be wondering why they have not seen or heard more about Resolution 487 during a period of intense speculation that Israel might launch a similar attack, involving the same violation of international law, on Iran. We can all, of course, remember the endless political and media references to UN Resolutions 1441 and 687, said to be relevant to the US-UK attack on Iraq in March 2003. The likes of Tony Blair and Jack Straw never stopped reminding the public of their crucial significance. We will return to media coverage of Osirak and Resolution 487 below.

‘Getting There’: An Exchange With Jonathan Marcus

Last week, the BBC published an article by Defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus under the title, ‘How Israel might strike at Iran.’

Like a tourist guide, the piece listed Israeli aircraft under the banner ‘Getting There – Aircraft, Details, Task’ and identified ‘Potential targets’, including Iranian nuclear energy facilities (as discussed in our previous alert, there is currently no evidence that Iran is even planning to attempt to build a nuclear weapon).

The nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz is a clear target. Marcus commented: ‘The facility is underground, making bunker-busting munitions essential.’

The military site at Parchin was also mentioned:

IAEA inspectors were prevented from visiting the site in February 2012 as they sought to clarify the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear programme.

In an article also published last week titled, ‘How the Media Got the Parchin Access Story Wrong,’ investigative journalist Gareth Porter wrote that ‘explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA and the language of the new IAEA report indicate that Iran did not reject an IAEA visit to the base per se but was only refusing access as long as no agreement had been reached with the IAEA governing the modalities of cooperation’. (Our emphasis)

Porter added:

But not a single major news media report has reported the significant difference between initial media coverage on the Parchin access issue and the information now available from the initial IAEA report and Soltanieh [Iranian Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh].

Returning to the BBC analysis, the ‘Task’ for each Israeli weapon system was described. However, when it came to Iranian defences, instead of ‘Task’, Marcus used the word ‘Threat’, thus presenting the imagined conflict from an Israeli perspective. Of course the Iranians might well perceive Israeli ‘Tasks’ as ‘Threats’. The media monitoring website News Unspun noted the biased language, complaints followed, and the BBC changed ‘Threat’ to ‘Efficacy’.

On February 27, we wrote to Jonathan Marcus about his article:

Hi Jonathan

Regarding this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17115643

Presumably the legal issues surrounding an Israeli attack, and the possibility of major civilian casualties, don’t merit a mention. Amazing to see such a close copy of the ‘toys for boys’ journalism that preceded the war on Iraq, which claimed 100,000s, perhaps a million, human lives. That ought to be sobering.

Best wishes

David Edwards

Marcus responded the same day:

Well that I suppose sounds an incisive point but when I am asked by my editors to write a military assessment of Israel’s capacities to carry out such a mission, I speak to the air power experts and write the piece.

There are indeed many other aspects to this story and I am sure they are being coveted and will be covered extensively over the coming weeks and months.

This is not “toys for boys”- go to a wargaming exhibition if you want that – this is a military analysis – nothing more, nothing less.

JM

Further exchanges took place on the same day:

Thanks Jonathan. You wrote:

‘Only a few days ago, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said that an Israeli attack would not be prudent. Such a strike, he said, “would be destabilising and would not achieve their long-term objectives”.’

What’s the difference between citing a US general on the imprudent nature of a strike and citing an expert on international law on the illegal nature of a strike? Dempsey was talking about political consequences – it ‘would be destabilising’ – which could also justify mention of possible civilian casualties, which would certainly be destabilising.

As an independent journalist, you could include this material, or suggest it to your editors for inclusion, or protest if they took it out.

Best

David

Marcus replied:

The piece dealt with the subject that was requested, which is why the General was quoted. Indeed there would have been a prominent USAF general (retd) cited in the piece but he was not able to respond in time, though that probably wouldn’t have made you any happier.

The other issues you mention, not least the legality of such a strike, were not the issue here. I daresay that I will probably be asked to do something on that subject in due course.

While discussing military matters the piece did not give any sense that this would be an easy nor an un-problematic undertaking. Indeed one of the people interviewed gave a pretty blunt view of the desirability of such an attack.

Your glib toys for boys reference annoyed me since I think it rather betrays your own prejudices. The freedoms you and I enjoy – me to broadcast what I believe is a fair assessment – and you to write in and criticise it – were maintained by “boys with toys” as you call them.

Your implication is that the piece is in some sense “war-mongering” which I entirely disagree with – for all I know you may be a battle-scarred recipient of the VC – but I have in the past seen some fighting reasonably close-up. It is not pleasant. But I know what wars are about and – if I may speak personally for a moment – have no enthusiasm for them.

That’s it – you’ve had my two responses (on my day off as well – there’s public service). You should be glorying in the fact that we have a BBC and especially the World Service – celebrating its 80th birthday this year), rather than always carping and complaining. But you are of course entitled to your opinion, as I am to provide my informed assessment.
Regards
JM

We responded:

Thanks Jonathan. Sorry if you were annoyed by the ‘toys for boys’ comment. I meant to suggest that it is wrong and dangerous to discuss military possibilities as a kind of technical issue distinct from political and humanitarian concerns. As I mentioned, you did refer to political issues, but you haven’t explained why these were included when the related issues of legality and possible civilian casualties were not.

In his analysis of obedience in modern society, the psychologist Stanley Milgram remarked on the growing ‘tendency of the individual to become so absorbed in the narrow technical aspects of the task that he loses sight of its broader consequences,’ such that he ‘entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing morality to the… authority he is serving’. (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.25)

It seems to me that your piece was an example of what Milgram was warning against. He pointed out that, finally – regardless of what is ‘requested’ of us – we are all morally responsible for our own actions. If BBC editors ask for a purely technical analysis of a possible future conflict, they should be resisted.

Best wishes

David

Marcus replied:

There will be a follow up piece later this week looking at at least of the issues you raise. this one happily was the most looked at page today so there is clearly interest.

I am not going to get into the sociology of the media – It gives me indigestion.
JM’

We answered:

That’s good to hear, thanks.

Best

David

We didn’t mean we were glad to hear that ‘sociology’ gives Marcus indigestion. We were grateful for his lengthy, if somewhat gruff, responses. He deserves credit for responding at all (so many BBC journalists do not). We look forward to his article ‘looking at at least [some?] of the issues’ we raised. If he mentions Osirak, and especially Resolution 487, he will have reinvented himself as a media outlier.

So how extraordinary would a Marcus mention of these issues be? Recall that June 7, 2011 marked the 30th anniversary of Israel’s historic raid on Osirak – the world’s first attack on a nuclear facility. And yet the LexisNexis media search engine records just eight mentions of Osirak in all UK national newspapers in the last 12 months. On the day of the anniversary itself, the attack was mentioned in single-sentence, ‘On this day in history’ comments in the free London newspaper Metro and in the Paisley Daily Express. The words ‘Osirak’ and ‘Resolution 487’ produced zero results for all available dates in all print media.

1. Woodward, State of Denial, Simon & Schuster, 2006, p.215.

— Associated Press, February 3, 2012

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the run-up to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.

—  J.Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972

Smelled any proverbial rats lately? If not, you have not been paying attention. There are plenty about.

Consider, for instance, this:

“Assad must halt his campaign of killing and crimes against his own people now” and “must step aside …” Hilary Clinton (Asia Times,  February 9, 2012)

“I strongly condemn the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault  … and I offer my deepest sympathy to those who have lost loved ones.  Assad must halt his campaign of killing and crimes against his own people now.  He must step aside …” said President Barack Hussein Obama.

Yet responsibility for US victims, in their hundreds of thousands, spanning Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, are wholly unaccountable — and uncounted.

Responsibility for tyrannicide (including the horrific, state sponsored assassinations of Osama bin Laden and others, including Libya’s Head of State, Colonel Gaddafi) have seemingly entered a Presidential memory hole.

“This (Syria’s) is a doomed regime as well as a murdering regime. There is no way it can get its credibility back either internationally or with its own people”, Britain’s little Foreign Secretary, William Hague, chimed in obediently from the Washington script on Sky News.

“Because the regime is so intransigent, because it is conducting ten months unmitigated violence and repression – more than 6,000 killed, with 12,000 or 14,000 in detention and subject to every kind of torture and abuse – it is driving some opponents to violent action themselves”, concluded Hague.

Hypocrisy reigns supreme. Walking distance from Hague’s office, “living in style and protection”, is Bashar Al Assad’s Uncle Rifaat, under whose Defence Brigades onslaught killed up to perhaps 30,000 people in the city of Hama, which was also partially destroyed Falluja style. The thirtieth anniversary of  a truly terrible event is commemorated today, February 25. (See Robert Fisk, Independent, February 25, 2012.)

Of Libya, in March 2011, Obama stated:

Going forward, we will continue to send a clear message: The violence must stop. Muammar Gaddafi has lost legitimacy to lead, and he must leave. Those who perpetrate violence against the Libyan people will be held accountable. And the aspirations of the Libyan people for freedom, democracy and dignity must be met.

An anomaly (apart from the script similarity): In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,  deaths resultant from US-UK and “allied” actions are “impossible to verify” by Washington and Whitehall.

Indeed, this month the (UK) Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence issued a Report, after an Inquiry into operations in Libya, stating that:

Britain has no way of knowing how many civilians died in the Libyan conflict as a result of Nato bombing.

Back in March 2011, however, the exact figure of Gaddafi’s victims was “known.” Coincidentally, it was also exactly 6,000, stated a “political analyst” — using remarkably similar State Department  phraseology.

As under Saddam Hussein in Iraq (with no diplomatic presence), in Libya, and now little in Syria, with no point of contact bar, seemingly a satellite dish fitter in Coventry, England, alleged to be the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights”, exact death and casualty figures are always miraculously available.

A new nemesis appears on the horizon — or “Arab street” — and precise numbers are trumpeted. Yet when Western forces, “Viceroys”, “Intelligence” services, “mentors” and myriad general meddlers, mercenaries and marauders pitch up, murder and occupy, none are available.

Of course, no proposed invasion (sorry, “humanitarian intervention”) regime change and accompanying mass slayings would be complete without forces of a wicked tyrant switching off electricity to babies’ incubators.

For anyone who has forgotten the details, the (1990-1991) Iraq model went like this: vast US government employed PR agency, Hill and Knowlton (“we create value by shaping conversations: we start them, we amplify them, we change them. We can connect seamlessly with all of your audiences…”) produced a fifteen year old girl called “Nayirah”, a “Kuwaiti with first hand knowledge of … her tortured land.”

I volunteered (tears) at the Al Addan Hospital .. I saw the Iraqi soldiers ..with guns, they took fifteen babies out of incubators, left them on the cold floor and took the incubators.

Strangely, no one asked why she didn’t pick them up and wrap and tend to them, or checked who she really was.

She was the daughter of Saud al Sabar, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to US. The incubators’ story, of course, was a complete fabrication.

October 10th 1990, Amnesty presented evidence against Iraq with Hill and Knowlton at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Capitol Hill. Amnesty International trustingly endorsed the incubator story, apparently never investigating who “Nayirah” was, and in a charged situation, whether propaganda might not be rampant.

Amnesty US Executive Director, John Healey, compounded the incubator baby story in testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on 8th January 1991. The carpet-bombing of Iraq began nine days later.¹

Amnesty, enjoined by Human Rights Watch, are amongst the most enthusiastic champions of Syrian intervention and onward to Armageddon. Glen Ford writes all you ever need to know.

The first Syria incubator baby story surfaced last August. “Syrian government troops”, had cut the electricity. It was quickly exposed as beyond questionable.

A similar story came up on February 8  with numbers varying from eighteen poor mites to a subsequent eighty. With both tales, as the Iraq version, no distraught parents, extended family were found, no funeral gatherings. Then the stories, too, quietly vanished.

Coincidentally, the current Speaker of the eighty eight Member Arab Inter-Parliamentary union, which backs intervention in Syria, is Kuwaiti, Ali Al-Salem Al-Dekbas, calling for all Syria’s Ambassadors to be expelled, confrontation with Russia over its stance — and in remarkable US-speak, for swift intervention to stop the Syrian government “killing (their own) people.” (Reuters, February 4, 2012.)

The new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, is Suzanne Nossel, formerly Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Assistant for International Organization Affairs at the State Department. She has also previously worked for Human Rights Watch.

She “… has launched several campaigns against Iran, Libya and Syria.”

The allegation that Kuwait gave Amnesty $500,000 for backing the Iraq incubator baby story has never gone away, but the little island, once famously called ”an oil company posing as a state”, with population just  2,595,628 (July 2011) which  includes 1,291,354 non-nationals, also has powerful American-proxy clout.

In 1999, an agreement was signed between the USA and Kuwait for a permanent US force to be stationed there, in twelve facilities (there are a further eight “spares”, seemingly not currently in use.)

The agreement for the bases, incidentally, was named “Operation Desert Spring.”

Here is a further coincidence. In March 2010, Libya was voted, near unanimously, on to the UN Human Rights Committee, after a glowing Report on human rights progress. After a ferocious campaign by Geneva-based UN Watch not only were they expelled from it, but nineteen months later, their country lay in ruins, their leader lynched and most of his family dead.

Last November, Syria was elected to the Committee and the fifty eight Member Arab board added their votes to the country’s place on UNESCO panels.

UN Watch railed that:

Western democracies, unanimously elected Syria to a pair of Committees – one dealing directly with human rights issues – even as the Bashar al-Assad regime maintains its campaign of violence against its own citizens.

Syria’s Committee places, as Libya before it, died a quick unnoticed death.

Amnesty’s Ms Nossel, unsurprisingly, has spoken at a number of events with UN Watch Director, Hillel Neuer, a Montreal born attorney, whose career has included serving as a judicial law clerk for Justice Itzhak Zamir at the Supreme Court of Israel.

In March last year, there seemed a glimmer of hope that the US and “allies”, would back away from repeating the tragic disaster that was unfolding in Libya – and had already struck Afghanistan and Iraq.

Secretary of State Clinton committed on CBS  (March 27, 2011) that the US would not intervene in the way it had in Libya.

Now, it seems, a miracle is needed, as it emerges Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among those subsidizing insurgents with vast sums – as French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe announced that the EU is about to further tie the government’s hands by freezing the assets of the Syrian Central Bank from February 27. Syria is already under a crippling raft of sanctions.  France was, of course, one of the leading and most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the destruction of Libya.

At the same “Friends of Syria” Conference in Tunis (February 24, 2012) UK Foreign Minister William Hague declared that the UK recognized the insurgents and Hilary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton called Russia and China ”despicable” for their veto at the UN, which may well have blocked further “intervention.”

The US said it will consider military assistance to the insurgents – a representative of the insurgents said they were already receiving “western aid.”

With “friends” like these, Syria certainly needs no enemies.

The US has, of course, “despicably”, vetoed thirty five UN peace Resolutions relating to the Middle East including  on “Operation Cast Lead”, the 2008-2009 Israeli Christmas-New Year onslaught on Gaza, and Israel’s 2006 blitzkrieg of Lebanon.

A “new world map”

Chillingly, no outrage, or cries of “despicable” has been given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in Switzerland the day before the Tunisia conference that there: “would be no Lebanon in the new world map. ”

He stated, further, that an Israeli strike against Lebanon would be supported by the United States and Gulf States countries.

There surely is a wildlife park of elephants in the room. Given George W. Bush’s “Crusade”, the belief by extreme right Israeli circles in their control of the Middle East “from the Nile to the Euphrates” and General Wesley Clark’s revelations of 2007 that the Pentagon planned “(taking) out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”, there is an obvious question, sparked by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s confidence over a Lebanon attack:

Are these AIPAC and Israel’s wars?

1. John R. Macarthur,  Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War , 17 December 1993, Chapter 2, pp. 54-59

Catastrophe is just a kind of change, a quick transition to a new equilibrium — and didn’t America recently vote for change? The discontinuity that marks collapse is simply the point at which prevailing fallacies are reduced to absurdity by life. Yeats saw war and British dominion reduced to absurdity, and wrote The Second Coming to make sense of it. It strikes me as a very cheerful poem: the unborn sphinx, a precious little bundle of joy.

Collapse is the obverse of renewal. Gibbon’s magnum opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is equally the story of the rise of Europe in all its centripetal glory. At the close of Volume VI, modern Europe has taken shape. The collapse of the Soviet Warsaw Pact has freed several subject peoples. As nations unite, states naturally come and go. Peace requires self-determination, as the UN Charter tells us, and self-determination is advanced as states fail in gross or subtle ways. Sometimes a state loses its reason to exist, and deserves to collapse.

We in America have weathered the collapse of commercial and financial integrity, property rights, and government legitimacy in an orgy of elite looting. We’ve seen legal and Constitutional protections collapse in oligarchic repression. What of any value is left in our state? Life in America is already nasty and brutish, and short, by rich-world standards, at 78.3 years, a state of nature with institutional predators and human prey. The yammering fury of public discourse gets more insistent as it’s clearer that the centre cannot hold. Here in America, who will decide when it’s time to retire our failing state? And as state failures cascade and compound, how much suffering will result?

States fall apart in various ways but rights and rule of law limit the discomfort — at least in the civilized world. Developed countries can handle their fissiparous tendencies:

Scotland

Scotland plans a referendum on independence in the Autumn of 2014. Consultation with the Scottish public has begun. A final referendum bill and implementation plan is to be in place by the end of the year. The Scottish parliament considers the referendum bill for planned passage in October, subject to royal assent. The English government is mounting a bureaucratic defense in depth, maneuvering behind the scenes to rig the options, to strip Scotland of its natural resources, and to cultivate support for the half-measure of home rule. Partly in reaction to that heavy hand, the Scottish majority now backs independence.

Slovakia

When the Velvet Revolution displaced a crumbling Soviet client state, trouble started early on. The first Slovak cause célèbre was a bid to drop the word socialist from the country’s name. Then the revolutionary Civic Forum tore itself apart, sidelining pinkos to form the Civic Democrats. Slovaks jibbed at the misery of the economic shock treatment imposed by Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus. Co-prime ministers and power sharing failed to heal the growing rifts. The majority Czech party turned down proposals for a looser union modeled on the Maastricht Treaty, and in July 1992, the Slovak National Council resolved:

We, the democratically elected Slovak National Council, solemnly declare that the thousand years’ struggle of the Slovak nation for independence (“self-standing”) has been fulfilled.

In this historical moment, we declare the natural right of the Slovak nation for self-determination, as embodied by all international agreements and treaties about the right of nations for self-determination.

Recognizing the right of nations for self-determination, we declare, that we also want to freely create the way and form of national and state life, while respecting the rights of everybody, all citizens, nations, national minorities, ethnic groups, and the democratic humanist legacy of Europe and the world.

By this declaration, the Slovak National Council declares sovereignty of the Slovak Republic as a basis for a sovereign state of the Slovak nation.

Concisely ticking all the boxes, self-determination, rights, and rule of law, the Slovaks broke away. The Czechs let them go. Klaus and his Slovak counterpart negotiated terms and in less than six months, Parliament dissolved the federal state.

The Slovaks have not lost their independent spirit. Just this February an anti-corruption protest drew 15,000 citizens who lobbed bananas, eggs, bottles, firecrackers and a flowerpot over the fence of their Presidential Palace. They are an inspiration to us all.

Quebec

Quebeckers have been restive since at least 1837, when they rebelled as Lower Canada. In the 1960s Quebec spawned various independence movements encompassing a spectrum of tactics, from party politics and illegal nonviolence to violent rebellion. As proper leftists, they bombed the stock exchange, but rural rightists were on board too. They felt like Frantz Fanon was talking to them, and even if he wasn’t, Charles de Gaulle was, when he yelled, Vive le Québec libre! Technocratic dithering bought time.

In 1995, at the Royal Commission on the Future of Quebec, the Marxist-Leninists emptied the stands by proposing that Quebec declare its independence. The ensuing referendum barely kept Canada together. The movement seems to be in remission now, subsumed by recent immigrants and ambivalent indigenes.

Slovenia

When the end of Soviet-style multinational rule uncorked the immemorial hatreds of the Balkans, Slovenia saw what was coming and determined to get out. The Yugoslav government planned to assert control of Tito’s decentralized armed forces, but before it could happen the Slovenes secretly mobilized a home guard command structure. They got to work on a war plan and a Tienanmen-themed media strategy. In December of that year, 88 per cent of Slovenes voted to secede from Yugoslavia. The Slovene people were on their own — the US and its European satellites could see no point to self-determination, and for NATO, ethnic tensions promised exciting new threats to bomb.

When the Yugoslav People’s Army took over in Slovenia, they found that no soldiers reported to them: the chain of command now took its orders from the new Slovene capital, Ljubljana. The Slovenes sat their Yugoslav border guards down and tactfully put them out to pasture. A bewildered Yugoslav army invaded itself. The tentative Yugoslavian Blitzkrieg featured desertions, mass surrenders, and serendipitous mechanical breakdowns, and was aborted by the Serbs, who didn’t really care. Forty-four Yugoslavs and 18 Slovenes gave their lives.

Collapse is a continuum linking devolution, autonomy, secession, disintegration, internecine warfare, and forcible dismemberment. When the government is evil, it’s all good — that’s US foreign policy, in essence. America’s ruling class has helped most of the world dissolve its governments again and again. The US government showcased its foreign-interference skills in Greece, Italy, Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Also in Cambodia, Chile, Australia, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama.

Our government’s enthusiasm for therapeutic collapse runs afoul of international norms, particularly UN General Assembly A/RES/36/103: Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States.

The resolution points out that economic and political pressure tactics are subject to UN authority just as war is subject to UN authority, under Chapter VII. As required by the supreme law of our land, A/RES/36/103 limits national security policy to the two poles of self-defense or pacific settlement of disputes. The risky middle ground of graduated pressure requires the concurrence of the world, under UN rules.

UN Charter Article 39 reads:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Article 41 reads:

The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

In the United States, economic or political sanctions without UN supervision are illegal under the supreme law of the land.

Yet the principle of non-interference, if applied, would paralyze US foreign policy. The US government would be lost without disruption, overthrow, armed intervention, subversion, occupation, destabilization, mercenaries, great-power confrontation, defamation, vilification, economic coercion, blockade, distortion of human rights, sabotage, or terror. The resolution rules out America’s favorite unilateral trick, use of transnational and multinational corporations as instruments of coercion. Our unilateral denial of the SWIFT banking network to Iran: illegal under US supreme law. US agents “striking at Egypt’s stability” with distorted selective claims of right: illegal, in the US as in Egypt.

When our Mideast puppet rulers began to collapse naturally, without us, the state’s urge to meddle swept away any notion of law. In Libya our government relied on traditional star-spangled carnage to topple the Libyan state, dispatching the CIA’s tame revolutionary, Khalifa Hifter. When routine interference failed, our government tried gun-running , direct reinforcements, and finally aerial bombardment in illegal support of civil war.

As soon as our government stubbed out its war in Libya, it lit another one in Syria.  Again, our subversion conformed with American tradition. We dusted off Kermit Roosevelt’s old plan, with its paramilitary insurgents, assassinations, coup de main, and sabotage.  Recognizing the growing importance of humanitarian law, our insurgents weaponized it, making up casualty numbers with whimsical abandon, posing executed soldiers in rubble as civilian victims of government bombardments. Our government fabricated crimes against humanity by cribbing old satellite photos, like term papers, right off the Internet.

But this time, when Uncle Sam offered to put the Syrian state out of its induced misery, the UN Charter tripped us up. Our government’s shaky grasp of the non-interference precept led Russia and China to cast unusual Security Council vetoes. Our great-power counterparts had been acting in accordance with UN reform principles, refraining from vetoes on votes involving human rights, but our fake atrocities and real slaughter were too much. Perhaps our Libyan mass-rape tall tale was the last straw. Like some greedy producer of action films who squeezes in one product placement too many, our spooks couldn’t resist the implausible propaganda flourish of Viagra as a rape aid.

Our government’s gotten away with it, so far. Libya’s a bestial bloodbath thanks to us. US proxies and paramilitaries are still gnawing like termites on Syrian society. Amateur revolutionaries in Congress are trying to cut Baluchistan loose from Pakistan. American bigwigs overtly support Kurdish terrorists in overthrowing the government of Iran, notwithstanding that’s a felony offense in the US.

There’s one slight adverse side-effect. Our spooks proved that you can topple a government anywhere — even here at home. Sauce for the Syrian or Libyan goose is sauce for the American gander. At some point a regional power or bloc will get tired of US spooks hiring traitors in their sovereign states, and decide to give our government a taste of its own medicine. After all, for every Ahmad Chalabi or Khalifa Hifter there must be a thousand dodgy Americans on the make, ready to fabricate intel, tug heartstrings, and organize resistance for the most treasonous designs. And why not? Everyone hates this government, patriots most of all. Public rage at pervasive state corruption and crime is barely contained by partisan divide-and-rule manipulation.

Caught red-handed throwing stones in front of its glass house, our police state is panicked to see its revolutionary social-justice weapons proliferating all the way back home. The National Defense Authorization Act is based on a world-view of a global state of siege with ubiquitous malefactors skulking behind every tree, striving to undermine and destroy America.  The see-no-evil gumshoes of the FBI, having slept through the greatest financial crime in history, are mobilizing the public to combat terrorists including beauty terrorists, home-improvement terrorists, and body-art terrorists.  The threat of accountability scares our government even more. The Defense Intelligence Agency fears “lone wolves” in its ranks, “radicalized” into complying with US supreme law such as the Geneva Conventions or Article 19.  The security state is even afraid of its old soldiers.

But as the Beltway death merchants know, one man’s existential threat is another man’s booming market. So in the spirit of traditional American FREE MONEY! seminars and infomercials, let us ask: If you as a domestic subversive want a piece of that foreign belligerent funding and training, how should you go about knocking over your tottering American kleptocracy?

First, let’s dispel the major misconceptions. There’s a lot of unhelpful nostalgia for the imagined golden age of the American Revolution. Our patriotic brainwashing seems to take hold when we try to face totalitarian encroachments by our state. The resulting historical conceit can take the sophisticated formulation of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who predicts that with one bad break, “…you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.” Or it can take the form of rattlesnake flags and silly buckskin costumes.

In fact, there is no going back. The American State Papers are as much use to you as the Dead Sea scrolls. They do not apply any more. They cannot help you with the forcible overthrow of the Government of the United States. Our state has set its founding documents aside. Besides, you do not need a war of independence. Independence is the last thing you want.

The key is to avail yourself of John L. Hargrove’s “web of living law.” Just leap and it will catch you like an acrobat’s net. Customary and conventional international law aligns the world with your self-determination goals.

This approach is particularly effective when the ruling regime is shown to hold those norms in contempt. The disgraceful failure of our state is amply documented in reviews by independent institutions of international repute: the Committee Against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, and the Human Rights Council. International law exposes domestic legal cover for impermissible state conduct. The scrutiny of the international community can void totalitarian enabling acts such as the PATRIOT Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, exacting escalating costs in national prestige and diplomatic influence. The US government’s client states become less malleable. Non-aligned states and autonomous blocs gain the moral high ground.

When it’s time to abolish the government, your declaration writes itself. No need for a founding genius to think it up de novo – you can cut and paste from universally-accepted boilerplate grounded in customary and conventional international law. Not so stirring, perhaps, but just as revolutionary in effect: in current doctrine, sovereignty is responsibility. An irresponsible state has forfeited its sovereignty and has no reason to exist. The world can and must step in.

By design, a state has to screw up pretty badly to flunk its sovereignty test. It has to be guilty of particular crimes:

- Of war crimes (Check. Fallujah, and dereliction of Afghan human security in breach of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention);

- Or genocide (Check. Cambodia, and attributable failure to prevent in Palestine);

- Or crimes against humanity (keeping the jackboot on the neck of the Gulf States while BP poisons them);

- Or ethnic cleansing (our government’s brutal cattle-drive response to Hurricane Katrina).

For a taste of modern emancipatory bumf, let’s slap together a pastiche of the World Summit Outcome Document; the UN Secretariat’s report, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect; some foundational international law that subordinates national security to human security and rights; and just to make the old soldiers sniffle and salute, snippets of the Declaration of Independence.

Declaration of Interdependence

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for peoples to demand their birthright of peace, dignity, and a better life in larger freedom, customary and conventional law require that they demonstrate their sovereignty in reclaiming it from an overreaching state.

We hold these principles to be universal and binding on any sovereign American state: the United Nations Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to derogate core human rights and permit the most serious crimes, it is the urgent duty of nations and peoples to provide new guards for human security.

The Government of the United States (the State) has repudiated its duties under humanitarian law and human rights law. The State perpetuates an unlawful policy of official impunity with attacks on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court including threat of force. The State exploits human-rights treaty commitments as pretexts for aggression, and subverts concomitant domestic obligations with legislative obstruction and federalist neglect.

Respect for human rights is an essential element of responsible sovereignty. The State uses domestic law as a weapon against its population, abridging the peoples’ civil and political rights while conferring impunity on compliant elites. The judiciary refuses redress for violations of fundamental human rights, in breach of the supreme law of the land.

Failures of governance have imposed profound and deepening inequalities. Development has reversed, opening lasting fissures in the social and political fabric. Incapacitating social divisions and an exploitative doctrine of corporatist growth intensify contention for resources. State repression lets domestic tensions worsen with no peaceful resolution. Political leaders have made a deliberate and calculated choice to take advantage of social divisions and institutional failures, using sovereignty as a shield to inflict widespread and systematic violence with impunity. Political leaders and ruling factions suppress and subvert rights and rule of law with war propaganda and hate speech, indoctrinating the public at large along with critical actors in society including police, soldiers, the judiciary, and legislators. Our rulers undermine and attack self-correcting mechanisms that could discourage and derail the most serious crimes.

To prove this, let the facts be submitted for a candid world:

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of America, CAT/C/USA/CO/2, 18 May 2006;

- Universal Periodic Review of the United States of America, Friday, 5 November 2010;

- Human Rights Committee, Eighty-seventh session, 10-28 July 2006, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant-United States of America, Concluding observations;

- Human Rights Committee: Consideration of Reports submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant – Fourth Report of the United States of America;¹

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of  America Fifth Periodic Report.²

In a mobilized military power with the privileges and unequal justice of permanent Security Council membership, this intensifying complex of repression and aggression constitutes a threat of paramount concern to the international community. The manifest failure of the state’s protective responsibilities have resulted in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Accordingly, we the American peoples request international assistance and capacity building to avert still greater crimes and to restore human security.

We call for concerted international suasion, education, and assistance, reinforced by parallel and consistent diplomacy, including measures in conformity with UN Charter Article 41 or Rome Statute Article 13 (b). Those contemplating the incitement or perpetration of crimes and violations relating to the responsibility to protect must be made to understand both the costs of pursuing that path and the potential benefits of seeking peaceful reconciliation and development instead.

We call for dialogue, education and training on human rights and humanitarian law to inform national agendas for institutional reform. The international community must engage with the State and the public to support a culture of peace, and to realize the educational obligations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We call for international development assistance based on human rights as an alternative to exploitative regimes based on corporatist central planning, elite looting, trading in influence and abuse of function, coercive control of peoples’ natural wealth and resources, and private debt imposed for social control.

To curb our increasingly dangerous state, we the peoples of the United States urgently need external intervention to restore lost attributes of good governance: rule of law, a competent and independent judiciary, human rights, security sector reform, a robust civil society, an independent press, and a political culture that favors tolerance, dialogue and mobility. In a climate of violent state resistance to basic obligations, the international community must support civil society, assisting and protecting associations committed to human rights and rule of law.

The Government of the United States has compromised its sovereignty with domestic repression and crimes of concern to the international community. The peoples of America have lost control over their state, and cannot preserve peace and human security without the help of all the nations and the peoples of the world.

We, therefore, the assembled Representatives of the peoples of America do, solemnly publish and declare, that as Free and sovereign peoples, they have full Power to keep Peace, contract Alliances, protect human rights, and to carry out all other duties of sovereign states, subject to the free expression of the will of individual American electors in universal and equal suffrage. And for the support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

It runs on a bit, in the gabby American way — it wouldn’t suit the taciturn Slovaks — but then the world might want to know exactly what to expect of American splittists or putschists, after the psychotic carnage of the country’s postwar history. If the wrong faction, or the wrong states, broke away leaving cooler heads behind, a spate of wars would surely ensue. Imagine Texas or Arizona breaking loose — or any state, led by the bloodthirsty nationalist ghouls of Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Nonetheless, things can’t go on this way, with the United States government as outsized as it is, and as murderous. The world knows this rogue state needs to be curbed or torn apart.

The thought has occurred to people here at home, and not just to crackpots and Dixie rednecks. Cold War statesman George F. Kennan daydreamed of breaking the US up. He worried that the USA’s huge scale would lead to overweening ambitions. He supported the affable insurgents of Sovereign Vermont. Near the end of his life Kennan wrote:

All power to Vermont in its effort to distinguish itself from the USA as a whole, and to pursue in its own way the cultivation of its own tradition.

And:

Such are at present the dominating trends in the U.S. that I can see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will be not only endangered but eventually destroyed in an endlessly prolonged association of the northern parts of New England with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.

Needless to say, a declaration’s only the beginning. Vermont’s declaration got them nowhere. The next steps would depend on the government’s response. An ace hustler like Ahmad Chalabi would hold that detail back until he clinched the deal with foreign agents. To an entrepreneur of induced collapse, the declaration is just promotional material, a teaser for his limited-enrollment seminars in dismal chain hotels.

The seminars could be packed with practical tips for aspiring American Chalabis. The art of destabilizing police states is advancing at a rapid pace. The revolutionist’s body of knowledge incorporates US foreign-subversion practices.  The world learned a lot ousting America’s Mideast puppets.

In response to state repression, modern subversives have a broadening spectrum of options. As part of its Iran strategy, the Brookings Institution devised a handy manual for toppling governments with popular revolutions, insurgencies, or coups. Traditional forcible-overthrow tricks continue to be refined. The Afghans and Iraqis are continually devising ingenious new ways to discourage illegal military occupation. The classics continue to inspire new generations and new ideas.

The US military funds destabilization research, producing weapons that deserve to proliferate at home and abroad. At the technical institute founded by Gilded-age oligarchs Carnegie and Mellon, scholars have devised CONSTRUCT-O to pinpoint the weaknesses of socio-technical systems. CONSTRUCT-O suggests that horizontal organizations like the Occupy movement are harder to destabilize than our increasingly autocratic state. CONSTRUCT-O can measure the frustration of America’s secret police when they attack non-hierarchical groups like Occupy. Our government’s fixation on its chain of command produces befuddled apparatchiks who scurry around dissident encampments demanding, “take me to your leader.” Heel-clicking government bureaucrats cannot see why you can’t decapitate an acephalous collective.

In the US, the state’s heavy reliance on debt peonage opens new possibilities for collective action.  The debt-encumbered underclass has grown to become an overwhelming majority. Secured debt exceeds the value of pledged assets. Predatory lending now regulates access to human rights like health and education, and as these basic services deteriorate, the state permits increasingly coercive collection measures. Well-coordinated debt strikes could paralyze the economy as effectively as work stoppages once did. The government is determined to purge this approach from the institutions under its control, but collective action for debtors is bound to be integrated into nonviolent resistance.

All in all, it’s got boundless potential for Multi-Level Marketing: not just training subversives, but training trainers of subversives, and training trainers of trainers in infinite regress, like AMWAY with collapse instead of soap. Free Foreign Money for Regime Change!  The entrepreneurial genius that gives America its weapons and prisons and wars could paralyze America for peace. Find a need and meet it, as the hucksters say, that’s the key to success. So for any threatened nation that wants to get America’s maniacal rogue state under control, a diverse selection of subversive elements can be reached through a network of dead drops and cutouts near you. Ask for Spitball, that’s my secret agent code name.

But there’s no guarantee. It doesn’t always work. Tibet and Western Morocco continue to languish in subjection. Sometimes you cannot effect rebirth, and freedom fighters fail, however greedy or grandiose or brave. Sometimes the repressive regime is too far gone for salutary collapse. In an irrational state lost to unchecked exploitation, renewal may be impossible.

In Palestine, freedom will play out with the grim futility of classical tragic κατάδεσμος, as a curse redounding through the generations. Despite press coverage of Palestine’s UN membership bid as a climactic contretemps, Palestine is a state – an occupied state under systematic genocidal attack, but a state nonetheless. The Palestinian state has gained recognition from more than two thirds of the UN member states. When the US quashed the formality of UN membership, UNESCO accepted Palestine as a state. Palestinians completed a National Plan, backed by the mediating Quartet countries, to build institutions ready for statehood — except for what the government of Israel could obstruct.

But in the grip of what the ancients called a curse, old victims are made mad, destroying new victims. When the State of Israel carpet-bombed its frontiers with poisoned uranium weapons  ³,  unfavorable winds sterilized Israel’s population. Now the nation’s in a spiral toward extinction. The state’s Moslem victims are holding their own for now, multiplying against a tide of monstrous birth defects and stillbirths, but if autonomy improves development and education, fertility will quickly drop below critical levels, as it has among Israeli Jews. Within a generation, peace will come to a depopulated waste.

The corrupt and brutal government of the United States lies between world-standard governance ideals and barbarism, on a continuum from the rights and rule of law of the civilized world down to outcast concentration camps like Israel or North Korea. America’s direction of movement is easy to discern: we’ve gone far beyond the civilized pale. The American peoples can no longer rein in their fanatical police state alone. For security and protection they must have recourse to the outside world. We don’t yet know if our predator state has passed the point of no return. It may be the world can only watch in horror.

1. At this writing the Department of State has released its own report but no Committee review documentation.
2. US report due November 19, 2011; at this writing the Department of State has released no documentation.
3. Poisoned weapons are prohibited by Rome Statute Article 8 (2b) (xvii) and may constitute a crime against humanity